Takayuki Watanabe aka Kitasenju Design created MEISAI, a body camouflage AR app for iPhone. Music by Rival Consoles. Put together by Gone West.
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11B-X-1371
8 JanIs it important for you that your art is understood? What value holds an artwork of cryptic aspects with their meaning missed by most of its audience, which only perceive the Peshat and do not seek the Remez, the Derash, and the Sod? Steganography is the practice of hiding messages in the form of a manipulation of open media. On the steganographic spectrum, an artwork can have accessible aesthetic value together with a hidden message its existence known only to the creator, or it can constitute an encrypted message in its whole lacking immediate value to the spectator, but a hint to the existence of the encryption itself. If you plan to be in the vicinity of Tel-Aviv in February-March, I hear that encrypted deep within the new-media opportunities newsletter HaShot! is a residency open call on this theme. One source of inspiration is the bio-terror-level plague-doctor-chic YOUAREALREADYDEAD KILLTHEPRESIDENT conspiracy theory viral video 11B-X-1371:
You may also want to check out Unfavorable Semicircle.
SUNLOVE
1 JanIf there can be only one video I could to share with you, it would be Jean-Jacques Lebel’s 1967 30-minute “Sun Love”. A crazy voodoo-level pagan surrealistic experience. Unfortunately, I was never able to find a digital copy. I was exposed to artist-activist Lebel in Centre Pompidou’s retrospective a couple of years back. And as you might have guessed, I became somewhat obsessive about it. When I shall get my hands on the footage, I will generatively machine learn the hell out of it! PM IF YOU HAVE A COPY. In the meantime please enjoy this rare footage of Soft Machine performing naked at the 1967 Sun Love happening in Cogolin, near st. Tropez, on the French Riviera.
“The Picasso part lasted an hour, that depended on the Soft Machine, and afterwards there were happenings, concerts… An American actor told us ‘come back to my place, I’ve got a swimming pool’, so we went and we created a happening which took the piss out of the faux-mystics, and we made a pseudo ritual to the rising sun, we took the piss out those people who were taking the piss out of the hippies, it was Sun Love…” (Lebel)
Happy 2020.
The girl with the Mejadra Eyes has the Sun in her Mouth
26 DecI more or less started to get interested in live video-art after seeing Mejadra Eyes, one of Israel’s most prominent VJ’s (and I guess one of the very few actually making a living out of it out here in the desert), perform with Fortuna in their duo Shemesh BaPe (sun in the mouth) some years ago. To me it was actionable inspiration – it was awesome AND it was something I thought I might be able to do myself one day. Yesterday she got me coffee 🤩
GAN-nam style (failed)
18 DecNvidia just released StyleGAN 2 a few days ago, addressing some of the state-of-the-art image generator’s idiosyncratic artifacts and glitches (and probably creating some less cool new ones). Should we upgrade our failed experiments?
Based on a real bug
13 DecIn 2008, programmer and glitch artist Doron Adler wrote the world’s first mobile client for streaming live video from the iPhone to the web. This was done for jailbroken iPhone (1st gen), before it had any official video support! But there was one small problem… the images were sampled from buffers of six frames, the order of which was unknown, causing a jerky glitch effect… I was hooked! Unfortunately, the original videos are no longer available, so for the past few weeks, Doron’s nostalgia and my obsession drove us to try and recreate the effect. And now you can too! junkie is an online glitcher that applies short-window frame shuffling, and we made it optionally cross-channel “for better effect”. Wait for the drop:
Doron explains how he made this clip:
1. Found on YouTube – a black & white video called “1920s Dance Craze”
2. Colorized it with DeOldefiy
3. Found on SoundCloud – A royalty free dubstep song
4. Ran junkie on the Colorized video and got many junkie-glitched flavors (different parameter choices)
5. Cropped parts I liked from each flavor
6. Edited the cropped parts and added the soundtrack with iMovie
more videos by Doron
Intersubjectivity
4 DecFor the last year, I have been running an open-calls community-backed open-source newsletter for new-media artists called HaShot! (in Hebrew, meaning: The Whip). We’ve just completed the first class of our own new residency called HaFlogger! (The Flogger), where I work with artists to introduce Algorithms and AI into their process. Resident artist Yosef Mashiach developed new techniques for face manipulation based on stylegan-encoder, and his creation will be part of a new theatrical performance الأيام Alayam אלאי-ם going up next week! This is one experiment gone trippy:
More stuff here: https://sites.google.com/view/yosef-mashiach/work/intersubjectivity
