Watching Cumberland’s Taiwanese Lantern Festival from our house on the hill.

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for videoblogging week, day 6
lumière style videos are silent, 60 seconds long, with a fixed camera.
this breaks the silent rule, so i’ve called it a son et lumière.

i wanted to keep the crunch of the snow, the voices carrying in the crisp smoky air. this is really just a postcard to myself, to remind me what it was like to live in Cumberland in the snow.

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London.

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Old clips given a home for videoblogging week 2009.

Château de Quéribus (map) is one of the Cathar Castles in the Languedoc-Roussillon region in the south of France – the Pays Cathare, or “Cathar Country”. Quéribus is sometimes considered the last refuge of the Cathars – perhaps where the Cathar treasure (the Grail?) was carried to, by the four Cathars who escaped the bloody fall of Montségur.
It’s an eerie feeling to have it all to yourself before dawn.

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I really should be working.

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A post so boring that it’s taken at least 15 attempts to finish it. I doubt it even makes sense, but I’m so sick of it that I just have to post it or I’ll hate myself forever.

The Wordpress plugins I mentioned are:
All in One SEO Pack
Google XML Sitemap Generator

(You can see that I’ve used the SEO pack to make an alternative Title for this post – see top of page. I also made custom Meta Description & Keywords for it.)

This is a great example of something that could have been done much more effectively with text than with video. I suppose somebody could’ve made a really densely illustrated screencast demonstration, instead of it just being me talking into Photobooth on my balcony. But, frankly, who would bother?

And I don’t know why it took me nearly 9 minutes to tell you, “Do SEO. Download these plugins. It’ll bring you more viewers” – but I do hope that it’ll bring you more viewers, if you actually managed to watch more than about 30 seconds of it without blowing your brains out.

Now I’ve got past this nightmare, I can move on to more fun things later this week. Please, God.

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I just had a wonderful three hour window from pain. And spent half of it transcribing a radio interview. Idiot.

Anyway, here it is. I typed it out because just before Christmas, Sull started a group called Artists in the Cloud, to discuss things related to online art, net cinema, etc. We’ve been talking about distribution models, Alternative Reality Games, live video streams of pre-recorded work – all sorts. I’ve been wondering how to triangulate the work we’re doing with trends and movements in the wider world (in art and society).

And tonight I heard something on BBC Radio 4’s art show Front Row, which I wanted to share with the group for that reason.

Since I’d done it for them, I thought I might as well also publish it here.

They were discussing the Tate Triennial 2009, which is called Altermodern – and were introducing the audience to the concept of Altermodernism.

You can read the Manifesto at the Tate’s Altermodern site. It’s a suggestion for defining art to follow postmodernism, postpostmodernism, to find a new direction. Its name seems to have been inspired by the way that Alterglobalization was coined as a middle way between Globalization and anti-Globalization. It’s a reflection of a globalized world with confused borders and cultural identities, movement of people and information and communication – both in subject matter and the disparate media the artists choose to combine.

The interview started with the curator of the Tate Triennial Altermodern show, Nicholas Bourriaud, who said,
“Altermodern started as a kind of term that designates and defines what’s next. The idea is to get out of Post – postcolonial, postfeminist, posthistory, post everything. I think we all feel spontaneously very fed up with it. Is it possible that a new modernity is emerging? Something which is positive and not in the suburbs of history?”

This was followed by a discussion of the Altermodern show between the host, Mark Lawson, and the London Times’s chief art critic, Rachel Campbell-Johnston.

Throughout, you could feel their suspicion that this was a passing trend – an Emperor’s New Clothes marketing gimmick (which in a way it probably is) – fuelled by her discomfort at not really understanding the curator’s definition of Altermodernism. I suspect that most cloud artists will find it quite easy to get a better grasp of it, as much of it is familiar.

Mark Lawson, host: “Having seen the show and heard the curator’s interview there, do you understand what Altermodern is?”

