DOWNLOADED BY ALEX WINTER
Pick of the Week #76
This week’s Pick is the upcoming documentary by Alex Winter, ‘Downloaded’. Premiering at SXSW 2013, this documentary focusing on Napster and the advent of digital file sharing investigates the digital revolution; “the kids that created it, the bands and the businesses that were affected by it, and its impact on the world at large.” Napster, founded in 1999, was originally a file sharing service and has more recently become an online music store. The introduction of peer-to-peer sharing and illegal downloads created a technology paradigm shift, upended the music business and changed the world. Described in the trailer as “building a business by facilitating the stealing of artist’s music”, the creators in contrast explain that they wanted to “share emotion over the internet” and “create a way to meet people through music”. The film sets out to assess the issue from all points in the chain from musician to downloader, featuring interviews with musicians such as Noel Gallagher, DJ Spooky, Mike D from the Beastie Boys and Henry Hollins, to label heads, Government Officials and leaders in the world of civil and digital rights. “When Napster launched the peer-to-peer phenomemon,” Winter explains, “a new frontier was birthed out of the ether. We’re still reeling from the arrival of this new landscape. And while there has certainly been evolution in the world of social media and networks, nothing currently exists that embodies the full functionality that Napster had twelve years ago. I think it has something to do with the youthful naïveté of launching a new technology without either concern or full understanding of its disruptive nature.” This documentary has a timely release in light of recent events with HMV. Rather than an issue of the 00’s, the topic of creative content downloads is ongoing and not set to go away any time soon as we see that “the record companies are not adjusting to technology.” HMV went into administration this week, 5 months after one of its own employees wrote a scathing blog post on the companies reluctance to embrace Internet based revenue, to their demise. In his prophetic article Phillip Beeching writes, “HMV’s single biggest mistake has been a lack of investment in their online offering”. Where were they when Play.com were getting into their stride? What about Spotify? Beeching points out that with HMVs established brand and audience, they could have capitalised on the online retail and music downloads market easily. 2012 also saw the court case for Megavideo founder Kim Dotcom sparking controversy over not only how we use file sharing, but what the laws should be. ‘Downloaded’ arrives at a time when moral and economic questions as to how we are to proceed are yet to be answered. “Downloaded is a documentary that has allowed each participant to tell this tale,” Winter concludes. “Not just Napster’s extraordinary rise and fall, but the wider story of how we got from Winamp to Wikileaks. And the great disruptions caused by new technologies that are far from being resolved.” http://vimeo.com/55214958 ‘Downloaded’ will premiere at SXSW 2013. Alex Winter’s website VH1 Rock Docs
MURCOF
Murcof is the acclaimed project of electronic composer Fernando Corona. His music is epic, sparse, minimalist electronica, founded on abstract, glitchy, sometimes complex electronic percussion. He draws on minimalism, postmodernism and baroque to create music that moves the mind and heart. Murcof has released 3 critically acclaimed albums and an EP on The Leaf Label. He has performed internationally and at festivals such as Sonar, Mutek and TodaysArt.
Murcof – Recuerdos
Links: http://www.murco…
SLOW DEREK
The epic and spellbinding tale of Derek, an office worker, as he struggles with the true speed of planet earth. Slow Derek is an award winning animated short produced at the Royal College of Art in June 2011. A stop motion animation directed and animated by Dan Ojari, Slow Derek tells the story of a man who becomes aware of the colossal speed the Earth is travelling.
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38 – 39 ℃
REAR WINDOW TIMELAPSE
Remix Winner, Vimeo Awards 2012 Jeff Desom dissected all of Hitchcock’s Rear Window and stitched it back together in After Effects, stabilizing all the shots with camera movement in them and matching them into a single panoramic view of the entire backyard without any greater distortions. The order of events stays true to the movie’s plot.
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EVERYTHING IS A REMIX
An ambitious four-part documentary on the history and cultural significance of sampling and collaborative creation. This is the fourth installment in the series, System Failure. Our system of law doesn’t acknowledge the derivative nature of creativity. Instead, ideas are regarded as property, as unique and original lots with distinct boundaries. But ideas aren’t so tidy. They’re layered, they’re interwoven, they’re tangled. And when the system conflicts with the reality… the system starts to fai…
CARDIA (ÉTUDE OP 2)
UNFINITY PROGRAMME Saturday 6th October, 4.15pm Hackney Picturehouse Directed by Sougwen Chung
In Cardia (Étude Op 2), layers of digital representation coalesce with analog abstraction, forming the interior and exterior of a myogenic muscular organ. Cardia starts off with a tremor of movement without resolution, beginning a myopic journey through a cavernous and alien space. As disorienting and mesmerizing as it is wholly enveloping, the viewers gaze recedes slowly, at which point the form is revealed in its entirety. The transgression from interior to exterior coincides with a backdrop …
UNNAMED SOUNDSCULPTURE
Honorary mention from the Prix Ars Electronica in the category Computer Animation Film VFX. Nominated for the 14th MuVi Award, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen.
Produced by onformative and chopchop the “unnamed soundsculpture” is a project by Daniel Franke & Cedric Kiefer, building from the simple idea of creating a moving sand sculpture from the recorded motion data of a real person. For the work the team asked a dancer to visualize a musical piece (Kreukeltape …
IN A PIG’S EYE
SUPERDREAMER
Psychedelic, colorful, dream-state vignette from David Broner who just finished his degree at Supinfocom, a computer graphics university in France.
