Amsterdamish New Media Artists

Hallo,

The last two days we've been visited by two different new media artists from Holland. On Thursday we were visited by Marc van Woudenberg (greatest name ever) of xolo.tv. Xolo.tv (from what I can tell) is a company which videoblogs for large companies. I think he got a bit of a harsh reception, as I think a few in the group saw what he was doing as a bit of selling out. There were long discussions about the progression and use of the internet, blogging, video blogging, and the internet in general. What we concluded was that the internet (from a blogger/scholar's point of view) was just entertainment and not really any solid scholarly content, even videoblogs which were trying to be smart. I think the final conclusion is that the internet is just going through it's adolescent phase of fart jokes and extreme sports.

On Friday we were visited by Thijs de Witte (craziest name ever) of Pips Lab. Pips Lab is a new media performance group based out of Holland that tries to take inspiration from all different artistic disciplines and combine them into a single entity. He showed us several videos, finishing with a video of one of their live performances. What they do is seriously crazy. The performance includes live acting, song performance, video mixing, crazy light technology, audience participation, and so much more. They actually were one of the first groups to design the technology for "light painting" in which you use a source of light and a video camera to save movements of the light and save it as a single image. For example, if you took a flash light and waved it in a big circle in front of you, the program would produce an image of a large connected circle. My favorite part of the show involved Thijs doing some seemingly random actions for a camera, then later these actions were "remixed" to animate to a song. The neat thing was that the remixed video was edited before the show. He used audio cues from a song that was being played by the band to get act his actions at the right times, and then the program automatically edited the video into the new remixed form. I'm hoping to get a video and perhaps an interview out of the people from Pips Lab for my senior project on remixing.

.:August

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[Keez PIPSlab]

No problem ~!