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)

A short film by Flat-e. The project began life as a film to accompany a performance by the London Sinfonietta of Edgard Vareses Ionisation. An inspiring 20th century composer who pioneered works that cross over into the electronic scene of today.

Sound: Ultre (ultre.co.uk).

I’ve mentioned this before and I can’t quite believe it’s happening this Friday, 8th January 2010, but it is and to say I’m excited is quite the understatement.

I was commissioned by the Big Chill festival’s visual curator John Rixon early in 2009 to produce a short audio visual piece based around the theme of Quiet Voices. John was really interested in my Downbeaten Exploratory series of mixes I produced in late 2008 and early 2009 (of which I will be doing new ones in 2010, grab the first 2 here) and was aware of my editing and video production work. I’ve been to a few Late at Tate events before and the quality of work blows me away, so to be asked to provide a piece for the event is quite an honour.

My piece, sevenzero, is my interpretation of ambient. It’s not really background sound, nor is it stuff that demands your complete attention. In my opinion it nestles somewhere in between. Comprised of footage filmed on location in Scotland with sound produced specifically for this piece.

If you can make it down, feel free to come over and say hi.

Quiet Voices, curated by former Big Chill visuals resident John Rixon, is an ambient audio-visual feast. Featuring Roger Eno and Dom Theobald, Jon Hopkins, Laura B and Graina, John Rixon and Simon Wild, Animat and Alucidnation. Together with a short film programme exploring the nature of ‘quiet’, expect an evening of beautiful aural soundscapes and lush cinematic projections.

Auditorium
19.00 & 20.30
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

As promised in previous posts (namely project: Acedia, the photoshoot & new project: Acedia.) here we have the recording of the début performance of fashion designer Sample Remix’s audiovisual multimedia Acedia show. In collaboration with myself, makemassair, and deadman dj (who did a fantastic job on the sound design, as well as redubbing the live recording with the original audio).

The show was met with a great reception and it really was one of the performances of the whole night. Looking forward to future performance projects with Sample Remix.

All garments designed and produced by Sample Remix. (sampleremix.co.uk)
Video produced by makemassair. (makemassair.co.uk)
Sound design by deadman dj. (deadmandj.net)

Clothing modelled and performed in by
Aiko, Lolita Trash, Miss Harriet, Grace Tebbutt, Biomechanina, Miss Cobweb, Ella DV

Performed at Festival of Sins. (festivalofsins.co.uk)

Lukasz Lysakowski has produced this video: Color Process. It’s part of an audiovisual performance between himself and Eduard Artemyev (who provided the audio).  I’ve highlighted it on the makemassair blog because it is both visually textured and aesthetically very pleasing. In my humble opinion anyways.

Why not leave a comment with your opinion.

I believe (from the information provided on Vimeo) that the video is a combination of the coding languages Processing, and MAX/MSP with Jitter, but with what doing which bit I don’t know (although I am very keen to uncover).

My realtime video work focuses on creating a nonlinear narrative which folds and unfolds in reaction to the interplay between sound and image. Digitization and processing allows for intuitive and spontaneous creation of image-sound scapes. Each video work is unique, situated in time and space, and reflects the ephermal nature of our experiences.

Levi van Veluw is a multidisciplinary artist, living and working in the Netherlands. I came across his work a good few months ago now and was struck by it’s ability to present a tactility to simple presentation. His work is afaik all self portrait based being both expressive and introspective. He is a one man process.

His works constitute elemental transfers – modifying the face as object – combining it with other stylistic elements to create a third visual object with a large visual impact. The work you see therefore is not a portrait, but an information-rich image of colour, form, texture, and content. The image contains the history of a short creative process, with the artist shifting between the entities of subject and object.

Levi van Veluw | Light | Light I | 120×100cm & 60×50cm | 2009

Levi van Veluw | Natural transfer I | 120×100cm & 60×50cm | 2009

Hair | 60×50cm & 120×100cm | 2007

Material transfers | Carpet | 120×100cm & 60×50cm | 2008

First up. Sorry for the lack of updates, I know I made a point about keeping the blog up to date, but I got booked to perform video visuals at a festival (Glade no less, details from that coming real soon). Anyways, hopefully this will interest you. It’s a webcam choreography piece slash music video for the band Sour and their track Hibi no Neiro (Tone of everyday) taken from their first mini album: Water Flavour EP

The cast were selected from the actual Sour fan base, from many countries around the world. Each person and scene was filmed purely via webcam.