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THE ART OF MAKING, ALMA FLAMENCA
www.deepgreensea.net
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FORMS BY QUAYOLA AND ATKEN
UNFINITY PROGRAMME GENERATIVE Saturday 6th October, 4.15pm Directed by Davide Quayola & Memo Atken. Production Company Nexus Interactive Arts.
Forms is an ongoing collaboration between visuals artists Memo Akten and Quayola, a series of studies on human motion, and its reverberations through space and time. It is inspired by the works of Eadweard Muybridge, Harold Edgerton, Étienne-Jules Marey as well as similarly inspired modernist cubist works such as Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase No.2″. Rather than focusing on observable trajectories, it explores techniques of extrapolatio…
#SOCIALMEDIA
As irony has it this video will be reblogged and seen on social media outlets the world over. Go ahead and participate in the irony and reblog the video on your facebook and twitter accounts.
We live in a ridiculously hyper fast paced life where information is exchanged so rapidly that it makes us feel inadequate and drains our attention span. This painting was executed at the GALORE festival (werket.dk/galore/) in Copenhagen, Denmark. The painting is a time-lapse composed of over 9,000 photos and painted over a 5-day period.
K.ATOU
K.atou started collecting electronic music at 17 and DJing at 18. Having moved to Corfu, she played frequent parties and hosted a radio show every weekend. Not long after she received a grant to study in the UK, and that was a very inspiring period. In the meantime she performed in different venues in Athens as well as famous Synch festival of contemporary electronic arts on the Red Bull Home Groove stage. In 2006 the NY label Goosehound assigned her as “foreign diplomat”. After a trip in US and Canada for music meditating, as she l…
DIGITAL DRAWINGS BY SHANTELL MARTIN
Pick of the week #89
This week we introduce you to the work of Shantell Martin, an illustrator and pioneer of digital drawing. “Artist Shantell Martin collaborates with her surroundings, translating into glyphs, lines, recurring characters, and words the newspaper someone is reading across the way, say, or a pair of shoes walking by, a thought she had, the sky, something overheard. Her universe is flexible, multi-dimensional, surreal, a constellation of small observations that spill from one medium to the next.” Martin studied at Central St Martins in London and went on to live in Japan and New York. Her Drawing style comes from a mixture of nature and nurture as she used her illustrations to capture her feelings about her surroundings. While they began as graffiti and small paper doodles, they went on to cover entire walls, shoes, jeans and jumpers. Martin also uses the medium of live drawing using open frameworks and projection. “If you were to look back on my older works the style if still very similar, but you can definitely see that over the past years my style and lines have grown in their confidence and recently also in size.” In regards to using digital as a medium, Martin explains “After graduating from Central Saint Martin in 2003, I moved to Japan where there is technology and visuals everywhere. In a way I kind of fell in to it. First the very inderground/avant guard Japanese music scene and then the minimal techno scene where I became a VJ, creating live drawn visuals to DJ’s and musicians.” “I teach a class at NYU called Drawing On Everything and I feel like that about sums it up for me. I’ll draw on everything and with everything be it code, drawing software, with pens on wall, cars people and so on. Let the canvas be limitless.” Martin recently gave a talk at PSFK and has completed a wall drawing for them in their offices. “Back in late 2008, early 2009 PSFK started giving me a lot of blog love. They wrote about some of the digital projects I was working on in Japan and also the drawing on people stuff too. So when I finally visited New York for the first time I got in touch with them and asked to pop by the office to say hi. It’s been a nice creative friendship since.” Martin also has plenty planned for 2013. “I’ll be working with the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto, drawing a mural in the new global head quarters of Y&R advertising, doing an artist residency at Clack Collage in Vancouver Washington State, collaborating with women’s wear brand SUNO, working with the hip product design company Aruliden on their award wining Glasscape fishbowl… I could go on but I leave it there for now.” Martin’s talk at Eyeo Festival 2012 http://vimeo.com/47602696 http://vimeo.com/13858937 http://vimeo.com/45145500 Shantell’s website can be found here Full Interview Below ————————————————————————————————————— 1. How did you reach your drawing style? If you were to look back on my older works the style if still very similar, but you can defiantly see that over the past years my style and lines have grown in their confidence and recently also in size. 2. What led you to the digital side of your work – mainly your light drawings? After graduating from Central Saint Martin in 2003, I moved to Japan where there is technology and visuals everywhere. In a way I kind of fell in to it. First the very inderground/avant guard Japanese music scene and then the minimal techno scene where I became a VJ, creating live drawn visuals to DJ’s and musicians. 3. Your work is made in lots of different mediums, I notice you have some coding experiments. Do you try to explore every possible medium with your drawing? I teach a class at NYU called Drawing On Everything and I feel like that about sums it up for me. I’ll draw on everything and with everything be it code, drawing software, with pens on wall, cars people and so on. Let the canvas be limitless. 4. How did you get involved with PSFK? Back in late 2008, early 2009 PSFK started giving me a lot of blog love. They wrote about some of the digital projects I was working on in japan and also the drawing on people stuff too. So when I finally visited New York for the first time I got in touch with them and asked to pop by the office to say hi. It’s been a nice creative friendship since. 5. What future projects do you have planned? Have a bunch of really nice projects coming up this year. I’ll be working with the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto, drawing a mural in the new global head quarters of Y&R advertising, doing an artist residency at Clack Collage in Vancouver Washington State, collaborating with women’s wear brand SUNO, working with the hip product design company Aruliden on their award wining Glasscape fishbowl… I could go on but I leave it there for now.