I made a series of fictional advertisements for my final project in Interactive Text last semester . I wanted to stress simplicity in design and concept. Here is one of them… I took the footage of St. Basille in Russia during a trip two summers ago (you can see Sara in the foreground) and the goldfish is ye ole stock footage.
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Eventually there will be four of these videos, each with multiple locations from an area (all locations in the above video are on the East Side of Providence). Each video will be of a different trumpet pitch and the videos will be installed in a room (four walls) and played in a loop (not too loud), forming a constantly morphing and never (practically) repeating chord.
I finally saw Wall E… Yeah, I guess it’s cute. And ok, robots can fall in love, and humans are destined to become vegetative blobs of jointless polygons who’s ancestors (actual people) have long since overused our precious earth, retreating to a cruise spaceship of seemingly variable size to resume a course of blobification that is unexpectedly disrupted only by multiple levels of anthrophomorphism which effectively coat the search for minimalist marvels with just the right amount of salesmanship, successfully creating the latest in a run of confrontational computer ads for the growing number of people who seem to really really care… eh. 6 fingers (out of 10).
I love stop motion animation (a very amatuer stop motion animator myself) and Pes is one of the best around. His animations are short and usually pretty self contained… simple, but humorous and brilliantly executed. He has a knack for finding the perfect object replacements to animate and his sound design is always spot on. Everything on his site is well worth checking out (Roof Sex is a classic and his newest Western Spaghetti is amazing too).
Somehow, I was a little late in discovering this guy, but he has quickly become a favorite. Arvo Pärt is a classical composer from Estonia who writes somewhat minimalist music generally for large ensembles and choirs. I’m not in love with his choir music but his orchestral scores produce some of the most beautiful sounds I’ve heard.
Below is one of my favorite Pärt pieces called “Cantus In Memoriam Benjamin Britten“. Not only is it an absolutely stunning piece of music but its construction is so transparent and simple. At its core, it’s an overlapping descending A minor scale which after time resolves to an A minor triad… amazing.
This recording is by the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra and the piece starts very soft… but let it play through, or download it and listen to it when you are on the subway… that would be fantastic.
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