[Video] 'I Link, Therefore I Am'

In brief moments snatched between furious bouts of study and trying to stay on top of work (amongst a bunch of other things), I've managed to put another short film together - 'I Link, Therefore I Am', as displayed above. This short film was actually produced for two purposes - one, as a piece of coursework for the 'Theory and Practice of Interactive Media' module as part of the MA, and two, as a submission for the audio/video remix contest 'The Past Re-imagined as the Future'.

As a piece of coursework, it is intended to demonstrate an interaction with a couple of pieces of theory that relate to new media and the body. It is also aimed at demonstrating a different form of 'writing' than than traditional notion applied to an academic essay. As a remix contest submission, the film takes a couple of tracks from the Free Music Archive and clips from a handful of short films from the Prelinger Archive and creates something new with them all. 

The monochromatic style is inspired by old jazz LP covers. I searched for 'network' in the Prelinger section of the Internet Archive and came up with footage from shorts films commissioned by Bell and AT&T on the building of the American telephone network, along with material on telegraphs, radio and television - the old media networks on which the new media network of the Internet was partly built. This also hopefully neatly demonstrates the past being re-imagined as the future. 

The public voting part of the contest is open from November 12-25, so there's just over a week of voting left. At the moment, I've only had one public vote. If you like the odd blend of academic bluster and archival plunder in this video, please head over to the voting page and help me to up that number.

Any votes much appreciated. All contest entries can be viewed here.

Thanks

A Tokyo film and a Berlin slideshow

Due to the amount of stuff I've tended to load onto my plate, it's taken me two years to complete a project that runs to a total of just 21 minutes. I will bring the complete fruits of that project together in another post, but in this one I'm delighted to finally be able to present the last film in the 'Japan Shorts' series.

Above, you can find 'The Crossing', the fourth of the four short films I've been making with footage shot using a Flip Ultra HD camera on my last trip back to Tokyo (in 2010). This film incorporates footage from around Shibuya Crossing, probably the world's busiest pedestrian intersection and a heck of a place for standing and watching the people flow from. All of the films make use of Creative Commons-licensed music for soundtracks, and 'The Crossing' runs with Mario Mattioli's 'Granados: Spanish Dance n.2', sourced from ccMixter. There's also a reading (by me) of a really old Japanese poem (in translation, of course), a first attempt at voiceover in one of my recent films, and a few new editing styles that resulting from upgrading my video editor to a more recent version.

Hit me up in the comments below if you like or loathe the film. This page features the YouTube version, but it's also available to view with larger in-page screen estate on Vimeo. Ahead of the post that features all four, follow the links in the brackets to find posts on the other three shorts ('Makes The World Go Round', 'In Motion' and 'J-Journeys').

This short film really concludes a period of work that has been heavily influenced by my time in Japan. This period included three CD albums, one book, hundreds of photographs, and these four short films. Coming to the end of this period is really exciting as it means that other ideas which have been bubbling under in my mind for a long time are finally going to start having a little more space. However, it's going to be quite a while before I can get going on any more of these new projects. I have another year of my MA to go. I have another film project I'm working on, which is going to be four minutes longer in playing time than 'Japan Shorts' but will need to be finished in about an eighth of the time (it's a wedding movie). There's also, y'know, other life stuff going on too :-)

As I'm not sure when I'll be able to get the next post up on this blog, I thought I'd cheekily combine two posts into one and finish this with the photo gallery of pictures that I took in Berlin earlier this year (hadn't got round to putting them up here yet). A fantastic city with a great vibrancy combined with the deepest, darkest historical shadows - take a look at a few of my grabbed moments below.

Punk in China and Africa

On a visit to China back in 2004, as Beijing was demolishing its past in preparation for the then-pending Olympics, I was invited out one night to a punk gig. Ever open to things I've never done before, I jumped at the chance.

The gig was held in a small, sweaty club near the foreboding walls of the Forbidden City, not far from Tiananmen Square. Musically, it could have been the Kings Road, London, 1976 (not that I was actually there, mind you). What was more interesting, however, was the lyrical content. My host leant in and informed me that the vocalist was singing about the events in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Raised on my Westernised perceptions of China as I was, this came as a bit of a surprise to me. Whether this was a genuine act of punk-style rebellion or evidence of a loosening up of constraints on artistic expression I'll probably never know. Nevertheless, I was intrigued to note that this form of musical expression, with its rebellious shtick and politicised undertones, had spread this far. 

