Rise Industries

A little light reading

People at work kept asking me how many pages I read in a day, since I often spend my lunchtime reading a hefty novel. So I put this handy info-graphic together.

A little tree graph

A little something I learned today on a hike up to Sturtevant Falls.

Let’s Get Bloody Video!

Hey! Happy New Year to you alls.. been on a bit of a blogging hiatus, as I am sure you can tell by now. Something to do with a new job, new house, new year, and all that. But more about that later. For now, I got video.

I just finished editing my music video for State Shirt‘s song Let’s Get Bloody, which is on the recent album of the same name. Have I mentioned the album is stellar? Yes, its worth dragging out that ol’ word for. So anyway, I have been talking with Ethan of State Shirt for years about making a video for him, and we finally pulled it together and starting shooting stuff a couple of months ago. Due to the new job and all that its been sort of slow, working on it a weekend here, an evening there, but now its done. I shot most of it, and my fantastic wife Michele helped me out with a second camera for one of the shoots.
I had been wanting to do something with these statues… I drive past the vendor every day heading in to work.. so here we go! Also, its in HD, so hit that full screen button down there.

100/10∆8: Rise Industries – Opens Tonight!

After a crazy couple of weeks packed with making new work, the show is finally up and ready for the public. Well, almost. There is still the matter of sound to sort out today, and a shelf/plumb bob situation to figure out. Oh yeah, and I might move a computer into the lab to show a couple of digital videos. But, plenty of time right? We got at least 7 hours to get it all in there.

The opening is tonight, and the show will be up all next week.
In case you like that sort of thing, here is a link to our press release.
And here is the Institute of Cultural inquiry main site.

RECEPTION:
June 11; 7-9 pm (if you are running late, come anyway, we will probably run later)
Free to the public; suggested $5 donation

LOCATION:
1512 S. Robertson Blvd. , Los Angeles, CA 90035
(two blocks south of Pico); street parking available

The work is mostly collaborative in nature, so many of the works share authorship across the Rise Industries membership. Contributors are:

Jeremy J. Quinn
Michele Jaquis
Sarah Rushford
Nicole Jaquis
John Kim
Boris Margolin
Tim Devin
Michael Feldman

with additional drawings provided by Ashley Moore

After Sarah had to return to Boston (sniff, we miss you!) Mike Feldman came by to scope things out, work on some texts, and plan his contribution. I also went around town shooting photos of Tim’s Mappy Facts – created about LA just for the show!

Some final videos were exported, the work got hung and photographed, I built some little foam-core surrounds for a couple of things, and finally figured out how to get my Quartz Composer patch into video. Used a work-around for that, still need to figure out how to export directly.

As the ICI staff wrapped up brochures, we prepped our print for the back of them – a lino-cut with text that summed up all our works pretty well. We spent last night printing these, so you get a free print as part of the brochure!

I got to get back to my final tasks – hope to see you there tonight!

All of us at Rise Industries would like to heartily thank the staff at ICI that we worked with throughout the residency – it was a real pleasure to work with you all, to have the run of the space, and basically be supported in doing whatever it was we wanted to do. So, Lise, Elaina, Gina, Jojo, Steve and especially Anna (I must have bothered her with a question about every half hour over a period of almost two weeks), thanks so much for letting us into your space!

Rise Industries at the Institute of Cultural Inquiry – Day 7

Yesterday was a blur. We got into the space around 11 (Michele and Sarah) and Noon (Jeremy, after working 4 hours on other projects) and set about wrapping up some of the projects so we could start laying things out in the gallery. Technical difficulties ruled the early afternoon – trying to get video from animated gifs proved problematic. There seems to be no getting my Quartz Composer files out of that software and into video. Michele crashed her whole Final Cut suite and had to reinstall. But these little problems were not disasters, just challenges.
I put the whole video operation on pause for a while and went back to one of my globe projection drawings, translating from one projection view of the world into another projection drawing, layered and shifted. It is basically a globular projection of the world with a cylindrical (?) projection overlaid on it. But I drew the cylindrical projection in eight segments instead of twelve, so I had to interpolate the continents to work with the new divisions. I went back to that off and on over the course of the day and finally got it done by the time we left.

