Inspired by Prof Cox and his astronomy television program, and on learning the planet Jupiter would be visible tonight, I wrapped up warm, slapped a long lens on the camera, set up the tripod and tried my hand as astrophotography.

It’s not easy. But while my photos might consist of blurry pixels I thought I’d have a play with them. Here’s a loop of 9 photos. The colour differences are the camera attempting to get the white balance right. (I should have turned auto-WB off.)

While I was watching this I had music playing and noticed it worked rather nicely with The Memory Tapes‘ track Treeship, so I slapped them together as a little movie.

After the IMG_4228 experiments I was pointed by Hannah to Jason Salavon’s work, reducing frames of a movie down to 1 pixel and displaying them in sequence. It’s similar in ways to the movie barcodes but visually closer to my final piece. So I thought I’d give it a go.

I’d recently gotten around to watching Koyaanisqatsi, the film by Godfrey Reggio which is essentially a collection of short clips arranged in sequence to a soundtrack by Philip Glass. I chose this as a candidate because of the music. I was interested to see how it would be affected if the imagery was rendered unrecognisable. The music would now be accompanying block of colour, cycling through the dominant shade for each sequence.

Initially I tried doing the whole 82 minute film but technical limitations prevented me from exporting 123,850 jpegs in to one folder. I decided to take a 10 minute clip from the middle of the film and use that. Here’s the stats.

Exported clip at 15 frames per second as 480×240 JPEG files.
Resized to 1×1 pixel
Enlarged back to 480×240
Created movie from JPEGs at 15 frames per second.
Extracted audio from original clip as AIFF.
Added audio to new movie.

Here’s the result:

This worked well but I felt it might be nice to draw a connection to the original piece, so I inserted a 64×32 pixel version of it in the corner. Here’s that one.

I’m in two minds as to the success of these, or where it might lead. I think more experimenting is needed.

After the last post I was going to leave this for a day or so but I couldn’t help having a go. The natural next step for me, having gathered a bunch of photos together, was to pixelate them in some manner. I tried a basic 12×12 but it didn’t do much other than create a blocky smudge. So I pushed it further, resizing each photo as a 1×1 pixel square. In other words forcing the resizing algorithm to chose only one colour. Though I don’t have any idea how it decides I’m going to assume for the sake of this exercise that it’s the average colour by some definition of average. At the very least it’s an extremely abstract representation of the photograph.

On its own the square of colour means nothing. But when I put all these abstracted versions of the IMG_4228 photos together we finally see something. The video has a nice shimmer but it’s the canvas that finally tells us something. Gone are the aberrations, the inconsistencies in cropping and framing, the mud of sameness and the jarring of distinction. Nor does does the lizard brain get distracted by provocative naked flesh nor the protective urge triggered by cute child faces. Pattern matching is useless. The intellect has nothing to hook on to. No themes, no cues, no templates to project on.

After working with the chaos of the IMG_4228 slice I found this canvas calming. I’d been wondering if I might find anything at all in a sample which was by its very definition free of patterns. These photos have nothing in common with each other but in order to understand that I had to remove anything that might lead me to think they did. Now I can see the chaos.

I feel the urge to get scientific now. I want to take further samples from the IMG_XXXX spectrum and see how they compare to this. And then I’ll need to take samples where the title of the image implies a connection. What would average pixel canvas look like for capital cities like New York or London? How would the average pixel canvas for people’s names compare?

I think I’ve stumbled upon something here. And I’m quite excited.

After slicing through YouTube using the filename IMG_4228 I thought I’d try the same with Flickr. As you might expect there are a lot more items on Flickr that haven’t been renamed from that machine-generated filename, 30,118 at the time of writing with 4 or 5 being added each day. My plan was to download as many of these as I could and then see what I’d got.

My tool for this was Bulkr, an program running on Adobe Air designed for downloading your Flickr account to your own computer (good practice as Yahoo aren’t likely to be around forever). By upgrading to Pro I was able to set a search for IMG_4228 and download up to 500 at a time. I could have figured out how to write a program to do this myself but for now £20 wasn’t a massive hardship to save some time. If I decide to pursue this technique further I will, of course, do some learning.

