the blog of makemassair

Back in January this year I was commissioned to produce a short audio visual ambient inspired piece. This was premièred at the Tate Britain on the 8th of the month. Some of you were lucky enough to come down to the awesome venue and gallery and see what me and my fellow artists had produced. (more details here).

The event Digital City will be screening the complete 12 shorts originally shown at the Late at Tate Quiet Voices event on the 27th March. It sold out really quickly (quicker than I could advertise it lol) but they have 3 tickets to give away, read on:

COMPETITION: We’re chuffed to be sold out, but also gutted that so many who’d like ot be there are unable to, so we are giving away 3 pairs of tickets. All you gotta do is answer this:

Q: Name one of the live acts that played at the first ever Digital City up in an industrial loft, 5 years ago, this march.

Hint: www.digitalcity.org.uk

Please sent your answer to info@digitalcity.org.uk . We will pick the winners a week before the event on 20/3/10.

more info about the event:

It’s taken us over a year to find this absolute beauty of a venue, but Digital City and Names of Nothing return to our secret party roots for a very special night in an utter gem of a warehouse- a secret venue in east London, very close to Hackney Wick.

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….now look what we have in store for you:

Digital City’s 5th Birthday Party (from 7pm):

Digital City will be transforming the venue into a world of screens, where VJ, film and art installation share equal platform with the beats, and will feature:

Active Optics: An interactive video feedback installation. Accompanied by chilled tunes and quality grub

Quiet Voices films: Curated by former Big Chill visuals resident John Rixon. Expect beautiful aural soundscapes and lush cinematic projections to experience, absorb and get lost in.

• Echaskech: Live AV set from the purveyours of arguably the best hypnotic technotronica since the demise & resurrection of Orbital
• DJ BarryDark (techno-electro set)
• Tentonatom Live & DJ set
• DJ Remote (warm beats and glitch set)
• VJs Mach V, Dr Mo and Parallax

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DC will be followed by Names of Nothing (until 7am):

Names of Nothing is an underground night and DJ duo.

Famous for their huge inner-London wood raves, Names of Nothing specialise in parties in different places- be they legal or illegal, indoors or outdoors. Their events revolve around a love for music and music alone and as such Names of Nothing try to maintain that not many people know who they are. It is not for commercial gain and has just built up via reputation and word of mouth over the years.

12 short films exploring and responding to the theme of Quiet Voices:

• RayV: 3 Steps, 3 min 18 sec
• Alex Pearl: Lodgings, 4 min 19 sec
• Annabel Dover: Imperial, 4 min 8 sec
• Bonny John/soundtrack by Input Junkie: A cloudless sky, 7 min
• Animat: A promise of snow, 7 min 36 sec
• Sounds for the Ground – video by MachV: First Light, 5 min 47 sec
• Another Fine Day: Buckets & Spades, 11 min 36 sec
• Emily Richardson: Redshift, 4 min 9 sec
• Lulu Horsfield – soundtrack by Amy Mallet: one hundred, 5 min 6 sec
• Phoebe Rixon – soundtrack by Enrico Coniglio: Mothlight, 2 min 31 sec
• makemassair: Sevenzero, 5 min 40 sec
• Lucy Wilson: 5:48, 5 min 40 sec

“Echaskech may sound lush and atmospheric but this is ambience with teeth…as a live proposition, Echaskech toughen up into a true armoured dance animal with crunching beats and vicious synth snipes as standard…with the addition of Mach V (visuals) Echaskech become a truely immersive audio-visual experience where melody and groove are prime directives.”

DJ Magazine (Fantastic 4 – Hottest four names in dance music)

Artificial Paradise, Inc is an experimental film anticipating a future where a major corporation has developed an unique software, based on organic virtual reality, which holds all the lost memories of humankind. A user connects to this database of the forgotten…what is he searching for?

Produced by Jp Frenay, this 3 minute promo video has gathered a lot of attention (selected for ONEDOTZERO festival in the WOW+FLUTTER 09 category, the Autodesk 2009 Siggraph Show Reel, Stash Issue 61, and a Realflow Case Study). Stunning stuff.

Big fan of the United Visual Artists work. They are constantly pushing themselves and their work is always inspiring and cohesive.

Massive Attack ‘United Snakes’ directed by United Visual Artists.

United Visual Artists are a British-based collective whose current practice spans permanent architectural installation, live performance and responsive installation. Research and development is a core part of our process – enabling us to constantly explore new fields, as well as re-examining more established ones.

We aim to work on a diverse and expanding range of projects, drawn from the commercial and non-commercial arenas, and to collaborate with a wide range of artists and companies.

So the Skywave Systems video loop is complete. A friend of mine who I have known for many years is embarking on a new musical project (having previously run the awesome, but sadly now defunct music label Virus B-23). He currently pushing fantastic freely available high quality net audio through his current label: Myuzyk. In addition to that he’s returning to producing music and producing it as Skywave Systems. It has a great lo-fi electronica feel to it and I’m really looking forward to hearing more of his original productions.

So, back to the video loop. Skywave asked me to come up with a looping video based around a certain colour theme, featuring UFOs or unexplained sky based phenomena, to have his text logo on the end, to be around 10 seconds long. I collected some open source and creative commons footage from Archive.org and using the Creative Commons search function and set about my task. The actual video loop itself was composed with Apple Motion, having used Adobe Photoshop for some of the still based layers. Oh yea he wanted something about triangles in there. So the Penrose triangle is included.

Countless tweaks and a few revisions later and we both arrived at a video we liked.

And the looping animated GIF as Skywave is using the loop on his Myspace:

Robert Seidel, commissioned by the Nabi Art Centre, developed this immense installation, currently on display at the SKT Tower in Seoul, South Korea. Huge dimensions visualised on several LED screens.

slices of a virtual sculpture, dimension 100 x 125 x 80 meters

In a time of complete virtualisation of knowledge, science and monetary flows the virtual sculpture “vellum” transfers the memory of one specific urban rhythm to another locality.

The video is a documentation and an excerpt of the work.

Links
Vellum at Robert Seidel’s page
COMO Media Platfrom, Seoul
Nabi Art Center, Seoul

A promotional video for maptype.com. Using the tilt shift technique, this video has gone for minature faking. A technique which involves selectively blurring part of the image, to generate a very narrow depth of field similar to that found in macro photography. This can give the image of a miniature model

The opening sequence created for the ProMax/BDA Africa 2007 annual event celebrating the best in broadcast motion graphics and channel identity design.

All I’ll say is that it’s pretty awesome.

Panic Embryo (one of the 3D animators):

It was myself and another 3D animator who both work at a company called Orijin that put the sequence together. The robots are 3D on all of the wide shots. We did close ups and tight cuts with other kinds of contraptions.

Just finished this video for the first release of the music label I co-run, mmii / midnightminustwo. It’s for a track called Grifter, taken from the excellent (even if I am slightly bias) 5 track EP from one James Fox. Those of you who listen to my MANTIS radio show may well have seen his name crop up once or twice with tracks from this release or from his first release last year on the superb netlabel Myuzyk.

The EP has been getting some really positive reviews from some highly respected musicians and DJs. So we’re hopeful it’s going to do well when it’s released next week (8th June)

So anyways, here is the video. Short and sweet.

You can take a listen to all 5 tracks in this minimix courtesy of Soundcloud

Links
mmii / midnightminustwo

Following on from the last post on here, this is the Main Titles of the awesome looking OFFF 2009 festival.