Rolf Sachs

Last week I was working on 4 pieces by Rolf Sachs.
These pieces are transparent Amber color polyurethane resin sledges.
They were sent straight to sweden to St. Moritz.
Obviously not to actually go down any slopes but to be awarded to the winners of a winter championship.
This job was completed at MDM props in London.

A preview of jbvidigal.com's new face!

I am currently working on the new jbvidigal.com website interface!
Hope you enjoy it!
Comments and suggestions are more than welcome!

Some more images

After a long absence...

Having been away for several different reasons, I am back writing about a new project.
This time I am taking a very deep look at a WACOM BAMBOO tablet. Along with it a Korg nanoPad.
My new project aims at creating an instrument based on the WACOM tablet.
To make it I am using several different softwares: Pure Data, OSCulator, Logic and Flash.
Here are some pages of study for this project.

Final Show

The final show is ready.
I have two rooms for my work. One light room, with two windows facing west, and the other one is a dome with no windows - a dark room.
The rooms are one on above the other.
On the light room, I'm showing 3 pieces: one print, one bronze and one arrangement of 9 digital drawing prints.
The dome has 2 pieces: one video and one interactive video installation that responds to that video.
The five pieces are part of the continuous process taken along the year.
Based on the video Dance 01, all the pieces intend to be different perspectives on a dance. Taking an everyday life situation and trying to see it with different eyes, trying to visualize the data contents of a dance in distinct ways.

After two months away

After being away from writing in the blog for time unavailability, here I am posting the updates of my practice.

The critical research paper took lots of time and I had to remake it almost from scratch. I was writing about the idea of "transformation as a failure of transformation" but it wasn't working out. The issue was that there was actually no research question beneath my paper and that had to be done!
In an essay tutorial with John Cussans, this issue of not having a research question came up and was discussed as a main issue. Once my concerns are related with technological advance and what new technology adds to the way of seeing things, specially the new acquainted Arduino, my essay's research question became: How can Arduino help revealing the hidden details of everyday life?

So I've been working with Arduino a lot.
The projects I started working with were as much parallel projects to the path I've been taking as introductions to the use of Arduino.

The ON/OFF box was the start.


What happens in this piece is the translation of the words ON and OFF to binary code and their audio reproduction.
The point is to see in a switch more than a function. It is to think about it in other terms, undermining the function and underpinning the word by which it's called.
A function that is not understood is as if there was no function. Understanding a function implies calling names to it's components. Not understanding it's components is not understanding the function as well. ON/OFF box gives new meaning to the components and consequently new meaning to the function.

The next step was the Doorbell installation.

What happens when you ring a doorbell? Who is on the other side? Is it who you expect to be and in the circumstances you expect to be?
The cinematic experience of a doorbell ringing scene is here transposed to an installation where the viewer is made part of that scene. He is invited to decide whether or not to press the doorbell button and then to see what happens if he does.
The interaction of the audience is key to underline the thrills of the cinematic experience.

Meanwhile I was getting experience and understanding how Arduino works and can be used, I was also working around the whole Dance project.
The issue now was the integration of Arduino in this project. The reasons I have for this integration have nothing to do with adding technological gadgetry to my work. It has to do with the properties of Arduino and the interests I input in my work.
Interaction resumes it all. I interact with people in my practice using viewers' feedback to rearrange my work and Arduino allows interactivity processes for creation. It's the perfect tool to continue my research and practice.
This time, for my final show at CCAD, I am re-using the samples I have from the responses of my artist colleagues to the Dance video.
The aim is to create an interactive video installation where several different questions are going to raise.
Here is a "behind the curtain" video of this installation.

Insomnia

During the insomnia I'm having in Berlin, a question about my work has been constantly popping up.
I've been studying, amongst lots of other things, the observation of a body dancing in space. This has a particular and specific view. The space observes the body. From that conclusions are drawn of the body occupation in space.
The question I've been thinking about is the reversal of this preposition, trying to figure out what does the body see o the space sorrounding it? What is the relationship the body creates with space by opposition of the relation of the space with the body.
I am now thinking about a way of connecting several cameras in body key points as it performs a dance.
What does the body see?
What's the body's point of view?

