Brief Bludge in Bundanon

We scored a week in Bundanon at the end of October, courtesy of Rosie Dennis.  I spent a week animating a gum tree stick-railway network which took a lot longer than expected.  I was trying not to go too feral but it is hard, trying to ignore wombat tantrums under the floor boards and unacceptably happy Friar birds out the front window of the studio.  I can't concentrate with all these noises of nature.  Shifting from urban insomnia to crazed, ethanol fuelled bull screams in the dead of the night echoing across the valley and daily spiders in the bed.

VIVARIA - Berlin residency @ GlogauAIR

Getting close to the end of editing this labyrinthine project...'VIVARIA' on the residency in Kreuzberg. Its five weeks time-out to work on the post production of a four screen video installation to be watched from the centre. It has a feature film's worth of compositing in it.., at the moment in Berlin its better to be outside and riding a bike.

- Working in 1080p with 1280x720p h.264, distorted 1024x768 mjpeg and deinterlaced 1080i HDV. Sometimes this makes an entire timeline go black after rendering. But the 1080p gives a nice crisp, animated stutter on speed adjusted clips.

- Wow the days are slipping by, not sure how to fit in the coffees and beers. Stuck doing manual rotoscoping, 2000 manual keyframes in a 1.5 minute video clip, 2 days just to do that...

- The complexity of editing 4 channel video should not be underestimated. That is, the relation between one edit and another in a single channel, multiplied by the relations between each of those in another three channels (linearly), multiplied by the relations between the corresponding events between each channel (spatially).

Ghost Quarters

My ninth work with Tess de Quincey, this performance installation is based on the writing of Thomas de Quincey
(Confessions of an English Opium Eater). This work has a programmed avoidance of cognitive structure though there is a sensory framing of Tess' four mind states; outside, internal hallucinatory, murder and vortex. Ian Stevenson's sound is randomized on Max making quotes from the text lingering and constantly in flux. Two 6000 lumens projectors, side on in 16:9 are pointing towards a central labyrinth of tule. Mixed live on two Numark Arkaos mixers.
9th-16th May 2009
Track 12, Carriageworks

Night Garden

Delve into the unconscious... and never return. Forget wishy-washy SUBconscious video projections, this heavy duty hallucinogenic work holds you underwater until you drown, and then the show starts. My Darling Patricia's next performance puppetry work is set in traverse with delicate textured burnt gauzes and projections on nighties in a perspex shed. There are a few challenges with the projections on such fine material in confined spaces and being in traverse, but there's a lot of attention to detail so it should be a great and haunting work. Co-directed with the inspired Margret Cameron (VIC) and Chris Ryan (NSW).

5th -14th March 2009, Performance Space, Carriageworks
24th - 29th March, Arts House, Meat Market

nargun and qlab

If you're thinking of using Qlab this is what you're looking at. These are my corrections notes JUST from the plot. Zoom in to the A4 pages! 5 times the amount of work than updating dvds - tedious and time consuming. The 2Ghz Intel Mac minis were only just barely able to do a cross dissolve, pathetic! Still, if you have to hand the av over to another operator, this is the way to do it. A BIG loss is no live operation, its all automated.

Nargun and the Stars

This is LARGE scale, scary puppetry from the mind of Scott Wright (Erth) co-directed by Wesley Enoch. Eye scorching, heavy duty, saturated imagery will be buffeting the scrims and textured cyc's - there will be screams of terror. For ages 8 and up. I've been working with triple layered composite mattes cut out of photographs from the Hunter Valley. Monstrous rocks, terrifying trees, spirits, dreams, night storms and supernatural swamps... puff, puff. Motion particle generators, luma keyed puppet multiples, filmed shadow puppetry, explosions, real videoed particle transtions... 9 weeks of intense making cut in as much detail as I have time to motion track it all. Some of the masked landscapes have come out similar to Sydney Long's paintings of opiate and impressionistic spirit dreams. The pain of this show is the 56,000 hours to program and prepare video for Qlab.
SYDNEY FESTIVAL, Riverside Theatre 15-21 Jan, 2009

