Tag: Culture

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What I’m Watching this week

The Great British Bake Off – I binged every season of this show that I could find during the first year of the pandemic. This is really good tv where skilled craftspeople are challenged and supported in a really enjoyable way.

Star Trek : Discovery Season 4 – Not the strongest start to the season but any time that gravity is involved, so is time. Im hoping the writers add something new to this rather overdone “let’s change time” storyline.

Dexter Season 9 – I just started watching episode 1 of season 9 of Dexter. I did enjoy this show when it was on a few years back. I’m hoping that this will be a “must watch” in my weekly rotation.

OMG I hate American Survivor. I much prefer the Australian show but hate-watch this show with friends. I cannot stand the entire cast and the show itself is off the rails.

However, last week we had pizza from Pizza Nerds and we were all very pleased!

Blade Runner Black Lotus. I have only seen two episodes but this Japanese-American anime builds on the franchise. I re-watched both Ridley Scott’s and Villeneuve’s before I started. I can’ even count how many times that I have watched the original. The original movie is embedded in the symbology of media culture. The Blade Runner universe is vast so I look forward to the rest of this series.

Another animated series that is ongoing that expands on the Star Wars universe. Star Wars : The Bad Batch was a good series so I am giving this one a shot too.

Murder Island. This was only six episodes where 4 teams of amateurs work with actual police to solve a murder written by Ian Rankin. I binged this last week during the first snow of the season. Its a good concept since most people think that they are Sherlock, Poirot and Ms.Marple rolled into one. Spoiler alert – they aren’t.

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Re-starting

Starting to reintegrate blogging back into my life.

I’m posting some of my older assemblages as video files. I was thinking to export them as gifs but I think that mp4 is a better format cross platform and across devices. Unsure. WordPress is giving me a 2mb limit on video files so I can’t get more than 10 seconds at that rate. I was testing HEVC but it might not be as ubiquitous as required to not worry about accessibility. This reminds me of when Macromedia Flash was a thing and designers like Hillman Curtis were looking at how to compress animations to take advantage of limited bandwidth. The solution might be to just post videos at Vimeo and link to this space.

This Philip Guston video is very first one that I did on completely on my iPad Pro in Affinity Photo and LumaFusion. And while my iPad Pro is a great tool, perhaps I am too old school? I haven’t been too productive with Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer or LumaFusion compared to the desktop apps like Photoshop, After Effects or Avid that I learned my craft on. I have chalked it up to the whole pandemic and the shift to working from home. I wanted to completely transition to my tablet but it didn’t work for me without a way to integrate my desktop media catalog into a new workflow and using my scanner for my analog work which is an important component of my artistic assemblages.

I will blog more about Guston but one way that I think through art is by dis-assembling it. When I dis-assemble art into component objects I get a better understanding of the compositional choices made by the artist.

More to come on this as I integrate a laptop back in.

The basic elements of each workflow is the following:

  • Media creation
    • Camera + SD card – Digital and devices images
    • Tablet – content assemblage / edits
    • Laptop – DAM, photo/vector, 3D, edit, motion graphics
    • Image scanner – Mamiya and legacy Analog devices
  • Content / Media Storage
    • NAS shared folders – cloud enabled
  • Tools
    • Digital Asset Manager
    • Photo Manipulation
    • OBS Broadcast
    • Video editing
    • Motion Graphics
    • 3D
    • Audio
  • Output
    • Blog
      • Text
      • Visualizations
    • VLOG – TBD

Fujikawa, from the series Fifty-Three Stations of Tōkaidō – Edo period, 1840-1842

This is another one from around 2010. Like Guston, it was originally Flash but rebuilt in Luma Fusion on my iPad. I really enjoyed working on these prints.

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Bon Iver – Holocene

We finished building the last of the furniture for my new apartment last night. The new media center was easier than I expected and the first thing I played on it was Bon Iver’s video Holocene. It made me miss Iceland.

It was a rough week moving and my back is aching. I’m going to need a day up at the Nordik spa just to get the kinks out although I am looking forward to hot yoga tomorrow. I have a lot of picture arranging on my beautiful large walls but that will be over the next several weeks. 
Several friends have already popped by and I can’t wait to have my inaugural gathering. Soon.

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My map of Iceland

I have arrived from flying all day. I met some nice folks along the way. I am quite tired but can’t sleep. I have just unpacked my wool stuff from Iceland and am resisting importing and beginning to sort through my photos. That, and the 4K video from snorkeling at Silfra, will take some time.

Here is my map of Iceland as seen through artifacts that I collected. From the black smoothed rock from the Black Sands beach to porus volcanic stone from the thermal area around Myvatn. The clam shell is from the rocky shores of the south western  peninsula and the sea shell is from the east fjords

 

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A hot tub with a view

I left Grundafjordur early this morning to avoid the storm pounding the peninsula. I slowly made my way south to Borganes and am here overnight and then on to Silfra for a dive tomorrow. I will spend one final night in Reykjavik and then back to Ottawa. 

Here are a few from today including my hot tub in Borganes where I’m sitting enjoying a glass of wine and watching the sun set.

   
 

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Snaefellsnes part two 

Here are some photos from yesterday. I climbed another volcano and hiked the sea shore. I stayed ahead of the major precipitation but it was a grey day. I started with Kirkjufelll and ended with the Black Church at Búðir. FYI the church is black because it is covered in pitch for the weather, much like a ship.