Bronze comming up!

The dance piece is now being made in bronze.
The status of this stage of the whole process is the bronze is made just needing finishing. Tomorrow is a grinding and sanding day.

New things comming to light! (part III)

The second one is the one I've been more committed to make in the last month.
A door, a doorbell button, a door viewer.
My intentions with this work is to make an interactive piece, that makes the viewer think about his position in space and his relation to cinema situations.
For this I put up the items I announced before, asking the viewer to ring the bell and look through the spyglass.
To complete this I created a Pure Data patch with an Arduino input and a video and audio output.
The video output goes to a 3,5in LCD display on the other side of the door viewer. The sound comes out of a couple of speakers placed in the same area as the LCD.
This patch responds to the door bell. Whenever someone presses the button a random clip plays (from a selection of 50). These clips are taken from movies and all of them are of someone ringing a bell and the triggered situation that follows.
This way I intend to make the viewer see himself as the one that triggers that situation instead of simply being presented with the situation in the passive comfort zone of the theater seat.

Soundwave sculpture

James Clar soundwave sculpture in Rolex Tower (Dubai)

"An art sculpture in the business entrance of the Rolex Tower in Dubai. For this sculpture James recorded himself saying "Rolex Tower" into a computer program. Once the soundwave was recorded it was transferred to a 3D modeling program. The waveform was then rotated to create a physical sculpture whose dimensions were recreated using stainless steel. The final measurements of the sculpture represent the sound of someone saying "Rolex Tower" after .05 seconds. This large sculpture hovers 2.5m above visitors as they walk around the lobby."

James Clar

New things comming to light (partII)

Last time I spoke about three projects. I can now say they are WIP (work in process).

The first one is a quite simplistic idea, though a little complicated to explain!
A button uses the premises ON-OFF. The functionality of the button is put aside swapping it with a series of translations. The importance of the function is then substituted by the importance of the word.
When the button is ON, a buzzer sounds to the rhythm of the binary code of the word ON, in a never ending loop. The binary code for this word is [0110111101101110].
The translation protocol I am applying is simple: 0=silence; 1=buzz.
The same happens when the button is turned OFF, though the rhythm changes from the binary code of the word ON to the binary code of the word OFF [011011110110011001100110].
All is placed in a small sized box (5'x4'x4'), giving it portability and autonomy.

continues...

Fine Collection of Curious Sound Objects

FINE COLLECTION OF CURIOUS SOUND OBJECTS from Georg Reil on Vimeo.

http://www.geschoir.de/soundobjects/

Related to the Doorbell process

Chris Poole sent me this video in response to the e-mail I sent to all the people in the MA asking for help.
I need people to tell me about movie scenes they can remember where there is someone ringing a doorbell. The movie from where the scene is from and a small description of that same scene so I can track it.
This video Chris sent me is similar just to the database part of the work I am developing.

New things comming to light!

I recently came across with something that is totally bringing the extra spice to my work - the Arduino.
Well, what is it, what does it do and why is it so special?
1st - "Arduino is a tool for making computers that can sense and control more of the physical world than your desktop computer." I think this sentence is clear enough to get started with.
2nd - "Arduino can be used to develop interactive objects, taking inputs from a variety of switches or sensors, and controlling a variety of lights, motors, and other physical outputs. Arduino projects can be stand-alone, or they can be communicating with software running on a computer."
3rd - The reason I find this a key piece to develop my work with is that in a way, I've been struggling to connect several aspects of my work (digital and analog or simply physical) and the Arduino comes out of nowhere and makes a real bridge between both universes. It gives me the ability to bring physicality to digital aspects of my though and digitalize the intensity of space and physicality.


