070722 Meeting Notes

Seems to me that we've got a much better idea about form and structure after Monday's meeting. I will add that Mindala and I made lots of headway in the selection and ordering of triptychs. Here are David's notes:

Major Movements in a Service

1. Ingathering

Prelude, Introit, Call to Worship, Greeting, Announcements

2. Participating

hymns, prayers, offertory

3. Listening

prayers, readings, sermon, benediction

4. Transformation

all of above, culminating in sermon and benediction

Or can see it in terms of maintaining the order:

1. Ingathering

2. Hymn

3. Prayer

4. Reading

5. Sermon

6. Outflowing

7/20/07

G: Movements as neighborhoods we walk through

D: oil corporation meeting?

N: deliverables, actionables

using more explicit businessy stuff: bullet points, power point presentations, back to the filmstrip idea, agendas—but on a very subtle, quick level

Edward Tufty

G: Sermon as combining all the different elements of other movements, playing them in variation. Long and dense.

Hymns:

Prayer:

Reading:

1. Ingathering

for now, stick w/ our earlier chart of Prelude-Introit-Call (We are artists). “Innovation of Commercial” might work too.

2. Hymn

music is predominant. Stick with “Oil Derrick” idea from first hymn; deforms sonically and fades into parts of “Innovation of the Commercial,” that should be played with for a while, comes back into “Goodbyes” from “Oil Derrick.” Segue into field sound—train or oil derrick, birds and other outdoor sounds. Section ends w/ “Sherri stopped next to the tanker”, as last lines are heard the front (and other?) screens fade to white—the transitional cue is thus in the visual more than sonic elements. The visual fade is accompanied by a sonic fade to field sounds, no “music.” Leads to bringing text back onto the screen?

3. Prayer

field sounds verging on silence, image-heavy. Main text: Modernity of Est. Use words as water, which then solidify into the water/river animation. Preacher: “Heavenly faucet.” Segue poem: “When We Entered the Four Religion Items.”

4. Reading

all is textualized—images use more text (signs, etc), sound composed entirely of text, text in front is stripped down, less flashiness. “When we entered” connects to the “peak oil—oil fuels human progress—graphoilogy” trio—more cerebral, academic, focus on text. Lucky Mojo on front screen in bullet point/power point form toward end, but accompanied by soundscape that’s very lush and emotional. “In Bed” comes out of that, or is a part of that logic? Using the table idea, etc.

5. Sermon

By now, media are thoroughly intermixed, starting to use texts that are about the relationship of image, sound, text. Less about oil and religion, more about art. Foregrounding media issues—the meta-quality helps us explore the alienation/community dialectic. Repetition of motifs from other movements, coming back here in culminating ways.

Major texts: Begin with “Now 1920s,” which feels very anecdotal, sermonic. morph into are we writing? N8’s riff on that? “Sherri stopped next to the tanker” reprise. Use our Sherri texts here. “Women of Maynot” has relevance to this too. “Holy Spring Water”—use this both as strong visual tryptich element, and as part of the sound-text field. The third stanza is the key for this—put up the whole piece as a visual element but use N8’s reading of the last stanza.

Sound: the preachers should come in here and get played around with. Very few preacher elements beforehand, so that we save it for development until here.

“Interesting Facts”: strong poem, but not entirely connected to piece—strong on oil and fire, strong on Indian issues (connects to “rail of tears”), light on religion. Can be trimmed and faded in w/ Mindy’s “deeplong” or preacher (“dot dot dot”) which N has already done in a sound file. Has a benedictory quality (end), but also a historical framing (beginning), and a sort of preacherly ethos (sermon).

[At some point, have the floating heads from the back be played also up front?]

6. Outflowing

N8 reading “Still.” music continues long after text and image have faded

Keep in mind the use of the front screen to prompt, as if a prayer leader is up there. Page numbers? Filmstrip? Use the river animation w/ words floating by as if it were a ticker? “Oi” floats by, etc.

Hymn vs prayer:

hymn: music, rhythm, repetition.

Fractal structure:

The whole piece is organized like a fractal: each part engages in the themes of the whole, but each part also emphasizes a different aspect of the whole, giving the piece an arc to itself. This solves our concern about whether we’re doing an endless loop or a discrete linear performance. No matter where the audience enters, they get a version of the whole structure, but if they stay they experience the larger-scale structure. G: It is the loop and the line. It’s organic but yet formally structured.

070703 Wakow Notes

In Bed animation:

Maybe bouncing ball would better indicate reading by audience, though there might not be room for it on the screen. Could take some time technically, too, though it is doable. At any rate, G definitely wants to get the audience participation, if possible. Being in the gallery during the opening, we could start the reading in hopes others would join.

