Owen Mundy

VIDEOGUD 2011

VIDEOGUD SPRING 2011
Kultur i länet
Uppsala, Sweden

A collaboration between the county councils of Gävleborg, Uppsala, and Dalarna to show video art in public places – for example in libraries, schools and hospitals.

Arts Gävleborg – Video Room

Theme

The theme for this spring’s movies is the human relationship with the city and countryside. Whether the works in the spring program takes place on the coast, in town or in front of a waterfall as they all have in common that they are asking questions about how humans project the feelings and sentiments of the phenomena in nature and in the city.

Common to the five works is that the artists relate to the province or city as the work takes place in. The city or the countryside is not given to the works but its influence is being investigated.

The program begins with Owen Mundy film “Through A Glass Darkly” in which what we normally see as the wings – the landscape now is the focus, Mundy works followed by Hanna Ljungh settlement and dialogue with a waterfall. In Ulu Braun’s film “Atlantic Garden” meet people, landscapes and nature, reality and fiction.

The program concludes with two films “Zwischen” and “The Perfect Hour” which takes place in cities, one in Berlin, the others in Stockholm. In both works, you can choose to see the city as a backdrop or motaktör the main character.

Still from Through A Glass Darkly

Through A Glass Darkly

(translated from Swedish)

Through A Glass Darkly is a remix of the landscape of popular films depicting war. Eerily quiet, but also beautiful, creates images at a contrast between stillness and chaos, between beauty and destruction.

The films are chronologically compiled, ie. first clip is from a film about American War of Independence followed landscapes and scenes from movies depicting war and conflicts in the world until today. Taken out of context becomes important landscapes charged in themselves, while they remind us of nature as a battleground. Examples of some films that used in the work are The Patriot, Gone with the Wind, The Thin Red Line and Apocalypse Now.

Through A Glass Darkly is originally an English translation of a verse in the Bible’s Korinterbrev, in Swedish reads: “Now we see in a dim way, such as in a mirror, but then we shall see face to face.” Stanza, Breakthrough A Glass Darkly, has been used in the English translation of Ingmar Bergman’s film “Through a Glass Darkly.”

—Andreas Bjersby
Kultur i länet
Projektledare konst

Poster

Program

3 Feb – 24 Feb
Through A Glass Darkly
Owen Mundy, USA

24 Feb – 17 Mar
How to Civilize A Waterfall
Hanna Ljungh, Sweden

17 Mar – 7 Apr
Atlantic Garden
Ulu Braun, Germany

7 Apr – 28 Apr
Zwischen
Diego Aguilló, Germany

28 Apr – 19 May
The Perfect Hour
Niclaz Erlingmark, Sweden

Display Stations

Gävleborg: Sandviken Public Libraries, Silvanum Gävle, Voxna Valley High School, Show Bilbliotek, Gävle Hospital, Hudiksvall Library, Workshops Port Hedland.

Uppsala: Uppsala University Hospital, Formation Center Jan Fridegård Bålsta, Enköping Hospital, Tierps clinic.

Dalarna County: Dalarna Museum, Falun Public Library, Old Meken Smederevo, Hedemora Public Library’s Cultural Right, Vansbro library.

Through A Glass Darkly (full version)

In February Through A Glass Darkly will be shown at 16 different public locations (libraries, hospitals and community halls) in Sweden. More details to follow.

In the meantime, I just posted the full version online. Enjoy.

Convert NTSC video to PAL with smooth motion

When converting NTSC digital video to PAL the pixel aspect ratio needs to change from 720 x 480 (NTSC) to 720 x 576 (PAL). Depending on your project the more important problem is the transition from 29.97 (NTSC) frames per second to 25 (PAL).

I found Final Cut Pro and QuickTime both convert 29.97 to 25 frames per second by cutting the five extra frames to make it fit. This results in a loss of temporal resolution, making motion in the footage jerk and skip because the frames which created the illusion of motion are missing.

There are a few commercial applications that can convert NTSC to PAL with smooth motion, but I followed advice on this forum which suggested using Compressor for the standards conversion:

Export an NTSC Quicktime movie from Final Cut Pro without compression
In Compressor, select a DV PAL preset
Turn on Frame controls and set resizing and retiming to “better” or “best.”
Run Compressor. This took >3 hours for 12 minutes of uncompressed footage.

