Pod Tech Interview for BloggerReps

16 Jun
2009


In a former life (that wasn’t too long ago), I was a online publicist for the FX cable network. In fact it’s the reason why I sold most of my possessions and came to Los Angeles in the first place. That Fall (2007) while visiting San Francisco, I was interviewed by Eddie Codel at LunchMeet for my thoughts on social media and effective methods to reach the blogsphere. Enjoy.

Spotless Rewind

14 Jun
2009

The blogger Kevin Lee and critic Matt Zoller Seitz just posted a video essay on one of my favorite films, The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004). Moreso than any other film that year, I remember being obsessed by how new and unusual it seemed to me that a story could dance around a single lead and then introduce new characters who are sometimes themselves, and sometimes simply figures that represent the lead’s emotional needs at the time.

What could have been a exercise in navel gazing (Think Synecdoche, New York), evolved into just the perfect mix of subjective narrative with the lead’s interaction in the real world left unbroken. Leading up to the well timed climax, the events in Joel’s head are just as important as his recovery from brain mapping within the story’s real life context. If you haven’t seen it, I can’t reccomend it more.

New Berlin : Art Hause v1 : 2009

11 May
2009

Download it now

Lately I’ve been spending alot of my free time in and around Venice Beach. If you’ve never visited, it’s almost magnetic and at the same time very inspiring. This new mix was intended to be series of field recordings off the shoreline, capturing the sounds of children playing and cars passing by near the lapping waves and busy boardwalk — book ended by a few fun songs.

Soon it evolved away from being a dancey mix to something more introspective, mainly because I want to share these recordings with art galleries and storefronts. So there you have it, a compact 45 minute mix of chin-stroking electro pop, downtempo, idm, and shoegaze — perfect for pondering art, or doing yoga poses.  Feel free to use it as you see fit.

Download it now : DJ New Berlin

Of course if you enjoy the mix I only ask one thing — just remember to forward it to your friends on Facebook, Twitter, or Digg below.

M83 – We Own the Sky

2 May
2009

M83 – We Own the Sky from David Altobelli

Altobelli’s turning out to be one of my favorite video artists, and this short is works perfectly to illustrate the various emotions that french shoegaze can elisit. Note the series of glowing dots resembling a 3d version of the Unknown Pleasures Joy Division album cover. Breaking lightbulbs shot in reverse, A man swinging a lightbulb on a cord in front of a bluescreen, creating time delay shapes, which can technically mean anything to the viewer.

(BTW – Lately I’ve been thinking about scripting a few scenarios for a HD video art instillation, with similar conclusions — making the viewer make his or her own emotional and subjective conclusion of what they’ve seen on the screen. Check back for more on that later this year.)

So, let’s assume that it only took a day to capture the actor’s performance on greenscreen (2 hours max) and the dark room shots of lightbulbs. Most of the heavy lifting to make this video work is done by the effects team animating the glowing dots and the actor’s patterns (circles, squares, triangles) Working full time with an editor, this should have only take about 14 days to assemble and make broadcast ready. What do you think?

Using math to prove perfect design

13 Apr
2009

Part of what drew me away from film making as a undergraduate and towards digital art, was the simplicity of creating “art” via electricity and numbers. Once I learned what a synthesizer was and how it worked, I was enthralled by it’s potential. Imagine being in the room the day Giorgio Moroder stopped playing the piano and started making disco with a sound oscillator.  Much like my first forays into Ableton Live — I learned that every instrument can then be sampled and reconfigured in a sequence, then looped to repeat again, or to be tweaked over a time line.  It’s all math.

The same goes for visual art — many of the IDM artists I discovered in the late 1990′s used computer artwork like polygons and hexagons drawn in complex patterns to represent the new and exciting music they were making.  For the seasoned electronic musician, these ideas aren’t new — but for a traditional art collector — the same principles seem to be relevant discussion threads.

From the Boston Globe:

In truth, it’s satisfyingly simple. Designed objects, Brock writes, can be broken down into “themes” and “transformations.” A theme is a motif, such as an S-curve; a transformation might see that curve appear elsewhere in the design, but stretched, rotated 90 degrees, mirrored, or otherwise reworked.

Aesthetic satisfaction comes from an apprehension of how those themes and transformations relate to each other, or of what Brock calls their “relative complexity.” Basically – and this is the nub of it – “if the theme is simple, then we are most satisfied when its echoes are complex . . . and vice versa.”

He gives the example of a chair in his collection designed by the English Regency architect Henry Holland. The dominant design motif, which can be found in the chair’s arm, is an S-curve. (Mathematically, an S-curve, which twists in space, is complex when compared to a straight line or unidirectional curve.) The back of the chair, writes Brock, sees that S-curve first reversed and then rotated 90 degrees – a simple two-step transformation.

Complex theme, simple transformation: Voila! The chair is beautiful.

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