I’ve always had a penchant for victorian aesthetics…and feminism. So for this project, I decided to make an animation to accompany a song called “Sister O Sisters” by Le Tigre with Yoko Ono. I decided to put this young victorian woman in various situations where she “sings” along with the song. While the image originally depicted the young girl at a beach shouting, I imagined her more shouting in protest. Some of the scenarios I had in mind included amongst lower east side immigrant women at the fin de siecle, within a Suffragette context, within a women’s liberation context (1960s), alongside Medea Benjamin and with Le Tigre. See below for a few of my initial ideas.
I have made some progress on my final project. I was able to get three feet of LEDs (300 LEDs per 5 meter, if I understand correctly.) They are pretty bright white, stark even. I will be able to make a cut at any two inch point and rewire and solder to power and ground. The LED strips were pretty expensive at almost $20/foot. I purchased three feet. They had denser variations (600 LEDs +) but they were far more expensive and didn’t seem necessary to accomplish lighting a small box. Canal Lighting was my source and they were stellar but expensive.
I also went to Canal Plastic and purchased several sheets of 12″x12″ plastic in various forms. I purchased 2″x2″ samples first because they were only a dollar a piece. I purchased a two-way mirror at the suggestion of Chika, translucent white, and frosted clear plastics. I drew out my construction plans and dimensions based on the cost of the plastics since I wasn’t committed to my initial dimensions. Even with my adjustments to accommodate for costs, each box is going to cost about $200 to construct. Therefore, I will only be creating one box for this final.
I tested out an old blender marker which I am pretty sure still contains Xylene since I feel slightly stoned from inhaling the sweet fragrance. I also found an old carbon print from my Div III at Hampshire to test the marker with. Carbon prints and the sent of blender markers in the middle of the night give me tremendous nostalgia for my Div III (thesis). In any case, I tested the chemical on all three plastics. I was disappointed to find out that the mirror coating renders the blender marker ineffective in adhering inks to the surface of the plastic. It worked fairly well on the translucent white but seemed most effective on the frosted clear plastic which I accredit to the small ridges and dips in the surface. It gives the ink a place to sink in, so to speak.
So my new plan is to buy another sheet of the frosted plastic and chemically transfer the image there. and then adhere it behind the two way mirror. I tested it on the 2″x2″ pieces and it was visible but it will be hard to say how it will pan out with the LEDs. I have a lot of testing left to do in the next two week, not to mention both Arduino and Processing programming and the physical construction of the box.
I’ve had a difficult time finding a cohesive narrative for the story so I am playing around with more abstract imagery and reading a list of names of sex workers who died in the past year as the audio component. I could really use feedback on this change of plans, though.
This is a video created for Comm Lab with Calli Higgins, Lucas Zavala, Krystal Banzon, and Lisa Maria. They were amazing to work with and I am really pleased with how our project turned out. You can watch below:
QUEEN WITH BENEFITS!!!!
a benefit for Queers for Economic Justice (QEJ) www.q4ej.org
QUEEN OF HONOR: KENYON FARROW!!!
QEJ’s INTERIM EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR and BIRTHDAY BOY!!!
DJ MARIMACHA
DJ SIRLINDA
DJ BRYAN BLACK
Special Performance by TACTICAL SPECTACLE!!!
(Formerly known as Team Awesome, Tactical Spectacle is the dance troupe extraordinaire of the Rude Mechanical Orchestra)
HOSTS:
Kitty LaKitty
Amy Agony
Sarah Jenny
and Scout
$10-$5 sliding scale (no one turned away for lack of funds)
Cheap drinks
$1 Shots all night long
SUGARLAND
221 N. 9th St
(between Driggs & Roebling)
Brooklyn, NY
L Train to Bedford
My initial plan has been to gather the stories and photographs (high res) of the murder victims of Gary Ridgway (aka the Green River Killer).
I am also interested collecting images and stories of other sex worker victims of violent crime for this project.
I am also looking for footage from December 17th events, statistics, and red umbrella imagery and footage to work from. I put a call out to advocacy organizations, harm reduction social service providers in New York and beyond, and sex worker communities online to gather stories. So far the contributions have been intense and overwhelming. Each year we hold a memorial service for sex workers who were murdered because of their job: by clients, cops, partners, or the system (prison industrial complex).
I envision images transferred onto plexiglass using xylene. The plexiglass surface would be part of larger light boxes. When a user approaches an image on the light box, an infrared proximity sensor or photo resistor would recognize the environmental change, causing the image to light up. I would also like to using Processing to then display video or audio to accompany each image. The impact should be immediate, visceral, and haunting.
I will probably start with a small number of people to represent, maybe five, until I work out the technological end and then continue on. This idea is a work in progress and feedback is welcome.
Assignment: In teams of two create a 1-minute sound piece in any of the environments we looked at. Again, this piece should can be environmental, create space or mood, tell a story through sound. Upload it to your site in mp3. Bring either the audacity or soundtrack files with all tracks to class.
Product: I teamed up with the very lovely Alex Vessels to work on this project. Neither one of us had a background in audio production but we had ideas for the environments we wanted to collect sounds from. I walked around the west village and into a restaurant. Alex went to the grocery store. Due to a few unfortunate circumstances, we were unable to finalize the piece together so part way through the editing process, we split up to find out what we could create separately with the same essentially the same audio.
The results were quite different. Here is my version.