John Kim came by yesterday, and explained to Michele how his New Time (also known as Metric Standard Time) works, and how we can convert from our times zones (ICI time, Pacific Time, Eastern Time, India Time) to his Metric time. Its a little complicated, but she went back over all our time cards (we have been punching in and out each time we go to ICI) and filled in the Metric times for each stamp. We also had a skype visitation by Boris Margolin, who Sarah toured around the space via laptop. Boris and John’s New Time App was installed on Michele’s iphone, and tomorrow (today?) we will figure out how that one will be presented.

Several videos got output to DVD finally. Two simultaneous walks – in Munich and LA. A rotating lens reflecting the ICI courtyard canopy, two Foucault’s pendulums, again in Munich and LA, two days and two nights in Boston and LA, two cross country trips, and finally the stereoscopic videos made it onto DVD. There was a lot of testing projections for the 3d stereoscopic photographs, and we finally got just the right method of showing those.

We took a short break for dinner and got back to work. By the time we punched out, we had been there around 12 hours.

Here are some images from the past couple of days…

Hot Town at 323 Projects

And now for something ALL of our readers can check out, no matter where you are located. I have a few experimental audio tracks in this great audio art show at 323 Projects, which is a phone number gallery hosting audio art, created and run by Tucker Neel. So all you have to do to listen, is dial (323) 843-4652!

(323) 843-4652!!!! (323) 843-4652!!!! (323) 843-4652!!!! (323) 843-4652!!!! (323) 843-4652!!!! (323) 843-4652!!!! (323) 843-4652!!!!

Call now! Call later! Call sixteen times a day! Serious, do that, because you will get a different artist every 15 minutes so there will be a new piece to listen to each time you call. There is also a schedule posted, if you want to try and hit a specific artist.

Here is a link to the schedule.

Check out 323 Projects’ web site for a list of all the artists involved, and links to their own websites.

Rise Industries at the Institute of Cultural Inquiry – Day 4

Today Sarah Rushford arrived and moved in to the Lab with us. Getting cozy in there. She and Michele did a tour of the facilities, and then hunted around the physical archive for some optical toys to play around with. They pulled some opaque projectors, a Super 8 Cartridge Projector (!), and some stereoscope viewers and slides. They started working on stereoscopic video… hope to get some of that working tomorrow.
I stopped by the art supply store to get a big beam compass so I could complete my Graticule drawing – the arc centers were going way beyond any tool I had around and the string trick wasn’t so precise. I also picked up some copper leaf. Will see where that ends up. Ran into some problems while drawing latitude – apparently you cant divide an arc into 9 segments using geometry. I spend a while stuck on that and did some research, then resorted to measuring the arc with a string, pulling the string straight to get a line, and dividing that line. Then I used that spacing to divide up the arc (transferred by divider). Whew. Drawing the latitude arcs is turning out to be slow, so I hope to finish that tomorrow.

Last night, after getting home from ICI, I started messing around with Quartz Composer and a plug-in for it called Rutt Etra 2.0.1, which is a digital version of the video synthesizer of the same name from the 1970s. It will basically create 3D scan-line renderings of images, with the Z-axis heights based on how bright parts of the image are. Took me a long time to figure out the simple syntax for Composer, and get anything to come out of it – but then, it was super easy to manipulate once running. Not sure yet what I will do with this effect, but I like it.
That last image there is based on the video I posted yesterday, of shadows on the fountain sculpture.

Rise Industries at the Institute of Cultural Inquiry – Day 3

Michele and I spent most of the day working in the lab at ICI today, and doing a bit of research. I pulled a few books about longitude, mapping and a great science text called The Study of The Physical World that had some explanations of the different map projections of the world. I decided to try drawing one of these, using only a compass, divider and straightedge (no measuring). Actually, I wanted to draw only the graticule – the grid of latitude and longitude. Naturally, I started with the easiest to construct by hand – The Globular Projection. It’s basically two hemisphere views (as seen in old Atlases and earth science texts) laid out in circles tangent to each other. All was going great, until I had to figure out how to find the centers of the lines of longitude. Took me a bit to learn how to construct an arc that will pass through three given points, but once I had that down, it was on with the repetition. I still have the latitude lines to lay out tomorrow. I am hoping my precision gets better as this goes on – my lines were pretty fuzzy, and I had to improvise a couple of long compasses for the center points that went way off the page. String worked best.

