Michael Snow

Excerpt from an interview with Michael Snow by Jonathan Rosenbaum (15th May 1981 -Film Comment)
Did you have certain editing principles worked out before you shot anything?
Yes — I was looking for certain things, and I was going to try to work with the subjects, but also kinds of space and kinds of movement, like curves, ups and downs — to work with that. And the principle I had was to try to have whatever method that would isolate or individuate each shot as much as possible, and make as little commentary on the cut as possible, except in terms of space — so that, for example, it would jump from being a deep space thing to being a surface thing.

I tried to stay away from too many ironic commentaries of one shot following another. The thing was, as i got going, that set up too much of a system, and I had to say now I was going to break that system. And I wanted to make a fairly even dispersal of all the material I had so that the connections would be made over long periods of time. Yet that also became too much of a pattern, so I had to cluster and then say I wasn’t going to cluster. It was a strange editing job.

Time-lapse Melbourne

The city becomes a living thing. Absorbing its inhabitants and revealing their stories, all at the same time.

Childs play

Vincent Laforet
Tilt shift photography is used to simulate a miniature image. Making the real look fake.
Here are some more great examples: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/11/16/beautiful-examples-of-tilt-shift-photography/

John Cage

Style over substance

Industrial (Heritage) media relies on the notion that space and time are scarce. If you’re going to show something it had bet to be good. Good as in ‘the look’. Broadcast standards and professional compliance dictates who can participate in it. Its style over substance. As Adrian said today, a professional network news program will use footage from an inferior phone camera if the images are compelling. But that doesn’t mean they will give the owner of the footage a job. Rather they are an amateur, their broadcast quality/HD video is branded “amateur footage”. Its the old saying, if it was easy everyone would do it. But surely if you went out and shot footage all the time, charging people for your content, are you not a professional?
The author of the footage is being interviewed by the news service, giving context to it. Note the watermark on the top left corner. Who now owns the footage?

City scape

Topography of the city

Interested in the city as a landscape. Communicating a place and time. Somewhere to find yourself and lose yourself.
There’s a way of creating the terrain of your Google Earth map through Sketchup.

Stampsy

Media tool to create online experiences

Non linear VJ

Filmmaker Peter Greenaway

Moscow 2008

Eating your spouse is a faux pas

Interesting lecture yesterday about the meaning of words. By themselves they don’t mean much, only in relation to others do they gain context. A chicken on a farm could be thought of as lunch but give it a name and it becomes a pet. The thing hasn’t changed but you usually don’t eat your pets. However, sometimes you do. If you can justify it, you can operate outside the pre-existing structures. Work is place and text is doing. By doing, you are disrupting. If it is repeatable, you start to build a new structure. An arbitrary structure. The Oxford English dictionary defines arbitrariness as choices and actions subject to individual will, based solely on a individual’s opinion or discretion. In mathematics, arbitrary normally means ‘any’. Structure is often quoted as the ‘glue’ or the fabric of society. Without it, chaos ensues and randomness thrives. Computer scientists now deliberately introduce randomized algorithms, which sometimes outperform determistic methods. Add some randomness, arbitrarily to language and a structure is built around the word ‘meaning’. A simple search online for a definition to the word is a message or signification. The ‘or’ signifies that both statements are equally correct. However, what’s really interesting is the synonyms provided for the word meaning:
acceptation, allusion, bearing, bottom line, connotation, content, context, definition, denotation, drift, effect, essence, explanation, force, gist, heart*, hint, implication, import, interpretation, intimation, meat, name of the game, nature of beast, nitty-gritty, nuance, nuts and bolts, pith, point, purport, sense, significance, spirit, stuff, subject, subject matter, substance, suggestion, symbolization, tenor, thrust, understanding, upshot, use, value, worth. There’s a lot. However, each one is part of a network of relations and has been adopted as language because it has been justified by ‘doing’. People used to eat vermin and marry their sister until some radical thinker gave the word vermin and sister a different meaning. These radical thinkers are usually heralded retroactively for being ‘ahead of their time’. It is perhaps due to an absence of structure or a network of meaning to support them that such messages got lost in the chatter.