ENTRY # 4 : Chris Clark - Ted

The electronic musician Clark, formerly known as Chris Clark is one of my all-time favorite artists that I have followed closely on Warp records. He is sort of technological pioneer, constantly pushing the limits and redefining what you can, and cannot do.

A MUTEK favorite (yearly music and technology festival in Montreal), he has performed with experimental sound systems consisting of hundreds of speakers surrounding his audience in a circle to create other-worldy soundscapes and 3D panning. Naturally, I was following his music releases online and was blown away by his single “Ted” when it came out.

Not only does he record at sound quality resolutions that are unusually high, but this time he has pushed the envelope further with a cutting-edge CGI video. The video depicts hyper-realistic computer animations of insects that do not actually exist. They are modeled after familiar ones like the praying mantis, but have unique and unseen appendages.

     To bridge the gap between real and imaginary is a difficult task to achieve, but to fully trick your visual senses into thinking its real is pure magic. If that’s not enough, combining the video to his original-sounding composition puts the cherry on top of digital experimental art. In class we learned about the concept of space in artwork. After looking at the artwork, step away from it. The experience of seeing/hearing the artwork stays with you after you leave. The piece “Ted” by Clark, leaves me with an alien landscape in a faraway mental plane. A reminder, in a sense, that creativity is a limitless universe and may harness intelligent alien life.

ENTRY #3 : Scanner Camera Photography

I do a lot of amateur film photography and have always been interested in DIY projects over the years. One day when I was browsing some ideas for a pinhole camera project that uses nothing more than a matchbox and a roll of film, I stumbled upon a website that depicted a strange contraption. This bizarre apparatus turned out to be nothing more than a flatbed scanner that was converted into a camera by using the scanning sensor on it, with a built-over housing. 

Aside from the obvious eerie and disturbing results that it produces, the unique part of it is the way it captures motion. Since the scanning head moves in a linear motion and records one line segment at a time, movement is captured in short linear bursts. Depending on the speed of the scan and the speed of the moving subject, the resulting photograph may either show long smoke-like stretches or very narrow (squished) line segments.

The scanner camera has even been used to capture video, and the results are genuinely spooky. The low quality also brings a chill to your spine, producing an almost security camera-like footage as if it were evidence of paranormal activity. This reminded me of the scanner principles we covered in the first lectures of this course and on the basics of how it works. It would be interesting to see further developments with this method, perhaps employing the use of color more or obtaining a sharper focus. None the less, I found the imagery to be quite provocative.

ENTRY #2: Vaseline & Pepper (short story animation, mixed media)

Vaseline & Pepper from Fraser Munden on Vimeo.

This is a short film and animation made by local Montreal film maker Fraser Munden. I came across it when I noticed some of my friends posingt it up on facebook and were giving it a lot of positive feedback. The short film is about a fellow Montrealer  telling the story about a mischievous outing to a strip club with his older brother’s friend when he was only twelve. He used Vaseline and pepper on his face to get in; pretending he was older.

The video is comprised of digitally outlining the contour of his face in the beginning, giving him an air of anonymity but hints at the cartoonish and comical nature of the story. Other media types in the video include flash animations of crayon-drawn storyboards, and a stop-motion animation made out of paper depicting the butterflies that were in his stomach.

 I found it be a particularly interesting combination of mixed media. Dubbed with his own voice for all the characters,  it really brought the crayon drawings to life in intricate manner. His voice really sucks you into the story and shows the viewer what the perspective of a 12 year old boy is when facing the adult world. All the awe and excitement is brought out by keeping a colorful, childhood-like theme. It is a very effective (multimedia) image-remix and a collage in itself really. I enjoyed it so much that I must have watched it over a dozen times by now.

ENTRY #1: The HDR Process in digital photography

A sight for sore eyes, literally. Bad HDR!

With the technological advancements in DSLR photography, new techniques and processes have emerged as trends in recent years. One of these trends is a process known as “HDR” photography I first heard about this concept when reading Photography magazines at the Photo Service camera store 2 years ago in the old port. It stands for “High Density Range” and requires shooting in RAW format.


 This type of digital format produces an image that is as minimally processed as possible. In other words, it can be said that it is the raw “negative” in film photography. Several versions of the same scene are photographed using different camera settings to produce a wide spectrum of possible lighting, contrast and colors. The photos are then processed individually in Photoshop to accentuate their properties (i.e. color saturation, contrast) and merged all together to form a surreal-looking image. 


At first glance it may seem impressive to someone who has never seen one before: ultra-high detailing, unbelievable textures and the inability to tell if it is real or CGI. However, I find it to be ultra-tacky, unbelievably cartoonish and it gives off the impression that the creator has an inability to understand the difference between photography and painting by numbers! It takes away from reality in an unforgiving, automatic way and creates an unfamiliar scene that is uncomfortable to look at. It is one thing to familiarize a viewer with a piece of artwork that plays with the senses (such as the fur tea cup) and to disconnect them from what they are used to, but it is entirely opposite to put them in a visual limbo of redundant imagery that does not stimulate the senses. 

Example of good, subtle use of HDR

There is simply too much of an exaggeration of reality that tries to employ a sense of hyper-realism and is too difficult to absorb in a satisfying way. I am not saying that I dislike all HDR entirely, though. It seems that 90% of it is corny, but there are examples of subtle ones that truly accentuate the beauty of a scene. These end up being great photos for car advertisements in the back of magazines where the car is in the desert or by a crystal clear lake at sunset.