As I'm quite impulsive and like to try things out I ordered one from eBay, even though I don't know anything of how to work with it or it's programming language.

While I don't get my hands on the brand new Arduino I've been spending the hole time researching Pure Data language.
Pure Data?...
Yes. "Pd (aka Pure Data) is a real-time graphical programming environment for audio, video, and graphical processing."

I have got 3 projects so far that I want to develop with the Arduino. Two of these have the need to work with a computer and the third works as a stand alone piece.

to be continued...

Chelsea College of Art & Design's MA Fine Art's Interim Show 2010

Chelsea College of Art & Design's MA Fine Art's Interim Show 2010 from João Vidigal on Vimeo.

Bach midi

Found this video. It is a very nice thing to do with midi tracks. Maybe it's calling for my attention to think about it and work out something with my midi!

Doubts

Along the way for the composition of the sound piece, the most present doubt is somehow Shakespearean: "To add other sounds and software instruments to the piece or not to add other sounds and software instruments to the piece that is the question!"

This question resides within a problematic that was put by Dave Beech in the first tutorial I had with him as I was presenting my previous work to him. This was raised after I shown him the video BLIP (2004). The interrogation was "do you consider this to be an artwork or do you place it in another sphere?".
This then implicitly raises other questions very important in the definition of my artwork, such as where are the boundaries of art and every other planes?, what is considered art?, what makes a work of art be a work of art and not any other kind of work? and for the present case what makes a sound piece be a work of art and not a song? what makes a song not be a work of art? what are the "forbidden" elements in a song that make it go out of the art realm? and as a present and common questions hovering over all these matters who decides all this, who gave him that power and what is the legitimacy of that power?

The thought of this comes to me as a very simple thing:
I can do the sound piece simply by solely using the sounds of the people I recorded in response to my video (Dance). Though in my opinion, the sound is not going to be that great in two senses:
1st - as a sound piece by it self, it can be funny, interesting and all into the realm of the translation that I am working with. However soundwise it is not going to be a great piece just because there are sound frequencies missing, kinds of sound matters related to things such as the attack, the decay, the sustain and the release of the sounds, the constant noise due to recording and so on.
2nd - this piece is not only about a whole work related to translation and recursion of thought in physical different media, but specifically about a specific culture: clubbing, dancing, electronic music and production of work all in present days. For this, the soundtrack being created turns against itself if made just with those sounds. It gets decontextualized. And turns the piece into another thing that it's not. It's not simply because it's not the reflection I want to put upon the piece.

On the other hand, trying to meet with Dave Beech's thoughts, the sound piece being made just with those recordings might meet more the (un)conventional artwork parameters.

After all this thought given (and more that I am not writing here...) I will probably make the two versions...

Present Status

The present situation is: I am trying to pull out a sound piece, made from sampling of people's interpretation of the dance video. For this I am using a lot of different software and a Korg nanopad that is going to help me shoot the samples to compose the sound piece.
The software being used is Audacity, Recycle, Logic Pro and Melodyne. All of these are performing different operations.
The whole process is long and painfull as it takes ages to split each sample and to program the samplers for each line.
My intention is to present the sound piece along with the acrylic piece and the video, as I felt that there was something missing when I presented the piece in "Condensation 2010".

Dance 07 - (Condensation 2010)

Acrylic cut

Planning of "A Trip for a Pig's Death"

Doesn't it sound 80's?

It seems we're in the same page!

Developing shape

At this moment I am developing the volume of the sculpture that came out of the dancing video.
Several issues are here brought to surface such as size, material, color or transparency.
Although, for now the volume must be defined.

Royksopp - Remind Me

Remind Me from Röyksopp on Vimeo.

Suddenly, my mind time traveled and brought me the memory of this video clip. I don't know how, but in a way, I think the whole mechanic of thinking behind the images, the whole structure of thought is related to the kind of translation that I am trying to pull up.

