In the process, it foregrounds an obsessive attention to the unobserved minutiae of everyday human experience while posing questions about contemporary American values.

Does an atmosphere of hyper-vigilance and loss of privacy actually make us more secure?

This project was initially developed during my residency as Artist In Research at the Berwick Research Institute.

It is being published by ASPECT: The Chronicle of New Media Art in Volume 16: Low-Tech.

Audio commentary by Wayne Marshall of wayneandwax.com and presently Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT.

Shrine to the Funky Drummer is an experimental video documentary that seeks to portray a specific instance of media sampling as an archetypal cultural moment and a lens through which to examine a multifaceted story of creative appropriation.  The ‘Funky Drummer’ is a five-second excerpt from a James Brown song that has been used as the foundation of hundreds of other musical compositions and is one of popular music’s most famous samples. For this project I gathered and created artifacts and ‘holy relics’ that explore the early history of Hip Hop and the creative acts of sampling and remixing. The video examines debates about copyright and fair use in relation to Afro-Diasporic musical notions of “versioning,” the fetishistic culture of record-digging, and postmodern theoretical questions about authorship in the age of digital (re)production.

There are countless anonymous networked cameras that broadcast publicly over the Internet. In the Telematic Timelapse project, I harvest selected ambient video streams and transform them into time-lapse musical video compositions. The minutiae of these tiny vignettes become rhythmic micro-narratives, dramatizing temporary and fleeting moments that are ordinarily invisible in our experience of everyday life. The resulting rhythms of change, textures of image, patterns of human movement, and qualities of light are mirrored by musical motifs that form an expressive, subtle portrait of the original spaces, of which the exact actual location remains unknown.
In addition to manifesting the specific, quotidian character of these spaces, both pastoral and urban, the works incorporate an implicit theme of surveillance. However, rather than being presented in a typically dystopian light, the depictions of the subjects are dreamlike, comical, sentimental, or maddeningly languorous. Further, the methodology of the pieces speaks to the ubiquitous culture of networked communication that characterizes so much of our present zeitgeist. They seek to restore a sense of wonder at the unbounded, global flow of information that is itself part of the daily experience of contemporary life.

Installation:
This piece was presented as an interactive installation which took place as part of the Association for Computing Machines’ Creativity and Cognition 09 conference at the UC Berkeley Art Museum. The video/music compositions were presented as a very large-scale projection onto the exterior of the museum. Opposite the projections I set up a video matrix with live surveillance feeds, incorporating feeds from the internet as well as live cameras surveying the exhibition areas. An ‘observation log’ was provided, inviting viewers to participate in the surveillance and note any ‘suspicious behaviors’ they observed.

Technical Information:
I created a Unix shell script to automatically harvest images from the internet at periodic intervals. I rendered the collected images into time-lapse videos in Quicktime, then edited together the sequences in iterations between Final Cut Pro, Ableton Live, and custom software written in Max/Jitter. I composed the soundtrack, then performed it on a variety of acoustic, digital, and analog instruments, recorded, and mixed. All aspects of this process were performed by the artist alone.

At present, there are thousands of webcams or networked security cameras that broadcast publicly over the Internet. A simple Google search reveals countless results for these types of cameras, including many that may not intended for public scrutiny but are catalogued nonetheless by search bots. The ceaseless flow of images from these autonomous cameras is typically ephemeral and unremarked, but provides fertile material for artistic investigation.

In my project I harvest these ambient video streams, using a telematic practice of ‘sampling’ the photographs from the virtual cameras, and transform them into video-music compositions and rhythmic micro-narratives. I meld the found images, which are often disassociated from any recognizable locality, into time-lapse videos, then use the minutiae of these tiny vignettes as a visual ‘score’ for which I compose a tightly-synchronized musical accompaniment. These videos provide a means of visualizing temporary and fleeting moments that are ordinarily invisible in our experience of everyday life. The resulting rhythms of change, textures of image, patterns of human movement, and qualities of light are mirrored by musical motifs that form an expressive, subtle portrait of the original spaces, of which the location remains unknown.

At present, there are thousands of webcams or networked security cameras that broadcast publicly over the Internet. A simple Google search reveals countless results for these types of cameras, including many that may not intended for public scrutiny but are catalogued nonetheless by search bots. The ceaseless flow of images from these autonomous cameras is typically ephemeral and unremarked, but provides fertile material for artistic investigation.

In my project I harvest these ambient video streams, using a telematic practice of ‘sampling’ the photographs from the virtual cameras, and transform them into video-music compositions and rhythmic micro-narratives. I meld the found images, which are often disassociated from any recognizable locality, into time-lapse videos, then use the minutiae of these tiny vignettes as a visual ‘score’ for which I compose a tightly-synchronized musical accompaniment. These videos provide a means of visualizing temporary and fleeting moments that are ordinarily invisible in our experience of everyday life. The resulting rhythms of change, textures of image, patterns of human movement, and qualities of light are mirrored by musical motifs that form an expressive, subtle portrait of the original spaces, of which the location remains unknown.

Watch video

Here’s what the press release says:

Update: My Berwick project blog can be found here if you’d like to follow along.

This piece re-imagines/re-wires clothing for a globalized, media-saturated era.  It situates the wearer as a sonic hunter/gatherer, exploring and documenting the sonic landscape of the postmodern city.

The autonomous machine embedded in the jackets amplifies the contemporary trends of ubiquitous, wearable electronic devices that constantly reassure us with their chattering voices, and, like John Cage’s compositions, seeks to recognize music in the sounds of everyday life. It weaves together sonic fragments of a multiplicity of voices and localities into a perpetually-remixed soundtrack to accompany the wearer’s journeys into public space.

The jackets themselves represent a trans-global remix of textile traditions, incorporating shibori and other Asian, African, and American techniques, as well as found and recycled materials. Brightly-colored and richly textured, they invite curiosity from spectators and encourage interaction with the wearer.

After presenting my research on self-contained digital sound modules at the conference portion, I fulfilled a lifelong dream by performing with the Parasites at the legendary Cabaret Voltaire, birthplace of the Dada art movement and still an exciting venue for avant-garde art. I was part of a ‘wired freak show’ with an international cast of performers who mixed technology with provocation and humor.