Nathan thought the animation rhythm might dictate a certain rhythm in the sound, and I assured him it didn’t. Perhaps slowing the text down, or at least the ball, would better indicate the liturgical rhythm.

N was concerned that audience might not know this is the same poem. Have the text stay the same while the ball bounces, or some other animation (ie words to be read get brighter, etc), might better show that.

Images:

Juxtapose burning refinery smoke stack with flag shot of Mindy’s. That is a must-have in this thing.

G showed N a few of the 200 some photos he shot over the weekend focusing on capturing movement through still shots. The flag series were particularly interesting, he thought.

What effects/movement can we add to photos or elements within photos? La Jettee imposes narrative on images, but every once in awhile there is a motion or effect (like shimmer). For example, cut the flag out of the church shot using Photoshop or Adobe Fireworks and have it move like a bouy in water while sound of water issues from soundtrack.

We went over the order of service to see where we might need sounds, animation, etc. Nathan said he would work on 3-5 “hymns,” including the sermon, of 2-5 min (15min in case of the climactic sermon).

I said I would have some animated “chunks” designed especially for the side screens but could also serve as elements for something up front. Also, thinking about using all three screens panoramically—holding three similar/complementary images on three screens for a sustained period of time would encourage viewer to look around—we would thereby be creating an experience for the audience, not just relation experience or message.

070613 Meeting

Despite the Skype sound problems, I thought that last night's meeting was productive. As I understand it, we each left with a task or set of tasks to work on for next time:

I will continue to experiment with flash to find new ways to combine our media and to use them in interesting ways, while at the same time keeping it simple minimal in large part. I will also begin processing combinations of text and images, as well as ideas for effects and animation, as they come in from you guys.

Nathan says he will plow ahead creating sounds and sound combination. He will also begin preparing to film all of us for the back wall.

David wants to continue working on the filmstrip idea and will flesh out his current ideas about Track 8 of Nathan's sound and also ponder ways to caption images.

Mindy promised to go through images as best she can and come up with pairs or tryptichs that create interesting juxtapositions.

Am I mistaking or leaving anything out? If so, post corrections below as comments.

As you saw, I sent Steve an email about changing the opening date, and I also sent All Souls an email about using their pews. I'll let you know what I hear. Finally, I email Chuck Tomlins about meeting with Nathan and me. He might have some input to offer as we solidify what we are doing.

Speaking of which, I'm starting to like the churchy idea more and more. The set up has so many possibilities. The placement of lighted videos on all sides evokes traditional stain glass, as well as the modern reliance of churches on media to promote their messages. The "altar" provides a natural focal point for our viewers used to such a seating/political configuration that allows us to play with it. The three forward screens (from the perspective of the viewer) also evoke so many relevant triplets: the triptych of medieval religious painting, the trinity of course, and our media of text, image, and sound (in fact, I would like to evoke that trio at some point in the installation).

Below are some ideas I've jotted down in my notebook about using flash, and I want to record them here not only for posterity but for your perusal:

• Embed short film clips within projected text or images, in a YouTube type of frame. We could use not only the movies we've taken ourselves but also found films--from the Tulsa Films documentary (there are 2 or 3 clips that are must have's for me), Oklahoma, Tulsa, oil industry promotional films, televangelists from TV, etc.
• One movement could have only films juxtaposed in a series of jumpcuts. We'd just have to make sure the resolution of these films can handle wall-sized projection. Most of them are too small.
  
• I'd like to do a sequence like the one in Fight Club where text pops out of the shot, labeling the furniture in the narrator's apartment like an IKEA catalog. We could do this with our photos of refineries or churches using lines from our texts. This will be easy to do and will resemble the animation in the fourth poem of Tulsita.
• Run text down side or margin of photos as if it were being typed, pipelined, or transmitted. Again, this draws off effects I mastered in the first animation of Tulsita.
• I also want to do more with the effects we used in Tulsita in the interludes attempting to combine text and image (eg and image turning to text, text arranged to form and image, etc).
  
• Since we are doing a church set-up, why not have some of our texts in a bulletin order of service type thing?
  