Level curves - analogue/digital (video)

Volume development

The whole process under development has as a basis of intent the transformation and/or translation of media and interpretation.
The primordial desire underpinning the whole work was merely to understand, interpret and transform the movement of dance to a movement of volume modeling. The hands of a dancer move continuously in a space where fundamentally there is no other matter than air. The objective of the intended interpretation was to bring matter to this otherwise ethereal matter or define the volume modeled with this movement.
The space occupation of a person is the foundational issue. Emphasizing the hands movement as modeling movement, this brings to surface the perspective that any person is capable of modeling space and therefore shape material forms, though without the proper awareness of it.
As shown and said before the practical case being worked out is the dance, as my work is referring to Sound, Music and Rhythm.
The methodology chosen to develop this transformation as desired can be defined in the following steps:

1st - Select a soundtrack to be subject of the Dance. As said in the previous post "Recent work", the selection fell upon a 2Many DJ's dj set. This was not a random selection as the Belgian brothers David and Stephen Dewaele, when acting as 2Many DJ's, are known to transform songs from other musicians in their very own way. This way I was underlining that the transformation process was not starting in me, has it had a long history behind.

2nd - Prepare a space for the dance performance to take place. This point was demanding for 2 purposes. The first is documentation of the performance. The second is to create, out of the documentation, material for the process to proceed. The documentation's format is video (24' PAL miniDV).

3rd - Perform the dance. The warm up of this performance is shown in the post "Video - warmup".

At this point the creative process splits in two derivations. This post follows only one of them.

4th - Extract 5' of video, turning it to still frames. The frame rate was diminished in order to reduce the amount of image files. 2500 was the result and following a process of intense layering came out a single image (see post "Processing images").

5th - This step was quite demanding in matters of thought, as it became somehow riddly the path to take afterwards. The objective was to extrude that image, but how? Color range was the solution. I then took two different steps leading to the same end: one analogue, one other digital.
Basically I created level curves out of the different colors in the image, therefore creating a map to a 3D extrusion. I made a video of the two methods that I will post soon.

6th - Using MDF as an experimenting material for a first 3D approach to what I want I created the volume I was seeking.

Saam Farahmand and The XX - A Sculpture of the Album

The Vinyl Factory to create limited edition of The xx’s acclaimed album, and host audio-visual show.

The xx have teamed up with The Vinyl Factory to showcase a unique audio-visual collaboration with video director Saam Farahmand, and create a deluxe limited edition version of their critically acclaimed debut album, voted the ‘best of 2009′ by The Guardian and FACT magazine, among others.

xx: A Sculpture of the Album finds Saam creating “a 3D physical interpretation” of the band’s debut album, xx, which will be displayed at The Vinyl Factory in London for six days from January 8-12, 2010 (opening times below).

The sculpture utilises film, light and sound via three specially created audio-visual units (each unit representing one member of the band with a mix of exclusively filmed footage and mixed sound), and every visitor will enjoy a totally unique experience of xx. According to the press release, it’s nothing less than a totally new way to immerse yourself in a record.

from: http://www.thevinylfactory.com

Parallel doors

At the same time, the initial video is the pretext for another line of thought, a new work, a new interpretation of a visual content. In the same way it is a translation, a transformation of the initial meaning into a different text. However, the initial meaning or the initial reason remains the same. If we want we can deconstruct the whole process and return into the first instance without it being changed. What has changed with certainty is the way that we now perceive that first instance, being in this case the 2 many djs' dj set. Now we get to see new things that can outcome from it in the same way that we understand what are the possible outcomes of eggs.
So, the step taken as a parallel work was to get 24 people to see the video without sound. In a very strong way, the sound is a great deal of the context of that video, meaning that this way the video was decontextualized. The 24 subjects were here asked to interpret that dance, taking into account their own notions of dancing, Sound, Music and Rhythm. Then they were to make their imaginary version of the soundtrack of what they were looking at in real time, expressing themselves in any way the could think of.
At this point this is raising issues as music culture, personal Sound, Music and Rhythm notions, individual memory, relation of Sound, Music and Rhythm and dance, the capability of expressing all these as one streaming thought and the ability of dealing with that in an exposing environment where a camera is recording.
This moment in the process ended up with about 3h of genuine footage. An amazing factor within the footage that was purposely used is the vast range of nationalities. 4 continents are represented in this, which is quite amazing and in great use for the purpose of this work.

