I cannot figure out how to embed video any larger than this, I suggest watching this full screen.
Above is a primer that explains American Post War abstract art in terms of Star Wars (the two line up eerily well). This is part of the video that will be screened at the Philoctetes Center. I heard the score for this the first time today. I could not be more pleased. Hopefully Luke will post it as part of hisYear In MP3sproject, if and when he does I will link to it so we can all listen to it uncut.
UPDATE:
The screening went really well, and there was a fun question and answer about the project afterwards. Hyperalergic posted a very nice piece about the screening by Zach Cohen HERE.
I cannot figure out how to embed video any larger than this, I suggest watching this full screen.
This is an a "fair use valentine" created by the sound and video artist R. Luke DuBois. When I make my sequel to The Matrix (The Matrices - its going to be so cool) this is the imagery I want to use to replace the green code. In the meantime Luke is composing a score for my current video project, the episodic artist commentary Star Wars & Modernism.
On May 20th the composer R. Luke DuBois and the writer Colby Chamberlain will join me to discuss and screen three episodes (about 45 minutes of video) of an artist commentary I began working on this past fall. It’s a free event open to the public (details above, and here). The clip embedded above is an introduction that explains the project. It is a work-in-progress that will round out to be 14 or so episodes, each focusing on ten or so minutes of the original 1977 Star Wars film (A New Hope). I recently began collaborating with DuBois, who is providing an original score for the commentary. He explains his contribution to the project much better than I could ever hope to:
The soundtrack is constructed using the harmonies and melodies of John Williams’ orchestral score for Star Wars: A New Hope, mutated with the rhythms and keyboard performance practice of Philip Glass in his minimalist compositions from the 1970s.
The music is algorithmically constructed and takes the conceit of the mash-up into the realm of musical, rather than sonic, information space. In the mash-up, an audio artist takes multiple popular recordings and samples them both, overlaying them to create a third, hybrid track. In the music for this film, I decided to create a mash-up based not on sampling the recordings of John Williams and Philip Glass, but by subjecting their music to computer analysis to deconstruct the essential musical vocabulary of both composers so that I could blend them seamlessly into a new body of music.
The result is an algorithmic, aleatoric work for keyboard that evokes Star Wars without ever sampling it, sounds like Glass without sampling any, and perfectly suits the tone and subject matter of John's commentary.
This is a short mash up my friend Teddy Gage digitally altered for me. It is a snipet of footage taken from Robert Smithson's film Spiral Jetty. I asked Teddy to "Star Wars Kid" it for me. He digitally altered it just as the original footage of a kid goofing around with a broomstick was altered by countless anonymous animators by added light sabers effects.
FOr those of you unfamiliar with the original, this is Robert smithson filmed from above as he ran the length of his curling manmade jetty. Teddy has digitally inserted a light saber into Smithson's hand.
This was made as a test. It is a tangential bit from a larger video project I have been working on for the past few months.
I am posting it because I think its hilarious, but also as way to test my skills at posting video. Blogger has been fritzy for me lately. I am curious to see how this works. I am always interested in comments, but would appreciate comments on how this down loads, looks and sounds. If anyone has experience embedding video on Blogger, I am very open to suggestions.
If this works for well for enough of you I will post a sample of the larger project, which is an artist commentary called Star Wars and Modernism. I will screen a portion of the commentary in New York later this month.
The Sith are the bad guys in Star Wars. Darth Vader and the Emperor are Sith Lords. They are the Yin or “dark side” to the Jedi Yang.
What does the term Sith mean as it is used on this blog?
Beyond their place in the fictional universe of Star Wars, the Sith are a narrative element of a film made by a particular group of people in a particular time and place. Therefore the Sith have a very real social and political context. And it is this very real world idea that I am referring to in this blog:
Lucas and his crew were young Americans working together at the end of the Vietnam War and in the shadow of Watergate. In the parlance of that era’s youth, the Sith are “The Man.” They stand in for the corrupt authorities of the day as seen by the young people of the day. Lucas describes them as “Nixonian gangsters.”
And like Nixon, the Sith perfectly represent a particular strain of American authority: Cold Warriors. Not just the violence and paranoia of America’s anti-communist foreign policy, but their repressive and absolutist domestic policies: “Are you now, or have you ever been a member of the communist party?”
Even the world building efforts of the cold warriors were perfectly embodied by Lucas and his crew. The top-down Utopian art, architecture and urbanism of the Cold Warriors were elegantly re-imaged as the Deathstar.
The Sith are characterized by the same traits that identify the Cold Warriors: they want control; they use a fear of chaos to squash any and all dissent. Their solutions are over simplified and deny the importance of disorder and spontaneity.
In the realm of urban planning Robert Moses was a Sith.
Are Sith creatures of the 1960's and 1970's?
No. The decade long rule of NeoCons was an unmitigated Sith disaster and puristic and absolutist mindsets survive in architecture, art and urbanism under every imaginable rubric.
What does it mean when I use the term Jedi on this blog?
Just as the Sith have a real world context (see above FAQ) so do the Jedi. But just because I believe the Sith were inspired Cold Warrior anti-communists and Modernists, I do not mean to say that the Jedi were Post-Modernists and communists.
