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China’s Synthetic Times

 

“Synthetic Times” is the largest New Media exhibition ever mounted in China and will run during the 2008 Beijing Olympics at the National Museum of Art China. I had the opportunity to film the curator of the exhibition, Mr. Zhang Ga when he recently spoke at the MOMA in New York City, and presented the curatorial background of the exhibition as well as the development of New Media in China and the World.

The “Synthetic Times” exhibition is a truly international event with the participation of American New Media thought leaders MOMA, the New School and Eyebeam as well as several European new media organizations. The magnitude of this exhibition and its impact on the development of Chinese New Media is certain to be great.

I’m happy and privileged to have been able to catch a bit of it for you. Soon to be posted videos regarding “Synthetic Times” include an interview with Barbara London, MOMA’s new media curator and her role curating an overview of the history of video art on behalf of MOMA for the Synthetic Times exhibition and Fan Dian, director of the National Museum of Art China’s presentation of the state of comtemporary new media in China.

How the Piece was Shot

I spent a fair amount of time playing with pixels on this piece. With what started out as damage control (no light and a subject located a few football fields away from the camera). Knowing that I would have colourful “B Roll” footage composed of stills of various media pieces in the show, I wanted to tweak out the head shot of Zhang Ga to visually hold its own. The background of the shot was a fuzzy, pixelated, grey-green soup and there wasn’t enough contrast to mask it out.

My Idea Creative!

With no way to hide the background muck and overall low-light, no-contrast look of the shot, I wanted to try to embrace the Yuck, and amplify and shape it into something interesting.

I zoomed in to the shot to tightly frame the speaker. This blew up the pixelated distortion. I increased the contrast and sharpened the image to bring out and define the pixels. I applied various luminescence-based colour correction to colourize the rogue bright little blips. With the background now a buzzing little kinetic garden of electro noise, I wanted to frame and contain the image against a background of clean clear video “normalicy”.

Humanity has expressed a long standing spiritual need which transcends wide tracks of geography, culture and faith to put circles around head shots. I’ve confirmed this by staring at Buddhas in South East Asia, Medieval manuscripts in Europe and Icons in Central Europe over the course of several years.

So pop on a fat circle mask I did! I added several thin spinning circle motion graphics on top of the circle mask to have at least one clean, slick element to contain the image (stock stuff from Final Cut “Motion”).

Now for the fun part. I set up various combinations of fisheye, selective focus and vignette filters to add direction and motion to the tweaked video noise. This served to keep Zhang Ga’s relatively stable and the background noise move outward away from him. Within each area of colour, contrast, and warp distortion I created around ten variations of the filter set so that the shot would look basically similar and yet would be consistently morphing over time via keyframe transitions and fades.

Originally, I had the “Head in Bubble” shot drifting all over the screen. Kindly and keen-eyed colleagues let me know it looks liked hell and recommended that I lose some bubble motion and let the B roll go full screen more often. Wise advice, this exhibition is massive and there is a wealth of images from the hundreds of individual art objects and installations.

The Toolkit

I used a combination of:

Final Cut - sharpen, RGB balance, min max and 3 way colour corrector,

Magic Bullet Looks - vignette and color

Eureka - contrast, people tweaker, silk stocking new,

Joe’s Filters - soft spot focus, chroma glow

I composed the score in Reason and Logic Audio. Dialogue clean up in Sound Soap and Protools with “waves” plug in set and final mix in Protools

Stephen Dirkes is a film maker and composer from Toronto, Canada. Currently residing in NYC, Stephen's creative interests lay in New Media Art, VJing and Art Films.