Rachel Campbell-Johnston, critic: “I think Altermodern is the most difficult term I have had to come to terms with, and I was just happy that postmodernism had gone. But before you cheer that Altermodernism is in, there’s one line where he (the curator) tries to explain it in the book:

“Altermodernism can be defined as that moment when it became possible for us to produce something that made sense starting from an assumed heterochrony – that is from a vision of human histories constituted of multiple temporalities, disdaining the nostalgia for the avant-garde and indeed for any era.”

She then continues, in an irritated tone, “That’s a typical sentence from an absolutely impossible explanation book. As far as I can tell, if postmodernism started as “Where Are We?”, Altermodernism suggests that we come from a global internet culture, where we don’t even need to ask where we are, we hop around all over the place – it samples and moves and wanders everywhere, it never alights anywhere – and how that is different from postmodernism, I’m not sure.”

Mark Lawson: “I couldn’t work it out either, because although I thought they’re trying to say that something new has begun here, there are very clear trends that have been going on for, in some cases, 10 years or more – with video installations, also random and interactive elements…”

[He then goes on to describe an ongoing piece in the show, which is constructed each Friday in response to a conversation with the curator each Monday – a “serious conversation” he says, with an amused laugh

At which point Rachel Campbell-Johnston came back in with, “It’s going to be responses to responses to the show – and that almost sums it up – there is no end in this. And if you’re looking for a finished piece, as far as I could tell, this show is not about an object – something to look at – it was about clusters of objects.”

And then she actually said something clear about it, which I liked:

“And actually, Nicholas Bourriaud uses the image of the *archipelago* fairly regularly – he sees these works as clusters of related ideas, but not one landmass, and actually that is one of the few helpful images I found, because the pieces are not A Video, they’re video, sound, photography, a bit of drawing, it’s everything thrown in together.”

I love the image of an archipelago. All the islands interconnected. Soft borders. Of course, “everything thrown in together” sounds more like her judgement of the messiness of these fragments – you’d hope that they’ve actually been chosen and placed and connected more carefully.

Lawson: “Couple of trends – Mark Leckey who won the Turner Prize last year, his big piece was a long lecture, and we have two lectures at least in these, so that also happens. Also, as at most exhibitions of modern art now, anyone going from the British Society for the Restoration of Painting will be disappointed – there’s a bit of wall painting from Franz Ackermann, BUT on the other hand, photography and printing are very strong – there’s much more of that than I expected – in Tacita Dean’s work and others”

Campbell-Johnston: “Well, painting is dead – having been told it was coming back again, it’s out – you’re absolutely right. There are a few drawings which are used as works in progress, but photography only as a means of capturing something in passing – either borrowing somebody else’s photograph… actually, one of the few beautiful things to look at in the show was photography, which was Darren Almond taking huge Chinese landscapes by moonlight, which is one the very few… beauty is also out, by the way (they laugh) as an aesthetic sense – and apart from that, photography just because it captures something very very quickly. I mean, I felt that after a while, the slideshow was back. I felt that all my thoughts moved to a sort of hiss-click-clack-drop of slides going round endlessly and there was never an endpoint.”

Lawson: “Just tell me very quickly, Rachel, will you be adopting the adjective altermodern or altermodernistic?”

Campbell-Johnston: “I certainly won’t, I mean the most optimistic thing about this show is that at least they are looking for somewhere to go, but I have to say they certainly haven’t found it.”

I also love the optimism of looking for somewhere to go, but even without having seen the show, I’m sceptical that “they certainly haven’t found it”. Maybe she just hasn’t seen it – she’s looking for something concrete, and seems appalled by the looseness, the softness, the fragmentation of it all. Art and media are moving towards a more fragmented, networked future, just as we are in our lives and communities. As cloud-based filmmakers, we’re so used to the idea of producing an expanding archipelago of separate but networked pieces, which form part of a larger ongoing work or body of work, that this all seems obvious and natural and exciting to us. Not to everybody. What the Altermodernism manifesto tries to do is tie this up with where we are economically, politically and culturally.