Bulkr can only do what its permitted to do by Flickr’s servers and eventually I noticed it seemed to be hitting walls. But by this time I had over 3,500 photos to play with. Next step was to clean the data. I removed the following:

• Duplicates. While I was downloading people were adding new photos meaning the last photos in one batch might also appear as the first photos in the next batch. This was done manually so I probably missed a couple.
• Non-photos. I was pretty liberal in what I allowed but screenshots and scans didn’t seem in keeping with what I was trying to do.
• Icky nudity. There’s a fair amount of cheesecake in there and I’d switched off the “safe search” filter but I didn’t think exposing people to a butt-plugged hairy arse and balls was the right thing to do, so I removed it.

Bulkr had also prevented me from downloading any photos where the owner had explicitly said they didn’t want them downloaded, which was about 60 per 500 batch.

The final count was 3,537 images posted to Flickr with the title IMG_4228 between June 3rd 2011 and Jan 15th 2012.

Finally I used the Mac’s Automator to resize and pad the images into 480px squares, while also giving them sequential filenames. This gave me a consistent shape to work with.

In order to figure out what these images could tell me I had to try and look at them as a whole. For now I’ve taken three approached.

The Giant Poster

Seen at the top of this post and full-size in this (low-res) 20MB jpeg, this has allows you to scroll around a giant contact sheet and, by pulling out, notice any patterns when the photos are really teeny. On the whole it looks pretty random in the abstract, which is exactly what you’d expect from a neutral-criteria slice through Flickr.

The Sequential Slideshow

A simple video sequence rendered at two speeds. 2 seconds per frame lets you look at each photo and lasts for half an hour.

15 frames per second only lasts for four minutes and starts to compress the images together into a single object.

Contact Sheet Slideshow

A compromise of the above. Twenty five contact sheets shown for two seconds each.

More?

There’s plenty more ways of looking at these photos. Loading them randomly, sorting by colour, pixelating them, statistical analysis of the contents… I may do some of these, I may not. The first stage, as with the videos, is to figure out if there’s anything worth looking for or if it’s just a random selection of 3,537 photographs.

This is a work in progress. Other itterations of this project may emerge in time.

I recently uploaded a video to YouTube straight from my camera. The filename was “IMG_4228.mov” and I didn’t change it immediately. By the time I did the suggested videos in the sidebar included a significant number titled IMG 4228.

I clicked on a few. They tended to be of nothing in particular, snapshots of life across the globe that were significant enough to upload but not to bother adding context. Often they had zero views. After a comprehensive search I found 12 with that title. I posted them to a Tumblr to keep track.

Amongst all the billions of videos uploaded to YouTube these 12 shared something. They were the 4,228th item to be recorded by their creators. Other than that they had nothing in common. It struck me this was a random sampling of an area of “user generated content” from way under the radar. The flotsam and jetsam of personal media.

I like to think of this technique as inspired by geology. To get a sense of the makeup of sedimentary layers scientists will take a core sample by drilling out a cylindrical shape. I chose to take a core sample of YouTube by aiming at IMG 4228 and slicing through time and space.

The sample has been taken. Now I’m working with it to see what these 12 videos tell me about the world. The first piece is the above video where I attempt to juxtapose the videos on a single desktop. Riffing off Jon Satrom’s performance at GLI.TC/H Birmingham where he used the OS desktop as his performance space, I opened all 12 videos in Quicktime 7, set them looping and minimised them to the dock. The “performance” consists of me maximising them and moving them in to position.

Unsurprisingly the processor couldn’t keep up with 12 videos running simultaneously and there was lots of delay in switching between them, but this adds something, I think. It’s not a huge success but I like it enough to share. Next up… something else…

A couple of days ago I saw a non-fox hunt while on a country walk. Looking at the photos I took I saw some of the figures were tiny so I cropped them out. Here are the results, each followed by the original photo from which they were cropped.

As I work on making these I’m putting them in this Flickr set.

What’s particularly interesting is the different qualities of scratch, from fine shallow lines to rough staccato gouges. Each place left its own mark, a journal of the places I’ve been.

A video from 2010 which was done as a test but which I think holds up well.

Using my old TTV contraption I tracked a sailboat as it moved across Edgbaston Reservoir taking 2-3 photos every second. Next I layered them in photoshop and matched the horizons. Saving each layer as an image I then created the animation.

