Yesterday I looked at METROPOLIS for the first time in daylight, and as my goal for the morning was to fall in love with the piece, I approached it with some caution. Let's just say that so far I have a growing infatuation for the piece. I photographed it at the current stage and emailed it to three trusted friends to get their opinion on it. I was not sure if the piece felt complete or not, if the bottom part was too empty, or a necessary resting place (I will post pictures and videos of it once the piece premiers in the gallery exhibition in October).
To be efficient with my time I worked on the donation piece, which I actually really like now, so it was not a blow off piece. It is actually related to something I wanna do in large scale one of these days anyway. It's tentative title is "t is for typo", and obviously it is an adaptation from the typo mistake on METROPOLIS.
Ellen and I went to the "Stop-Motion and Pixelation" workshop at CCA, where we also encountered Cris and Annica's piece. While the work looked underwhelming, very small for the scale of the room (and very two-dimensional, which is not what I expected from previous work I have seen, not a good use of the space), it had its inherent fascination by being interactive/responsive to body movement. Perhaps the final outcome has to do with the technical issues they were having? The workshop took place in the same theater Aimee and I saw the Jane Fonda movie. The instructor, Eileen Reynolds, was very nice and sweet. She's taught at a university in Singapore for many years, a founding member of the media department, from what I understand (she does not teach there anymore, not sure what the reasons are and what her next move is - I suspect she might be from the area though). The class had its mixed bag of participants, and the results were mixed. She showed us a software for stop-motion capture called Dragon something, as well as a few other freewares. After doing a demo (which was preceded by a mini lecture of historical predecessors, interesting to watch), we were divided into groups, mine consisting of Ellen, myself, a guy named Jacob, a gal named Juliet, and two women I think may be mother and daughter, who apparently have tons of experience in doing what we were doing (they were familiar with the dragon software, even had a USB keypad with it, which controlled both software and camera). I suggested we used Cris and Annica's installation as stage and background as it was pretty interesting. We played there for at least an hour. We first did a group animation with us moving around in space, and later with us jumping up and down to simulate floating or flying. At one point Ellen and I just got silly and unbeknownst to us, were photographed by Jacob doing all kinds of silly things. These last more spontaneous plays turned out to be more interesting than the rest, but overall our group did pretty well. I wish I had gotten a copy of the stuff we did. We returned to the group saw everybody's work, and then the workshop got really boring, so Ellen and I decided to fein a 2pm appointment (it was about 1:50 and the workshop was gonna last until 3 pm) and left early, but before we invited everyone to come to the open house on Thursday. I hope they do.
Got back to the institute, starving as usual, and got back in the studio. Read email feedback and decided to work on a video sketch for the piece, which I am now calling MEDIATOR. Final Cut Pro was being a pill with my laptop, which did not surprise me. I edited a four minute piece, but for some reason there were tons of inconsistencies (like ratio changing mid-play, tracks not appearing altogether, import issues, etc). I was getting pretty frustrated, so I quit and restarted the program a few times. When that did not work, I closed the project and started a new one, reimported everything and re-edited it to a 2.5 minutes piece, and it sort of worked (still some glitches I am sure no one would notice). Set up the projector and played the clip on a loop, and actually really liked the effect. By then it was almost 6:30, so I called Aimee to take a look and we watched it for a bit.
We decided to go for pizza as a reason to get out of the institute. We got there and had a good time, the pizza was pretty yummy, we had a salad too. Saving the testicle exposure next door, it was almost the perfect meal, seating outside in the shade, good conversation and good food. To get that silverball image out of our head (we still do not know if the man was doing it intentionally or not), we decided to get some dessert somewhere, so this being Santa Fe on sunday, everything was closed. We ended up going to Trader Joe's, Aimee bought some groceries and we settled on a flourless chocolate cake. Got back to the institute, ate the cake (good but a bit dry, maybe old?), and went to our rooms. I watched Netflix for a couple hours and went to bed a bit past 10 pm.
Woke up at 5 pm, which was pretty good for me(one bathroom break in the middle of the night), though I really wanted to sleep more. Tonight we might go to the Ojo Caliente hot springs, not sure yet who will go. Also not sure what will happen in the studio, as I only have an idea for one more piece I want to make here. Perhaps once I make it other ideas will come my way. I may also edit other things into the 2.5 video, not sure yet. We'll see.
- posted via iPad
Location:Cerrillos Rd,Santa Fe,United States
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