All About Liberal Art

Here are links to a lot of my “documentation” of the High Desert Test Sites events this past weekend in the Joshua Tree area. Most photos and titles link to Facebook photo albums; there are also links to YouTube videos for some.

Kriblin Jihn Kabin - High Desert Test Sites

Video pan of  the interior (with lots of wind noise)

Godwin & Pioneer: Thom Merrick - High Desert Test Sites

Video from Godwin & Pioneer

Rosa Muerta After Party - High Desert Test Sites

Marnie Webber Spirit Girls High Desert Test Sites

Andrea Zittel’s Land - High Desert Test Sites

Yosua Okon “White Russians” High Desert Test Sites

Patrick Johnson “Yesterday and Tomorrow” High Desert Test Sites

Amy & Wendy Yao Art Swapmeet - High Desert Test Sites

Short video excerpt from the musicians’ performance

Joel Kyack The Greater The Goal. The Deeper The Hole High Desert Test Sites

Very short video interview with Joel

Julia Scher “Surveillant Architectures” - High Desert Test Sites

Jack’s Place at High Desert Test Sites

Ann Magnuson Time Travelling Hooker - High Desert Test Sites

Wonder Valley Inst. of Contemporary Art Inaugural Opening

Well, it’s nice to think you’ve made a discovery and have run off into new territory by yourself, but I’ve discovered there are quite a few others tredding this same area. Hockney actually tried this technique with the BBC, but they weren’t too excited by it, and he abandoned it. 

It’s sort of like when I was hiking up in the remote mountains and thought I was someplace where no one had been before, and then I found some plastic trash in the bushes.

I suppose that’s no reason to abandon the experiments; perhaps it could be more interesting to pursue them within a community of like-minded artists?

A couple of these artists are doing really nice work. I especially like Matt Ziniel and Lester Alfonso’s stuff.

Matt Ziniel:

Absolute Vs Relative Time

Pieces Form Whole

Lester Alfonso aka OriginalPlastic:

[hockn eye d]

Myself and Murno Gladst

Will Parker

isa face

room

the3robbers:

hockneyesque video test

Edward Grubb aka vjgumbo:

Cubist Video Montage (without Hockney and Picasso)

Seanán Oliver Manfred Kerr aka seanankerr:

“Me” by Hockney

Click on photo to view it full size (it’s worth it, I promise)

OK, this has taken forever to get to because these are the most complex assortment of clips I’ve shot. Furthermore, after I shot them, I was told people didn’t want them posted because it was a personal and private ceremony. Well, with some regrets, I can’t help myself. I also haven’t figured out the best presentation for the “sensitive” material, so it’s just a composite grid of the ceremony, and you can’t really hear any thing except the chant we all did. It’s enormous too; an unwieldy 58MB. Keep in mind that at actual size, the widest ones here are nearly 3-1/2 feet wide. That’s as big as Flash can handle; 2880 pixels square.

Fortunately, some of the others are quite breathtaking and not nearly as huge.

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Indian Spring Equinox Ceremony

Click on image to load 58.1MB file.

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Malibu Canyon Sunset

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On Top of the World Over Malibu Canyon

Click on image to load 9.8MB file.

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Malibu Coast at Dusk

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Malibu Coast View

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Malibu Shores

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Taking photos of the Malibu Coast

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Santa Monica Night Coast

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Wright Ranch HouseI find this one to be rather interesting; it has more cubist character than most of the other works. It’s a house they’re building that’s been under construction forever.

Click on image to load 5.8MB file.

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Well, this proves that without much activity happening when you shoot video, you might as well be shooting stills. As I assembled the video clips, I began to realize that the lens and tripod were distorting the images so they didn’t fit together. I could actually skew the video itself, which would probably take forever to process, but it was just as interesting to layer and overlap them.

Click on image to load 5.5MB file.
Mt. Pinos is an amazing place. The highest mountain in the range at the southern edge of California’s Central Valley, just outside of Frazier Park, you can’t help be be deeply moved by the views, the peacefulness of the place (in good weather, at least) — or the high altitude!

Some new video collages here. These were shot at the beautiful Japanese Garden next to the (ugh!) DWP water reclamation plant in Balboa Park in Van Nuys.

The first is more of an experimental mandala-esque view of the brook.

Running Brook 1
Click on image to load 2.4MB Flash file

The second is just a longer view of the brook in a simpler form.

Running Brook 2
Click on image to load 3.9MB flash file

I guess I need to either;
1) get a cable release for the camera, if I can control the video button with it
or
2) spend the time to trim the small shakes that happen when I start and stop the camera
They seem to quake and vibrate, like the earth in California, or perhaps to breathe…

The park is near two airports too, so you hear the planes drown out the running water in the first one.

Many years ago, a group of singers that included Warren Burt, Deborah Kavasch, Ann Chase, Philip Larson, Edwin Harkins, and Linda Vickerman at the Center for Music Experiment and related research at UC San Diego recorded a Lexicon of Extended Vocal Techniques. This includes various harmonic singing techniques, fries, shakes, clicks, and a host of things that would make the ministry of funny noises proud. The lexicon was issued on tape, and I’ve been working on turning them into samples.

I digitized the various sounds from the tape and have chopped them up into short sound bites, then put them on CDs. I ended up with over 200 separate sound files, and since CDs can only have 99 tracks, they have to go on 3 CDs, even though the size of the audio files would all usually fit on one CD.

I know, I know; singers who can master these techniques would scoff at having them on samples, but I guess it’s part of the labor-intensive lazy man’s digital revolution. So it’s a work in progress; I don’t have commercial aspirations for the samples, especially since I didn’t create the original lexicon, but I do hope it will provide a rich tapestry of “choral” possibilities for experimentation and composition.

If anyone knows any of the original singers, I wonder if they’d be interested in doing anything else with the Lexicon, which as far as I know, is the only resource of its type.

So the doctor at LA County Hospital was giving me advice about my broken toe and how to take care of it.  He looked like a death-metal rocker dude in a lab coat; long scraggly hair, beard, tattoos, rings and all. He was nice though, and used lots of big vocabulary words to prove that he really was a doctor. Then when I said I’d love it if I could get a copy of the X-ray, he went and printed two out for me.

Then he said he was gonna show me how to “buddy tape” the toe. I wasn’t so sure it wasn’t some new S&M thing people around LA were into these days. I knew I shouldn’t have watched the first season of “Californication.”

So, I updated some of the artwork on my Closet Thespians line, and then the next day got an email from Cafe Press:

“We recently learned that your CafePress.com account contains material which may not be in compliance with our policies. Specifically, designing, manufacturing, marketing and/or selling products that may infringe the rights of a third party, including, copyrights (e.g., an image of a television cartoon character), trademarks (e.g., the logo of a company), “rights in gross” (e.g., the exclusive right of the U.S. Olympic Committee to use the “Olympic Rings”), and rights of privacy and publicity (e.g., a photo of a celebrity) are prohibited.”

“Accordingly, we have set the content that we believe to be questionable to “pending status” which disables said content from being displayed in your shop or purchased by the public.”

I’d waited until I could take the photo of the statue myself so I didn’t violate any copyright holders. Well, I guess it’s time to investigate other companies with similar offerings to Cafe Press or maybe (god forbid!) I’ll have to get some printed up myself and distribute them in person.