How to End It & Nagging Ideas for Living Arts

I’m almost done with scene 4, but I’ve reached the part in the soundtrack where the sounds are very faint and subtle, so I’m thinking I want the animation to match that.

Also, I’ve been thinking that I like the idea of doing a pastiche of a Tulsa promotional film/presentation for our Living Arts installation. It could still have Oil and Religion as it’s two main focuses. In fact, all of the things we included in the mocumentary would tie back to those themes, mimicking the way PR people sometimes will stretch associations to the point of incredulity.

We have discussed, though, how we want to avoid merely parodying Tulsa, which is not hard to do. At the same time, a more abstract or surreal approach to our method and presentation could help us prevent that. For instance, Nathan and Mindy had the idea of including a version of “The Channels,” the new, crazy development idea for the river, in the promotion. However, our version would float above the river in a sort of Gulliver’s Travels type way, above Tulsa but not of Tulsa (in fact, that could be it’s motto). By combining things we’d actually like to see happen in Tulsa along with parody of the plans of The Channels developers, not to mention surreal and highly aestheticized imaginative spaces, we can attain a neutral, if still critical, pastiche. Of course, the issues of oil and religion can tie in in several ways—the floating above can be spun as a way to “get closer to God” and the island could be powered totally by “recycling fumes from the refineries below” etc etc.

I’ve been keeping this diary for a while now, but I think making it a blog would not only allow us to share information when it inspires us, but also to use it as a portal to Mindy’s server where we could store larger files, such as flash, jpgs, and mp3s. Even if they don’t like the idea, I’d like to keep it for my own benefit and keep my notes there. I hope they're up for it because I think ultimately that the blog could serve as a supplement to our final project for our audience by documenting and including the process into the final product.

Scene 4 animation and WaKOW meeting minutes

David finally sent me his remix of Death/Metal, but I was unsure of how to animate the new poem. The sound during this part has David’s voice repeating in a sped-up, electronic tone. So, I thought it would be appropriate to put the poem down at the bottom of the page and having each word flicker (like the Doby Bowl) and then drop straight down and turn at a right angle and fly into its position. Question is, should I do it randomly (or semi-randomly to build in new meanings as the poem assembles) or in order. Well, see. Oh, btw, the whole poem will fade, leaving the words of the new poem in place. They will then fall into their new places from there.

In the meeting:

Nathan and David wondered if the “interscenes “shouldn’t be their own thing. And certainly we all agreed that the photos could stand on their own and fit a large scale animation in an installation. For example, the Living Arts space could handle three large projections on the walls—two on the long side wall and one on the long back wall.

Show and Tell:

1. Nathan had photos to show.
2. I have bibliographies and newspaper pdfs.
3. Mindy and David had bubkiss...

Things to think about:

Where to get

• projectors (ask Steve, Glen, Chuck Tomlins, etc)
• speakers (All Souls?)

House Art Show

Applying for grants through

• TU—exhibitions grant
• OK visual arts council
• English Dept/Dean’s office

Podcasts of supplementary sound

Could we program it so that the images would change depending on the sound or vice versa?

(We could if we learn the software and buy the hardware)

I said that I think we are making a movie

but we also could include related projects (photos, books, texts)

Having two projectors would allow us to present the duality of Oil/Religion but also to deconstruct the binary.

Question: how much of the Tulsita materials will we use in the new project?

I assumed that it was going to be all new stuff…unless, as David said, the old stuff is relevant

Nathan wondered how the House Show stuff would relate to the Living Arts stuff—would it be the same—we don’t want to tip our hand.

Interscenes and Death/Metal progressing

Been working late nights this week to finish this project at least to a point where we could submit it to an online journal. Nathan finally got me phrases for Death/Metal, but I’m still waiting on the other two. Mindy did finally get me two nets that she made out of Dig Down.

Mindy was also able to get me some “posterized” versions of some of the photos we submitted to Living Arts. She had the idea, above, to gradually animate them in a sort of paint-by-numbers scheme, which gave me tons of ideas as to how to show the language that undergirds the places and images we see every day.

