Class 06 | 08 Nov 2019
Assignments
Daily videos
Organisation
You have been recording videos every day for the last six weeks. Your task is now to find a way to organise the videos so that an audience can see the corpus you’ve built up. Ideally, your method of displaying the videos should highlight the similarities between your films, and the difference in the outliers. Showing one film after another after another without any organisation isn’t good enough!
Ideas
This is a task that is all about organising information, so here are some ideas.
- You could overlay videos, as with this video of every episode of Friends Season One layered on top of each other. Or you might choose to create a large grid of videos. If you do this, ask yourself: are there moments that can be synchronised? How can I make the actions of all of these videos intelligible?
- You could show multiple videos together, as in Cristian Marclay’s Pub Crawl (2016). Marclay has produced numerous video works which combine huge amounts of information. Famously The Clock (2010) is a 24-hour found-footage which all features clocks or the time shown in films/TV programmes – a method of organising thousands of video clips.
- By tone! Cory Archangel’s A Couple Thousand Short Films About Glenn Gould (2007) features clips of amateur musicians playing on YouTube spliced to play the Goldberg Variations. See also Drei Klavierstuke for a more abstract version of this idea.
- By brightness. Gregor Stol Nielsen’s Routed (2012) organises scenes by brightness, moving from light to dark.
- If you are technically-minded, please do try to play with tools like Max or PureData (open source!) to combine your films.
You’ll need to show a draft by the next class – please let me know if you’re planning on using a tool like Max/PD to show your work, or would rather upload a draft rendered video.
Don’t forget to keep uploading your daily videos!
Exhibition
This week you’ll also be thinking about the exhibition. Please think about how you will display the video work, as well as the information about the video work – the rules, your names, etc!
Please have a few ideas ready for next time we meet! I can only ask for budget, etc, if you know what you want to do. :)
Constraints:
- The exhibition will be at V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media on 17 December in the evening. There will be one part where you present your work, and the second part where everyone from MIVC will be enjoying end-of-term drinks whilst your work plays on screens.
- We have to be able to put up and take down the work on the same day (taking work down after having a few drinks!).
- We’ll have a limited number of screens and media players. There is one big screen we definitely have, which can show more experimental content from a laptop.
- Most media players can only play video content, so you’ll have to make playlists and conform your videos, titles, etc, to similar standards (16:9!).
- There will be a small production budget for printing posters, etc.
- Think about all of the potential that exists for printing at St Joost! There’s an excellent print department downstairs at St Joost.
Graphic Design
You can download a PDF of the Graphic design (or, how I learned to stop worrying and love the grid) presentation here: