Sunday, 6th February, 2005

Pigeonholed

In a moment of sheer self-indulgence, I thought I might take a little time to talk about something that's really important to me — my work. Down at the bottom left of tranniefesto.co.uk, I've started putting links to some of the films I've made over the years, and I thought I might take one of them, and explain it a little.

Do please excuse the departure from the normal flow of rantage about being a trannie

I've made a half-sized DivX AVI available, but it's rather large — 21 MB in fact — and my server's upstream connection is only 256Mbit/sec, so patience is required. But then again, as they say, patience is a virtue — and the world is lacking in virtues these days don'tcha think?

I find, that the most significant things in life — the moments that change your world beyond recognition — happen purely by chance. Little inconsequences build up until suddenly, you find yourself in a brand new situation — almost unaware of how and why you got there.

It was like that for me, back in 1992, when I was moaning out loud in a Student bar about the current state of the Students' Union newspaper — unaware that I was sat next to the best friend of the Editor — and ignited a conversation that would end up with me becoming a graphic designer.

Equally, in 2002, when after a chance Google search and an email, I suddenly found myself surrounded by trannies from all over the world in a hotel in Atlanta.

I like this I enjoy the serendipity of these little events. Sure, it frustrates me that most of the time all my little plans seem to come to nothing, but I kinda take a bit of comfort in the excitement of not quite knowing what's going to happen next.

In 2000, I was reaching a point of staleness in my research for my MA that I was doing at the time. In my undergraduate work, I had developed an interest in experimental film, and had thought that I knew where I was going with it. All the work I had done had been very graphics-based — complicated After Effects sequences playing around with Motion Maths and Particle Playgrounds. But I was getting a little bored with it all.

What I was concentrating on at the time, was building up a collection of raw source material — film, photographs and sound — that I would then do wonderfully clever things to with software, and everyone would be dead impressed But I'd kinda got in a bit of a rut.

I'd got my hands on a series of photographs of microscopic slides, absolutely stunning closeups of, well, I dunno what. But the colours and shapes in them were so intense and beautiful, that I knew I had to do something special with them. I just couldn't think of what.

I tried fading them in and out — I tried panning the camera over them, flipping them round, using them as distortion maps for other bits of film — but nothing seemed right.

It was as if (and I know this might sound a little silly) I couldn't do anything worthy of them. They were just so beautiful that they were out of my league.

Enter Norman McLaren.

Back in my undergraduate days, I'd been introduced to McLaren's work by one of my then-tutors/now-colleagues, along with other experimental film-makers like Len Lye and Stan Brakhage.

Norman McLaren was a student at the Glasgow School of Fine Arts in the early thirties. in 1941, he moved over to Canada and joined the National Film Board where he spent the rest of his life experimenting with what the new medium of film could achieve. The guy's output was absolutely prolific — over the course of his time there, he made 59 films, mostly dealing with experimental abstract animation.

There were a couple of his works that really stood out to me — Begone Dull Care (1949), and especially Lines Vertical (1962) — and it was his process that caught my attention.

Rather than using a camera, here he was, painting and scratching directly on the emulsion of the film, a painstakingly long process but one that resulted in the most beautiful visual displays of colour and light.

Now it occurred to me, that I could do a similar thing, but using my Mac rather than paint and film. I was also quite interested in the slit-scan animation technique used in the Stargate Sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and I'd been playing around with a few ideas on how to create something vaguely similar.

I figured, that if I took those microscopic images, and stretched them massively, then I might end up with a digital equivalent of a piece of one of McLaren's films.

And d'ya know what? I was right

After a bit of tinkering around, I ended up with a series of two-second clips of coloured vertical lines that moved and swayed seductively over the screen. But before we all get too excited, I still wasn't sure what I was going to do with them.

See, at the time, I was trying to put together an series of films that I was working on, films that would be joined together using what I had been calling "mulch". Like a garden, you'd have these little moments of intended film, interspersed with stuff and the whole thing would become some kind of fluid, organic visual experience.

I chucked the stripey films into a folder, ready for later, and set about making some more ... I took some sheets of paper, scattered coffee grounds and tea-leaves on them, soaked them in water and left them over night, resulting in strange brownish patterns over the pages, that when you inverted them in Photoshop became stunningly pretty blue and black patterns. Almost like stars, which when I applied the same technique of stretching produced wonderful dark moving stripes.

Anyway, back to the serendipity...

At about that time, I was collaborating a little with some friends who were into making audio pieces. And one of the had sent me a short piece she called "Pigeonholed". I wasn't entirely sure what I was going to do with it, the plinky sounds and rythmn conjured up various visuals in my head, but there was nothing solid to work on yet.

Then, quite by accident, I dropped a pile of my mulch into a time-line. And it was at that point, that I realised that not only did the two second clips of moving lines fit perfectly with the beat of the track, the actual movement of the stripes fitted as if they had been made especially for it.

It was at this moment, that I jumped out of my chair, and ran up and down the stairs singing "I am so fucking clever"

I dunno — it's hard to describe that feeling of suddenly everything fitting together at once. It was as if these things had taken shape in front of me, destined to be together, and all I'd done was introduce them. It was like "Oh My God, that's beautiful"

The name of the piece, as I've said, came from Becky who made the audio. But it's kinda ironic that over the years since, I've found myself pigeonholed as the guy girl who makes stripes. I suppose there are several interpretations of the stripes that you can arrive at — I, for one, have a lovely little monologue about how the stripes represent the transgressive nature of transvestism — but I think there are two important things about them.

Firstly, the underlying intention of them is to mask the original source material. For reasons I'll leave for a later date, I don't really want people to know what the originals look like (and this applies to my still-image work as well). It's about transforming something either mundane (as in the case of the coffee grounds) or subversive (as in the bad pictures of me — which is what I use as source material these days) into something distorted, but beautiful — turning a sow's ear into a silk purse if you like

And secondly, it's about exploring what the medium of Digital Video can achieve. I've ranted a little before about my dissatisfaction with current New Media trends — the mimicking of traditional media in an attempt to garnish credibility. When I first saw what happened when I made these things, the first idea that popped into my head was that the visuals almost represented the DV stream itself.

...

So, anyway. I hope you like it, and I hope that the shift away from trannieness isn't too hard to take on a Sunday afternoon. I wanted to write about my work for a couple of reasons — (1) because, obviously, it's important to me, and (2) because prompted by my colleagues' noticing of work very similar to mine in the foyer of MoMA in New York, I thought I'd just get it down somewhere that I'd been doing this for about 4 years now.

I mean, it's not like it's a particularly difficult thing to do or anything — and I would be daft to think that no-one else makes stripes. But, ya'know

Trust me Dave, they look incredible, if I do say so myself. That film was shown in Leeds City Art Gallery about a year or so ago, and seeing it that size almost made me weep.

Um, in total? About four of the stripe pieces that I'm happy with (I know they look easy — but I've been working on the last of them for about a year and a half now). Before that though, there's about ten films that are completely different

Are you the same guy from two weeks ago? Same thing I said back then: Yes. Older OS's atop 10.3 (7.6.1-9.2.1) pfft