The music is by Friends of the Stars.

A short film from last year when we discovered a nest of relatively endangered bumble bees were nesting under our floorboard. They came and went through a airbrick which I positioned a video camera in front of. While the bees are pleasing I’m also interested in the fixed unblinking gaze and the ambient suburban sounds.

Occurred during the process of making this.

A few things have been coming my way recently, feeding into my notions of art and aesthetics. The principle one was the GLI.TC/H festival my friend Antonio Roberts curated in Birmingham last month where I did the video/photography stuff. I’m still processing the details and wouldn’t want to make any pronouncements, but there’s the seed of something to do with digital errors and degradation in copying. It probably started with my obsession with photocopiers circa 1988 and keeps popping up again and again.

The granddaddy of degradation in copying is, of course, Alvin Lucier with his masterwork I Am Sitting In A Room. You can find it on YouTube in three parts and it’s worth listening to in full at least once. There have, of course, been many pieces inspired by this work. A landmark one for the Internet era is I Am Sitting In A Video Room where a video was uploaded, ripped and re-uploaded to YouTube 1000 times. Here it’s the compression algorithms that create the flattening but the end result is surprisingly similar to Lucier’s. Here’s the whole thing summarised in a couple of minutes. And I should of course mention Antonio’s glitch-font version.

I say all this not to put my effort on the same level but to merely illustrate my thinking. I did the following on a whim, the culmination of a wasted day of mooching around the house, desperate for something to snap me out of this funk I’m in. I’d been thinking about pixels (producing this piece, cropped from a photo and designed to be printed at A3) and found myself thinking about the loops one could create using Apple’s iCloud photo stream. Sitting on the sofa I loaded this photo on my Mac at fullscreen and took a picture of it using my phone. Soon that picture appeared on my Mac and I took another photo. Eventually I had 21 copies, 20 of which you can see at the top of this post. Here’s the full sequence as a video:

The image is filtered through a number of processes. Off the top of my head:

• The scaling of the jpeg on the screen
• The gamma and brightness of the lcd display
• The light emitted by the display
• The ambient light in the room
• The sensitivity of the phone camera sensor
• The phone camera’s automatic metering of the screen
• The processing and filtering in the phone
• The compression undergone through the iCloud server

At each of these stages some information is lost, noise is added, the image is changed in some way. I only repeated this 21 times because it’s just an experiment. If I were to do this properly I think at least 50 or maybe 100 iterations would be necessary. It only really starts to get interesting towards the end. And, of course, it has to mean something, to say something of value to the world. Right now it’s just a degrading H.

I’m selling off my small framed TTV prints at The People Shop in Kings Heath this Christmas. Previously £15 each they’re now £10 which, a saving of 33.333%.

People have the core range shown above plus loads more I made on a whim – eighty five 5″ frames in total, each print signed in silver ink and bagged. Only a few will be on display but feel free to ask if you can have a rummage through the overstock box.

Needless to say they’re the perfect gift for that special someone this season, and all that.

I also have other stock left over but I’m not going to make the effort to put it on sale. That said, if there’s something I produced in 2009 that you’d like to have get in touch and I’ll see what I’ve got and no doubt cut you an epic deal.

The market trader artist experiment was a good one and I have no regrets (I really need to write my account of it all) but the failure of the We Are Bham shop (something else I need to write about) has left me with a lot of inventory, not to mention not being paid for what did sell, so I could do with clearing a shelf or two.

People is a lovely shop that you should consider patronising anyway so do pop along.

50 Poplar Road
Kings Heath
Birmingham
B14 7AG

View Larger Map

I was quite taken by the number, which is large and yet still attainable, and the variety in scale and it got me thinking there’s something in this.

One idea is a series of 600 one minute videos of the same picnic enacted on each park. Keep the tablecloth and accoutrements the same but invite folks to join me.

There are other ideas but they’re not as thought through as that one. Whatever happens it won’t do so until the Spring so there’s plenty of time for me to get bored with the idea. Feel free to run with it if it grabs you.

Here’s a very quick’n'dirty map of official green spaces in South Birmingham.

So the TTV workshop with Fizzpop didn’t happen. One person signed up and we needed at least 10 to break even. I’ve thought long and hard about why it didn’t but it pretty much boils down to one simple truth. There wasn’t a need for it.

