An Assignment for The New Year
Jed Smith
online refuge of strange, creative, and experimental multimedia
authors, which has of late been filled with nothing but vapid canned
meat, propagating fake requests for sex parties, cam chats and links
to despicably stupid web content.
I went through the settings of this group, since I happen to be the
owner, apparently, and made it so that new members are able to join
the group by invitation only. This should help with the spam problems.
I went through and cleaned up the spam messages also.
Doing this brought back some fond memories of our monthly
"assignments." I look back on them fondly because they were created
with the idea in mind that creativity does not come easily, and it
helps to have some framework within which to create. I have spent the
last couple years absorbed in learning technical bullshit. Technical
bullshit is useful, but it is not creative. Creativity is about ideas
and communicating an aesthetic, a mood, an emotion, a concept.
Technical bullshit is about improving your tools to accomplish the
creation of ideas.
I was thinking maybe there are people on here still listening who
might be interested in creating some assignments. I was thinking we
could each write down an assignment, numbering each one, and then on
the first of December, we could randomly choose one of these
assignments using a random number generator. For example, I created an
assignment numbered "1", 6 other people created other assignments,
numbered in the order they are created, and we then choose a random
number between 1 and 7 inclusive, using the random number service
using http://www.random.org/. We could then all work on something to
be created in the month of December, and share our projects in January
2011.
I am assuming that the old collection of assignments written on scraps
of paper that we used to have are gone.
I am going to be trying to make something in the next month
regardless, because I feel sad having been creating nothing.
Here is my assignment, numbered 1. It utilizes an ambiguous thematic
constraint, and no technical or format-related constraints.
"Create something on the subject of the conflicting forces of comfort
and alienation in one's living environment."
I hope everyone is doing well.
-Jed
Will Erokan
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Jed Smith
Will Erokan
Morgan Dusatko
Morgan
thelastquest.org
Jed Smith
I managed to change the group's name to "safeharbor", and the
notification email and url have both now been changed to
"safe_harbor" (for some reason, "safeharbor" was taken or didn't
work).
http://groups.google.com/group/safe_harbor
safe_...@googlegroups.com
I have also updated the Vimeo channel's description and invited some
friends who might be interested. (Some who are here already and some
who are not). If anyone has any suggestions for the description,
please let me know.
-Jed
On Nov 18, 5:00 pm, Morgan Dusatko <morgandusa...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Safe Harbor, one word or two. Let's try to recruit everyone we can. Also I
> can create a tumblr where we can put all the work from each assignment at
> once (like a tube site just for safeHarbor).
>
> Morgan
>
>
>
>
>
> On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 4:46 PM, Will Erokan <willieben...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I'm all for Safe Harbor.. Actually I always preferred safeharbor (no
> > space).
> > Another question is.. Who all's interested, and should we try to recruit
> > any new people?
>
> > On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 4:41 PM, Jed Smith <dli...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >> I created a group on Vimeo called Safe Harbor that might be used as a
> >> suitable place for sharing projects as well. I know many people have shared
> >> stuff on youtube. Vimeo seems perhaps like a more receptive and interested
> >> place to share experimental work of this type however. The community there
> >> has more video artists and creative types than the typical abusive and
> >> ignorant 13 year olds that seem to be so ubiquitous on youtube.
>
> >>http://vimeo.com/groups/safeharbor
>
> >> I like the old name of "Safe Harbor" better than "Video of the Month".
> >> Would anyone be opposed or in favor of me attempting to change the name of
> >> the google group to "Safe Harbor"? Or does anyone have any other perhaps
> >> more suitable names for the group, in our present somewhat dispersed and
> >> disconnected form?
>
> >>>> 2011.
>
> >>>> I am assuming that the old collection of assignments written on scraps
> >>>> of paper that we used to have are gone.
>
> >>>> I am going to be trying to make something in the next month
> >>>> regardless, because I feel sad having been creating nothing.
>
> >>>> Here is my assignment, numbered 1. It utilizes an ambiguous thematic
> >>>> constraint, and no technical or format-related constraints.
> >>>> "Create something on the subject of the conflicting forces of comfort
> >>>> and alienation in one's living environment."
>
> >>>> I hope everyone is doing well.
> >>>> -Jed
>
> >>>> --
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> >>>> Groups "VideoOfTheMonth" group.
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> >>>> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
> >>>> .
> >>>>http://groups.google.com/group/videoofthemonth?hl=en.
>
> >>> --
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> >>> .
> >>>http://groups.google.com/group/videoofthemonth?hl=en.
>
> >> --
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>
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jeremiah jones
assignment:
Inanimate object acts as performer.