recent biog

Sam James has been a filmmaker and projection designer for performance since 1995. His focus has been to collaborate with new media, dance and theatre projects to develop integrated, paradoxical languages in live performance. He has been a regular contributor to Performance Space for ten years also filling a role as video documentor for many independent dancers there. His approach to the moving image is to be equivalent to the live body, encompassing space, rhythm and time with the use of video. Most of his work involves animation of motion jpeg images to expose the subconscious of natural and urban environments and objects, but on the other end of the spectrum he trained in architecture and film and has made successful super 8 films and projections such as Nun's Night Out (winner best dance film, Australian Dance Awards 2006). He has screened dance films in Cinedans Amsterdam, MOVES Manchester, VideoDansa Barcelona, Dança em Foco Rio de Janiero, Tansfilm Wetbewerb Berlin, Video Danza Buenos Aires, MediaTerra Athens, Reeldance in Australia and NZ and the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, New York. Although he spends most of his time working on small, independent developments he has regularly contributed to the major festivals in Australia, from Adelaide to Perth to Alice Springs.

Nomads

Led by Hans Van den Broeck (Ballet C de la B) : a three week development at Performance Space with intensive camping/filming at the south of Sydney. Psychological breakthroughs were happening second by second with Hans' tough manipulations and from the periphery, improvised video is forced to to a more rugged level. It must be recorded, but it must be new. It is the catalyst of dream and memory, but at a different time, the mere playing card in a play of real life. The basis of the exercise/experiments lead to a constant, churning invigoration of presence in time, memory and interactions between individuals. Our participation leads one to question whether we are part of this, or whether we are playing roles in a group hypnosis, witnessed by an audience, also partly hypnotized. The daily updates and reformation of material by Van den Broeck makes the artists unable to hold onto 'unauthentic structures' and the improvised thread must be climbed fast before gravity can break it...

Triptych

A minimal and transformative work by Tess De Quincey with dancers, Linda Luke, Lizzie Thompson, Victoria Hunt and Peter Fraser. Simple for me was simple, objective, working with Tess' video shoots of trees in wind, water near her house and Robin Fox's oscilliscope, using the feeds of Chris Abraham's sound. A very collaborative cross-over, intersection of three states, air, electricity and water... three screens with diffusion cloth repositioned in three formations in the round. The av component was based on using remote, mobile projectors with mac minis cued by Qlab and Quartz Composer and three down projectors in the rig. We almost had independent power on the mobile projectors too but inverters would have been too big, powering large 6000 Lumens projectors. All in the essence of the elemental footage, my editing was sparse and manipulation practically non-existant. Tess' selfless shooting eye already showed what needed to be seen.
Performance Space @ Carriageworks 6th -16th Nov 2008

Tokyo (Aug-Sept)

I can't tell the difference between dream and reality, the streets full of colourful alien co-travellers, stuck in microcosms that I only momentarily encounter, like heavy raindrops in an endless tropical storm. Night showerers are shuffling in yukates in the ryokan, where I'm staying. I'm shooting MPEG backgrounds and foregrounds, waiting for the super-haze to steam off into the less flat afternoon, evening glow, then contemplating middle grounds to flip them beyond child's drawings. In the mornings drinking iced-coffee, eating mayonaise sandwiches and falling back out into endless discovery. When do you come back in? Not sure how to put this all together, I've got too much but not enough.

