Author: Yutong Lin

White Crane, Old Dog, Fading Memory

Documentation

 

Project Description

The project is a tribute to my great grandmother in the form of a live cinema performance. It is a re-telling of her life story through my reflection. By bring her singing from almost twenty years ago in conjunction with my family archival footage and my photography, I wish to remember and celebrate her by sharing her story.  

The title – White Crane, Old Dog, Fading Memory has its own connotation. “white crane by the lake” is a repeating theme/metaphor in the folk music of Nakhi, “old dog” is literally what I saw a lot in the village where my great grandmother used to live. There were old dogs wandering around in the village that made me think about the passage of time. 

Perspective and Context

I was greatly inspired by the Light Surgeons, which is a London-based live cinema performance collective. True Fictions was one of the projects dated back a decade ago. It investigates the concept of myth, cinema, and American history. I was intrigued by the story just by the trailer on Vimeo. The amateur aesthetics, music score, and the editing have together created a power arrangement of media and deeply engaging emotion. I can’t imagine how sensory and breath-taking the performance was when they play the music score live. 

From their work, I became fascinated by live cinema as an art form and personal expression. 

Gabriel Menotti says in Live Cinema, that live cinema has the potential to challenge the storytelling strategies in traditional theater-based or screen-based cinema. Or to say, to mythicize the content by the multi-sensory input and the fluidity of visual arrangement and music-making. “Such extensive freedom of configuration favors works whose evocative structure is closer to poetry than to the prosaic linearity that distinguishes most movie genres, thus suggesting improvised, free-flowing abstractions” (Menotti 86). The “poetic” aspect of live cinema, loosely structured, widely sourced can be coherent by the magic of music, if edited or lively-controlled properly.      

In addition, another aspect of live cinema that I am interested in is the creator/artist’s way of interaction with the audience. “The light projected onto the screen is like a campfire around which the public gathers to absorb the performer’s tales. The performer is an actor whose main job would be to pursue communication through this process, keeping it meaningful for the audience” (Menotti 88). 

The presence and visibility of the “director” can be regarded as a powerful statement to understand what he/she has to say. The after-party and mingle with the audience also are part of the feedback for both sides – the audience and the director. 

 Development & Technical Implementation

Link https://gist.github.com/Amber-yutong-lin/28f089eab4176af7fb426653268958a8

Since my direction is slightly diverged from what other people were doing, my workflow was also a little different.

Step #1 – music composition:

I composed my music in Logic Pro. It was my first time using it. I was sampling drum sequences from GarageBand and Eric suggested that too much sampling may result in a generic output and lack of personality, especially for those who are familiar with either GarageBand or Logic. Therefore, I recomposed a more futuristic and ambient layer that goes well with my great grandmother’s folk singing.

(The drum sequence was made by my friend – Fiona Chen with her consent to use.)

Step #2 – scriptwriting and transcription:

 

I wrote a short prose of my memory of her when I was younger.

Step #2 – text, image, and video curation

I chose the visual materials based on the script. The selection began even earlier when I was reviewing my previous photograph and family footage. 

Step #3 – pre-compositing and visual effects

This step is done in C4D, Max, and Aftereffects.

Step #4 – move to Max for live performance

The live visual elements are mainly controlled by MUTIL8R and HUSALIR for saturation, contrast, and hue. By altering the black and white only images to the highly contrasted ones, I wish to visualize the color of memory, the hyperreality in nature of cinema.

The audio effects are played live. The reverb, echoing, and filters are rehearsed to fit the visual and the grand layer of music. 

Performance

The performance generally went well and achieved what I envisioned before. I think my action to bring folk music to an unconventional venue for it, which are the night clubs, can facilitate more conversation about different kinds of music and ways to think about heritage. 

However, I have to acknowledge the fact that I changed my mind one day before the performance and I skipped the rundown of my final patch, which greatly impacted my judgment of how was the overall experience. Next time, I have to give myself enough time to test on bigger screens and different audio configuration. I asked a bunch of people who were there at the performance. I got some positive feedback but I am afraid because they are my friends and acquaintance and didn’t have to be critical. However, the subtitles for English readers didn’t go super well, people said the projection contrast wasn’t enough to see the letters and some of the duration of words needed to be extended. Secondly, the audio filters could be better rehearsed and polished. 

 Conclusion

I really appreciated the chance to perform what I have learned in RAPS. I have never thought about making my music since I have no background in it. And my passion for it has been cultivated during this class. I wish and I want to learn more about music-making 

And I never thought about doing live performances. When I heard people say that they almost cried after experiencing my performance, I consider it a success. This class made me rethink VJ, and I think it can be more cool, and more than “wallpapers,” but as an engaging way to tell powerful stories.

