Dr. Woohoo!

Flash on the Beach (FOTB) ‘09
As promised, here is a link to my slides + lecture notes. It took longer than expected due to reasons: 1) it was my turn to sit next to the sick, coughing family on the flight back from London, where in turn I was sick for the better part of a week; and 2) I felt I needed to exploit the format of the slides by explicitly adding detailed notes to each one – a luxury that an hour presentation simply does not give you. Be forewarned, the notes are random thoughts and it is in a raw and early stage of research. The insights and conclusions I make might lead you in circles, or you might find a grain of truth that is worthy of further examination.

A YouTube Channel for Intelligent Video Art
As I worked my way through several books on Cybernetic Art, Artificial Life Art and Genetic Art, I created a spreadsheet of the names, titles, urls, etc. of video art that continued to grow and grow and grow. I was able to include only a fraction of the video art within my presentation at FOTB, but I wanted to share the entire list with you.

To my amazement, a large number of quality, avant garde videos are available on YouTube. However, with the exception of the excellent MediaArtTube, most of the videos I found were not easily available, especially from an iPhone / iPod Touch. With that in mind, I would like to share with you a new YouTube channel: In The Mod: Video Art++.

The Vasulka Archives
As much as it pains me to find out that a book I desire is out-of-print and unavailable, a void of greater size is created when the same is true for an important piece of video art. There were numerous times during my research for my presentation that I simply could not find relevant videos online. During a conversation I had with Simon from the Santa Fe Complex, he mentioned the Vasulka’s Archive. It turns out that from the late 60s the Vasulka’s have amassed an enormous collection of tapes, papers, videos, articles or magazines of avant garde related pieces for their archive. The archive consists of artwork from a variety of different artists who would donate their personal collection to the Vasulka’s for various reasons including the fact that they knew the Vasulka’s would take great care with their work.

We are fortunate to have Woody and Steina still with us and it is the perfect time to explore a relationship with a foundation to digitally archive this library so that it can easily be shared with future generations. With that said, if you know of someone with a track record of protecting artwork with the highest amount of integrity as well as funding such an endeavor, please let me know and I will forward their information on to the Vasulkas.

Hiatus
On a side note, I wanted to sincerely thank everyone who attended the conference as well as John and Joe for inviting me back for a 3rd year in a row. I feel at home when I’m in Brighton and I love seeing all of my friends again and celebrating this crazy, wonderful journey that we are on. John + Joe put together a conference that feels more like a functional family getting together to share with each other wonderful ideas. With that said, it is time for me to hibernate for at least a year from the conference circuit and focus my energy on creating artwork using the tools that I have created as well as hijacking existing features and functions from a worthy list of creative and mentally stimulating applications. I look forward to seeing you again at some point in the future, as much as I look forward to creating artwork that I would love to share with you.

As part of the 9 Evenings: theatre and engineering which took place at the Armory in NYC, “Alex Hay gave a very austere solo dance accompanied by the amplified sounds of his brain waves, heartbeat, muscle and eye movements.” - Jack Burnham Beyond Modern Sculpture.

There is a great description of the event here and Alfons Schilling’s GREAT film 9 Evenings here…. you will get a full appreciation of the amount of energy, effort and scale that was required to put this show together. Although it was largely considered a failure at the time due to the technical difficulties they encountered, I can not help but be in awe and inspired by what they were able to achieve. With lessons learned, we need to stage another event with the same magnitude of artists.

Of special note are:
4:17 into the video, the segment about Alex’s performance begins.
At 6:20, David Tudor does

More video, info and DVDs on 9 Evenings here.

Fast forward from Alex Hay to 2009 and Graffiti Research Lab crew – Chris Sugrue, James Powderly, Theo Watson, Evan Roth and Zach Lieberman – have just uploaded their latest video demonstrating their eye tracking software created with openFrameworks called eyewriter.

Tempt1: SE2 EP2 from Evan Roth on Vimeo.

I am researching Cybernetic Art – which I will present my findings and experiments at Flash on the Beach on September 21st in Brighton – and in the process stumbled upon the Avant Garde video artist Robert Breer. His hand-drawn 3d wireframe animations and whimsical shape-morphing characters reminds me of a loosely similar path my friend James Paterson is on using what has been to-date, a proprietary 3d drawing tool that James & Amit Pitaru created. I say this with the greatest amount of respect for both artists to have found a similar style at times and yet, anyone who has seen James’ work knows that his content and characters are truly uniquely a reflection of his wonderfully twisted sense of humor. Lol.

Recently, my friends James, Amit, Zach Lieberman, Ralph Hauwert & Zach Gage announced they are collaborating on a 3d drawing tool called Rhonda. For more info on their work and the app, check it out here.