Mallory and I have reached our first checkpoint in the Oh What War video system development. To the anachronistic surveillance system, I have added the following features:

-Detritus selector: This is a jpg player that inserts 'detritus' jpgs (pre-selected war themed paraphernalia; and sometimes not*) into the inter channel distortion. The idea is that like a 'radio tooth' our system is picking up some not-necessarily-random static. The selectors flash each detritus image for 1/10th of a second- however the detritus (when it is on) lasts for a full second- so while you might not be able to name/recognize/remember all the images (they appear on top of a wobbly scramble) you certainly realize that you saw something. Not like we need any more subliminal garbage!

HOWEVER I read somewhere recently that narcissists are more likely to read meaning into random symbols in their lives... Is our system a narcissist? (Just like mommy?) Before we get totally way off course- I am just injecting the words from the script as images in the interstices. There are: tanks, scribbles, sausages, rib cages... sometimes thematically: severed arms, severed heads, severed legs, severed torsos. And then linguistically (homo-nyms/phones) a spade, a spade, a spade... an idea stolen from more than one poet.

Since there are so many landscapes in the monitors/ afterall, the system is keeping an eye on the landscapes in the four directions, therefore there must be an instrument for digging into them.

stay tuned to hear about the unfortunate

-Singing/talking faceless man: our World War I pacman

Zbigniew

After consulting with Hal, I have begun work with the matrox- a device which is aptly named since the 'i' in matrix is stretched to an 'o' just as the device creates a stretched display of 2400x800 , allowing me to serve all the video from one stage in Isadora and develop the show on my laptop.
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In Oh What War, the first thing that we are preparing is an anachronistic/unreliable surveillance system. Mostly the system shows horizons. I have been using horizon images from No Man's Land. There were initially four horizons representing the four geographical directions. The horizons can be characterized by the following attributes:

1)The dead tree

2)desolation

3) Gas pipes

4) barbed wire

Hal said in an email to me:
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Interpretive Patching

I have started to talk with Hal about patching. A large part of my theatre video work up to this point has utilized patches that themselves form some sort of symbol or relevant shape to the piece. In europe and at the wooster group, I have worked utlizing an organic process; often I try to mimic or reflect the shape of the set (or something else related to the piece) or the narrative of the piece in my physical and virtual video patches. A good patch should look like the piece that it's a part of.

For me this kind of patching serves two very practical psychological functions. 1)it makes the video elements an unquestionable integral part and 2) it helps the video designer and operator remember how the patch looks, what it is for and where it is going....

So far the video system in Oh What War has been like a system scavenged off dead bodies- a part of the makeshift character of our old set for Culturemart... a bit of an anti-system, a series of tvs, projectors and monitors and one camera that was not centrally controlled nor completely interconnected.

I am looking for the best ways right now to clump the equipment together into organ-like entities and then figure out how they relate to eachother. I am looking for a closed system that will be the shape from which all our necessary video gestures will be possible/ attainable.

I think the shape of this patch will be disturbing like a buried octopus.

z

Hello and apologies for our late arrival on the blog. I (Mallory Catlett) will make a brief entry here about the project (OH WHAT WAR) and then I will leave it to Z (Zbigniew Bzymek) to inform you on the details. I'm the director (Mallory) and he (Zbigniew) is the video artist. 
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OH WHAT WAR is a mixed media theater piece in development at HERE
as part of HARP. The most recelt performance used 3 video projectors and 3
surveillance monitors to stream video for an 1 1/2hour performance.
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