Computer Shop Tbilisi

[Bulah Landaker]

WhenI was a kid in the 1980s, the future wasn't going to be just a world of computers, it was going to be a world of computer creatures. It was R2D2, and Johnny 5, and Max from Flight of the Navigator. These guys had personality, they had soul. They were going to be our friends, our sidekicks, even our pets.Fast-forward to today, and the future feels like it's finally here. Many of us already have some sort of virtual assistant in our home that talks to us, that answers our questions, that helps us get through the day. But this amazing device doesn't look anything like the computer creatures we dreamed about as kids.So for this project I took a boring Amazon Echo device, added some animatronics, added an old CRT screen, and tried to make this machine feel a bit more . . . alive!Check out the project write-up on Arduino's official blog, and the build notes over on the project's Hackaday page.

After ten years living in Eastern Europe, our family decided to move back to the United States. This was a crazy period in our lives: among the thousands of things to do for this move, we had to bid farewell to my long-time workshop in Tbilisi and open a new workshop in Massachusetts. And we rescued a forgotton robot along the way!

Check out more of my builds and vintage tech restorations on YouTube! Dijkstra's algorithm in C Dijkstra's algorithm, programmed in C At the height of the pandemic I took a programming course at Portland Community College: "Introduction to Programming in C". For our capstone project, my partner Danny and I had the ambitious idea to write a program that would run Dijkstra's algorithm in a randomly-generated maze environment. (Dijkstra's algorithm is a method for finding the shortest paths between points in a graph, such as road networks.) Limited to a text-only format, we decided to embrace an ASCII image interface not unlike the dial-up bulletin boards and early text-based adventure games of the 1980s. Bascially we were creating a text-only graphical user interface, and to do this it felt like we were operating on the outer frontiers of what is possible to achieve in C. In the end we were not able to get the algorithm working properly, primaily due to the data transfer limitations of the school's servers that we were required to use, but I'm proud of the project nonetheless. I learned a ton about programming and creating a user experience with very limited graphical resources.

I've had a handful of Soviet-made IV-6 (ИВ-6) tubes sitting around my workshop for years, mostly because I love the analog feel of their electric-cyan glow. It takes me back to all the electronics from my childhood. When I recently started a project to restore a Soviet-made variable transformer, I realized they would be perfect for the display. I learned a ton about multiplexing and transistor arrays on this build, and now that I've climbed the mountain, I've a got a simple, compact toolkit for incporporating VFDs into future projects.

In 2020 I was commissioned to direct this short film about a collaboration between a fashion designer and a photographer in Tbilisi, Georgia. My goal was not to tell the story of their project, but rather to construct for the viewer the world that they inhabit in their creative practice. To do this I sought to portray a hypothetical civilization built around the vision and taste of these two creators. We filmed over eight days in and around Tbilisi, and in the mountains several hours to the north.

Directed by Thomas Burns & Andrei Kovalev

advertisingThe Paris publishing house ditions du Seuil commissioned us to create a piece to celebrate the launch of Sven Hansen-Love's new novel, Un Emploi Sur Mesure. Inspired by the visual styles of directors Wong Kar-wai and Tony Scott, we created this poem as a tribute to the process of creation. We shot it all in one day on 35mm B/W film stock, which was then processed in Prague, scanned in Moscow, and edited in Tbilisi.