When you move away from single self-contained works – and works in one medium – you move away from traditional ideas of commercialization, productization and mass-production. But not away from reproduction and duplication. Philosophically, you’re moving towards the commons, towards open source and remixable art, artworks with softer edges, with complex networks between pieces – towards The Cloud. Selling and removing individual pieces, or individual components of larger works, affects all the other pieces in that network. I’d think that artists and collectors and galleries are going to find themselves facing a lot of new challenges, just as we do. Especially right now, it’s interesting to think of this in relation to the global economy, its boom and bust, and the mass economic migrations that have been caused by it and have supported it.

Will had some good thoughts in the Group about how this is all very well, but what Artists in the Cloud is about is based around small open networks, as opposed to an idea for a definition and a manifesto that comes top-down from a curator of a commercial show.

I wish I was in London to see the show – it starts tomorrow at Tate Britain and runs until April. (Hopefully Lize will go and tell me I’m talking bollocks and/or it’s all a joke)

Ouch – back to bed.

You can see what I look like here.

Shingles (tagline: This Time It’s War) is the sequel to the popular virus Chicken Pox. It turns out that after you thought you’d defeated the Chicken Pox in childhood, your body failed to blow it out the airlock. It crept into the ganglion of your spine, where it stayed, hiding, waiting, until (woken by an unknown force) it bursts back out of your skin and clamps down on your head and bleeds acid all over your face, eyes and nerves.

It looks bad, feels a lot worse, and can cause blindness. RA. (It hurts too much to RA louder than that). I’ve had two eye check-ups (including one from an eye doctor who feigned horror when he saw me and jumped back going “AAAHHH!”), and I think I’m clear on that front – but even without the cornea damage, the pain is bad enough.

The strangest effect has been on my brain. It’s attacking the nerves on the right side of my face and eye – which is controlled by the left side of my brain – and that’s how I feel: like my rational brain is in lock-down.

At its height, at the end of last week, I could answer basic Yes and No questions, but anything more taxing sent me into a panic. I couldn’t process simple tasks, or retain any information – even before they gave me drugs.

Anyway, the real reason for my post is not to whine about my bad luck. I’m now half Canadian, so my British whining is starting to be tempered by irritatingly cheery optimism.

Sometime in the middle of all this, I got a sudden hunger for downloading and watching beautiful old films. I’m shut down here in my darkened basement, and even with painkillers it hurts to read the screen for more than a few minutes even with painkillers, but it turns out that watching slow black and white movies is the only time I’m pain-free.

They’re all films that I’ve been meaning to watch for years – that I really should have seen already – but have never given myself time to. Tokyo Story, Ugetsu Monogatari, 8½, I Vitelloni, La Regle du Jeu, Rashomon, L’Atalante, L’Avventura.

It’s like a festival of all the best films *ever*, but with an invisible usherette sticking hot knives into your head in the interval.

And since my left brain is out to lunch, it’s not getting in the way with all its irrelevant analysis, so they’re washing over and through me. All these stories and relationships and exquisite black and white compositions.

They’re *exactly* what I need to see right now – my head is exploding with ideas and excitement about making films again. I’ve been feeling like I haven’t felt since university – like my brain is switching on and I’m shifting up a gear. I don’t regret that I hadn’t seen them earlier – right-brain/left-brain weirdness aside, I’m experiencing them at a much richer level that I would have a decade ago.

And the thing is: given all the things that are going on in my life, I probably never would have made the time to watch them, had I not been Aponed by the Shingles.

In one of Amy’s books, there’s an old Chinese story that I like, about a farmer:
- first his horse runs away, and his neighbours say “What Bad Luck!” – and he says, “We’ll see”
- then the horse returns, accompanied by a wild horse, and his neighbours say “What Good Luck!” – and he says, “We’ll see”
- then his son tries to ride the wild horse and breaks his leg, and the neighbours say “What Bad Luck!” – and he says, “We’ll see”
- then the army come through the village to take young men to fight a war, but they leave his son because his leg is broken, and the neighbours say “What Good Luck!” and he says, “We’ll see”.

But FUCK, it hurts.

I know, I know – it’s all just a hideous, self-congratulatory, intellectually bankrupt fashion show. But I love it.

Today started off as a bad day, then the nominations cheered me up. And then technology brought me back down again. I tried three times to record a video to go with this, but my phone failed every time, so I’m just going with text.

