A couple of weeks back we wrote about Binge Thinking, the rising street cred of engaging our grey matter to get our kicks. As I mentioned in that post, I was looking forward to Dazed’s inaugural celebration of music, culture, ideas and music. Dazed Live was posited as a rabble-rousing call-to-arms, a declaration of independence, a clarion call to open the collective mind, to be curious, to engage with the world around and make stuff. The ambition was noble, it was big and it was provocative. As we know, lofty ambitions can very easily fall flat but I have to say, the event was really rather good. I managed to cram quite a bit in so I’ll give you my highlights.
First up, Champagne Valentine at the Tramshed: CV are an art collective based in Amsterdam spearheaded, by Geoffrey Lillemon and Anita Fontaine. Their mission is to “embed engaging layers of beauty inside reality” which they do brilliantly. Digital in form but real in scope, their work stretches into numerous fields – from advertising, animation and design to garden experiences and museums – they think expansively and their interactive creations immerse the onlooker in their weird and wonderful imaginations.
Some of the work they discussed…
How it is for Tate Modern. You may remember an installation in the Tate’s Turbine Hall back in 2009 by Miroslaw Balka called “How It Is” which resembled an enormous, monolithic steel chamber, a bit like a sea container, housing inside a gaping black void. To bring this into the digital world, CV designed a site which allowed the visitor to experience via a 3D interface. By exploring a series of dark and abstract spaces, mirroring the vast black void Balka has constructed, the visitor encounters visions and sounds inspired by notes made by the artist, with these notes themselves suspended in the darkness. Also nicely integrated throughout the site are films of Balka, explaining and describing the work and its inspiration. Like Balka’s installation, CV’s execution alludes to many things – the biblical Plague of Darkness, black holes in space, images of hell, hopelessness and so forth, but what’s really interesting is the way they use complex shading algorithms to give the user the experience an infinite landscape of audio and visual content. Watch the Vimeo, its cool.
Tate Modern site from Champagne Valentine on Vimeo.
In the woods: an interactive prequel for hyper-surreal film of the same name. Immersive, creepy and mysterious experience where the user can explore the protagonists stories as they are roaming around in the trees. Here you will meet some familiar faces – Moby, Terrence Howard, Will Oldham, Rufus Wainwright, Alan Cumming, and Debra Winger among others.
The Never Ending Why: an interactive music video for Placebo’s latest single. The tale follows a boy and girl trying to escape "Why Monsters" in a fast-moving, multi-coloured world. For Lillemon, this was about “making a really stunning interactive music video filled with amazing puppets in a fantastical world which people could play around with." Visitors can use the mouse to manipulate the movements of the monsters and change up the environment. Again, fun and novel approach to the music video.
Placebo - The Never-Ending Why from Champagne Valentine on Vimeo.
Second up, one of the keynotes, Aaron Koblin, Creative Director of Data Arts at Google Creative Labs, speaking in St. Leonards Church. Unsurprisingly, he was awesome and pretty inspirational. As one of the most in-demand and celebrated data viz wizards around, it was great to see him talk firsthand about his work, his ideas and concerns.
Koblin’s highlights
You may be familiar with the work he’s done for Arcade Fire, Johnny Cash and Radiohead but it’s worth emphasising as its just pure genius.
Arcade Fire, The Wilderness Downtown: Viewers begin the experience by providing their childhood address. The video experience then unfolds in multiple windows, taking viewers on a tour of their hometown to the tune of the Arcade Fire track. Users can also write a note to their younger selves in a tree branch-inspired font that is incorporated into the video. The thought behind TWD was to completely reinvent the music video experience, using the entire space of the desktop, pulling through multiple Chrome windows to tell the story, all the while centring it on the user and their own personal history. Have a play if you’re not familiar. I challenge you not to be wowed!
Johnny Cash Project: crowdsourcing at its best, TJCP is the product of thousands of images of the Man in Black rendered by fans sequenced in stock motion animation to create a music video for “Aint no Grave” the title track form the last album Cash recorded before he died. Anyone can contribute to the ongoing project which asks participants to redraw every single frame of archival footage of Johnny Cash thus building up a personalised, living portrait of the man as the fans see him. It's easier than it sounds: Koblin created a drawing tool for the site, which randomly assigns you a frame to draw. Using a series of paintbrush tools, you just trace over the original video footage. When you're finished, you just click "submit," and your drawing is dropped into the video. As more and more people contribute, frames are constantly being redrawn meaning that the video is in a constant state of flux. No two viewings are ever the same, you can even filter by style, so realistic vs. abstract vs. sketchy vs. random. Through TJCP, a visual testament to the Man in Black lives on.
Sheep Market: using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, (a crowdsourcing online marketplace that enables computer programmers to co-ordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks which computers are unable to do), Koblin asked the workers to draw a sheep facing to the left, and in return, they would receive $0.02. A few weeks later he had 10,000 sheep drawn facing to the left. Key stats:
Avg. time spent drawing each sheep: 105 seconds
Avg. wage: $0.69 / hr
Rejected sheep: 662
Collection period: 40 days
Collection rate: 11 sheep / hr
Unique IP addresses: 7599
No. of people asking Why? Why are you doing this? 1!!
Don’t think I need to spell out the irony!
Ten Thousand Cents: again using the Mechanical Turk, Ten Thousand Cents is a digital crowdsourced artwork that creates a representation of a $100 bill. Using a custom drawing tool, thousands of individuals working in isolation from one another painted a tiny part of the bill without knowledge of the overall task. Workers were paid one cent each via Amazon's Mechanical Turk distributed labour tool.. The work is presented as an interactive/video piece with all 10,000 parts being drawn simultaneously. For Koblin, the project was an attempt to explore the circumstances we live in, a new and uncharted combination of digital labour markets, "crowdsourcing," "virtual economies," and digital reproduction. This is fascinating in 2 ways. First, like the Sheep Market, people actually bothered to do this for one cent and second, that people stuck pretty faithfully to the task. Taken together, the 10,000 artworks pretty accurately represent a $100 bill.
Flight Patterns: you may be familiar with this piece but it’s worth showing for its beauty. Koblin managed to get his hands on the flight data of the FAA and plotted the flight paths across America, from the west coast to the east coast and back again. The result is a fascinating representation of America going about their daily business across the US skies. The pulsing data perfectly captures the daily ebb and flow across the country, moving in and out of time-zones up and down the country.
The really interesting thing about Koblin’s practice is his very human treatment of the data. He’s concerned with the process as much as the product. Play with Sheep Market a bit, Ten Thousand Cents or reflect on Flight Patterns and you can really see that he’s fascinated by the human details of production, how these singular actions, and the trail they leave tell their own story. Conceptually, this is a disarmingly simple thought; it’s about exploring the mark we leave on the world every day. Koblin’s sublime wizadry makes it easy to overlook how disarmingly powerful this is.
John