DG's listening notes, 5/16/07

Listening to sound 5.16.07

Contrails—processed sound from Tulsita

Flatlander High—processed sound from Tulsita—same chords as above but higher

Canal on Crack/ Canals Rending—processed guitar sound, sinister, cavelike

Rabelais Guitar—guitar but processed so it sounds a bit like Biber violin—vaguely medieval, hymnal, as if bowed; then twittering, flipping in and out

Overload Guitar: watery, mostly monotonic, sonic equivalent of watching sonar blips on a screen

trickle: field sound of water gurgling
oil pump: um, oil pump

After fires: Grant reading w/ ember sound beneath

More Light or Not: Church on the Move sermon in which OK driver’s manual is compared to Bible: rules of the road
google search rhymes with Christian church
DOT DOT DOT

Canals Rendered: like oil transformed into a cicada

Slowpump Fizzy: oil pump filter: like a sound buried inside a sound

“our culture is berift”




homework: N gives us 3-5 min sound files, we work with them in some way.

Notes 5/27/07

N8: set up tension in the space (Binod)—competing screens?
set up as if church? Something in front, with pews, and then something behind that unnerves somehow—us reading the poems?
nice to use the space somehow. use the corner? If so, and if there’s emptiness in the middle of the space, will that be active somehow?

Or two things in back, one in front

how to suggest church? 1 pew, folding chairs w/ numbers, book on each chair, altar, chalice, cross, bowl for (holy) water, stage? risers?, books on chairs are bibles/coloring books/oil texts

DG: how can we signify the emptiness/soulessness of contemporary Tulsa churches? defamiliarize this sort of architecture/design, thus calling attention to industrialization of modern churchgoing? Aluminum siding, Starbucks coffee, ugly cheap tables, carpeting, fake flower urns, altarpieces, the driller on the altar—make our own iconography?

M: chairs in diagonal toward corner?

N8: what is our true subject matter? Not so much oil and religion, but the sense of isolation/alienation that we feel, living in/leaving Tulsa.

DG: Oil vs religion—regarding fundamentalist Chr, I’m entirely antagonistic, contemptuous, must struggle w/ living in that environment; w/ oil, I’m agonistic, must register how rooted I am in an oil culture no matter what my intellectual relation to it.

GJ feels implicated in Christianity the way DG feels implicated in oil

Hanson’s debut album: The Middle of Nowhere

DG: in a sense what we’re doing is mapping the emptiness at the geographical, symbolic, economic, and spiritual center of America

Susan Howe: narrative as implied, fragmented narrative, full of fleeting details that may or may not be true, w/ sources pulled in from all over the place—kernels of information

Mojo Curio Company: rich poem for grounding some of these issues

Wakow as an artistic refinery

do we want to generate alienation in people? Brechtian…
N8: television is the opposite of alienation; comfortable. We need to do something other than recreating the feeling of watching PBS on your couch.

MS: might be interesting to have the chairs right up against the short wall, but still projecting onto it, so that your perspective is thrown off, or so that the chairs become part of the perspective

DG: I still like the idea of creating a niche within the space—dropping black curtains, having a sound inside (the oil/water sound from Tulsa, the preacher, etc)

if we do a church, we can do a bulletin using our materials, etc

if we invoke a space (church, movie house), then we can push against it in some way.

Notes 5/20/07

Structure:
tie altogether w/ DG reading all or several of the poems straight? Balanced out w/ other voices mixing, etc, to avoid sense of poetry reading

use filmstrip as recurring motifs—bookends? every other one?
GJ imagines using Grapes of Wrath as a model, interchapters, narration, etc.

poem as machine, form as machinery

homework due Sun

Notes, 5/16/07

Wakow 5/16/07

themes in our photography:

sky—indirectly spiritual, beauty of sky as opposed to landscape
natural vs industrial
ironic harmony of industrial and evangelical
signs: words reorganized, fragmented
advertising transformed into something silly or sinister
windows: blocked-up (DG), broken, reflective, transparent
water manholes, gas meters
connectives: wires, pipes, roads, railroads
debris: detritus of the modern
journey, movement in stasis (our evangelical salesman selling holy oil)
commerce: religion and oil are both businesses. Connects back to advertising, and to writing about commodities (snake oil, holy spring water)

oil as energy dredged from the earth, used to move
vs
religion as attempt to escape earthboundness
but really two sides of the same coin

G: the threat of the downfall of modernity is what has electrified evangelicalism

first well drilled in 1859; American Theocracy: the rise of America is predicated upon the rise of oil
empire’s inability to adapt to the new energy source is the cause of their decline, the stubborn clinging to what worked

images: take bunch more pictures in Catoosa, Guts Church, Church on the Move

text: continue to develop characters, do more writing

sound: need to listen to stuff together, but we can skype it out in a conference call

one session before we leave to bang out a clearer picture of the project

G: chapters—narrative—characters—filmstrips. need more text.
M: exercise: storyboard a few chapters, using text, images, etc?
N: we need the text to emerge improvisationally from the materials we’ve got already

our initials: GDMN (god/man? goddamn?)

