Wednesday, May 9, 2012

some new avatar work / productions



duradura, duramater, dura, dura europa

images come to me in my sleep
they leave me there exhausted
breath is a luxuray
avatars form their inhuman

murmurs and texts in ontology
what falls apart comes apart
what comes apart falls apart
ontology and texts of murmurs

video
http://www.alansondheim.org/duradura.mp4

stills
http://www.alansondheim.org/dura1.png
http://www.alansondheim.org/dura2.png
http://www.alansondheim.org/dura3.png
http://www.alansondheim.org/dura4.png
http://www.alansondheim.org/dura5.png
http://www.alansondheim.org/dura6.png
http://www.alansondheim.org/dura7.png

audio
http://espdisk.com/alansondheim/dura.mp3
http://espdisk.com/alansondheim/duras.mp3

11 comments:

  1. how beautiful!

    "images come to me in my sleep/ they leave me there exhausted"

    --this, THIS is the place of interest I was posting about at the post I was sending to you just prior to this one. the haunt. so I guess I am saying that I am very interested in the images that haunt--perhaps even more so than what they inspire in the context of code re virtual avatars.

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    1. agree with you, with these images, there are very many moving things, constantly moving among avatar and scripted objects, and I really don't know what's going to emerge... so for me it's a dialog between image and 'setting' - Second Life - and I always surprise (not startle) myself in these things...

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  2. dura1.png is especially touching to me this morning. a bifurcating or tripling forest--an imagined innard of a half human half bot. are those mushroom tips or the reoccurring tips of dicks? wow. so beautiful.

    --I am curious if anyone has ever written creative reviews/ responses to your pieces (as with the dura docs above)?

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    1. they're neither, they're mannequins from Poser animated by altered motion capture files, and the finger-print-looking background imaging is from 3d-printing of similar avatars. I don't think anyone's written on these, at least as far as I know - sometimes the videos win awards or some such, but there's no critical discourse on them.

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  3. Desert lands, soldiers, squadrons of phalluses, missiles, dwellings, huts, (beehives? lobster pots?)... caught in a net, trapped in a grid of distorted logic/rationale folding in on itself... and the haunting, mournful music... shadow projections or the digital debris from a video war game?

    And yet... those strange black creatures that seem like the shadows of modern day soldiers at first, have the look of something from another time, a mythical creature, replicating...

    And then, in the still images, the shadows of coffins...

    Beautiful, yes, paradoxically.

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    Replies
    1. the black creatures are outlines of a female body from the motion capture stuff I do; they're particles that emerge from the intersection of the avatar and the object the avatar is 'sitting' on - which really means dancing on - the object takes over the avatar... so they're all human forms, the music is sarangi (which I play) with very heavy echo so that the sarangi acts as its own drone. and thank you!

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  5. when you are haunted by these pictures/ images do they haunt you in a narrative/ relational sense (relational to you) or is it more like they press into you and drag you toward manifestation of the imprints that were/ are left? or?

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  6. haunted by them in the making of them, in the depth of them; I wonder in situations like this, what conceivable life-forms are elsewhere in the cosmos? I try to eliminate gravity in them, so that they're suspended without reference to surface; they cohere to themselves. -

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  7. I see. I also wonder about life-forms elsewhere in the cosmos. in seeing and spending time with some of your pieces (they are a very beautiful sort of iteration in my feeling of them) that they themselves might feel more indigenous to some of those elsewhere life-forms than perhaps their own environments do. or--what is it to apply information that has somehow come from an inter (dream, proprioceptive sense, etc.)

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  8. I think the information comes, not from dream, etc., but from the mechanisms and permissions of Second Life itself - what's possible to do in this virtual world, what tweaks are there. A simple example - if I set the rotation speed of an object high enough, it will be greater than the bandwidth or monitor refresh rate will allow, so it appears to chaotically 'jerk' around. If I choose to use the special alpha-layer elimination texture (which corresponds to nothing in the real world), objects will only appear partially, as if there are invisible forces at work. This all partly simple hacking and partly creative misuse and partly pushing software limits. So I'm not sure what a particular 'push' will do, but it's almost always interesting. As I said at a conference, the difference between a programmer and an artist is, that if a program breaks down at a particular point, the programmer finds out what's wrong and repairs it, but the artist might see it as another direction to things to go, and might explore that. There's a motto of course, "it's not a bug, it's a feature," which is pretty applicable.

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