Month: August 2011

Mnemovie : visual mnemonics for creative interactive video (research)

Mnemovie is the title of a project commenced in 2004 to investigate the precept of interactive video installation, developing ideas demonstrated in Pathscape (2000) and Strangers on the Land (1999). The experimental interactive system Mnemovie, uses simple gestures to interact with memory images and events recorded as moving images and sounds as a basis for hyperlinking between digital video files. A short movie was made in 2006 to explain some theory, by way of demonstration, go to: http://vimeo.com/36948956 . The system has been developed using practice-based research methods, rather than user-centred problem-solving design approaches. The difference is that the former is similar to an art making process, where the concept is developed directly through the practitioner’s practice, applying knowledge, experience, skills and sense of creative enquiry (Schön 1983). The approach was extended with knowledge gathered from related research found in publications, together with an observation and evaluation process conducted toward completion of the PhD research in 2008. For more details see Text; for a brief demonstration of the principles, go to: https://vimeo.com/36808922

2008

Shepherd’s Bush

1971
15 min

The film is available from Lux, London, and is also part of the Shoot Shoot Shoot DVD collection curated by Mark Webber. Taking re-found image of a patchwork of black and white confusion and working on it using the Debrie Printer neutral densities and aperture band, the resultant image is re-related into the environment of the cinema.
” …concerned with post-camera structuring. Again the range is wide, including systematic procedure in printing as in Shepherd’s Bush… the system is not ‘content’ to be ‘discovered’…a loop of film shot from a fast moving camera, presumably close to the ground, is repeatedly printed, each time with a change in the exposure, so that its visual quality alters in imperceptible stages from totally black to totally white, while the soundtrack, also a continuously repeated pattern, gets lower and lower in pitch. The systematic or structural aspect of this film is again partly directed towards the appreciation of duration through attention of minimal developments in the image.” – From Abstract Film and Beyond by Malcolm Le Grice, Studio Vista 1977.
” Shepherd’s Bush was a revelation. It was both true film notion and demonstrated an ingenious association with the film-process. It is the procedure and conclusion of a piece of film logic using a brilliantly simple device; the manipulation of the light source in the Film Co-op printer such that a series of transformations are effected on a loop of film material. From the start Mike Leggett adopts a relational perspective according to which it is neither the elements or the emergent whole but the relations between the elements (transformations) that become primary through the use of logical procedure. All of Mike Leggett’s films call for special effort from the audience, and a passive audience expecting to be manipulated will indeed find them difficult for they seek a unique correspondence; one that calls for real attention, interaction, and anticipation/correction, a change for the audience from being a voyeur to being that of a participant.” – Roger Hammond
“Shepherd’s Bush (Mike Leggett, 1971) is a startling black and white abstraction, advancing from the deepest black – through frenetic gray-scale contrasts – to a luminous white, in its several repetitive loops. Soundtrack is a pleasingly electronic burbling possibly produced with an early EMS synthesiser….” Jim Knox, Senses of Cinema, (‘Shoot Shoot, Shoot’ at the 51st Melbourne International Film Festival (2002).

 

 

Camera Null series

The Camera Null series use a scanner, not a camera to capture the images; these are digitally assembled into the frame of the picture. Unified in this way, the tangibility of the material components move from a utilitarian domain to an exotic context created from unexpected juxterposition of scale and setting. (MORE to follow)

2005

Bristol Bands Newsreel 1980

The film was commissioned by South West Arts as a community collaboration with some of the bands active in Bristol, UK in 1980. It was screened as part of a rock film season at the Bristol Arts Centre (seen at the very end, on the stage of which some fans perform). The 27-min full version – is now available here – made on Super 8mm film with sync sound and edited on video, it includes the music of the bands: Apartment, Art Objects, Black Roots, Blurt, Exploding Seagulls, Brian Damage, Glaxo Babies, Slow Twitch Fibres, Shoes for Industry, Stingrays, Talisman, TV Eyes, Untouchables, Various Artists.

Following completion of the project, the filmmakers prepared a report for the Arts Association (see in left column), on their experiences working with the community – the musicians and the cinema – using the often under-used super 8mm single sound system, making recommendations for better integration of the funder’s policies and filmmaker innovations.

A film by Mike Gifford and Mike Leggett.

1980
27 mins