Date: Tue, 17 Nov 2015 17:15:47 -0800
From: Robert Ochshorn
Subject: Re: Alphabetical Order
I mentioned at lunch today that I sometimes like contradicting myself—making something that’s the polar opposite of what I’m “really” trying to do.

iphone3-subj3-dilCube-1mbps.mp4

This came out of a thread with Dave about eye tracking. It’s a visualization of someone watching an iPhone ad—as if you are watching it through their eyes.
While A Little Bit More Stable tries to reward focus and invite viewers to ask the piece questions, this rendering asks you to just let it wash over you.

Had thought about doing something with the audio before sending it out to the group, but may not get back to that for a little while.

RMO

On Oct 30, 2015, at 1:27 AM, Robert Ochshorn wrote:

A Little Bit More Stable
HD Video
2:30 (link, 73mb)

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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.

This will be installed at the Fotografisk Center in Copenhagen, from November 5 to December 6, within the show Rewriting Histories curated by Lasse Lau and Benj Gerdes (Kran Film Collective) and in conjunction with the Copenhagen International Documentary Festival. I will be traveling to Copenhagen for the opening on the 5th, and will give an artist talk on the 10th (returning to San Francisco on the 14th).

• • •

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.


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.
****************." class=""><alphabetize.py>

Some other interesting things were sorting words by duration and playing all the bigrams.

RMO