~Jeremiah
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Anthony Simon
I saw a video installation a few years ago where there was dialogue
between two characters but each line had a gap of at least 6 seconds
between responses. The mood was disconnected and it gave an
interesting amount of time for the lines to sink in. I really liked
the effect of it and was wondering if that approach could be attached
to a specific film movement or director. I've asked a few film friends
and they couldn't come up with anyone besides Guy Maddin. Anyway I'd
like to see this technique applied to a conversation and see what
atmosphere it creates.
Assignment:
A narrative with dialogue between characters that leaves a 6 second
gap between the characters' lines.
Does this work?
jeremiah jones
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Will Erokan
Jed Smith
1. Create something on the subject of the conflicting forces of
and alienation in one's living environment.
physiological response in the viewer.
4. A narrative with dialogue between characters that leaves a 6
gap between the characters' lines.
3. So it looks like #3 is the assignment! Sound good?
-Jed
On Nov 29, 4:38 pm, Will Erokan <willieben...@gmail.com> wrote:
> We've got one more day to submit...
>
> On Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 3:10 PM, jeremiah jones
>
>
>
> > Whats the assignment?
>
> > On Sat, Nov 20, 2010 at 4:03 PM, Anthony Simon <asimonproduct...@gmail.com
> >>http://groups.google.com/group/safe_harbor?hl=en
>
> > --
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Morgan Dusatko
M
>>>> %2Bunsubscribe@googlegr oups.com>
>>>> For more options, visit this group at
>>>> http://groups.google.com/group/safe_harbor?hl=en
>>
>>> --
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Anthony Simon
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Will Erokan
Here's an expert from the Futurist Manifesto of Cinema. It's reproduced in its entirety below.
7) Filmed dramas of objects. (Objects animated, humanized, baffled, dressed up, impassioned, civilized, dancing—objects removed from their normal surroundings and put into an abnormal state that, by contrast, throws into relief their amazing construction and nonhuman life.)
The Futurist Cinema
F.T. Marinetti, Bruno Corra, Emilio Settimelli, Arnaldo Ginna, Giacomo Balla, Remo Chiti
The book, a wholly passéist means of preserving and communicating thought, has for a long time been fated to disappear like cathedrals, towers, crenellated walls, museums, and the pacifist ideal. The book, static companion of the sedentary, the nostalgic, the neutralist, cannot entertain or exalt the new Futurist generations intoxicated with revolutionary and bellicose dynamism.
The conflagration is steadily enlivening the European sensibility. Our great hygienic war, which should satisfy all our national aspirations, centuples the renewing power of the Italian race. The Futurist cinema, which we are preparing, a joyful deformation of the universe, an alogical, fleeting synthesis of life in the world, will become the best school for boys: a school of joy, of speed, of force, of courage, and heroism. The Futurist cinema will sharpen, develop the sensibility, will quicken the creative imagination, will give the intelligence a prodigious sense of simultaneity and omnipresence. The Futurist cinema will thus cooperate in the general renewal, taking the place of the literary review (always pedantic) and the drama (always predictable), and killing the book (always tedious and oppressive). The necessities of propaganda will force us to publish a book once in a while. But we prefer to express ourselves through the cinema, through great tables of words-in-freedom and mobile illuminated signs.
With our manifesto “The Futurist Synthetic Theatre”, with the victorious tours of the theatre companies of Gualtiero Tumiati, Ettore Berti, Annibale Ninchi, Luigi Zoncada, with the two volumes of Futurist Synthetic Theatre containing eighty theatrical syntheses, we have begun the revolution in the Italian prose theatre. An earlier Futurist manifesto had rehabilitated, glorified, and perfected the Variety Theatre. It is logical therefore for us to carry our vivifying energies into a new theatrical zone: the cinema.
At first look the cinema, born only a few years ago, may seem to be Futurist already, lacking a past and free from traditions. Actually, by appearing in the guise of theatre without words, it has inherited all the most traditional sweepings of the literary theatre. Consequently, everything we have said and done about the stage applies to the cinema. Our action is legitimate and necessary in so far as the cinema up to now has been and tends to remain profoundly passéist, whereas we see in it the possibility of an eminently Futurist art and the expressive medium most adapted to the complex sensibility of a Futurist artist.
Except for interesting films of travel, hunting, wars, and so on, the film-makers have done no more than inflict on us the most backward looking dramas, great and small. The same scenario whose brevity and variety may make it seem advanced is, in most cases, nothing but the most trite and pious analysis. Therefore all the immense artistic possibilities of the cinema still rest entirely in the future. The cinema is an autonomous art. The cinema must therefore never copy the stage. The cinema, being essentially visual, must above all fulfill the evolution of painting, detach itself from reality, from photography, from the graceful and solemn. It must become antigraceful, deforming, impressionistic, synthetic, dynamic, free-wording.