Director: Masashi Kawamura + Hal Kirkland + Magico Nakamura + Masayoshi Nakamura

SOUR official site: http://sour-web.com

(more…)

So, I’ve decided in some respects to be a bit more direct with this blog. Those of you who know me and my musical activities (primarily as a DVNT and radio host of MANTIS) will know that I spend an inordinate amount of time on music forums across several genres and probably countries. Back in February I decided to take the plunge into a freelance career (video editing/post production/graphic design etc…) and since then I have been spending most of my time either looking for work, networking (online mostly), and undertaking a few paid jobs (always on the look out for more).

As I’m sure some of you who are working for themselves successfully, or aiming for it, know, it can be a struggle balancing the work side of things against the hobby side of things (in my respect, the music) particularly if you are based at home. The danger I’m finding is that the music is easier to get into, relax into and generally I can even subconsciously avoid the “work” side of things. That isn’t to say I don’t enjoy the work I’m pursuing with my freelancing; quite the opposite in fact, I do. At the moment, the balance is generally spent finding the work, rather than the work itself. lol.

There are so many things that I aim to do in any given day.  You spend a while (normally most of the working day at the moment in my case) unable to decide, or flitting between them, that your day flies by. You’re left sitting there going, well, what happened there. For me, it comes down to focus. I focus on one topic, begin thinking about another one, sometimes related, sometimes not, and then begin that topic a little bit, thinking I’ve got it under control. And so on.

Generally I H A V E to over do things. I probably have mild OCD, well I’m hoping mild. So, 3 paragraphs in, and what am I saying to those of you who have read this. Well it’s this. That as well as highlighting creative visual inspiration as I hope I have been on this blog, that I’m going to use it as a soundboard for ideas, and discussions related to my freelance work. Give you an insight into the creative work I undertake on a daily basis, and in doing so I hope that it will give me greater focus and commitment to my chosen profession as opposed to my lovely hobby.

Still with me?

Phew. Ok, so one thing I have been trying to do is read up on video art in more depth than I did before whilst studying a few years back. I’m in the early stages of an ambient project and am looking possibly at a performance aspect of it. If not specifically for the project then as an after process to it. I’ll try to highlight interesting bits I come across.

Good old Wikipedia has a good basic introduction to it:

Perhaps the simplest, most straightforward defining distinction in this respect would then be to say that (perhaps) cinema’s ultimate goal is to entertain, whereas video art’s intentions are more varied, be they to simply explore the boundaries of the medium itself (e.g., Peter Campus, Double Vision) or to rigorously attack the viewer’s expectations of video as shaped by conventional cinema (e.g., Joan Jonas, Organic Honey’s Vertical Roll).

Peter Campus – Double Vision (1971)

Campus investigates the metaphoric overlap between properties of the video camera and processes of human perception, an area of great interest to many early videomakers. Double Vision inventories strategies for comparing simultaneous images of a loft space produced by two video cameras whose signals are fed through a mixer, thus producing an electronic version of what in film would be called a “double exposure.” The cameras are set up to perform variations of binocular vision; for example in the section entitled “Copilia,” the two cameras are set at different focal lengths and search independently around an empty room, attached to the same moving body. In “Convergence,” the cameras are stationary and separated but focused on the same distant wall; their images gradually merge as the artist repeatedly returns to the cameras and moves them closer together. Double Vision is an elegant and systemmatic exploration of vision using basic video technology. “[Double Vision is] an exploration of double or two-camera images and works its way up to an eye-brain model, always conscious of how this model differed from its subject matter. ” — Peter Campus

Deaf Center + Claudio Sinatti mixedmedia performance
NODE festival, Modena / June 2008

Although short, this is a lovely piece, both audibly and visually. Both elements working in harmony with each other that makes me quite jealous I wasn’t there in person.

Links
NODE Festival / Claudio Sinatti