Pengilly and Gil Q&A Transcript | iotaSalon October 2009

October 1, 2009 7:30pm
UCLA Design | Media Arts

View the video from this event on our YouTube channel, with captions:
Part 1 | Part 2

 

Introduction: Madeleine Gallagher and Jeremy Schwartz

[Madeleine]

00:00:16
[iotaCenter was] one of the draws for me to come to Los Angeles. I wanted to be here to see the works that they have and their holdings. I’d heard so much about them as an advocate for experimental film. Its an important place for them within our department because we have a relationship with some of the historical pioneers and practictioners of experimental film, and also experimental media-making.

00:00:45
So this is an important event, in the sense that we have had John Whitney, as part of our faculty, among Saul Bass. You can see some real relationships between the design world and also in the cinematic world. So its my pleasure to introduce Jeremy Speed Schwartz as the curator this evening. And he’ll talk a little bit more about the program. There’s going to be roughly once every six weeks an event like this will happen.

00:01:14
So please, since you’re one of the first at these events, you have the privilege of being one of the few to spread the word. So the more people you bring, the more people that know about this, the more beneficial it is to the Design | Media Arts department, and the graduate students that are sponsoring it, but also for experimental film at large. Being next to such a powerful film area, this is always the other voice on some level. So you being here, in some ways is a political gesture. So I really appreciate your efforts. So thank you, here’s Jeremy.

[Jeremy]
00:01:52
So as she said, this is the first of our salon screenings here, so I really hope you enjoy it, and I hope you come back again and again. The purpose of the salon is to expose UCLA students and the community at large to this kind of abstract experimental work that is a little bit inaccessible, a little bit difficult to see.

00:02:14
And to expose both the historical artists and the contemporary artists. And we are very fortunate to have a couple of the artists here with us tonight. So as we get into the screening I hope they will join the conversation to tell us more about their work.

00:02:30
The majority of the works tonight were made and will be projected digitally. We are projecting three pieces on film, and those are Flesh Flows, Object Conversation and Come Closer.

00:02:45
A little bit about the iotaCenter, The iotaCenter is a nonprofit dedicated to inspiring and connecting artists working in abstract and experimental cinema. We do this through screenings, fostering research, distribution and preservation.

00:02:57
Some of the films you’ll be watching tonight have been preserved by the iotaCenter as well, so they’re the best that are out there. We maintain a study center and library in Culver City, and I would invite you to call us up, make an appointment and come out to see us sometime.

00:03:13
So the theme for tonight is Strategies of Abstraction, and the program is divided into three parts, [gestures to program notes] just like that. Between each part we’re going to have a little discussion about those films.

00:03:26
And like I said, I hope the filmmakers that are here will join us in that. Each part is kind of unified around a theme of how the artist is working aesthetically, or how they’re working with sound, or what KIND of abstraction they’re using.

00:03:44
So I invite you to think about what commonalities are there, and what’s really disparate in the depictions of abstraction. Moreover, I mentioned that this was the first in a series. We would really like to feature in future salons work from UCLA students, work from students in this community, and and the LA community at large.

00:04:04
So if you”™re interested in submitting work for future salons or for our library. If you have a program, there’s a website there where you can go for information on submitting to us. So without further ado, we’ll start our program with Adam Beckett’s Flesh Flows.

 

Sylvia Pengilly Q&A

00:04:29
[Jeremy] How did you come up with the concept to do this piece? I read a little about it in your notes, can you explain how that piece came about?

00:04:34
[Sylvia] Can I come up front? Well, its hard to say in two sentences, but I am fascinated by contemporary theoretical physics. Its terrible! But superstreams, quantum mechanics, that’s my meat there. So because I’m so interested in this stuff I do a lot of reading in it. And one of my most favorite books of all time is something that you guys might have read.

00:05:11
“The Elegant Universe” by Brian Greene. Wonderful book, I highly recommend it. It does go into quantum mechanics, superstreams, all that stuff. But he explains it so clearly, that even a dummy like me can understand.

00:05:30
And at one point, he is talking about before the Big Bang, you know, you’ve heard all about the Big Bang. Apparently before the Big Bang, the universe was … eleven dimensions. But then the Big Bang comes and splits it up, and now we have four, that is three spatial and one temporal. And the other one gets peeled off, and it becomes this sixth dimensional universe, that’s curled up into a really tiny space, and they call these the Calabi-Yau Spaces.