some narrative will come out of our current text, some will emerge from photos and sound. That’s how we’ll really integrate the media in this one.

let’s meet regularly from a distance and see how it goes

go to Living Arts again before we leave

technical issues:
M: 3 projectors, while one is going, the other two are frozen, then it switches. The soundtrack keeps going, though it may shift sonically across projectors. Similar to the installation about auctioneers we saw in Dallas.
Could do only one or two projectors, but the idea of a triptych has a long religious history

If we’re working w/ a triptych, it might be interesting to start w/ an oil derrick (maybe an old one?) that also somehow evokes religion and/or commodity (remember the oil derrick repurposed as advertisement for a hotel on the way back from Bartlesville

sound: I want the sermon to be broken down in parts until you can tell it’s a sermon but can’t make out words

our salesman is a lot like the preacher, both searching for meaning in the world

dip into my church, my washbasin—use image of sinks and tubs

Texas is a real place. Oklahoma is not a real place. It doesn’t exist, is out of joint, there’s no here here.
How is OK defined in the national imagination?
—the musical
—Grapes of Wrath
—oil
—evangelicals
the first is a Hollywood set, the second is a novel, the third has gone dry, the fourth is a story told endlessly and incompletely
We’re creating a sort of lost travel guide to OK
How does OK promote itself now? Route 66, a way to get through, a memory that does not exist.
How else?: pioneer woman, Indian pipe, oil derrick, scissortail (when our senator doesn’t believe in global warming)—all of these are myths, all are nostalgic memories of something that doesn’t and didn’t ever exist
the fact that guidebooks always leave out OK
the fact that no one in NY could remember where we were going

Notes 4/29/07

Notes 4/29/07

W/ tulsita, text was the backbone
here, sound is the backbone. Voiceover more important.

Development of a narrative—connections between the poems that develop a story, weave a narrative

Think Cardiff, Robertson

come up w/ a loose but specific narrative structure? List of characters, etc?

Lonely Soul Oil: use as a kind of word from our sponsor?

Grapes of Wrath: vignettes that separate the parts—turtle crossing road, used car salesman

N’s problem w/ getting a sense of structure, what’s fair game for sound

M: if we come up w/ a narrative structure, it gives a jumping off point for N’s and M’s work process

G: let’s say 7 sections, each with voiceover, separated by interludes, given to N to work with

N: runs the risk of me creating soundtrack for a text

M: much looser than that. Last time, the only thing that tied it together was process. This time we’re trying to focus it by giving it a sense of travel, movement

N: my process is based around sounds I think are interesting. If I think oil pump sound is boring, do we use it, how do we use it, do we process it? Do we use only sounds that come from oil and religion? Could be boring as piss.

G: constraints are going to be productive. N: I’m questioning that.

M: constraints are a starting point, should be a factor in at least one of our modes (text)—but we should be able to open out, not have to take pictures of gas pumps all the time.

D: I’m a little mystified by this: if it becomes less interesting, switch to something else; if it doesn’t end up fitting in, we’ll use it for another project.

N: but if I’m working on something I become attached, and if someone says “this isn’t about O and R,” I’ll wanna punch them. Let’s review sounds as they get made, as we do texts and images.

M: that’s about working in isolation. We need to be more collaborative with the sound as with everything else

G: pictures sound and voices blending a lot, as they did in Tulsita

N: not that hard to soundtrack the voices; not enough. How to go beyond that and bring in a variety of sounds we’re all interested in.

M: likes idea of chapters and vignettes. Combination of soundtrack and other things involving the interludes, other stuff. The soundtrack could be a totally sonic piece. How do we incorporate image w/out competing w/ each other? What if we did do chaps w/ interludes? Have a chap that’s meant to go w/ an image, like a slide show; then the interlude w/out image, just sound.

G: or varying approaches, like one that parodies Ken Burns…

N: in favor of having text in small portions, at least on the wall, maybe quoted as if it’s someone’s philosophical sayings

D: I agree; that’s what we accomplished in Tulsita; collaboration of text and visual is part of the point of our process, and we should evolve that in the next project

G: 2 models: 1) chaps loosely related, connected by sonic interludes; 2) frame narrative into which chaps ostensibly fit—frame is intro and conclusion, and interludes

[fight and argument—blah blah blah]

then we start reading the texts:

“Here are artists”: first part of it, M and I imagine a filmstrip style, with the sound and the same border—can we photoshop this? Nathan wants one to melt. Filmstrips also usually have text—high five! Also, one of the fun things about filmstrips was that the sound and image always went out of whack.