This should give you a 720 x 576 (PAL CCIR 601) with 25 frames per second. Finally, in DVD Studio Pro make sure you choose PAL before you import any footage, and leave all the regions selected which is the default.

UNIX: List open files

Can’t eject a CD or unmount an external hard drive on your mac because of this error: The disc is in use and could not be ejected. Try quitting applications and try again.?

This UNIX command reports a list of all open files and applications that opened them. Open Terminal and replace the name of your volume below to test.

$ lsof | grep /Volumes/media/

Thanks

Addendum: Here’s an even more helpful command: eject the disk with UNIX when the GUI won’t allow it.

$ diskutil eject [Mount Point|Disk Identifier|Device Node]

Oh, and a final tip nestled in this addition: If you have a space in the name (for example you had two disks mounted named “backup” and OSX named the second one to mount “backup 1”) then you can easily reference the name (or any file or directory name with a space) with a backslash which “escapes” the character. Typing the first few characters and then type the tab key will do it automatically.

$ diskutil eject /Volumes/backup\ 1/

Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK) and Google Person Finder

Last weekend I took part in Random Hacks of Kindness an international hackathon dedicated to creating useful systems to respond to critical global challenges. I met with other programmers at the Betahaus in Berlin and worked with Tim Schwartz and Mikkel Gravgaard on Google Person Finder a searchable database of missing persons that helps people find loved ones during disasters. It was used during the 2010 Haiti and Chilean Earthquakes and is developed by volunteers and employees of Google.

Photo by Flickr user rhokberlin

Photo by Flickr user nblr

Give Me My Data and exporting mutual friends

On the one-year anniversary of the beginning of Give Me My Data I’m very happy to announce that you can now export your friends and your mutual friends from facebook using two new formats. Both of the data formats are geared towards making graphs by displaying objects and their relationships. Needless to say, this is the most often requested feature since the official beta launch in April 2010. See below for more information

The DOT language

DOT is a plain text graph description language and can be rendered using a variety of layout applications like Graphviz or Tulip.

This example (saved as a plain text file with the .dot extension)

graph G
{
	a -- b -- c;
	b -- d;
}

Produces something like this

Python / Nodebox 1.0

The other file format is also for visualizing relationships. You can copy and paste the contents into a plain text file saved with a .py extension and open it in Nodebox, a Mac application that uses Python to create 2D visuals. Learn more about creating graphs in Nodebox.

Here’s an example file. My mutual friends exported from Facebook…

Review of “Python: Visual QuickStart Guide (2nd edition)”

I have to admit I had my doubts about this book. I have not been impressed with Visual QuickStart Guides in the past. I respect the idea, of presenting only essential information in an easy-to-understand introductory manner, but that was rarely the case in previous experiences. Usually I found them to be a mixture of non-essential information that was not presented in a manner that would be good for those new to the subject.

That being said, their Python (2nd edition) breaks with their past. So far, I have almost consistently found it to be concise and to the point regarding an introduction to Python and programming languages in general. The examples are relevant and work accordingly. While I normally head to O’Reilly for the in-depth look at a language, this book is a great starting point.

One note and criticism; The examples using input() are flawed for users with Python <3 (most of us). You have to use raw_input() in place of it, although the book does not point this out.

Germany and Google Street View

This week I have been enjoying the blurred images of German buildings whose owners have chosen to opt-out of Google Street View. Infamous moments in the country’s history have led Germans to take privacy very seriously; especially when it comes to information about their residences. Unlike the United States, where data privacy is an opt-out option, Germany law states that, “citizens must opt-in to have their data collected in any way.” (1). In fact, there is a document detailing the rights of the “data subject” in the German Federal Data Protection Act which serves “to protect the individual against his right to privacy being impaired through the handling of his personal data.”

An even more powerful gesture are the very public images that have resulted from this protection. While they serve a specific function—to obscure identifying aspects of buildings, faces, etc.—they also communicate very effectively the message that individuals should have the right to decide how their data is used. This gets to the heart of the Give Me My Data app—to prompt this sort of discussion. It is then ironic that Google, a company whose revenue is based almost completely on advertising opportunities made possible by aggregating and re-representing data, has inadvertently brought us this message.

I was excited to find my own apartment building in Berlin has been removed.