00:06:15
And they’re still very very mysterious, even to theorists and mathematicians. But Brian Greene, bless his heart, he tried to draw one. There is actually a graphic in there about what one of these sixth dimensional Calabi-Yau Spaces might look like.

00:06:35
And I looked at that and I said, “you know that looks a lot like what I’ve been making on my home computer.” So I thought, why not try to investigate multidimensional space? So I took three that we are familiar with – cubes, cones and concentric spheres/circles – and tried to create three short pieces that evoked multiple dimensions.

00:07:14
I’m not sure if there are six, I never counted, but there sure are more than three. So that was really the genesis of the thing.

00:07:25
[Jeremy] Did anyone get that impression from watching the film, that there were dimensions you weren’t seeing? [Pause] Good nodding … [Laughter]

00:07:36
[Sylvia] Can I say one other thing too? I don’t know if you’re familiar with Brian Evans’ work? Brian Evans does a lot of what they call visual music, and he uses a concept called “time slices,” which I sort of stole from him. And they suggest making keyframes, and making a sound from each keyframe.

00:08:01
You can make a lot of these, and overlap them so that as the program samples the graphic … its the same thing as the music moving along in time. So you get more of a feeling of the forward motion of the music.

00:08:22
And, as Brian does, I just do very short pieces, his are always 2 minutes 15 seconds, and make this long time slice. And you derive the music from that, using MetaSynth, I don’t know if you’re familiar with MetaSyth.

00:08:41
But in MetaSynth, which is such fun, you take the graphic … “Import Graphic” – and its a music program, a sound program – and you import your graphic. And if its time-sliced then its very long and skinny and horizontal. Then you say “ok computer, make a sound,” and it is generated from this.

00:09:05
And that’s how the sound is generated. And it works with color, the left is red (that’s very political), and green is right, and blue is ignored, that’s sort of background color. But that’s how you get your stereo diffusion.

00:09:26
Its from the colors. And the pitch of course comes from where the pixels are on the XY plane. So according to how you map it, and of course there are many different mappings, you can come up with a number of different sounds depending on which graphic you have.

00:09:43
So it’s a lot of fun to play with.

[beginning of “Part 2″ Q&A video on YouTube]

00:00:19
[Student] Did MetaSynth inform your palette choice? [Sylvia] What was that?

00:00:24
[Student] Speaking about the colors you used, did MetaSynth inform your palette choice?

00:00:29
[Sylvia] Oh no, not at all. I do the video first, then pump it into MetaSynth and see what I come up with. But you can massage it, theres a lot of things you can do in the MetaSynth program to change your sound once you’ve mapped it in a sort of raw way.

00:00:48
You can process it in many different ways. So no, the graphics came first and they stayed and MetaSynth had to go along with it.

00:01:00
[Student] And what are your tools for making the graphic element?

00:01:03
[Sylvia] The graphic program is a sister program to MetaSynth. Its called ArtMatic. It’s by a company called U&I software. And if you want to try a free program (they should pay me for this!), you can go to their website which is uisoftware.com.

 

Joaquin ‘Kino’ Gil Q&A

00:04:28
[Kino Gil, coming in mid-sentence] And being rather lazy, I wanted to do everything on the computer instead of drawing everything, which didn’t happen.

00:04:40
As you can see, all of them have elements which are drawn by hand. I guess it was a back and forth thing, at the beginning, I made some .. I was working with Final Cut for rich people I guess? [Laughter]

00:05:05
So I was taking, I was using Final Cut. It has a very interesting tool as part of the suite of things, which is this program that you use to make background music. It’s called Soundtrack. And it’s like acid if you know what I’m talking about, because you can take loops and drop them, and the timeline sort of ..

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00:05:36
[coming in mid-sentence]…you can look at this thing. In video, you have a higher frame rate. And it should help. But the truth is, it doesn’t help, it makes things worse. On top of that, somebody mentioned that it’s like, less like film or something? It is more fluid, but it gives more detail.

00:05:58
Going into a different kind of field, years and years ago we did this experiment at the request of a client. We did this thing where we shot a model for I think it was Revlon, a beauty promo. And we shot it in 24, 60, 29.97, and 30.

00:06:20
And I remember someone did something like 12, but those are the basic frame rates. And it’s the same model, the same thing, and the cameras are side by side. Everything is one setup, the cameras are side by side so we simply shoot, and amazingly enough,

[Sorry folks, we were having technical difficulties with recording this salon. An error which was remedied by the third salon. Many apologies …]