At any rate, I thought this short animation would serve great as “interscenes,” transitions between the various poems. They could have sound or not (I don’t think the Green Door short will work with sound—it’s too slow a file because of all the text animation). I did the first interscene with the wicker deer photo mindy sent according to the paint-by-numbers idea, but I thought it would reverse it wit hteh green door, moving the animation in the opposite direction. Fading into text then fading into text that resembles the shape of the objects in the photo, then fading into and stopping at the photo. One more should do it, but I haven’t given thought to what it will be yet.

Instead, I’ve been tweaking the interscenes and in Scene 4 adding Nathan’s texts to Death/Metal. I hope to finish Scene 4 this weekend to show to WaKOW and to get approval to add the interscenes to the full project. Another idea I’ll run by them is to add hyperlinks to keywords in the texts that pop up photos when clicked. The photos would in turn have little x-boxes to click to close them. I think these pop-ups would work best when the poem is not in motion. This interactivity would be idea for an online zine environment even if it would be useless in an installation.

Thoughts on the Tulsita Flash

It will probably be necessary to create a downloading bar graph to show viewer how much has downloaded.

The fla file I created using the 15 photos we submitted to Living Arts might make for a nice intro page (I think I’ve decided against a title page like with Action, Yes. I want it to run as one movie). I need to ask Nathan to come up with a sound file that might accompany it. It’s now 17.5 seconds, but I could stretch it out. I also could combine it with Tulsita-intro.

Yesterday, I was looking at Beehive online mag—it seems like a good venue for this piece. Arras.net is not—it’s Brian Kim Stephan’s home page, basically, and does not accept submissions. I need to look at some of my other links and start contacting them.

N8 coming through...

Nathan had some interesting ideas for animation for the Oil project:

At some point it might be cool to bring in huge -

takes up the whole screen - font that shinks or bleeds

back so you can read it. Varying textures and colors

on the fonts. Black font - like oil - w/ liquid

effects would be good, I think. Crumbling-to-dust

and/or wind effects....

WaKOW meeting minutes

Meeting with WaKOW

Mindy: slowly dissolve photo into a paint-by-numbers with text instead of numbers

Nathan: make images out of smaller images—each photo standing for a pixel in larger image. Viewer could control zooming in and out.

See www.photomontage.com

Tasks:

• Write Missy about money theology (what is the name of the term?)
• Go to Christian Bookstore
• Shoot abortion billboards
• Attending megachurch services
• Architecture is interesting too
• Shoot refineries
• Oral Roberts trip
• Record TV shows
• Look online for sermons
• Research history of Tulsa: relation of oil to building of churches in Tulsa
• Would Pet Eng dept be a resource?
• Snuggs lecture guy—book on religion and environmentalism
• Visit Glenpool

Deadline:

Have something to share by Feb 11 at 2 pm.

Flash Scene 3 and problems putting it all together

Today I took a step toward making the text an image, in the vein of Charles Olson and Susan Howe, by arranging the words and letters on the stage (interesting semantics from Flash) and then splitting them, rotating them and scattering them.

….Or not….Maybe I won’t be able to import the movies into each other. When I tried it, it just put the movie in its separate layer without sound. I guess I’ll go back to the idea of combining the scenes under the umbrella of a master file, probably the Tulsita title page that I made as one of my first attempts at Flash, and have them linked with buttons that move to the next poem. Each poem will also then need a play button that the viewer will push to start the sound and animation. I will begin working on that while I am waiting for the “homework” to come in from the rest of the Wakowites.

I was able to get a simple push button to work so that it loaded a movie when I pressed it. This is probably the solution to follow. I think it would make it easier if I broke up the scenes into separate files.

Animating Death

One of the things I considered today was the speed of the animation on Death. I’m not sure I want to leave lines static long enough for people to read them completely because that would imply that the line are somehow aesthetic objects worthy of consideration. Part of keeping a fragment a fragment is not just text in space but also in time. A glance at a line is a way of making a fragment, since the sense can’t be fully garnered in the time given.

