pecha kucha- 17/4/08- D&AD 20 people, 20 slides, 20 seconds lecture

the falling man, 9/11

this D&AD (design and art direction) lecture was mostly fantastic- read this guys (not sure of name) blog and photos. in my current work (so many facets to research- doh!) wanted to see how people talk about slides, the kind of slides people choose to talk about when its up to them, what's said and what's just looked at. this night was for designers, presented by designers, i would very much like to now see david gale's peachy coochy performance art equivalent night....the presenters skills on few parts of this D&AD night were very dry

some of the the clear common things were;

plentiful use of flickr
photo of self as a child and/or own kids
nostalgic reminiscence for old atari console games
thematic- eg- blank piece of paper- wasn't sure what to do for their presentation so themed it like that, or one slide ended on a description that then led into the next
lots of talk about likes or loathes of second life
snippets of own design practice
bad logos/signage- hilarity factor

the most poignant image of the evening is at the top of this post. the last presenter, sanky from all of us, was very amusingly discussing and layering photos of bad signage over bad signage getting the audience really aroused for his first 18 slides, the air is very lively. the moment this slide comes up, a deathly silence comes over the room- like the blink of an eye when everything changed. those 20 seconds the slide was up, like a memorial service when silence is requested to remember the lives of those lost. someone clapped at the end of this slide. the power of the iconic image that needs no explaining, we all know what it means.

Image manipulation workshop- images PART THREE

lots to think about here- the disembodiment of head from body, making an image become a picture postcard, bringing together personal and anonymous strangers photos and inventing connections, bringing together different eras and generations, different ages of projector- ancient and modern

Image manipulation workshop- images PART TWO

lena and invisible friend


laura was capturing this slide projector image at the bottom left side on paper

mixing old and new projectors- lumens differences!



mixing projected and held photos- when to sue which?

as i mentioned in the previous post i didnt really explore concepts but layering possiblities, use of live feed and still image, workign between 3 interconnected projectors split from one laptop signal (need to find out all this equipment)

Image manipulation workshop- reflections and images PART ONE

just a few things to comment on how i felt my workshop went and what i learnt from it....

whose workshop was this? what was achieved? how could i have worked with this better? the main thing i felt was that technology dominated the experiences and that my attempts to have worked with concepts with technology should have followed a tech-know how workshop which everyone really needs- from image resolution to outlining hardware and software and what they do. lauras workshop in the afternoon brilliant tackled one easy use of technology and I want to do more of this. For example, i got very interested in the how isadora software works myself and sidetracked away (but i should have intervened more) from my group working on their own stories for example resulting in some fair attempts to explore projection through stories told in photos- I lost focus on what I was trying to achieve seduced by the technology- doh!.

However, i liked the idea of invisible friend as a virtual projection which lena inadvertently came up with very much. sally's performative lecture requiring a still image she pointed at met with doug persisting in moving the image around;) playing with the software demonstrating what isadora can do, when in her story a powerpoint slide would have been enough.

so what does this teach me...um, that i've led many many workshops before and that this wasn't all that successful for conflict of interests in it being carried out , as well as putting too much in to it myself, and the suggested introduction of text into the workshop part way through which contradicted the intended nature of my workshop....the story text was to come from the images. however I have some interesting images from VLPers to explore related techniques and really want to bring in isadora in my experiments with projections.