I knew that the likes of The Beatles had spread in influence way beyond just the West (banned in the Soviet Union, I believe), that Wham! had been the first Western band to play China in 1985, and that these days, all sorts of musical borders no longer stand tall as they once would have done. Still, Chinese punk rock, played in China, by Chinese musicians - this was a bit of a new one on me. Broadband certainly wasn't ubiquitous in 2004 (particularly in China) and although I'd started noticing more Chinese travelling abroad, I didn't think that the country had opened up to so many outside influences that much.

Wrong, obviously.

I was reminded of this moment when I recently came across the new film 'Punk in Africa'. In a very readable review, Okayafrica.com describes the film thus:

Punk in Africa examines the punk scene in Southern Africa from the 70s onward, an era in which apartheid was being challenged in South Africa with violent repercussions, civil war burned across Mozambique and Robert Mugabe began his massacres in Zimbabwe. At this time, a combination of musical catholicity, the urge to break out of the stifling patterns of the past, and an influx of (white) U.K. citizens lit the slow fuse that transformed Southern African music. It wasn’t an explosion, it was an uninhibited musical miscegenation, in which punk and native musical traditions met – and screwed in the bathroom at the youth club.

I've been very interested in African music for years and started getting into African psychedelia a few years ago. That young Nigerians would hear Jimi Hendrix and James Brown and be inspired to pick up electric guitars could only have led to some seriously cool tunes. That young Zimbaweans would do the same ten years later based on three chords and pogoing...well, music is music and a strong idea will spread to all sorts of unexpected places once it is out of the box. It can take on more intriguing turns though when fused with other local sounds, rhythms and musical customs.

Where the young punks of Southern Africa would have stood out from their British peers is probably the greater sense of urgency in their expressions. British and American punks might have been putting two fingers up to the old guard, but the Mozambicans were rocking out in the middle of a civil war.

Check out the official trailer below:

Once you've done that, here's 75 minutes of African punk, garage rock and ska tunes to keep you busy.

From the film's SoundCloud page:

This mix includes exclusive mashups and re-edits, and goes from Punk to heavily Africanized Rebel Rock to Post-Punk, Dance-Punk, Political Dub, Punk Step, 60s Afro-Garage Techno, Bass Music and beyond, features remixes of Congotronics and a couple of tunes not from the motherland, but surely in keeping with the Afro-Punk spirit.

If that wasn't enough for you, here's a mix of some of the roots of Southern African punk, with a little more vintage underground rock and township funk (also from SoundCloud):

Enjoy!

New film: 'J-Journeys'

More video.

It's great having spent much of the past two months working on a project to then be able to knock a different one out in about an hour. This short film, the third to feature footage shot on my last visit to Japan, takes a leisurely meander through Japanese suburbia as seen from a bus and a train. It also features a great mellow piano tune by Chris Zabriskie, which under by the unlikely name of 'That Kid in the Fourth Grade Who Really Liked the Denver Broncos' (sourced from the Free Music Archive and issued under CC-BY licence).

The film is more of a mood piece than a story (in other words, nothing much happens), but I rather like the pace of it. However, over 4 minutes is probably a little long for a web video where not much happens!

I chose to debut this film on Vimeo rather than YouTube this time. No reason, and it'll find its way onto YouTube as well, but always good to get to know another platform better.

Bird Step Sequencer (WN0040)

Love this one. In Kathy Hind's words:

By observing the resting of birds on telegraph lines, it was soon obvious how much the lines resembled a music score or piano roll. Thus, a computer-vision program was developed in order to scan a video of the birds behaviour to translate it into music, by triggering audio samples of a music box and a prepared piano in the same fashion as a modern step-sequencer.

Going along to see her talk about sound maps in London next month.

'This Is Brighton' (WN0038)

First week back at work after Christmas. Made it to the weekend. Tired, but picked up on a Friday evening with the discovery of this little gem.