Messing around with the program after I had gotten to the ¼ mark on Death, I tried the “Import” command to see what would happen. Like publishing, it took a long time, which probably means it imports all the symbols, frames, tweens, and other data from the movie complete. So I now think that it won’t be a problem to have it run as a single movie without the need for actionscripts, etc.

Integrating images--the big questions

While meditating today, I got some ideas for integrating photos into this movie. Although I think I want to submit it somewhere without photos, I’d like to continue working on integrating the photos we took at the time we were writing these poem and making the sound.

There are several possibilities:

1. The photos could appear in simple slide shows between the poems
2. The photos could appear in a slide show during the animation of the text
3. The photos could be activated by clicking on key words (we might alert viewers to this in an intro or on title page)
4. The photos could be animated during the text animation

At any rate, I could create a master movie in which the photo animation appears concurrently next to the text animation in a larger window (esp for #2 above). Or, the slide shows could be linked to the text animations within a master movie if they ran sequentially. However, I really like the idea of combining both #3 and one of the other options because it would make the piece more interactive and allow us to utilize more of the photos we took.

In the meantime, I should ask Mindy to convert all the photos we used in the Art Show slide show to PNG files (I think). Check on that.

Oh, that reminds me—I promised to host the next House Art Show, so I better get on that—we should hold it on the anniversary of that last in my house.

Knowing Nathan, he’ll ask me how this animation or the principles I’m using to animate the poem, relate to Tulsa or the project as a whole. One of the justifications has to be, especially for Dig and Death, that when first writing these poems using “musical chairs” and four computers, we often drew upon the words and images from the passage written before ours. In a sense, we were recombining words much like I am doing in my animations. The animations just make that method visible and explicitly part of the text. In this way, the animations act as meta-commentary on the process that produced the poems.

To go over it again: The questions we are asking again and again in this project are

How do you put text into time like sound?

How do you represent music as an image?

How do you convert sound into text?

How does an image become musical?

How do you blend text and image?

How is an image translated into words?

Of course, the last one is how can all three—text, image, sound—work together seamlessly?

Don’t forget movies: Fantastic Tulsa Films, Tulsa, Oklahoma, The Outsiders, etc. and stock images from Tulsa (check the library website for pictures of campus as well as of the Tula riots).

Rearranging Death

I’m now thinking that using only the words from Death/Metal would be too limiting and too much like the previous poem. Outside of the animation, the idea is the same—there are other poems ‘trapped’ inside this one. If I used words/letters from all the other poems too, it might give me some more leeway. Words from other poems could come from outside the text.

To make new combinations of the words from the entire quartet, I made a list of all the words in a Word file, separated by commas, and then pasted them into Excel, where I could sort them alphabetically, each word to a cell. The procedure created an interested array of words across rows and down columns. I got some pretty amazing results, like this:

Nihilists fiat about the crap, if in thing of Hoppin truck then rising:

Oh Year’s is skin and can in my Oklahoma, in Days, into nothing

it believes is townswept, find The and know Midwest, a more

sun, as they believes, hoped water need not the oneself, the it—

Day wonderful steel lawn, believe and make it old, kind loving

you dry of believe, the above, about skin can, if crazy, think

New warm, Lower watered oil of—of Death—away, over and

within gin, scarfing everything, waiting days, hands, and for one say.

Canals my how But here when doesn’t riff-raff That city—by any

Then metal—know born The Tulsa in the one think severed.

Do shakes which the shake Satanic Model They else up bounds off

the you, dirt biggest sense—it—something—death severely of newly

the mainstream canal in You type tolerate of be, must like go, one in

outside Venice, Middle killing then how from love righteous it, Ford,

submerged a you, one’s, if dirt, you, my difference on Satan, the End.

Dip it, middle Caboose, honestly, that they little toe scarification

from the Dig doesn’t matter more sand, chokes it, wings it.

And that poem I simply transcribed from the Death/Metal column, which got cast in that arrangement when I sorted the first (or first two) columns alphabetically. Anyway, the concordance really makes it easier to take the words out of their original contexts and create new, interesting combinations.