TARKOVSKY'S Horse

Sorry to post yet another black and white picture.. can't seem to get colour into these projections! Tone and expressionism always seems to be stronger without the realism of video colour. Coming up is Peter Fraser's 'Tarkovsky's Horse' as part of '2 SOLOS' with Peter and Linda Luke, part of The Weather Exchange. Abstract, elusive, pure choreographic imagery by Peter blends into a flashing, pseudo super-8 front projection with great idiosyncratic sounds by Natasha Anderson.
Melbourne (Dancehouse 15th-17th Aug), Sydney (Campbelltown Arts Centre 21st-22nd Aug, Performance Space, 'Liveworks' 25th Aug-7th Sept)

IMPROLAB Cairns

Russell Milledge, Rebecca Youdell and Nick Mills invited us to the On Edge Festival in Cairns to do the 5th version of Improlab. Jim Denley, Amanda Stewart, Tess De Quincey and myself. With a new approach I poured dozens of mpeg videos captured in the space and the near surroundings into a modified, compacted digital setup, one small hdv camera firewired to Arkaos and the Numark mixer and crossed them with a single live feed of the present space. A relay between live and prerecorded. Each Mpeg went stale after only one day. Starting with uglier conceptual images in the first performance (tourist development and deconstructive shots of bumping in, running schedules, taxi receipts) and returning to a sanctuary of aesthetics on the third performance, burning together Tess's subtle movments, twisted vines, sprays of water, remnants of flooding, lichen, wind blown shadows, tiny fish in mud. That was us, tiny fish in the vast mangrove, on the edge of an infinite blank page.
On Edge Festival, Cairns @ JUTE Theatre, July 31st - August 2nd 2008.

Electronic Church (Berlin)

There is a little man inside machines who turns the meters but they are always slightly faulty. The record of time progresses forward but loses order in the present. The present jumps to anything which has occurred in the past, but because it always moves in regularity we respect its accuracy as a rough measurement of time. Also showing other recent animations from Prague and Glasgow and Calcutta. At Electronic Church, 223 Greifswalder Str, Berlin in Prenslauer Berg, 19th June 2008, 9pm.
With great old and new travel sounds by Gail Priest.

Calcutta Visual Arts Residence

You need to be more than a Bengali poet to put Calcutta into words. This residency with dancers, Tess de Quincey and Santanu Bose was an exploration only of the tip of an iceberg. Iceberg is not a metaphor to use for Calcutta. I am trying to extract high resolution, progressive motion jpeg videos into slow moving graphic energies and cryptic combinations of chaos. An expression of the impossibility of framing in a complex urban environment. We did 2 performances with dance and video at Uma Gallery to audiences of about 40 per night. With some positive responses we passed through unscathed, a mere blip on a fizzling Calcutta radar.

(getting around in Cal)

Anamorphic Archive

For interesting RealTime reviews by
Martin del Amo and Jodie McNeilly
check 'links' above and program notes are in this blog's comments.
















Martin del Amo, 1997.

DANCE SCREEN Sydney Festival

Erin Brannigan has curated a selection of recent dance films presented in a variety of formats in the Studio Foyer of the Sydney Opera House. In this I have 'Midnight Dancer' with Martin del Amo, excerpts of 'Simulated Rapture' with Rosie Dennis and excerpts of '5' with Victoria Hunt. They are on interactive touchscreens designed by David Corbet, limited to 2 minutes, with headphones. I'm going to check them out when we bump in INTO again on Monday 14th.

FIGMENT Sydney Festival

This is a dance work about schizophrenia, again with Choreographer Narelle Benjamin. I imagined I would have unlimited imagery for a work about mental illness but no, there's a huge responsibility making a substantial work about it. It is attempted through multi planes of image making, then fracturing them together, based on a real person's experiences. Its important for an audience to see the whole picture to relate to the mental state, but its been a while since I've felt schizophrenic, so this work can only be an external view into a whole and complex existence. I am trying to think that we are all schizophrenic in our relationship with the urbanized world but I can't tell if I am in that state or have adapted and desensitized myself from it. Again we are using a black scrim front projection for states and ghostly presences and a rear projection onto a 2 x 1.5m One Way Mirror for positive and reflective psychic states. Its an example of a symbiotic expressionism in dance and projection that cannot be logically explained.
INTO @ Riverside Theatres 8-12th Jan,
The Studio Sydney Opera House 15-20th Jan 2007
Dancer: Kathryn Dunn
Sound: Huey Benjamin

