Sunday 30 September 2012

Stakker

Mark McClean and Colin Scott Originally collaborated as Stakker producing innovative live visuals and produced various VHS releases and music videos such as the ground braking Eurotechno (1989) and The Evil Acid Baron Show (1988) . There visuals are full of strange 3D landscapes that are reminiscent of early CG  films produced by american companies such as Pacific Data Images and image processing straight form the Fiarlight CVI, the fast cutting and break neck speed at which new visual elements are introduced helped pave the way for what would become the standard style for live VJing and the visual accompaniment to underground electronic music for the next 15 years. Mark and Colin appear to have stopped working together after the release of Eurotechno. However Part of the sound track  was produced and released as a single to great acclaim by soon to be Future Sounds of London member Brian Dougans, Mark McClean went on to produce most of the visuals and artwork for Future Sounds of London including there seminal album Lifeforms. There is very little information available on line as to what became of Mark, Colin or their early influential collaboration. Stakker is credited with the 1995 Aphex Twin sound tracked Westworld VHS so they may have had a much longer working relationship than is described on-line. Mark's work for FSOL is credited as Buggy G Riphead and FSOL have some fantastic videos possibly produced by Mark and collaborators.

I really like the graphics that accompany Glass on the Teachings From The Electronic Brain video
























Richard at Lewes Psychedelic Festival

Richard and his DIY modular audio and video synths will be performing as part of Lewes Psychedelic Festival in the Crayola Lectern psychedelic big band go see some live video synth !
















http://synth-punk.blogspot.co.uk/

Tuesday 25 September 2012

DIY Micro Video Transmitter Workshop

on the 17th of this fine month I attended a DIY micro video transmitter workshop hosted by Ryan Jordan and run by Kyle Evans of Cracked Ray Tube, The design was based on one produced by Tetsuo Kogawa and continually developed as part of his practice. Kyle also uses this circuit in his work to great effect to derive perfectly imperfect images and abstract raw colour video signal in to new jagged forms. Everyone at the workshop got to make and try a transmitter and we even used two at once. The design is really simple and purposefully unstable to allow artistic exploitation of it's properties.

anyone with limited soldering skills could produce one of these devices easily and it was great fun tuning it in and watching the results. The construction is also beautifully simple using the copper coated PCB material a ground plane and attaching 'tags' to the surface using more PCB material make construction fast simple and relatively interference free. If you can't get to a workshop run by Kyle (which I would recommend due to the fun and social aspect and great documentation alone) then don't fret as the low parts count  make this easy to source and build on your own. 

I was sad not to be able to stay for the live performance by Kyle,  Ryan and a host of others but alas I was halfway though moving house :<

what follow are some bad phone pics 



















Wednesday 12 September 2012

Thursday 6 September 2012

Masayuki Kawai

"Masayuki Kawai, born in 1972 in Osaka Japan, is a Tokyo-based video-artist and curator. He received his B.A. in Aesthetics from the University of Tokyo, and in 1999 founded the Video Art Center Tokyo. He is an active publisher and critic of contemporary video works. Since 2000, his own video art been shown internationally in Europe, the U.S. and Australia, as well as in the Far East."