I visited the new Lucasfilm campus at the Letterman Digital Arts Center, in the Presidio (San Francisco). Very sedate, conservative environment, with no obvious signs of anything related to cinema. However, there is one statue on the grounds, of Eadweard Muybridge. Here’s a picture of Amy, Nik & myself next to it:
Everything seemed very natural. However, it is all very, very artificial, as shown by the shut-off button for the creek that runs through the site.
The kings of junk e-mail are trying new ways to get around spam filters. I received one recently that was weirdly poetic, apparently using some kind of grammar-aware automatic sentence generator. Follow the link to read it, and enjoy…
Nik, my charming & jetsetting girlfriend, has arrived in New York!
It’s so nice to see her here, after two months apart. Not much of a shock for her: my furniture, appliances, etc. are all the same ones I had in Tokyo, so it was easy for her to settle in. Even more important, I am the same person she knew in Tokyo, except literate (I can read & write, unlike in Japan!) and more purposeful.
Soon after she got here, I introduced her to the thrill and romance of New York life by going for a walk in Washington Square Park, where they are filming “I Am Legend” starring Will Smith, possibly the biggest film shoot ever in New York. I fed her a nice meal, all sourced from shops on the block where we live.
Here’s Nik by night, lit by the movie lights:
I went to see this show with a bunch of other ITP students. Matmos is a very interesting duo (with occasional collaborators) that works with found sound and samples, using it produce music with a pointed political sentiment. So Percussion started out as an avantgarde percussion quartet, mostly playing the works of other composers, but now starting ot compose and perform their own works.
The concert was really beautiful: first, So Percussion performed alone, showing short films made by the sister of one of the musicians, then they performed together with Matmos. A particularly beautiful moment was when So Percussion played their drums with huge bunches of roses, making a muffled, yet oddly hypnotic, sound while rose petals flew everywhere.
The encore, which is rapidly acquiring a kind of notoriety, involved Matmos reading the text of Hugo Chavez’s speech at the UN calling George W. Bush “the devil”, while So Percussion played excerpts from Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring“, a fascinating juxtaposition of two possible views of American values.
I went to see the premiere of “8 Bit” at the MoMA. It’s a movie about videogame art, starting from the early days of computing and arcade games. I was particularly pleased to see artists such as Bodenstandig 2000, Bubblyfish and Glomag in the film, especially since I’d seen some of them perform recently!
Cory Arcangel’s modified Nintendo cartridges are particularly amusing, especially the piece called “Clouds“. It consists of a “Super Mario Bros.” game cartridge, from which he has removed everything except the clouds. What was previously a frantic & noisy game becomes a serene, surreal sequence of cartoon clouds moving silently across the screen. As Rui pointed out, it is also a bridge to the exotic subculture of circuitbending.
This is the first documentary I have seen on the subject of art created from video games, but it appears that there is actually a thriving cultural & academic scene devoted to its study: the film featured speakers from universities and research centers in the US, France & Germany.
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