The Lichen + Screen Ink + MLGI

The Hyphae Series - Screen Ink. from the lichen on Vimeo.

New Project

‘pho∙to∙gra∙phy’ (etymology of): from photos (ϕοτοσ), light, and graphos (γραοσ), writing, delineation, or painting.



I love pushing the limits of relatively uncomplex consumer cameras, repurposing their pre-programmed photo modes for unintended and beautiful consequences of imagery. Here, "Starry Night" mode on the Panasonic Lumix TS-1 becomes more Mark Rothko painting than photograph as a 15-second exposure soaks in colors and attempts to white balance. See more this Friday at Roundscapes, 14th & O in the Parrish Building, where I'll be showing along with Jason Ortiz.

Who Knew?

I just discovered canned dolmas. They're on special right now at Open Harvest, and became an impulse buy for me Saturday. I thought there would be no way they'd compete with fresh, restaurant-made ones, but holy wow, they're yummy.

In other news, I'm spending my little employee benefit of a state holiday working on my Pecha Kucha presentation.


Hope to see you at the Bourbon Theatre on the 24th!

Three Links and a Dot

Gizmodo was entertaining this afternoon. Here are three links worth sharing.

Awesome White Elephants including Burrito Glasses:



Custom stuffed toys made from your child's sketches:




And sculptures made from dust.

I should clean my house.

When I got home, Dottie had been on my computer. This is what she managed to get up on the screen:

Tugboat Represent!

Inlight Richmond

Fantastic poet and wonderful person Joshua Poteat invited me to add video projection to an art installation he was putting together in Richmond, Virginia, this weekend. Honored to be asked, I submitted a piece that is of sunshine through trees that ends up looking like stars, one that lends itself well to projection. Well, the collaboration ended up taking best in show! I wish I could've been there to see it, but photos will have to suffice.

Sexy

This week's cover of The New Yorker is really sexy. "No Trespassing," by Istvan Banyai.

Technology + Creativity

It's amazing the things people hear and see and think to mash up.

Freestyle 50

Check out the Freestyle 50 tonight at Screen Ink (press coverage here). After tonight's First Friday, I'm heading out on the road for 7 days of Bicycle Riding Across Nebraska. Peace, be safe, and get out and enjoy the weather.

A Keith Jacobshagen Kind of Evening

The entirety of Reinkordts went up to Omaha last night to celebrate the birthday of the youngest. On the way home, Old Low to the Ground noted that it was a real Keith Jacobshagen kind of evening. Sadly, a camera is unable to capture this while driving down the interstate.

Spam, Illustrated

More here, and I hope he keeps going, because there aren't enough of these gems!

Home Grown Film Festival

"Homegrown" Film Festival
@ the Bourbon Theatre 1415 'O' Street - April 3rd, 9pm
Featuring local cinema arts on the big screen.

Free Admission-Free Popcorn

Playlist

"The Girl Who Could Run 600 Miles Per Hour" ~20mins

Directed by: Mark Thimijan

"I Want You To Know Something That Is True" ~2mins

Directed by: Jake Gillespie

"Neighbors" ~5mins

Directed by: Aaron Holmes

"Broken Circle" ~20mins

Directed by: Aaron Sawyer

"Red Means Danger" ~2mins

Directed by: Jake Gillespie

"Creation Myth" ~5mins

&

Triptych- 1."Little Dances", 2."Dallas", 3."Las Golondrinas" ~10mins

Directed by: Elisabeth Reinkordt

"Orange Fuzzy" ~2mins

Directed by: Jake Gillespie

"M.O.N.S.T.E.R.S." ~15mins

Directed by: Robby Defrain

"Untitled" ~5mins

Directed by: Diane Nelson & Nate Young"

"Nice" ~2mins

Directed by: Jake Gillespie

"Treasure House" ~10mins

Directed by: Joe Younglove & Jacob Cammack

"Strange Medicine" ~10mins

Directed by: David S. Ozinga

"Jakefomercial" ~5mins

Directed by: Jake Gillespie

Minnesotan things

Ande & Modelo

Some mustard greens & garlic

Ande's coffee brewing methodology, involving ladle. Side note: it was wonderful to not have to get up or make the coffee I drank in bed Sunday morning.

The scale of kitchen instruments in a young child's Montessori environment, as compared to my hand

A sponge the size of a silver dollar and its accompanying tiny pitcher

Ludvig Van Beethoven

She's a Talker

Neil Goldberg, 1993.  Watch it here.

More than 70 gay men in their living rooms pet their cats and say "She's a talker."

Weather's Nice

Get out and dance!

BOOMBOX from Ely Kim on Vimeo.

(as an aside, on Monday, I sent a boombox to the state surplus property auction...)

Animated Education

Nicely done, and certainly made me understand things better:


The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

The Short and Simple Story of the Credit Crisis.

Crisisofcredit.com

The goal of giving form to a complex situation like the credit crisis is to quickly supply the essence of the situation to those unfamiliar and uninitiated. This project was completed as part of my thesis work in the Media Design Program, a graduate studio at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.

For more on my broader thesis work exploring the use of new media to make sense of a increasingly complex world, visit jdjarvis.com.

More Color from Michael Hernandez-Stern

Beautiful, uncut footage, graced with the markings of the Brown MCM transfer machine...

DIGI/HYPNO-TIZE from MNHS on Vimeo.

transfer of most recently developed film.