When I came across Sam O'Hare's beautiful tilt-shift/time lapse video of New York and a later clip of Tokyo, I thought to myself 'I'd love to do something similar on Brighton someday'. Little did I know that I'd not only get beaten to it by someone else, but that someone else was 13 years when he started making 'This Is Brighton'. Kudos to Caleb Yule - he's got a great future ahead of him. 

Miniature ski resort

A Tiny Day in the Jackson Hole Backcountry from Tristan Greszko on Vimeo.

Been meaning to put this one up for ages. 

This weekend in the UK is the August Bank Holiday weekend, often thought of here as the end of summer. The seasons are shifting, parts of Britain are bracing themselves for another wet weekend (although it's beautifully sunny here in Brighton, at the time of writing), the US East Coast is getting ready for another huge storm - winter's going to start creeping around again soon.

In preparation, the above video will give you a taste of the good side of winter. All in miniature too. I do love tilt-shifted and time-lapsed video!

Tokyo in Pummelvision

I was recently introduced to Pummelvision - an online tool for making videos from photo collections - and used the service to make a video of some of my Flickr-held images of Tokyo. The service produces a snappy little clip with a choice of displaying the images 'fast' or 'very fast' (hold on to your hats, I chose 'very fast'). 

It's very simple to use, taking pictures from places like Facebook, Flickr or Instagram and putting them up at either YouTube or Vimeo. Once a collection of images has been chosen, Pummelvision throws them all together and syncs them with an audio clip that matches the speed of image navigation.

For a 30-second clip, it's quite nice. I'm sure that such a tool could have some effective classroom uses, such as producing a video to showcase steps of a project or something like that, but at the moment it's also fairly limited. There is only one choice of song, for example. Still, a bit of fun all the same with potentially wider uses. 

Enjoy the video.

DJ Derek (WN0034)

DJ Derek pt. 1 from Grand Finale on Vimeo.

DJ Derek pt. 2 from Grand Finale on Vimeo.

Been meaning to give this fellow an airing for months now, having stumbled across him through a comment left by Idle Format earlier last year. Finally, the moment has come around...

Derek was born & raised in Bristol, & during the late 50's & early 60's fell in love with the music & culture of the West Indian immigrants moving to Britain. He picked up the lingo by hanging around in barber shops & listening, & picked up the groove by buying & selling reggae records around the country.

Now in his late 60's Derek tours the country armed only with a backpack full of killer tunes, his bus pass & an unquenchable thirst for real ale.

from original Vimeo page

It works for me on a number of levels. I've also long loved what's described above as 'West Indian' culture - the music, food, people and language of the Caribbean - as transported to Britain in the mid-20th Century. So, it seems, does the man in this documentary who has immersed himself in that culture.

The documentary takes conventions about culture, age, nationality and race, and turns them on their head. It's also a great example of how deep a part music can play in people's lives.

When I first came across Derek, I saw posters for him playing in Brighton. Didn't actually get to see him perform, but I was glad to see that he was getting to play what he loved and getting paid for it.

Dig.

The Internet in numbers (WN0032)

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from JESS3 on Vimeo.

A nicely produced little video here that gives some idea of the scale of the Internet, at least in terms of social network users last year. Attractive use of colours, fonts and images too, I thought.

'Coalition of the Willing': a post-Copenhagen call to action

Coalition Of The Willing from coalitionfilm on Vimeo.

Global discourse on the climate change issue reached a peak at the end of last year with the meeting of world leaders in Copenhagen. It was rather adventurously sold in much of the media (British at least) as 'a last chance to save the world from ourselves'.

Of course, in the end nothing of any substance was agreed - it would have required a concerted, multilateral effort for the leaders of the most polluting countries to go against their seemingly natural instincts and change course from policies of continuous economic growth to one of systemic and philosophical overhaul. Also, the leak of emails from climate scientists at the University of East Anglia - rightly or wrongly - changed the conversation away from what was happening to the planet to whether the canaries in the coalmine could be trusted in what they were saying.

Since then and against the backdrop of the frailty of global economic recovery, the issue of climate change seems to have largely taken a back seat on the international stage.

In light of this development in the 'end of the world' narrative that has largely defined our times, I was intrigued to recently come across the above video. Titled 'Coalition Of The Willing', the film boldly aims to re-seize the initiative lost following Copenhagen and inspire people to bypass governments by taking matters into their own hands. Produced by Knife Party, this collaborative venture is a pretty remarkable piece of animation in its own right, irrespective of the message. The wide range of styles nevertheless hang together well as a cohesive whole.

