Collaboration

underwater nymph mode shoot w/ vi i met vi in detroit on the dancefloor at no way back a few years ago. we connected over our interest in inhabiting spaces as dancers and what elements consciously or unconsciously influence our states in spaces. for later: we coined “dance proxemics” or “dancefloor proxemics” as maybe a future zine collab. vi visited the bay and hit me up for coffee; i was really glad vi was down to have our hangout be a collaborative shoot involving portraiture and collage/obfuscation. ...

Got a lot of help on this one. R. advised me on rattan weaving (attachment and how to soak them for pliability). N., S., and M. came over despite me being very low functioning to apply wet gauze to the rattan frames and clamp them down to dry. (I found gauze dipped into a water bath of flour and glue added the kind of drape we desired.) I drew a lot from my anatomy knowledge and from experience binding people. I felt I tapped into past knowledge acquired in my 20s when I was working a lot with these odd representational forms. ...

For Valentine’s Day I made an omakase spread in my rope studio for F. and A. We were talking about goals and desires (in general and acutely), and F. remarked “I want to feel beautiful”. It was maybe 11p, and one of those times that I felt lucky (despite everything) to live in our often-fraught but always-inspiring artist collective. For the fit, I had a concept to use this cream bustier that I got her at a Berlin workshop and figure out the sort of dramatic wedding train fit that I see sometimes in a Vogue Italia spread. ...

invited n. and m. over to do some movement while i played with projection. i showed some basic slitscan functionality i had, but i found a few things lacking before i would try it again: camera quality projection brightness (maybe) back-projection (maybe) backdrop quality while trying to improve the contrast of the projected image, i had m. hold an rgb light, and we found an unintended pleasing of feedback loop with the dominant color changing the background. ...

https://vimeo.com/1062659763?share=copy **spent 30 min tonight doing a rapid proof-of-concept for this multi-aerialist x multi-visualist hybrid performance i’ve been thinking about for awhile ty @myles_higher for being my test subject 🤍 oh and also giving me lots of real feedback on this idea in general for tonight, i set up very simple gestural control for reactivity using public #hydra.js sketches, but i want to add more cohesion soon with a mix of different sensors or controllers ...

Background and Outcome This lighting installation was a fever dream; two weeks of near-daily workshopping by L., J., N., and myself resulted in an installation that was perhaps the most synergistic we’ve ever created together. Concept: a laser projects onto objects that diffuse light down onto the dance floor. We ended up using IR LEDs inside paper lanterns as the objects, arranged in a traditional calder mobile construction to form a sculpture. On the ground we used a camera with an IR filter, MadMapper, and Resolume to provide visual output to a laser which projected onto the sculpture. ...

r. tyler and i did viz for ciel, dj ladybug, and never not romance for crip rave during the plural prototypes gray area festival. solo viz for dj ladybug i did solo viz for dj ladybug with much more prepared material than i typically do for a hydra set (thus i would call this a hybrid of a livecoding set) step 1: preprocessing materials. when i asked dj ladybug for inspo she referred me to val de omar’s PLAT, which was a 20 min film comprising a series of still photographs. the only source we had for this was 480p. first i upscaled the photos to 4k (n=110) in stablediffusion. this process took about 12 hours. ...

most of the hard work here was done by L. who implemented the extremely well-engineered lights and our rigger J. who set up the tree rigging, but i refined some alternatives with a 3d scan of the site and advised on what dimensions i thought would feel good for the dancers. (note to self: the physical-bottleneck “trap” of the front of the dj booth is not to be repeated!) ...

performed with dan gorelick at syzygy. really loved working with dan on our concept where we started from nearly blank screens (i started with only one function describing an fft spectrum and worked my way up from there), and was also glad i was able to integrate some realtime analog camera work of dan playing live cello. dan taught me how to do midi interface integration into hydra so that for a future set (when i’m more prepared!) i can control features with sliders. ...

As of this writing, imo this is the best hydra set i’ve ever done. mapped to a rollup door behind the dj booth i don’t have a recording since this was a last-minute idea (about an hour before, f. asked me to do visuals), but i followed my constraints well (monochrome, minimal, all visuals would be derived from the fft spectrum, an emphasis on linearity), showed restraint in letting ideas play out rather than shift too jarringly, clearly demonstrated the idea to the audience, and felt embodied enough with the music that i really enjoyed myself. i was really happy with the result. ...