BLUE PRINT

This is a new work directed and performed by Deborah Pollard and three firemen. It traces memories of the Canberra Bushfires in 2003 pivoting on a live overhead camera projection of the floor plan of Deborah's family home which was destroyed. The voice overs of her family members articulate the vivid detail of the moment but we show little of the actual event in images. There are two strands of imaging the event, the cold, technicality of re-drawing the house plan in live camera and a subconscious projection of a masculine principle and its relation to trauma and grief. This is embodied by a life size model of a horse, the three yellow clad, anonymous firemen and the projections of doorways and windows leading into forests, the doorway into the heart and guts of the horse and the parallel of the suburban and the wilderness meeting in tragedy. I'm looking forward to a 3 day break at the end of 12 weeks constant work.

Performance Space @ Carriageworks
26th Oct - 4th Nov 2007

Quietly Collapsed

After almost 6 weeks this 3 minute video directed and performed by Rosie Dennis
is almost at the end of the tunnel. Its shot and edited on hdv, the process just able to eek out of my G5. Produced by the ABC and Channel 4 in the UK. New teams, numerous people in the chain of events, epileptic editing restrictions and grading limits... so complex, its back to the inefficiency of film and tv. I've become so used to getting up late and going to film some mpegs by myself and shifting images around randomly. Some of the editing in this was random, a lot of it was single frame adjustments left and right to get movements to jump cut nicely. Rosie made some radical edit shifts which made the sense of the choreography leap forward. For me, shooting in a brightly lit, brand new office building, its a film where there's nowhere for the filmmaker to hide. Everything is exposed, transparent and very 'video'. It is serving Rosie's quality of performance though I think, and taking it to a new place developed by chopped-up editing.

Language of Loss

This performance, directed by Nikki Heywood and devised by Matt Prest, Lizzie Thompson, Michelle Outram, Costa Latsos, Siobahn Murphy with sound by Jason Sweeney, projections and design by myself, unlike many other projects, allows us to search without the need for answers. I am constantly trying to tie things up and tie them in but apart from sound and image resonances, the work resists analysis. Although it is based on the performers' real experience, ambivalence reigns, an unrelenting, unconscious sculpture... phew... humbling... beyond conscious, before construction...

Immersion: ELECTRICAL EMPATHY

An Inter Arts Grant, Gail Priest and I produced a one week development with 2 showings at Carriageworks, Performance Space.
I designed two large 16:9 screens with some expensive front and rear projection diffusion cloth, suspended in Track 12. Technically analogue, feeding into three vision mixers but from a combination of live camera objects (Nick Ritar, Cicada, VIC), Isadora (Scott Morrison, NSW) and Arkaos with a Numark mixer (myself) developed two, 45 minute sequences in which we each crossed over with sound artists, Gail, Jason Sweeney (SA), Peter Newman (NSW video also) and Ai Yamamoto (VIC). We had a great week, trying to produce something that wasn't the usual solo-artist-type event where we would overlap and create new partnerships. The plans of setting up half outside was impossible because of the floods going on out there, so we had immersion inside.

The DARKROOM

A ten minute dance/projection piece in BODYTORQUE with the Australian Ballet, Sydney Theatre, May 2007.
Choreographer, Narelle Benjamin and myself use our formula screen design - Black Scrim downstage with high contrast black and white 'ghosted' objects with a background on White Cyc. 7 weeks of time lapse video of 4 different roses growing and dying at the beginning of winter. They flower in a derelict room, three dancers from the ballet company articulate a man's early death and his surrealist signals from the afterlife. Music: 'Drive By' - The Necks.

INVISIBILITY PROJECT

Apart from me reversing the polarity on electrical devices, the laptop has done some fast rendering through a showing of Nargun and the Stars (Erth) at Carriageworks and a development of "Miss and Miss Elder" with Julie-Anne Long. In M + M Elder, Julie-Anne goes on a long shopping expedition with her projected sister to Westfield Eastgardens. There these elderly sisters have enjoyable hallucinations but it leads one to question whether her sister's projectionism means she is a figment of the imagination. It is a project looking at lonliness and invisibility of old people in a busy world.
PERFORMANCE SPACE @ Carriageworks 9-13th October 2007.

Improlab: 45 Downstairs

Improlab performed for four nights in Melbourne in the new space at 45 Downstairs, Flinders Lane.
This space is beautiful, old wrinkled floorboards, a brand new rig with nice new profiles and fresnels. One whole wall of old windows next to a narrow lane full of weeds. The receptions in Melbourne were very warm with lots of interest and feedback.
Every night we ate in Chinatown. It was a good chance to bond and develop this work further - the forth incarnation.

Remixing the old

"I Shatter" is remade from material I made in Hill End with the Darling Patricia's
called "Invisible Cities" which has continued to be very invisible because its too long and we're not in Hill End anymore... It should be on at the inaugural
Performance Space Nightime #1 in April. (narrated by the Magnetic Fields song 'I shatter')

Carriageworks Open Weekend

Performance Space included Simulated Rapture as an installation for the open weekend at Carriageworks.
It was a general public opening. It was hectic.. a bit like the Powerhouse Museum on a Saturday. Its an exciting space, but like a giant white horse, so big its hard to get on it, but fascinating, but it makes you feel like you've got to upgrade all your gear...
This was the basic setup - 2 monitors with separate JBLs. It reads well that way, but there was the suggestion of doing 4 monitors, each with a separate performer's world.

Elusions: postphotography and fascination

an article by George Alexander
in a book on Post Photography by CCP
Some quotes in response to 'Strange Eyes'
- see comments below

Trust and Try ABC

The ABC has bought "Trust and Try" for five years. A five minute film by Julie-Anne Long and shot and edited by myself. Again it was the most simple film, like 'Potsdamer' I think it took about an hour to edit. It is basically four single takes of simple vaudeville acts with Michael Whaites, Kathy Cogill and Narelle Benjamin, Rakini Devi and Julie-Anne with a clicking super-8 projector as a soundtrack... with a few indiscriminate speed changes.

Desconacida

a work in progress with dancer Kathy Cogill that has documented her as a performer, getting pregnant and performing with her baby, Clara. Kathy has been dressed as Wonder Woman for two years, and this is another patchwork docu/drama assembling scraps of video memory into fiction. Desconacida means 'unknown'....

strange eyes

Experimental filmmaking seems like its only referred to as a formalist category of film, something that only relates to the material of film. So few people are looking for a way of communicating images of different qualities seen in a sequence over time that transcends narrative language. It is higher and lower than narrative at the same time. It is like intuition versus thinking. The camera can be used to look at what is below the surface. Turn the camera on without setting it and focussing it. It is a mode of seeing, by being fixed in its mechanics, that enables our perception to stretch and seek. As in individuals that are in trouble or insane, the frame is not lined up or focussed, but it is still the frame of reference. The art of experimentation is to give value to the world outside the conventional mode of expectation.
Improvised video cameras give us a shifting perception of the room we are all in. We see something abstract and then may realise that it is simply part of something familiar. But that is not the total aim, familiarity. Familiarity is when the mind stops seeking for itself, the soul is not stimulated, it dies.

IMPROLAB Transparencies

The Improlab team plus Ami Yoshide and Sachico M (Japan) finally made two nights of improvised performance at the Studio, Sydney Opera House. The Studio is a tough and unadventurous space, and hard place to find inpiration. Each night we ran two sections of about 40 minutes each. After the first night I was completely drained and after the second I was rushed into a speedy bump out. Our rehearsals were much better than the shows. But the audiences were as expected - half bored out of their minds and the other half totally enthused. Overall I think its the most genuine and rewarding artform anyone could hope to participate in.
Realtime Arts Review: http://www.realtimearts.net/article/77/8340