The message of the film is simple yet complex - by harnessing the power of the internet, peoples of the world should sidestep their leaders and come together to solve the problems of adapting to climate change or changing consumptive lifestyles towards more sustainable ends. It takes a largely uncritical view of the Western social revolutions of the 1960s, recommending them as a blueprint for the future whilst wrapping them up in the buzzwords of our digital age - open source, swarming, Linux, etc. Timothy Leary's maxim of the psychedelic era ('turn on, tune in, and drop out') is updated for our times with an invocation to 'log on, converge and swarm'.

'Coalition of the Willing' proposes the setting up of a network of three websites as a step forward towards these goals. Although it might have been even more effective had the film been a vehicle to announce the launch of said sites, the appeal that it contains is bound to encourage some steps in that direction - after all, the internet often seems like a place big enough for a good idea eventually to germinate somewhere or somehow.

In case a reminder is needed of why a change of course is badly needed (and thus prompters like the above film can only be a good thing), the pictures below give a slight flavour of what the human addiction to fossil fuels has done to the Gulf of Mexico.

'Burns in Bataria', by PinarOzger

'Oil Slick by the "Source" on the surface of Gulf of Mexico', by PinarOzger

'Beautiful?', by PinarOzger

All photos issued under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 2.0 license

New York City in miniature (WN0028)

The Sandpit from Sam O'Hare on Vimeo.

I stumbled across this little gem this morning, via a mailing list I'm on. The film depicts a day in the life of New York City, as seen in miniature, as was made by Sam O'Hare. I've come across the miniaturisation technique used in the film for photos before (known, I believe, as tilt shifting), but this is the first time I've seen it used for video. Nice work, Sam!

Ah, NYC, some day we shall make our acquaintance.

I was going to post a review of the previous decade on this blog, but the piece of writing has ended up being so long that I think it's better suited for the Collected Writings one. In editing stage at the moment, so hold tight - almost there.

Check out this site and this one to tilt shift (miniaturise) your own pictures. Go here for an interview with the filmmaker, who explains that this incredible technique was all done in post-production, and using time-lapsed stills.

'This is Japan!': fast-paced video tour round the country (WN0025)

This is Japan! from Eric Testroete on Vimeo.

While doing the promotion for 'Japan From The Inside', I got plenty of feedback in terms of emails and comments (coming here soon). My cousin also sent me a link that had been forwarded round his office, which I couldn't help but put up here.

The video above is about as frantic a tour around Japan as you can get in a few minutes. Stacked with plenty of classic Japan iconography, it also comes with a bit of a health warning - this tour is fast.

Best enjoyed in full screen.

'Sakura In Tokyo ' - a Japanese spring (WN0019)

Sakura in Tokyo from James T. Kirk on Vimeo.

As Britain starts wobbling through its spring months, unable to decide whether to be a little bit warmer or to keep up the chill, I came across this delightful video reminding me of the joys of springtime in Tokyo. For just a few short weeks of the year, the usual greyness of the cityscape is blanketed in a sweet, fluttering pink as the cherry blossoms ('sakura') come out in bloom.

'Hanami', which literally translates as 'cherry blossom viewing party', is one of the few times of year which the whole city allows itself to let the hair down a little. Visiting during this season is a rare opportunity to see Japan at play.

I felt that this video was very nicely done, so decided to put it up here (and not miss out on the season entirely myself, even if I might be a little bit late). It came via Alexandre Gervais. Thanks for pointing it out, Alex-san!

'Yes They Can!' dynamic global stats (WN0017)

Yes they can! from Gapminder Foundation on Vimeo.

It's easy to view statistics as anything but interesting in the way that they are commonly presented - lists of numbers on a page, graph or table are rarely intended to be viewed as dynamic.

There are, however, other ways to view them. Hans Rosling of Sweden's Gapminder Foundation makes a presentation in the video above that may completely change the way you look at the world.

Using the unique Trendalyzer software developed by Gapminder (and later acquired by Google), this lecture brings statistical data about global development alive and makes a very compelling arguement for altering one's worldview.