Prada's Trembled Blossoms fails to fully bloom

From ShowStudio comes word of "Trembled Blossoms", an animated short film for Prada. Directed by James Lima, the film depicts a "cyber woman's journey through a magical, illustrated forest", accumulating clothing from the fashion icon as she goes. And while "Blossoms" is an important shift from glossy photo spreads to moving image for fashion, what's more interesting are the cues taken from online worlds, videogames, and new media.


The film's protagonist, an androgynous avatar birthed into the world by a rose, is heavily influenced by manga and anime - featuring the long legs, large eyes, and faerie complexion favoured by Japanese artists. Beginning nude, but fully grown, the animation starts in the same way as notable online words like Second Life. The main item of clothing, a red and blue check sheath dress, isn't put on, it's transferred. Another avatar appears to bestow the clothing, virally spreading the distinctive check texture from herself to our heroine. A host of traits are picked up from online massive multiplayer environments like World of Warcraft: a pixie companion that circles the avatar, a camera that tracks movement, even glitter and glow effects that look downsampled and artificial.


Starting life as a series of stunning storyboards from James Jean, with beautiful finished watercolours from Jared Purrington, "Blossoms" mood boards are pieces of art by themselves. Elegant lines wrap around explosions of colour, pencil drawings of organic flower/high heel hybrids are delicately articulated. Unfortunately, the final work fails to keep it's cyber and organic influences in tension. Caught between pixel and paint, avatar and actor, "Blossoms" plunges into the Uncanny Valley.


Roboticist Masahiro Mori coined the term in the 70s to describe robots "with appearance and motion between a 'barely-human' and 'fully human'. We love the clumsy hulking metal of C-3PIO, but a more realistic woman cyborg with fake hair, skin and unblinking eyes repulses us. While "Blossoms" doesn't cause this degree of emotion, it fails to work because of it's straddling. Instead of an obviously artificial video-game walk cycle, or a motion captured female walk, the film uses a mediocre between - a badly animated slink that's more strange than sexy. Likewise, the avatars facial expressions are more than the real-time triggered response of a videogame, but they're also far less than human. The result is an experience that is beautiful but cold, stunning but not completely compelling.

Indie videogames push for new visual style

The Independent Games Festival has just posted all of it's entrants - and there are 173 of them. With a burgeoning indie game scene and tools to allow artists to create a wider range of styles for games, it's no surprise that aesthetics are being pushed beyond the usual clean 3-dimensional look associated with the medium.


Crayon Physics is playful and childlike, generating much of it's artwork dynamically from lines and boxes the player draws.


Flipside lets you "see the world through the eyes of a madman", exploring an idyllic, hilly terrain, then letting the player switch into a dark alternative - filled with a dying sun, black tones, and a "hero" that's just revealed a nasty streak.


The Glum Buster entry comes with no website, no developer contacts - almost no information at all, apart from this visually strong image of a bleeding tree, and a mysterious phrase: "Cheer up, dear friend, or they may come, And take you where the glum is from."


Aureia Harvey and Michael Samyn are entering "The Path", a dark twist on a Red Riding Hood type fable with a compelling visual style concocted from a witches brew of Twin Peaks, the Blair Witch Project, and M. Night Shyamalan films. What's interesting is that visual style and content are intertwined - an innovative, unique aesthetic is a catalyst for new forms of play, and sets up expectations for players to expect something different. Harvey and Samyn as a case in point don't just break the mold in their visual style, but also in fields like gameplay mechanics, interaction, and goals. "There is one rule in the game. And it needs to be broken. There is one goal. And when you attain it, you die."

Quick Take: fps live cinema event

A quick take on this years fps experimental film night, which finished moments ago.

Abject Leader presented three performances in what was my standout act of the night. The Australian duo of Sally Golding and Joel Stern combined a range of digital and analogue hardware to stage three mini-shows, Bloodless Landscape, The Gospell According to Johnny's Ghost, and Henri's Hallucinations across Time and Space. Joel provided the soundtrack, running sound from a laptop through live effects, with some a surprise coming from a trumpet he played at random intervals. Sally frenetically worked a group of five 16mm projectors, loading film, skewing and reflecting it off mirrors, and even tinting it via coloured rotating on a household fan. The performance was magical and surprising - frames drifting off into corners of the room, buzzing synths mirroring onscreen insects, it was expanded cinema at it's best.



Next up Stella Brennan showed South Pacific, a long researched (18 months she mentioned) digital video work exploring the legacy of WWII on the region, especially that of island culture. Much of the video plays out as you see below - blown up shots of ultrasounds, ocean waves, and bombs with typewritten text animating across the bottom. More poetry or commentary than any video work I've seen recently, for me it was mixed. Each word and phrase was plucked carefully, delivering a strong statement which was at times poignant (describing how efforts to replant war runways failed), and funny (riffing off pacific myths of steel guitar and khakis) but always retained a personal naturalness ("I'm going to land now"). But the visual side let me down, why use video for a poetic/text based piece? Like a computer or a mobile phone, text isn't particularly suited for the medium. Doable, but not easy.