People can like an idea. People can think, hmm, I’d want to do that. But unless you’re tapping in to a visceral need you’re not going to get much beyond a notion. As much as hacking vintage cameras and cardboard is a cool thing there are probably more fruitful things to be spending your time and money on.

So let’s dial it back a bit. What do people need from a mashup of my approach to photography and Fizzpop’s approach to collaboration?

From asking around I’ve picked up on two things.

The first is a strong desire to loose the stabilisers and ride free. I’ve got a lot of friends who’ve bought a DLSR in the last couple of years but haven’t got the guts to switch it from Auto. They know their camera is capable of much much more but don’t know which step to take first.

image source

The second is less common but still quite strong and is, I think, a natural development from getting off auto. I’d call it “experimental photography” and TTV is just a small part of it. Homemade cameras, pinhole devices, expired film, repurposed vintage equipment, alternative chemical processes and things that sensible people look at and ask “why would you do that?”

image source

Both of these require an element of teaching and mentoring, but neither really require the formality of a workshop. So having chatted about this with Leroy at FizzPop I have a proposal to make.

Fizzpop have established a space for hackers and tinkerers which they are keen to expand. I would like for a small group of photographers to join Fizzpop with the intention of developing something distinct from the main Fizzpop activities but complementing the ideals and aims. At the very least it’ll be nice to hang out with fellow travellers once a month. And if things go well maybe we can use the Fizzpop infrastructure to run the kind of events and workshops that photographers need, whether they want to attach a camera to a kite or just get off the auto setting.

What do people think?

In June I ran a series of workshops for the Cadbury College AS Level Photography class. These went rather well and pushed me towards running one with Birmingham’s emerging hackerspace FizzPop.

We have a venue, have settled on a price and a date and are now taking bookings. Yay!

The 3 hour workshop will take place at 10am on Saturday September 10th at Faraday Warf, Aston Science Park. It costs £16 per person (£10 to me, £5 to Fizzpop’s fund and £1 for admin). Book tickets:

Here’s the blurb I threw together

Come and learn about Through The Viewfinder photography and make your own contraption at Fizzpop’s TTV Workshop.

Local artist-photographer Pete Ashton has been shooting TTV photos since discovering the technique in 2006 and offers you the chance to make your own. Not only will you have a weird-assed hunk of vintage camera, cardboard and gaffer-tape to point your camera through, you’ll also learn interesting and exciting things about the very nature of photography.

• Thrill to the possibilities of analogue manipulation of images before they hit the camera sensor!
• Gasp at the shocking idiocy of the Auto setting!
• Shudder at the creative possibilities of limitations!
• Wonder at the improvement in your composition through slowing the hell down!

You’ll learn the how and why, built your own contraption, shoot some photos, process and review them and go away ready and able to join the Experimental Photography Community.

The three hours will run like this:

• Introduction to TTV and DIY photography (presentation)
• Making the Contraptions. (workshop)
• Shooting (out and about)
• Processing (workshop)
• Rinse and repeat

To get a better sense of what I’m intending you’ll achieve in this workshop read my report on the Cadbury College sessions. Here’s a photo of the students at work.

Some notes, which I may add to over the next month.

You’ll need a digital camera that has a macro setting / close-up lenses. The optimal length for a TTV contraption is 30cm, give or take, so try taking a photo of something a foot away.

Bring the necessary USB cable / card reader to get your photos off as we’ll be processing them on the day.

You’ll need a vintage camera to take photos through. Ideally this will be a Duaflex or similar. I can sell you one for £20 or you can get one on eBay. They look like this:

It’s the square of glass at the top that is the important part.

If you haven’t got or can’t afford to buy one I can lend you a camera for the day.

We will be doing some processing of the photos on computers. There’ll be a few spare laptops and feel free to bring your own if you’d prefer.

Children are welcome with parental supervision. Id suggest this is suitable for aged 13 an above but am making no guarantees. There will be slicing of cardboard with knives and photography outside. Please contact me.

If you have any questions at all, please get in touch.

Here’s the Mostly Jazz Dancing Dodecaptych for your enjoyment.

With any luck I won’t be tediously unwell for its older brother, the Moseley Folk Festival, in September…

Fiona was also shooting the festival in a more reportage style and has her shots up here.