After this point the ball rolled back to my hands. I had to sample these three hours into short clips. Got over 200 samples. Here are some.

Processing images

The final video was put into single still frame files in a rate of 8fps. I then took 2500 files and made one image out of it using transparency layers.

This is the result of this process.

Video - warmup

This video is the warmup session to the full performing act that serves as a base to a series of following events.

Project's Blueprint

These drawings are reflections on the project.


This drawing is the space planning on the studio where the first experience was held. It also insinuates the plan for the desired space. The actual experiment had only one camera recording while the desired scenario has three: front, side and top.


This drawing is another study of the space and the performance space. However, it presents what somehow was imagined to be the motion blur resultant from a sum of overlayed frames.

Recent work

As a starting point for my most recent work I've set up a studio to perform some recordings of a dance. The performed dance is itself a response to the dj set I'm dancing to (2 many djs). Meaning that the initial instance on this work is the 2 many djs' dj set.
It is very interesting on the other hand that the infinity that I present as a process for my ongoing work doesn't have a start at this point in a simple way. This point is where this work starts on my hands. Before that it had a whole history of relations with previous influences in the same way as I propose to work this ongoing process.
To star with, I present a few pictures of the setup I used to begin.

Number Spiral

This site has great mathematical patterns. The starting point is simply a spiral.

Daito Manabe - test 4

Daito Manabe - test 3

Candice Breitz - Thriller

Candice Breitz - Legend

Kutiman - Mother of All Funk Chords

Kutiman is indeed a great influence in my work for the way of doing video meshes.
Sampling videos and creating great music compositions of all kinds he masters the remaking and reinterpretation of sound.
See more at his website.

Triangle Project - Videowork

Triangle Project was a one week work based on the exchange of information between two students on the MAs of Fine Art and Graphic Design.
My partner on this work was Ralph Dunn.
What we did was explain each other what our work is/was and based on that each one created a new piece of work to present by the end of the week.

These pairs of people were arranged in larger groups. Each of these had to present a group catalog. The point of this catalog was not to present finished work but the process over witch the groups thought their work, their worries and their abilities to resolve the project's demandings. Our group presented an audio catalog. It seemed more important to us to involve the discussions of what and how to do and approach the other's work than to show images of unfinished processes. Specially because some of our work, as mine or Ralph's were audio and video works.

My work consisted in an appropriation of Ralph's video and audio works, in a postproduction act, and soften the weight of his works by remixing them all into a new audio/video piece.

Introdution Presentation

This video was the first presentation I did for the MAFA at Chelsea College of Art and Design (2009/10).
It was a statement of intents as much as a presentation of my previous work and the whereabouts of my thoughts and ideas.

Magic Wave - artist interview

Magic Wave - Reuben Margolin

Kinetic Waves

Edition 01-02

This blog will contain mostly 2 things:
1st - influences, ideas, images, ways of doing and thinking related to what I do and want to do
2nd - my work

Edition 01-01

This blog is dedicated to the work in progress by the artist João de Brito Vidigal.
His work has been going through a huge change of perspective and his approach to it is being solidly developed.
Having Sound, Music an Rhythm as a basis of his work, he analyzes a whole role of translations that happen within everyone's mind. The work then goes on from that point, developing a series of different translations from Sound, Music and Rhythm to dancing, writing, performing, sculpting and drawing. A broadband of media as a support to several steps of creation, where the process is as important as the final solution.