The next act started mysteriously. The audience came back after the interval to find the chairs and mattresses moved, creating a diagonal aisle down the middle of the space. Loren Chasse, a San Francisco artist, proceeded to unfurl a giant paper banner down this, then scatter a collection of rocks, pebbles, and sand down it, recording the process with a MiniDisc. Loren then moved to creating sound with stones while the recorded sound played back. A colleague (unnamed in the programme) manipulated ferns, twigs, and other NZ flora over a OHP projector, mirroring the sound created by Loren. These two phases were repeated again, with variations - simple shadow making reflecting live sound creation. The piece was interesting, but I was so surprised they didn't do the obvious I became a little disappointed. Why not use concrete, physical actions - like tossing stones down on the ground - to create a live soundtrack? Sand washing down the paper would have been beautiful with effects applied, or as a trigger for other instruments. Instead, the record/playback process was slightly laborious, and the overlong piece - after the main action occured - grew tiring.



Finally we were up to Matt Brennan's Cardboard Cinema, an intriguing piece that was meant to finish up the programme. It never occured. Due to technical difficulties or breakages of equipment, Matt was stuck. Through some tremendous last-minute effort he submitted a short DV piece titled something like 'Matts great movie'. Consisting of a barrage of echoing yells, blasted trumpet and cymbal crashes, the video was fun, and funny. Matt appears in face masks -beating drumkits, running down stairs and playing lead guitar riff next to a toilet. A heroic effort and an easy end to the night, although it would have been interesting to see his billed act - where "audio visual collages emanate from cardboard machines".

Subliminal stimuli: sneak preview of Botborg

Officially opening Wednesday night, thought I'd post a sneak preview of video work and writing on Botborg.

Subsequent research has determined that the frequency that causes vibration of the eyeballs – and therefore distortion of vision – is around 19Hz.

The effects of this specific frequency were confirmed, independently, by the work of engineer Vic Tandy while attempting to demystify a ‘haunting’ in his Coventry laboratory. This ‘spook’ was characterised by a feeling of unease and vague glimpses of a grey apparition. A spot of detective work implicated a newly installed extractor fan that, Tandy found, was generating infrasound of 18.9Hz.

The work opens with a sun, a glowing red orb which hangs in the middle of the frame. Quickly the edges become distorted, agonized, fluttering and flicking outwards in spasms. The video then rips apart, not in a traditional filmic tear, but a wholly digital, alien mess - an abortion of florescent rainbow pixels, jagged lines and blown out glitches. Botborg abandons linear narrative, form, and cohesion in an attempt at a much more profound, visceral experience. Like the Surrealist film UN CHIEN ANDALOU (1928), where an eye is symbolically slit - it's "principles" can only be communicated by injecting an intertwined barrage of audiovisual matter behind the pupils directly into the brain.... keep reading full Botborg introduction here

Digital flipbook: Project lomo at Cross Street

"Shoot from the hip", state the originators, a couple who discovered a cheap, small Russian camera one day in an Austrian thrift shop. Cross Street featured a show based around the cult phenomenon known as lomography tonight. Sharing a common aesthetic of grainy, highly saturated, blurred shots, and a common philosophy of shooting everywhere and anywhere, lomography has spawned a number of imitators, organisations, and online photo groups.

Joshua Lynn digitized a dozen or so of his rapid-fire sequences of everyday events and screened them on an appropriately old skool computer system in the space. Masking tape on the floor reading "controls" pointed to the page down and up keys, which flicked to the next sequence. Making concrete the implied temporality of the rest of the photography, their motion was sometimes real (a stranger walking on the street) or hinted at (shifting focus and lens flares animating a sunset).

New video work at Window

We're busy working on the next exhibition, a show featuring 5 artists working with video: Charles Ninow, Sean Grattan, Veronica Crockford-Pound, Ritchie Frater, and a soon to be confirmed artist. The short, two week show will give each artist two days to show their work - screened, projected, or installed.


Naomi Lamb, a contributor on this group blog, will be VJing on the opening night. Bypassing the slick stock footage sometimes dominant in the genre, she'll be mashing up a variety of clips she's shot herself - palms from local road trips, clouds over a moon, or the korean skyline seen from a subway car (shown below).

A German/Australian duo under the pseudonym Botborg will be screening online. Utilising a range of device feedback, they produce a barrage of flickering, glitching, digital video. Described as "aggressively complex and occasionally frightening" , the work attempts to demonstrate the oneness of light, sound, and movement as theorised by photosonicneurokineasthography.