"Adam"

New work out of USC -- cinematography by Jon Miller, and a score by Anderson Reinkordt!  I particularly love the Edward Hopper-esque shot in this clip. 

More about the work here.

Nate's got a nice new piece up

.

I remember seeing this in-camera. Nicely done!

TIE Retrospective, 2009

All you need for cinema to happen: A room with an audience, all facing the same direction, a source of light projecting above their heads, and darkness.

-Christopher May, director, TIE

There is a pause, space of black and silence, purposefully left between the short films. I describe to Jennie the need for a moment to clear the mind, come to the next piece fresh -- "like ginger & sushi," she retorts.

What follows are my notes and reactions to many of the films screened.

PROGRAM ONE

Necrology (Standish Lawder, 12 min, USA, 16mm, 1969-1970)
The only older piece of work in Program One of the show, Standish Lawder's motionless camera films people on an escalator, then projects this motion in reverse. The effect, of a flat mass of people ascending ad infinitum, brings to mind the Auffahrt (Ascension) -- countless souls in their own performative little worlds fleeting upwards on screen. At the end of the film, we are treated to a cast list full of imagined lives and ones constructed from what we see -- the secretary, menstruating, the man picking his nose, the Yalie, black. In this list of assignations, we are reminded of the projections we make onto others, strangers.

Dipping Sause (Luther Price, 10 min, USA, 16mm, 2005)
A series of Rube Goldberg devices propel the film toward varying torturous, fetishized conclusions.

Film for Invisible Ink, Case No. 142: Abbreviation for Dead Winter [Diminished by 1,794] (David Gatten, 13 min, USA, 16mm, 2007)
The screen is white. There are flecks, small variations in color, and the dust on the film is both evident and repetitive. Hair is focus-pulled. I ask Jennie if this is what winter in Nebraska is for her. She says it is, and like a kaleidoscope, only so much better.

July Fix (Jason Livingston, 3 min, USA 16mm, 2006)
How brilliant it is to take just small snippets of a pop song with appropriate pauses of silence -- we know to fill in the blank space, we do it automatically as the song is immediately in our head.

Nothing is over Nothing (Jonathan Schwartz, 16 min, USA/Israel, 16mm, 2008)
Toward the end, we see the eponymous shot, a stenciled bit of graffiti of Ahmadinejad sporting playboy bunny ears & bowtie with the words NOTHING IS OVER NOTHING just below. An Israeli solider stands next to the electrical box on which this is scrawled, posing for the camera. Schwartz's travelogue of Israel is full of blue -- from the opening shot of a blue door detailed with a Star of David in the foreground as a Hasid stands in the right half of the screen, slightly back to the mother in a blue denim dress holding a Russian Blue cat to the bathroom encrusted in blue tile, blue window panes to a man and a woman covered in mud at a spa to another stencil, this of an upside-down machine gun, done in a pale blue spray paint -- and this produces the effect of nearly convincing us the film has been tinted. Apparently, his camera was broken; he did not realize he was shooting in more than 24 frames per second. The effect of the all-encompassing slow motion is deeply profound, and it was quite striking to see it at this precise historical moment.

Sacred Space (David Chaim Cohen, 14 min, USA, 35mm, 2007)
Stan Brackhage revisited, not through technique but in effect, and ramped up on tactile, seemingly three-dimensional steroids. And to think this was a student film from CalArts, made on 35mm. Amazing, mesmerizing, and I never wanted it to end.

...
PROGRAM TWO

Dollar Portrait (Matthew Perino, 4:44 min, USA, 16mm, 2008, Silent)
In the positive and negative optical printing, parts of money begin to resemble sprocket holes.

Whirl (Scott Banning, 7:35 min, USA, 16mm, 2007)
Lights on an amusement park ride look so blue, they've never looked so blue or purple all at once before. Sometimes, in their close-ups, they begin to look like anglerfish, deep underwater. This was originally black & white film that was then transferred and edited digitally, then projected and the projection filmed. The tint emerges in the digital space between film stocks.

Wot the Ancient Sod (Diane Kitchen, 17 min, USA, 16mm, 2001, Silent)
This portrait of leaves is a reminder of the incredible possibilities of a shallow depth of field, something only film can achieve.

To Be Regained (Zach Iannazzi, 10 min, USA, 16mm, 2008)
One of a few films done by young, devoted filmmakers, this one a graduate of Amherst. It's impressive to see documentary work -- a medium that traditionally requires a much higher ratio of footage to finished length -- done all on film. Iannazzi does plenty of hand processing, adding lovely grit to the footage of his own he cuts together with stock footage of salmon being...de-egged?

Trauma Victim (Robert Todd, 17 min, USA, 16mm, 2002)
This collection of shots and scenes seems to come deep from within the psyche. As waterfalls are projected, I find it impossible to keep my eyes from tracking downward with the water. Like its waterfalls, it is a pouring out of brain space.

Errata (Alexander Stewart, 7 min, USA, 16mm, 2005, Silent)
Nothing so beautiful has ever been done with a photocopier. Ink soaks like blood through the projected image sequences.

Metaphysical Education (Thad Povey, 4 min, USA, 16mm, 2003)
Made with a homemade optical printer, frames seem to slide horizontally, revealing their soundtracks in the otherwise hidden margins, bright and beautiful.

...

Official Program Notes

TIE on the web