Last night I checked out my friend Chris’s art installation Synopsis at the Leo Kuelbs Collection in DUMBO. Gorgeous work, elegantly executed. Here are my pics (click for the Flickr set).

Tomorrow morning bright and early i’ll be heading off to Owego, NY, for a 5 day residency at the Experimental Television Center. I’ll get back Sunday night, probably. Wish me luck and/or productivity.

I saw Flipped Chips at Galapagos tonight, a show of video art by contemporary artists and pioneers like Nam June Paik, Bill Etra and Matthew Schlanger. Works that stood out to me: Matthew Schlanger (beautiful synthesis, all built from oscillators); Karl Klomp, with music by toktek (simple distortion of a vid of a dog, triggered by audio, the results seemed so violent); Jon Satrom (nice sprite rip stuff with a sense of humor); Defanti/Sandin (really pretty and mesmerizing math psychedelia with a charming how-we-do-it video at the beginning); noteNdo / Johnny Beverley 1989! / Jeff, who I played with at the big chiptunes show back in October (excellent textures from hacking the NES). And there was a great Bit Shifter track with Jeff’s video. Speaking of which, Bit Shifter has a new album out and so does David Sugar!

Man I’m tired.

Anyway, to finish up — great stuff. It drove this home:

• it’s all simple things added together. no magic.
• minds are pattern recognition engines.
• the best stuff is elusive and evocative.

Also, I had a fun idea for projections @ Galapagos that I’m going to bounce off of CJ. Now I can crash. Thank Jeebus. I’m still not recovered from the end of the semester pushzzzzzz….

Today at 2:30 pm Central I’ll be participating in Video Feedback at Aurora Picture Show, a non-profit microcinema and media arts center in Houston, TX.

Do you want your video art critiqued but can’t afford the high price of graduate school? Join Aurora for our FREE inaugural video review series “Video Feedback” with visiting film and video curators and artists. First up is Astria Suparak, a roving one woman powerhouse of independent film and video curation. The first six media makers to sign-up each get a 30 minute critique with Astria. Observers are welcome!

I’m going to be participating via live video stream. You — yes, you! — can watch Video Feedback and the stream of me from my apartment. You may need the latest version of Quicktime Player (free) to watch. Note: you don’t have to give Apple your email address to download it.

• watch the stream from Aurora — other artist are presenting their work right now!
• watch the stream from my apartment – featuring a lovely view out my window right now while I nip out for lunch

*

Well, that was fun. Thank you to Barna, Astria and everyone else at Aurora for having me. I’m looking forward to meeting you all next month. I’ll chop the two stream recordings into a movie and stick them online for you if you like.

The seminal video artist Nam June Paik passed away yesterday. In tribute to his ground-breaking, medium-defining work, I’ve uploaded a small excerpt from a performance that I thought fitting to his memory. It’s a brush piece that was drawn with the light of a television. We stand on the shoulders of giants.

I am exceedingly pleased with myself and even more so with my friends. With the kind assistance of two Dans, a luxz and a vade, I converted a bunch of sprite GIFs from wilyweeps.org and The Mushroom Kingdom into VJ-software-compatible Quicktime movies. It took hours of playing around in Image Ready and After Effects to turn this

into

small mario running with alpha

Now, granted I can’t get Firefox or Safari to display the second one the way I want them to but if you download that and stick it in a VJ program you’ll see it’s got a proper alpha channel. All so I can rock out tomorrow at the INTERNATIONAL CHIPTUNES RESISTANCE. Yes, the capital letters mean it’s going to be awesome.

None of this would have happened without the time-consuming, tricky work of ripping the sprites from the ROMs, which was accomplished by the good people at wilyweeps.org and The Mushroom Kingdom, including my friend Jeremiah, who will be rocking the Tank as Nullsleep tomorrow night.

Here are all the sprites as GIFs and MOVs if you would like to use them too. If you’d like to learn how to rip sprites from your favorite games, start with the links in my del.icio.us tagged with sprites, NES and ROMhacking. Please share your sprites!

Update

Sorry about the password protection on the files folder. I’ve removed it so you should be able to get the sprite zips now.