The Digital Ancient and the phenomenons of denature
My friend Lei started her Tech Art Berlin initiative. As a curator she is inviting people to shape with her
A creative community to connect talents, share resources, and create dialogues on critical issues in technology and art.
I rendered generative video out of Tech Art Berlin logo with one of the effects I made before, with a very slow feedback loop dispersing de Chardin’s Noosphere.
Not only from the curatorial perspective, but also as a filmmaker and a writer herself, Lei decided to make an essay film introducing all the artists presenting during the first event under “The Digital Ancient” theme.
And while working on this video, she asked me if I can provide some generative effects over her footage. You can see some of these effects in the final cut. I also published them separately on Vimeo under single collection called The Phenomenons of Denature.
And here is an accidental glitch which happened while working on another video.
I am not really satisfied with these visuals. The first challenge was to localize generative effect only to specific subject, in this case one of these birds. It would be easier if I had a ready mechanics of the machine learning technique called semantic segmentation, which would allow me to precisely extract the silhouette of an animal. But it would be an overkill for this project therefore I used simple edge and color detection. Lei also wanted to find some aesthetics matching other visuals in her film, which are taken from Kubrick’s Space Odyssey. Unfortunately the context of space is visually so far away from the phenomenons of the Earthly nature. Anyway I wanted to evoke some discomforting spookiness — conceive unearthly creatures while feeding digital transformations on what already evolved. Therefore I called this series “the phenomenons of denature”, also to pay a tribute to my professor Wacław Mejbaum, the head of the Institute of Philosophy in Humanistic Faculty of my university. Absolutely unique personality, worshiped by students for his disregard for any social conventions and non-conformism. Interested as much in philosophy as in surrealist poetry written mostly during boring scientific conferences, usually very surreal, full of linguistic and semantic experiments. Here is one of the poems from Świnia na sośnie (The Pig on the Pine Tree):
Żyła była królewna chińska. Jej ojciec, stary cesarz
kupił córeczce jeziorko z błękitnej porcelany.
Królewna hodowała w jeziorku śliczne złote rybki.
Przyszli Polacy, jeziorko rozbili, a rybki wyciągnęli,
usmażyli i zjedli.
Teraz królewna siedzi i płacze.
My translation:
There had lived a princes of China. Her father, the old emperor
bought her a lake made out of sky blue porcelain.
In the lake the princes was breeding lovely gold fishes.
Polish people came, they crushed the lake, and pulled out the fishes,
fried and ate them.
Now the princes is sitting and crying.
Mejbaum published a book titled Denatured Animals: an introduction to philosophical anthropology. I learned a lot from this genius mind of the hardcore Marxist (at this time, after collapse of the communism, it was extremely difficult to be a Marxist in Poland) and the philosopher of science. He was also dealing with the pain of existence with excessive amount of alcohol, proudly continuing all the traditions of Lwów — Warsaw school. If I owe him something, it is this ability to constantly contemplate the fact of being a specimen of the third subspecie of the chimpanzee. Hairless, running, sweating, junkie (all the differentia specifica) ape in shoes, with swollen cerebrum, neurophysiologically rewarded for eating sugar, having sex, fulfilling vendettas, but also recognizing patterns everywhere, with our giant organic neural networks.
In the video Lei also used some other experiment I did before, which is shaped by the sound, a beautiful one. The music which made me cry the first time I heard it. The cover of Time from the Inception soundtrack, performed by ThatCelloGuy, which is much better than the original.
Despite slight disappointment with these visuals, I still value the whole experience. At least I learnt how to create generative effects over video frames.