Here are artists, yuppies, and Baptists
Here is a block in the America of heart
Here is manifest wind coursing through oil derrick park
tfos
ykcits
drah
who work for oral.

Images: Tulsa parks, Glenpool, oil parks, derricks, refineries (through oil derrick park)
flag sticking up (manifest wind)
who work for oral—janitors at ORU

get some brown recluses jumping

If I experienced a wave of oil notions, it would sound like this:
first the rusty doublewide door opening into the empty warehouse
then the skyscraper scraping steel
then the motorcycle of advance warning, the apostle
higher, then training my sights lower,
ticking off the paperthin railings as they melt by

images: ticks, melting

skyscrapers/ scrapes/ sorrel/ scapes

“then we then” trying to find sonic equivalents for Nathan’s d.j.ing

“Deep Long”:
two characters: 1) doctor in graphoilogy, “Dr. Cocktail” 2) ape-man

http://graphoilogy.blogspot.com/
contains a diagram that describes our process: cumulative production/proven reserves/future discoveries

“Resale the Copious”
Jesus is a doctor like Dr Cocktail—Cocktail as reincarnation of Jesus?

“film strip” or “filmstrip” on youtube

“DavidGrantMindyNathan”: the way G reads it, sounds exactly like a filmstrip

Maybe 2 filmstrips that comment on each other—start and end w/ filmstrips? In the first, the sound and image get out of whack; in the second, the image itself becomes deformed, transformed into a different kind of media.

use the graphoilogy graph, modifying it in various ways over time

6/8/2007 Meeting notes

Nathan and I met in his studio to work on sound. I also showed him the beginnings of a chapter draft in flash.

Nathan’s idea of fourth screen in back with video of us as viewers/hecker—has a big brother, self-reflexive feel; with only occasionally saying something, sometimes just standing there, sometimes speaking without sound; in fact, sounds don’t even have to by synched.

The way LA was set up when we visted is just closed enough to suggest the box, the room, the sanctuary. Our installation is a sanctuary within the sanctuary of Living Arts.

Instead of ch, G says, we could work in modules, little riffs of time in images, motion, and sound. Then, we divide the sound modules in a kind of Chinese recipe—noodles/rice, meat, sauce, veggies—that always go together—that might solve the synch problem.

David read in most of the remaining texts, so we have lots of poetry.

Pick out certain lines and phrases and sounds from poems and have Nathan find the recordings. Use those little chunks in animations.

Reverse the process—give Nathan a flash animation and have him accompany it.

During this installation, we should have every combination of text/sound/image, including dead silence with images moving, still images with sound, etc etc.

We need to take advantage of the space and time that LA affords us without succumbing to the impulse to be too complicated. Spread sound, images, texts, and silence over the space and the time.

Without four sound systems, I’m afraid that it will just be another movie soundtrack.. Nathan says he doesn’t want this either.

We can use other sound systems, on side perhaps, to draw people’s attention to a certain event.

Check out video cameras from TU>

Nathan slowed down some video from Catoosa using Final Cut that is really great.

WE NEED A TRIPOD!

Part of an installation is recognizing the viewers perception within the space of the gallery, in addition to our perception of the material/place.

Figure out how to make a DVD run automatically.

Notes on Nathan's sound homework

Track 1 & 2
Short clip of preacher

Track 3
David reading (The modernity of est lubricates est)
I’d like to see some of the photos from Catoosa here—sandpipers, river, etc.

Track 4
rechanneling of sexual mores

Track 5
similar to track 4—could be the same?

Track 6
Grant reading dig down deeper along with Mindy reading new text (“Deep long rolling”), rain in background.
I see how Nathan is drawing parallels between the two “deep” poems.

Track 7
sermon, Tulsa movie, rig sounds
Too much of the sermon??
marriage (reminds me of the “Interesting Facts you may already know”)

Track 8
“Dot dot dot”
Grant reading from “DavidNathanGrantMindy”. The long chords from Tulsita (taken from Tulsa movie I believe)
Mindy reading from “Deep long rolling”.
cellos?
Great use of sermon in this one, though I’d like to hear more of David’s voice reading our texts than repeats of the sermon stuff from Track 7
7:07-Indians singing Jesus song (more of this)
7:30-David reading “The modernity of est lubricates”—I think we could use other texts rather than repeating


Notes:
I’d like to hear more of the “music” you were making when we were writing
I do think we need to read more of the poetry we’ve written
More oil derrick sounds?