One must free the cinema as an expressive medium in order to make it the ideal instrument of a new art, immensely vaster and lighter than all the existing arts. We are convinced that only in this way can one reach that polyexpressiveness towards which all the most modern artistic researches are moving. Today the Futurist cinema creates precisely the polyexpressive symphony that just a year ago we announced in our manifesto “Weights, Measures, and Prices of Artistic Genius”. The most varied elements will enter into the Futurist film as expressive means: from the slice of life to the streak of color, from the conventional line to words-in-freedom, from chromatic and plastic music to the music of objects. In other words it will be painting, architecture, sculpture, words-in-freedom, music of colors, lines, and forms, a jumble of objects and reality thrown together at random. We shall offer new inspirations for the researches of painters, which will tend to break out of the limits of the frame. We shall set in motion the words-in-freedom that smash the boundaries of literature as they march towards painting, music, noise-art, and throw a marvelous bridge between the word and the real object.
![[Photo from the Futurist movie Thais]](https://ci3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/xEk8VHKnMvyiUcMvZeGfbojsNHqReDn4ymEWmECFkk6BHoXH_ZHkkOePL9aiIkIVQyNFRPkMvHy-U9Vb-7matz6O0w=s0-d-e1-ft#http://www.unknown.nu/futurism/images/thais2.jpg)
Our films will be:
-
Cinematic analogies
that use reality directly as one of the two
elements of the analogy. Example: If we should want to express the
anguished state of one of our protagonists, instead of describing it in
its various phases of suffering, we would give an equivalent impression
with the sight of a jagged and cavernous mountain.
The mountains, seas, woods, cities, crowds, armies, squadrons, aeroplanes will often be our formidable expressive words: the universe will be our vocabulary. Example: We want to give a sensation of strange cheerfulness: we show a chair cover flying comically around an enormous coat stand until they decide to join. We want to give the sensation of anger: we fracture the angry man into a whirlwind of little yellow balls. We want to give the anguish of a hero who has lost his faith and lapsed into a dead neutral skepticism: we show the hero in the act of making an inspired speech to a great crowd; suddenly we bring on Giovanni Giolitti who treasonably stuffs a thick forkful of macaroni into the hero’s mouth, drowning his winged words in tomato sauce.
We shall add color to the dialogue by swiftly, simultaneously showing every image that passes through the actors’ brains. Example: representing a man who will say to his woman: “You’re as lovely as a gazelle,” we shall show the gazelle. Example: if a character says, “I contemplate your fresh and luminous smile as a traveler after a long rough trip contemplates the sea from high on a mountain,” we shall show traveler, sea, mountain.
This is how we shall make our characters as understandable as if they talked.
-
Cinematic poems, speeches, and poetry.
We shall make all of their component images pass across the screen.
Example: “Canto dell’amore” [Song of Love] by Giosuè Carducci:
In their German strongholds perched
Like falcons meditating the huntWe shall show the strongholds, the falcons in ambush.
From the churches that raise long marble
arms to heaven, in prayer to God
Prom the convents between villages and towns
crouching darkly to the sound of bells
like cuckoos among far-spaced trees
singing boredoms and unexpected joys...We shall show churches that little by little are changed into imploring women, God beaming down from on high, the convents, the cuckoos, and so on.
Example: “Sogno d’Estate” [Summer’s Dream] by Giosuè Carducci:
Among your ever-sounding strains of battle, Homer, I am conquered by
the warm hour: I bow my head in sleep on Scamander’s bank, but my
heart flees to the Tyrrhenian Sea.We shall show Carducci wandering amid the tumult of the Achaians, deftly avoiding the galloping horses, paying his respects to Homer, going for a drink with Ajax to the inn, The Red Scamander, and at the third glass of wine his heart, whose palpitations we ought to see, Pops out of his jacket like a huge red balloon and flies over the Gulf Of Rapallo. This is how we make films out of the most secret movements of genius.
Thus we shall ridicule the works of the passéist poets, transforming to the great benefit of the public the most nostalgically monotonous weepy poetry into violent, exciting, and highly exhilarating spectacles.
![[Photo from the Futurist
movie Thais]](https://ci6.googleusercontent.com/proxy/Xwxdg02LDEkXONXT-wOd70KCvLr-aqROLez1XkoOj2TNZR9OQ0X1IpTss9pE1qf646fbjw4QZKM2vdp027FTXTWRoA=s0-d-e1-ft#http://www.unknown.nu/futurism/images/thais3.jpg)
-
Cinematic simultaneity and interpenetration
of different times and places. We shall project two or three different visual
episodes at the same time, one next to the other.
-
Cinematic musical researches
(dissonances, harmonies, symphonies of gestures, events, colors, lines, etc.).
-
Dramatized states of mind on film.
-
Daily exercises in freeing ourselves from mere photographed logic.
-
Filmed dramas of objects.