I did two lessons for three classes of students – six in all. The first on blogging as part of the artistic process, specifically searching the Internet for inspiration and using Tumblr as a scrapbook , which I may write about on the ASH-10 blog later. The second was a three hour workshop where the students built a basic TTV contraption, went out and took photos, reviewed and processed them in Photoshop and shared the results with the class.

I started with a quick overview of some of the contraptions people had shared in the TTV Flickr group, talked through how to make a contraption by measuring the optimal distance for your lens and then let them go at it. Within an hour they’d all built a ‘trap and taken some photos which, after the break, I showed them how to process. Having seen what they could achieve they then went back out for another go before a brief critique by me of their work in the final ten minutes.

There’s a great post by Sarah NB who was in the first workshop and you can see all the photos from the second and third workshops here (we didn’t think to get them to share their jpegs in the first one…). Julie and I also took photos of the students working which you can find in this set.

Like all good lessons there was a not-so-hidden depth to these workshops. I didn’t just want them to build a lens out of an old camera and take some freaky photos. I wanted them to use this exercise to think about what photography is on a number of levels.

Some of the points I was trying to drive home included:

A few times during the lessons students mentioned mobile apps like Hipstamatic and Instagram which mimic vintage photography and some of the effects of TTV, and yes, if you want that effect it’s easy to produce it on a computer. I don’t have a problem with that in the slightest. What interests me about taking photos through a TTV contraption isn’t the effect on the image but how it affects the act of creating that image, the act of photography itself.

I’m hoping to run a TTV workshop with FizzPop, open to the public of all ages, later this summer. If you’re interested drop me an email and I’ll keep you posted.

Here’s all of them in one big grid. Click on it to see them at a reasonably legible size (200px wide).

Bear in mind these were produced over three hours from cutting up cardboard to processing in Photoshop. I was astonished not just at the quality of the work but the speed at which they got the hang of it.

I talk more about the workshop itself in another post but for now, here are the photos:
Callum Mackinnon

Cara Halling

Cherelle

Kelly

Alice Dennant

Ashleigh Kearney-Williams

Bee Cullen

Elvin (using a scratchbox)

Jade Johnson

Jessie Andrews

Jordan Finch

Latifah Gordon

Louise Bastock

Saffron Ward

It’s been an interesting experience, all told. I’m happy with it, but in a guarded, aware that I could do much better but must walk before I run kind of way. I’m so glad I found that Ira Glass quote before all this as I feel I’d have been a lot harder on myself.

You’ll also note I’ve changed the name and URL of this site from ttvpete.com to art-pete.com, the exact reasons for which I hope to go into more details later but suffice to say I’m feeling slightly restricted by the photography label. It’s an important part of what I do but it’s a tool and tools shouldn’t dictate ideas, at least not too much. For my next project I want to collect and display found pieces of rusty metal. No TTV involved in that. All old links will still work so don’t worry on that front.

So yes, it’s coming down and, as expected I could do with some help. Mostly Claire and I have got it covered but there’s one weak spot, and it ties into some really good news.

The 50-odd monitors are staying in Birmingham! Our generous supporters at Pure Planet Recycling have said they’re not bothered about having them back so the hunt was on for somewhere to store them. Leon Trimble has come to the rescue with the Rea Garden on Floodgate Street, Digbeth, where we can keep them out of the rain. They’ll need a better home in the long term but that’s not so urgent. This means if you’re planning something that could use multiple monitors there’s a go-to place to get them. Antonio has an idea for a glitch show and of course Leon has far too many notions. I might even do the viewfinder thing again.

The issue is we need some help unloading them. The van will be at the Rea Garden around 2.30 – 3.00pm on Friday. If you can spare an hour and are in the area I’d really appreciate the help as the driver is doing us a favour and needs to shoot off sharpish.

This is the entrance to Rea Garden:

And here’s a map:

If you can help please drop me a txt to 07775 690 106 and I’ll keep you posted. I’m thinking of you nice people who work in the Custard Factory / Fazeley Studios and could do with a little bit of exercise in the fresh air.

And I’ll be eternally grateful. Again.

Pic courtesy of Steve.

The piece comes down next week. Look for an update soon.