South By Scooter Screening With 200 Grams at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival

Last year Soup Du Jour's hilarious salami caper 200 Grams debuted at the Cinema Nova accompanied by my film South By Scooter. 200 Grams is a laugh-out-loud hilarious film by two of the kindest people I've had the pleasure to have met, so I'm absolutely thrilled that South By Scooter will be a part of two more screenings of 200 grams at Cinema Nova for the Melbourne International Comedy Festival.

If you're up for a laugh you really ought to see 200 Grams, no other film tackles the struggles of international salami shipping with such panache.

Dates/Bookings/Details:

2 Shows. Wednesday April 1 and Wednesday April 8. 6:30pm at Cinema Nova. Bookings online through the Melbourne International Comedy Festival.

See you there?

Experience Encounters!

An ambiguous taste of my contribution to encounters...

An ambiguous taste of my contribution to encounters...

For several months a cluster of creative minds from the Microsoft Social NUI and the Victorian College of the Arts have been toiling away to build an enormous interactive Art machine. I've been fortunate enough to have joined them in contributing to Encounters, a new interactive Art experience that is part machine, part performance, part game, part instrument, and particularly difficult to describe.

So, I stole this description from the official website:

 

"Step into Encounters’ interactive space and become part of a digital art spectacular. Join with friends and family or make new connections to shape the music and light art. Let loose together — and see what happens when you collaborate. 

Encounters brings art, technology and people together in a weekly outdoor interactive digital art space in the VCA Courtyard throughout the 2015 SummerSalt Festival.

Come along and experience a cohesion of sound, music, lighting, and visual effects. All ages welcome."

 

Encounters is spectacular. Honestly, it ticks all of the spectacle boxes. It's huge, it's loud, it has dazzling lights, it draws you in, and empowers you to participate.

So I encourage you to come and join us, to step into the machine and experience Encounters for yourselves. We'll be at the Victorian College of the Arts every Saturday night in February culminating in White Night.

Dates:

  1. 7pm–11pm Saturday 31 January 2015 
  2. 7pm–11pm Saturday 7 February 2015
  3. 7pm–11pm Saturday 14 February 2015
  4. 7pm–2am Saturday 21 February 2015 (Melbourne White Night)

At the Victorian College of the Arts

Entry via Gate 3, Dodds Street, Victorian College of the Arts, Southbank

VCA Arts Courtyard, Victorian College of the Arts, 234 St Kilda Road, Southbank [view map]

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For more information and a full list of contributors you can visit the encounters page, see the facebook event, or read about encounters in the Summersalt festival programme.

Gameboy Camera Experiments #1

As part of a larger project I’ve spent a few days exploring the possibilities of the Gameboy Camera and Gameboy printer combo in animation.  I’ve been in love with the impressionistic almost-machine-vision aesthetic of the Gameboy Camera ever since I was given one as a kid, and over the last several years I’ve found myself returning to it.

My aim is to eventually create a project that is larger in scope than the Gameboy Camera’s tiny resolution and limited palette of greys would seem to allow.  So far my attempts have failed, and the experiments presented here are the latest in this line of failures. But failures are important to creativity, and with each disappointment I hope I’m getting closer to understanding how to achieve my goal.

In this experiment I was aiming to create animations reminiscent of the images sent back by early space probes. I began my exploration with the thought that the most basic form in space is a single point of light and attempted to capture images that would convey a feeling of luminosity. In isolation I’m pleased with how the animations achieve this goal. Unfortunately they really don’t fit within the greater context of the group project I designed them for, so I present them here as a pleasing dead end.

I had originally planned to run the camera through a Super Nintendo / Super Gameboy and capture the video feed on my Powerbook G3 Pismo. I love playing around with dated multimedia technologies, so I thought it might be fun to cut the footage together on an early version of Avid. 

Unfortunately this didn’t work out - the video signal from the SNES confused my old video capture card. I tried a number of things but I couldn’t solve the problem so I turned to the Gameboy Printer, and the experiments lead me to a delightful process that produces a kind of  intermediate thermal-printed-film-strip from the Gameboy camera that is then scanned and animated frame by frame. It’s a digital-to-physical-to-digital process.

Under a magnifying loupe the dots and dashes of the Gameboy Printer look like delicate brush strokes. They’re rough with a strikingly human inconsistency that adds a layer of expression to the images that is absent from the digital files.

I fiddled around with a several different captures - I even attempted to use two Gameboy Cameras simultaneously to create a 3D image - then scanned and animated the results in Photoshop. These experiments created an interestingprocess, but one which is perhaps more interesting than the results it produces.

I’ll keep experimenting with the Gameboy Camera, I have some big ideas. But I’m not there yet.