(Objects animated, humanized, baffled, dressed up, impassioned, civilized,
dancing—objects removed from
their normal surroundings and put into an abnormal state that, by
contrast, throws into relief their amazing construction and nonhuman life.)
-
Show windows of filmed ideas, events, types, objects, etc.
-
Congresses, flirts, fights and marriages of funny faces, mimicry,
etc. Example: a big nose that silences a thousand congressional fingers
by ringing an ear, while two policemen’s moustaches arrest a tooth.
-
Filmed unreal reconstructions of the human body.
-
Filmed dramas of disproportion
(a thirsty man who pulls out a
tiny drinking straw that lengthens umbilically as far as a lake and
dries it up
instantly.)
-
Potential dramas and strategic plans of filmed feelings.
-
Linear, plastic, chromatic equivalences, etc.,
of men, women, events, thoughts, music, feelings, weights, smells, noises (with white
lines on black we shall show the inner, physical rhythm of a husband
who discovers his wife in adultery and chases the lover - rhythm of soul
and rhythm of legs).
-
Filmed words-in-freedom in movement
(synoptic tables of Iyric
values—dramas of humanized or animated letters—orthographic
dramas—typographical dramas—geometric dramas—numeric sensibility,
etc.).
Painting + sculpture + plastic dynamism + words-in-freedom + composed noises [intonarumori] + architecture + synthetic theatre = Futurist cinema.
This is how we decompose and recompose the universe according to our marvelous whims, to centuple the powers of the Italian creative genius and its absolute preeminence in the world.
jeremiah jones
Will Erokan
Morgan Dusatko
jeremiah jones
Will Erokan
I haven't done the assignment... I've been having some trouble with it. But I have a bunch of Bumpers, and a short from Jon Clark, and maybe some other stuff...
Who else has work to show?
Are yall ready to do this?
How are we going to meet?
Webcams?
Chatroulette?
Are we doing this tomorrow or sunday?
And when?
Morgan Dusatko
http://www.tumblr.com/join/tuojhIZAEb
Tumblr is a super easy way to bring all of our videos together. All you have to do is upload your video to vimeo or youtube and share the link. There's also a million other ways to post, like calling in with your phone or sending it an email?!?!
I'll compress my video tonight, maybe we can meet tomorrow (2pm?), does someone know how to do and online conference or something like that?
Morgan
thelastquest.org
Will Erokan
http://www.voip-sol.com/free-multi-person-skype-video-conferencing-chat/
Does this work for everyone?
Anthony Simon
Here's my video, didn't have alot of time and I was a little stumped but here it is:
http://www.vimeo.com/18552217
Morgan,
the link took me to the main page of Tumblr, did anyone else have this issue?
-Anthony
Will Erokan
Morgan Dusatko
I've posted all the videos that are shared so far. Will send out individual links to get on the tumblr. If you want to get in, and I don't send an invitation to your email, send it to me at morgan...@gmail.com. I also need text for the about page. Anyone want to take care of that?
Thanks,
Morgan
Will Erokan
jeremiah jones
Morgan Dusatko
Will Erokan
I'll have it up tomorrow.
Does anyone else have anything?
Bumpers? Otherstuff?
Who wants to get it on their local station?
When do we pick the next assignment?
It's a little looser via the internet.
Morgan Dusatko
Send me the DVD and I'll get it on!
I think we should choose our assignment next week. That should give us some time to think of more and send them to Jed.
If anyone has anything else they can put it on the tumblr, or put the link here and I'll put it on the tumblr.
Thanks,
Morgan
Will Erokan
Does anyone still live in olympia?
jeremiah jones
Brad Hutchinson
Will Erokan
jeremiah jones
??
Will Erokan
Morgan Dusatko
Morgan
Will Erokan
Does anyone have a problem with this?
jeremiah jones
Mine is for real this time, I even went to America for this one.
Jeremiah
Will Erokan
jeremiah jones
I'm curious, what kind of work paid/unpaid are people doing right now? I know there were a lot of changes over the last few years.
I'm still working with experimental film and sculpture, but I think it's gotten better. I am incorporating objects, food, slides, and other items into installations. Working on a puppet series right now. I am still making loops.
For money I am working five gigs, all in art education. I am collaborating with a group of middle schoolers to construct a large scale fabric sculpture based video installation, I am collaborating with a group of 8 year olds on building a sculptural garden for the brooklyn museum, and I'm doing a whole lot of fucking one shot school visits to the Folk Art Museum, the New Museum and The Guggenheim.
Will Erokan
First I was doing it every two months or so, but lately it's been much more frequent, last month I played 2 clubs and a rave. Next Friday I'm playing at an art gallery... Live video. I've been trying to incorporate these techniques...
http://mindingthegaps.pbworks.com/f/BurroughsElectronicRevolution.pdf
I typically play on a combination of projectors (1-6) and televisions (10-30).