Works cited: 

Menotti, Gabriel. edited by Ana Carvalho and Cornelia Lund. “Live Cinema”, THE AUDIOVISUAL BREAKTHROUGH. 

Link to my gist:

https://gist.github.com/Amber-yutong-lin/3d4f37725ae036985093c913fa70bed2

Documentation:

I used a free shrimp 3D model for my exercise.

The counter will add the number of shrimps every 0.5 second. 

The texture is rendered from the realtime capture of the webcam. 

The visual effects are mainly produced through HISALIR and SLIDR to smooth out the texture and make the color composition more interesting. 

The terminologies of VJ-ing, Live Cinema, and Live Audiovisual Performance obviously overlap in terms of improvisation; audience engagement and participation; and intermediacy. However, the institutions for presentation, sequencing arrangement (structure, visual rhetoric), and the primary purpose and can be selectively emphasized or altered by their categories.
From my perspective, VJ-ing is about feeling and sensory responses. For example, a typical VJ-ing happens at night clubs or music festivals (institution) that are mean to be consumed as a form of sublime entertainment (purpose). The sequencing arrangement is often non-linear that does not have to follow a script or storyline. (Sequencing arrangement).
An example would be:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7aLiCGkESs0

On the other hand, Live Cinema is essentially moving images in a live form. Even though there exist problematic approaches to current Live Cinema appreciation in the setting of formal film contests, theaters, opera houses (institution), Live Cinema aspires to be properly considered as moving images and to be judged upon its live cinematic values, which challenges the traditional definition of cinema, “namely narrative continuity and a fixed spatial arrangement” (purpose). Therefore, a script though less obvious than static films will probably lead the arc of storytelling when played live. (Sequencing arrangement). In other words, Live Cinema employs the performative elements (live music scoring, live visual effects) to expand the cinematic experience.
An example would be the Light Surgeon’s True Fictions (2007):

Live Audiovisual Performance is used more often to describe the community and the genre as a whole that includes VJ-ing and Live Cinema. Live Audiovisual Performance value the performance as the “aura” Benjamin critiques that the mass-produced art lacks.

However, rather than hard defining what is VJ-ing, Live Cinema, or Live Audiovisual Performance, I think what matters most is the statement from the creators/artists. A Live Cinema can be displayed and performed anywhere and a VJ can tell a  well-constructed story. The definition does not matter once the statement is made clear.

Citation:

Live Cinema by Gabriel Menotti

Live Audiovisual Performance by Ana Carvalho

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin

Link to the patch:

https://gist.github.com/Amber-yutong-lin/ca632048b551ef2e944e8acda1572dfa

Documentation:

I used the oscillator to generate the synthesized sound. And the main visual effects I used is to layer the three video sources together.

The offset (pitch) of the sound is responsive to the movement and selection of a certain part of the video. And the timbre of the sound is responsive to the delay of the videos. 

Together, the sound and visual create a culty aesthetics. 

Whitney Brothers’ mechanism and the creation of “mechanical analog computer,” which utilizes the remains from WWII warfares. They definitely marked down a cornerstone of the history of visual music. Their pioneer works also greatly influenced other artists. Belson is also a very significant figure in the experimental animation and cinema field, including the legendary Vortex concerts. I think their visual aesthetics share the same touch since they practiced around the same time around the late 50s – 70s.  Their two-dimensional animation and visual music often both involve repetitive dots/lines/shapes, a black background, and similar reactions from the sound to the visual.  

 What’s different about their visual language, on the other hand, is that the Whitney brothers’ visual music is more about patterns and movement. They utilize the whole screen as their canvas to create the movement and changes in different patterns. They also thought about the cultural context of visual language and musical composition. One of their representative works – Arabesque, really speaks about creating a harmony between visual style and the music. By adopting some of the symbology of what’s considered “Arabic” in its visual creation, it represents an exotic, mysterious, yet harmonious feeling. 

Belson is more articulate in creating sophisticated and complex kaleidoscope visuals in his works. His works are very exquisite from my perspective. I also admires his technical craftsmanship.

They are perfect statements that mechanics and digital tools won’t kill the authorship of the artists. In fact, their works speak for their style, aesthetics, and artistic choices. 

Artists like them created amazing works using the technology back in the 50s. Today, software and technology became much more accessible and easy to use. They can be great empowerment if used wisely. But more importantly, the radical and experimental spirits to challenge the concept of visual art, music, cinema, and the visual experience should remain unchanged.

This is a contemporary interpretation of the Whitney brothers’ Arabesque: