A Little Bit More Stable
HD Video
2:30 (link, 73mb)
Much like the stabilized video from military drones, which allow commanders to observe and interfere with unfamiliar territory from aerial vantage, A Little Bit More Stable takes the viewer above and outside the normal passage of motion picture time. The source material, a promotion for video stabilization software that has been commercialized from its military applications, depicts the stabilization of home movies and implies a similar steadying influence on the lives of would-be customers.
To make this piece, I’ve combined the video mastication technique from my 2013 Chewing video with a modified/dissipating alphabetical ordering, using alignment data from Gentle. I’ve tried to exploit the cocktail party effect, in combination with textual/visual reinforcement, to reward a viewer’s attempts at focus and concentration.
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One of the great pleasures of making a piece like this is that it stretches my perceptual abilities. I spend a lot of time listening, looking, and learning from the intermediate results. In some ways, I am teaching myself to “read” a language as I develop it. Unfortunately, that leaves me unable to anticipate the legibility (or illegibility) of a piece like this to those who haven’t spent time with the language. All of you are somewhat tainted by familiarity with my work, but as ever I am hungry for reactions.
Your correspondent,
R.M.O.
On Oct 23, 2015, at 3:38 PM, Robert Ochshorn wrote:To test my “Forced Aligner” (I’m calling it “Gentle” for now), I’ve been alphabetizing audio files.****************."><alphabetize.py>I was doing all of this in an iPython session, and using reverse-search-completions. I’ve attached the code, in case Glen wants to think about a Flowsheet that does something like this.