Executive producer: Thomas Burns

Series producer: Katia Patin

Animation by Gogi KamushadzeWhile I was working as the creative director at Coda Story we launched this series to counter the Russian government's efforts to erase the history of the Soviet Gulag, a system of fear and forced labor camps that imprisoned or exiled over 28 million people in the Soviet Union. The series is built around the first-person testimony of Gulag survivors, using animation and archival footage to relive their stories.Honorable mention, 2020 Webby Awards

Official selection, The Atlantic Selects n_vestigateDirectorn_vestigateClient: N-ost

Directed by Thomas Burns

advertisingShort list, Best Directing, Kyiv International Advertising FestivalThe brief called for a piece that conveyed the global importance of investigative journalism and the often extreme risks that journalists face in their work. I generally loathe voiceover narration as it rarely meets expectations, but with this piece I needed to situate contemporary journalism within a larger historical narrative. Rather than write a script and record a voiceover artist, I decided instead to research recordings of famous speeches. Over the course of several weeks, with help from archivists at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, I assembled a series of exerpts from Kennedy's speeches to fit the project at hand. HeForSheDirectorHeForSheAgency: McCann Tbilisi

Client: UN Women

Directed byThomas Burns

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Such treatments of the region are at best inadequate. These photographs are an attempt to move beyond this sensational paradigm and explore the underlying issue of memory in a more intimate context. As a collection they eschew the romantic and the picturesque, focusing instead on average citizens from the anonymous ranks of the lower and middle classes. Their goal is to present the region not from a narrative perspective, but rather a meditative one, as they invite the viewer to study the quiet state so often masked by the flow of our daily lives. Portraiture, whose function has always been infused with a sense of time and loss, offers a specific kind of access to this state.

I was commissioned by the organization Design Can Do to make a short film about their design hackathon in Cape Town, South Africa. The event brought together designers from many different fields to tackle the problem of what to do with an area of central Cape Town that has been plagued for decades by urban blight, a legacy of the country's apartheid past. You can check out a longer version of the film here. Revolutions Per MinuteDirectorRevolutions Per MinuteDirected by Thomas Burns

documentaryWritten as a love letter to vinyl records, this film was the third project I shot while in film school at Stanford. We filmed at one of the few remaining vinyl pressing plants in California, located in Long Beach. It warms my heart to see that vinyl is making a resurgence.

This was the first film I ever made, in autumn of the year 2000. I filmed it on 16mm reversal film using a wind-up Bolex camera and edited the camera-original celluloid on a flatbed editing table. The filming and editing process was very tactile, and this created a much closer relationship to the film, one that I believe is impossible to recreate with digital tools. I feel very fortunate to have had this experience. I often wonder what this film would look like if I made it again today. Commercial Photography: An Intensive Online CourseWriter & DirectorCommercial + Fine-Art Photography: An Intensive Online CourseDirected, written, and edited by Thomas Burns

Hosted by Andrei Kovalev

educational

Andrei Kovalev and I were commissioned to produce this fifteen-episode online course for the Spos International School of Photography in Paris. Our goal was to build a course unlike any of the many other photography courses we had seen, something that was focused first and foremost on taking the students on a journey, rather than simply teaching them techniques. The project involved several months of writing and research, fifteen shoot days, and 50-60 days of post-production.The video above is the twelth episode in the course. You can check out the full course on the official Speos course page. Seven: A Documentary Theater PerformanceDirectorSeven: A Documentary Theater PerformanceI was asked by the European Union delegation in Georgia to direct a staging of "Seven" as part of fourteen days of awareness of gender-based violence. The play features the actual testimony of seven women whose lives were touched by violence. What made this project so interesting was that we asked seven EU and US ambassadors to read these testimonies in front of a live audience. The play was performed at the Marjanishvili Theater in Tbilisi to a packed house. WunderkammerDirector of PhotographyWunderkammerThe above clip is a short excerpt from the full film. Director: Andrea Pallaoro

Director of Photography: Thomas Burnsnarrative

BestCinematography, European Independent Film Festival

Best Short, Solento International Film Festival

Audience Award, Bolzano Film Festival

OutstandingFilm, Ismaila International Film Festival

Sundance Film Festival

LosAngelesInternational Film Festival

+60festivals

A four-part live journalism storytelling event hosted on the opening night of the 2019 Zeg Tbilisi Storytelling Festival. Executive producer: Thomas Burns

Produced by Isobel Cockerell performance event

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