Around late afternoon I noticed the light coming in through the trees was pretty amazing, so I went around the place shooting short videos wherever the shadows landed. Will work them into something else down the road I am sure.

Michele spent the day editing video that was shot over ten years ago on two different cross country trips (flying W->E in July 1999 and driving E->W in June 2000). She also remade the timecards to include a column for John Kim’s Metric Standard Time. We’ll have to wait for John to arrive to figure out the conversion.

Rise Industries at the Institute of Cultural Inquiry – Day 1

Over the next few weeks the whole crew at Rise Industries will be participating in a residency (some in person, some via mail/skype/phone/email) and show over at the Institute of Cultural Inquiry in west Los Angeles. We will be tracking the development of our various projects and excursions here of course.
Michele and I will start inhabiting their lab and gallery spaces this week, and get down to doing some research and interventions. Later this week Sarah Rushford will join us there, and we will be organizing information flows to and from the rest of our membership in order to get them involved. This whole undertaking will be experimental in a few different ways, especially as an experiment in modes of collaboration and attempts at cross-pollination of ideas. We shall see how it goes.

In the meantime, I have been tossing together some ideas and images related to our vague research directions of time and distance.

Since the Earth rotates at a steady rate of 360° per day, or 15° per hour, there is a direct relationship between time and longitude.

The vernal equinox itself precesses very slowly in a westward direction relative to the fixed stars, completing one revolution every 26,000 years approximately.

During the time needed by the Earth to complete a rotation around its axis (a sidereal day), the Earth moves a short distance (approximately 1°) along its orbit around the sun.

Therefore, after a sidereal day, the Earth still needs to rotate a small additional angular distance before the sun reaches its highest point. A solar day is, therefore, nearly 4 minutes longer than a sidereal day.

Locations (to date):

Munich, Germany

WGS84 48° 8′ 0″ N, 11° 34′ 0″ E
48.133333, 11.566667

Los Angeles, CA, USA

WGS84 34° 3′ 0″ N, 118° 15′ 0″ W
34.05, -118.25

Somerville, MA, USA

WGS84 42° 23′ 15″ N, 71° 6′ 0″ W
42.3875, -71.1

Boston, MA, USA
WGS84 42° 21′ 28″ N, 71° 3′ 42″ W
42.357778, -71.061667

Haridwar, India

WGS84 29° 57′ 36″ N, 78° 9′ 36″ E
29.96, 78.16

Wabi Savvy at Jaus

Before I get into this post for real, let me just say I have a backlog of photos from many great art shows and other events from the past year – and for whatever reason (something to do with either managing an apartment building project, or working on a play or two, or getting some installations done or some other such nonsense) I have not gotten around to posting anything about them at all. So, I am going to try and get this archive of stuff out into teh interwebs where people can actually see it. Since its been awhile for many of these, I may just put up my photos, or try and write some brief things about them. Either way, if you want more info on any, post in the comments and I will get to it.

With that out of the way, this one is more recent than some: the Wabi Savvy group show at Jaus gallery in West LA – Ichiro Irie’s fantastic little space on a suburban street across from the rock climbing gym. Wabi Savvy is a satellite exhibition of Gateway Japan Organized by Torrance Art Museum, and features over a dozen contemporary Japanese artists with the tag line “The image you already have of the warped Japanese sensibilities are probably all true”. The show opened right after the recent earthquake, then tsunami, then nuclear disaster in Japan – so Japan’s plight was already on everyone’s mind at the show which may have colored our perception of the works presented. The show ran from March 18 to May 1, 2011.

A very coherent show across many media, I found several standout works among the small collection.