Every year, my friend Lize and I swap Oscar predictions. This year, I thought I’d publish mine.

I’ve never seen the films – most don’t come out in England until much later – and even though I’m in Canada now, most of these don’t make it up here. Plus I hardly ever go to the cinema any more.

So it’s a bit like going to the dog track and taking a cursory look at the form before placing your bets. I think it’s more exciting that way.

The thing that makes it even better, though, is second guessing the way Academy members will vote. Just like the fittest dog or horse doesn’t always win, so the films with the best form often don’t take the Oscars. The Golden Globes are more predictable – there are very few Hollywood Foreign Press voters, and they actually judge films on their aesthetic merits. The Academy voters are swayed much more by money, glamour, promotion and commercialism. I remember the first time I really understood the awful genius of this – the night that Forrest Gump beat Pulp Fiction.

Sometimes, I even place bets. The best category to bet on is Best Director. I think I won about £400 on Roman Polanski from a £20 bet.

Anyway, here are my predictions. I explained my reasoning for each in my video, but never mind.

List of Oscar Nominations with Predicted Winners:

BEST PICTURE
WINNER: * “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (Paramount and Warner Bros.)
* “Frost/Nixon” (Universal)
* “Milk” (Focus Features)
* “The Reader” (The Weinstein Company)
* “Slumdog Millionaire” (Fox Searchlight)

BEST ACTOR
* Richard Jenkins in “The Visitor” (Overture Films)
* Frank Langella in “Frost/Nixon” (Universal)
WINNER: * Sean Penn in “Milk” (Focus Features)
* Brad Pitt in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (Paramount and Warner Bros.)
* Mickey Rourke in “The Wrestler” (Fox Searchlight)

BEST ACTRESS
* Anne Hathaway in “Rachel Getting Married” (Sony Pictures Classics)
* Angelina Jolie in “Changeling” (Universal)
* Melissa Leo in “Frozen River” (Sony Pictures Classics)
WINNER: * Meryl Streep in “Doubt” (Miramax)
* Kate Winslet in “The Reader” (The Weinstein Company)

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
* Josh Brolin in “Milk” (Focus Features)
* Robert Downey Jr. in “Tropic Thunder” (DreamWorks, Distributed by DreamWorks/Paramount)
* Philip Seymour Hoffman in “Doubt” (Miramax)
WINNER: * Heath Ledger in “The Dark Knight” (Warner Bros.)
* Michael Shannon in “Revolutionary Road” (DreamWorks, Distributed by Paramount Vantage)

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
* Amy Adams in “Doubt” (Miramax)
WINNER: * Penélope Cruz in “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” (The Weinstein Company)
* Viola Davis in “Doubt” (Miramax)
* Taraji P. Henson in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (Paramount and Warner Bros.)
* Marisa Tomei in “The Wrestler” (Fox Searchlight)

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE
* “Bolt” (Walt Disney), Chris Williams and Byron Howard
* “Kung Fu Panda” (DreamWorks Animation, Distributed by Paramount), John Stevenson and Mark Osborne
WINNER: * “WALL-E” (Walt Disney), Andrew Stanton

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
* “Changeling” (Universal), Tom Stern
* “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (Paramount and Warner Bros.), Claudio Miranda
* “The Dark Knight” (Warner Bros.), Wally Pfister
WINNER: * “The Reader” (The Weinstein Company), Chris Menges and Roger Deakins
* “Slumdog Millionaire” (Fox Searchlight), Anthony Dod Mantle

BEST DIRECTOR
* “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (Paramount and Warner Bros.), David Fincher
* “Frost/Nixon” (Universal), Ron Howard
* “Milk” (Focus Features), Gus Van Sant
* “The Reader” (The Weinstein Company), Stephen Daldry
WINNER: * “Slumdog Millionaire” (Fox Searchlight), Danny Boyle

BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE
* “The Betrayal (Nerakhoon)” (Cinema Guild), A Pandinlao Films Production, Ellen Kuras and Thavisouk Phrasavath
* “Encounters at the End of the World” (THINKFilm and Image Entertainment), A Creative Differences Production, Werner Herzog and Henry Kaiser
* “The Garden” A Black Valley Films Production, Scott Hamilton Kennedy
WINNER: * “Man on Wire” (Magnolia Pictures), A Wall to Wall Production, James Marsh and Simon Chinn
* “Trouble the Water” (Zeitgeist Films), An Elsewhere Films Production, Tia Lessin and Carl Deal

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM
* “The Baader Meinhof Complex” A Constantin Film Production, Germany
* “The Class” (Sony Pictures Classics), A Haut et Court Production, France
* “Departures” (Regent Releasing), A Departures Film Partners Production, Japan
* “Revanche” (Janus Films), A Prisma Film/Fernseh Production, Austria
WINNER: * “Waltz with Bashir” (Sony Pictures Classics), A Bridgit Folman Film Gang Production, Israel

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
WINNER: * “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (Paramount and Warner Bros.), Screenplay by Eric Roth, Screen story by Eric Roth and Robin Swicord
* “Doubt” (Miramax), Written by John Patrick Shanley
* “Frost/Nixon” (Universal), Screenplay by Peter Morgan
* “The Reader” (The Weinstein Company), Screenplay by David Hare
* “Slumdog Millionaire” (Fox Searchlight), Screenplay by Simon Beaufoy

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
* “Frozen River” (Sony Pictures Classics), Written by Courtney Hunt
* “Happy-Go-Lucky” (Miramax), Written by Mike Leigh
* “In Bruges” (Focus Features), Written by Martin McDonagh
WINNER: * “Milk” (Focus Features), Written by Dustin Lance Black
* “WALL-E” (Walt Disney), Screenplay by Andrew Stanton, Jim Reardon, Original story by Andrew Stanton, Pete Docter

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Fantastic Home Birth Video, about planning for natural childbirth at home with a midwife and birth pool in Virginia. It’s a beautifully told video birth story with an in-depth discussion of homebirthing.

I wanted to make a video about our own experiences of having two home births, but we were too close to it, and I felt I’d be doing a bad job of emulating a RyanIsHungry video.

So I was very happy when Ryanne & Jay told me that they were making a video about their friends Katherine & Todd having a home birth – they’re by far the best people for the job. This is it – and it’s fantastic. I hope a lot of parents and professionals find it and use it. Kate and I have a cameo via video chat about halfway through.

Their original post of this home birth video is here, where you can read the accompanying text and leave comments.

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I’ve been away – and in all the holiday excitement, I’ve totally forgotten to blog about this.

Michael Verdi is putting on a 24 hour webcast to celebrate the 24th anniversary of the theater company he’s involved with. He’s given an hour each to 24 different artists. I’ll be on at 7am Pacific Time – 3pm GMT/UTC on Saturday 3rd January.

Some of the performers are videobloggers, but there are a lot of other people from all over the world.

Check it out now at 24hours24artists.com

It’s midnight now – I need some sleep before my show!

I created a 30 second version of this in August as a promo for a music festival I was videoblogging here in Cumberland. I put music over it and speeded it up to 8000x its original speed. But although the festival videos were well watched, this fell under the radar and few people saw it. And I think it lost some of its power being so compressed. So I’ve slowed it down a little – now you can see the outrageous colours and changes more clearly.

It’s shot from the balcony outside our bedroom. Amy gets up early, so I got to see a lot of spectacular dawns like this, this summer.

As the sky brightens, in the distance you can see the Coast Range mountains of mainland British Columbia and a small strip of the sea separating the island from the mainland. It’s a bit freaky, because Cumberland is quite a few miles from the coast, but our house is at the top of he biggest hill in town. On clear days, you can look out of our bedroom and see cruise ships on their way to Alaska.

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Podcast file (iPod/iPhone compatible)

Found in the vaults. From May 16, 2008, 2 weeks after we arrived in Canada.
Worth remembering this week, as the winter sets in. Started to get my first proper pangs of homesickness this weekend. Which may be partly why I’ve fallen a bit behind in posting.

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Podcast file (iPod / iPhone Compatible)

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Podcast file (iPod/iPhone compatible MP4)