THIS IS NOT ART 2004
I arrived in Newcastle late on the Wednesday night, its was a very long drive from Melbourne.
I stayed at an Irish themed pub called the Northern Star Hotel. The room was clean, fairly big (bigger than my room at home!), had two desks for me to set up all my equipment on and a tv with Channel V (doubled as a handy preview monitor too).
On Thursday morning I finished preparation for my Critical Animals presentation. I brought my printer/scanner/multifunction thing with me so I could scan in some last minute images from books (I still need to find some video of John Whitney’s films) and print out some notes to refer to.
I decided to use the Finder as my presentation tool after a bad experience a few months ago trying to use Keynote on the 2nd monitor output of my laptop with the notes on my own screen. It was very messy and the audience couldn’t see what I was doing properly. This time I set up a series of folders for each of my main points. Within each of these folders I had either examples (Quicktime files, jpegs etc) or sub-folders with sub-points. This worked very well, letting me keep track of where I was up to and letting the audience see exactly what I was doing.
I just caught the end of Keir Smith’s presentation From Transmission to Multiplicity: Interactive Art Installations as a Site for Research which looked very interesting. Keir is a Phd candidate from iCinema at UNSW in Sydney. He is studying as part of both the Collage of Fine Arts (COFA) and the Computer Science department.
“Keir Smith explores the changing methods with which interactive art installations are being designed, built and experienced, and the shift from singular author/creators, to groups of collaborators and multiple users.”
I look forward to reading his full paper when it is published in New Media Poetics.
Later that night I headed over to the QuantaCrib, an all-in improvised AV jam space. If I expanded the collection of computer and music bits and pieces that fill my tiny room to fill a hall sized venue this is what it would look like. Great fun. They had two video projectors going so I plugged into one and Tim plugged into the other. While he played with video feedback off his laptop monitor with Universal Access effects, I played with Vidget 3. Later another guy (who’s name I forget) played with a MAX patch he had written. I continued to play, matching some of his dark and heavily masked imagery. I tried to keep up but after a while I couldn’t stand to look at my low frame rate / low resolution video next to his super-fast, super-smooth lovely images. It was all good fun anyway.
