In 1999 or so, editor Berin Golonu invited me to write an article for ART WEEK's issue on Surveillance. This was published in ART WEEK 31, No. 9, 2000.

THE ARTIST IS WATCHING BACK
    By Owen O'Toole
    Since Sony's introduction of the video Portapak in 1968, artists have been exploring ways in which video, so often aesthetically linked to the commercial complex of television production, can actually express the personal, the poetic, the sculptural and the political. Video is unique from film in its immediacy; the tape can be rewound and viewed instantly after recording, then recorded over again, unlike film which preserves a one-time record of events and must be chemically developed. Video recording is particularly well-suited to the long watch of documentary coverage, while film has been used more often to record and add cinematic flourish to premeditated drama or to rigorous plastic montage.
    A fascinating use of the video apparatus, something noted right off by artists and business interests, is what is called "closed-circuit television." The camera serves almost as an intercom, connected by wire to a distant television or monitor for viewing. No recording unit is necessary, just a camera and a monitor. This was seized by the business world as a marvelous security device and the era of surveillance video was born. Artists have used television's closed-circuit potential since that beginning. An amazing aspect of our market-culture is that these mass-produced tele-envisioning machines have gotten out into the hands of so many creative people. While the security-state minded world of business and finance viewed their surveillance apparatus as protection from external, or internal employee threats (and installed it everywhere), artists have elegantly used video's reflexive properties for self-portraiture; it has proven a medium with a capacity to be every bit as beautiful as painting (Mary Lucier, Bill Viola). The artist finds wonderful use for a machine which otherwise is used to blend, chop and grind.
    Ray Beldner, primarily a sculptor and installation artist, has done a number of works commenting on corporate uniformity. Surveillance appears as one aspect of the new urban landscape in which we have come to accept a man-made or mirror image of the world as the totality of our relations with nature. Beldner cleverly clusters channels of closed-circuit video beside monitors playing back prerecorded material to multiply and confuse the sense of live action. He also curated On The Money, a show in which artists altered legal tender, raising issues of "who is watching or reporting," since defacing money is illegal. Beldner's sewing of dollar bills into a sack to carry horse dung is a clear editorial statement, hopefully supported by the First Amendment. Other Beldner installations find racks of business suits standing for populations of office-commuting, white-collar workers. One popular piece, Converse/Confer/Conceit, has pigeon cages built above suit racks, allowing pigeon guano to paint the shoulders of the drab uniforms, revitalizing them. The effects of a society of surveillance are bound tightly to the technology.
    Of course, video cameras have become expert witnesses in cases against overly violent security forces (Rodney King). Even more so than film, the video camera gives anyone the power of being the "roving reporter," stirring up dirt or just being in the right place at the right time. Some strange contradictions are at hand, in which utopian possibilities of unfettered creativity and self-awareness meet seemingly opposed notions of "big brother watching," the dystopian present of a market-driven planet as viewed through TV-Darwinism, and the artist is watching back.
    Kim Trang's videotape Ocularis: Eye Surrogates serves as a miniature history of surveillance in a mere twenty-one minutes. Trang set up a 1-800 number and invited the public to call in episodes of surveillance from their lives, then wove those voices together with a variety of mundane video material, everyday camcorder shots slowed down or shot from above to simulate surveillance-mode, including footage of driving and waving at friends in another car (who also have a camcorder handy!). "Surveillance is kind of funny because it creates anxiety and boredom simultaneously. The searching gaze is anxious because surveillance is a form where one watches for something to go wrong. But it's also stultifying watching monotonous footage of real-time video," state the voice-overs. The tape is an argument for the basic joys of the video camera while also carrying several warnings on the box: Always have camcorder ready in case of imminent disaster!
    I think that a definition of art could be 'paying attention.'
    --John Cage
    Since 1984, Orwell's prophetic year, surveillance has increasingly been the subject-content of video artists' work. In 1987, Branda Miller and Deborah Irmas curated an extensive exhibit at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions titled SURVEILLANCE. The show was a major survey of such work and presented videotapes, photographs and installations. Miller expressed the purpose of the show as "stimulating the viewer to look beyond the fetishistic examination of the technology itself in favor of the multifaceted information gathering process' greater implications." The show was international in scope and featured many artists, including John Baldessari, Louis Hock, Martha Rosler and Michael Klier. The catalog even included a Freedom of Information Act kit, with a form and instructions on how to obtain FBI files.
    With the advent and growth of cable television, Americans--those who watch the tube--have been fed a diet of image-content which demands more and more of the same, feeding a voyeuristic syndrome which has peaked in the confrontation and exhibition of daytime talk shows like "Sally Jesse Raphael" and "Jerry Springer." MTV's "The Real World" plugged into the fever for so-called "reality TV" which now harvests cash crop with "Survivor" and "Big Brother" (though locking a group of strangers in a house, or island, and observing them like rats, or watching them eating rats seems a rather forced hand of reality). The blossoming Internet has also absorbed its weight of this surveillance-exhibition culture drift. Eyeball cameras and CU-See-Me software have turned college kids in dorm rooms into cyberspace celebrities available for viewing 24-hours-a-day. Charge it to your VISA and help pay my college tuition. Thank you!
    Video art has finally been entering the museum canon with big shows such as Seeing Time (selections from the Kramlich collection) at SFMOMA, and of course, Nam June Paik's Guggenheim show in New York, which may have been the art event of the year. In 1999, the M. H. de Young Museum invited curator Glen Helfand and artists to examine the museum from the inside out in an exhibition titled Museum Pieces. "The artists and I were, outside of practical restrictions, given an impressive amount of free reign. We scrambled through the attic, poked into files, gained access to security cameras, and navigated the internal bureaucracies," states Helfand in his voice-over narrative for the Museum Pieces video produced by artists Sergio De La Torre and Julio Morales. An installation by De La Torre and Morales that was included in the exhibition, mixed active surveillance video on an elegant rear-screen sculpture, making fun of the surveillance pre-occupation of institutions while offering up its aestheticised future.
    San Francisco and its southern Silicon Valley are at ground zero for the testing and questioning of this new media. Micro-technology develops and is used to support moving-image art in museums and galleries at just the time when we begin to move away from image in general. Steve Seid, curator of video at UC Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive, spoke of "a surveillance that doesn't necessarily involve moving images." For instance, Seid talked about a recent computer surveillance program called Spector: "Spector is more along the lines of where things are going. A lot of surveillance is displaced out of the image-world that we tend to think of. It's going towards the informational rather than the image, collating more and more data about everyone. It's more about consumption than policing." We've become trained through media saturation to police ourselves. "The kind of thing Safeway does when you belong to their club. They not only know what you buy, but when you do. Analysis gets into finer and finer detail, data becomes a (virtual) image of you. They no longer need an image or picture."
    The Bureau of Inverse Technology is a collective of artists working in close critique with science and technology. The videotape bitPlane is a remarkable work, an austere piece of surveillance video which manages to nose-in on the current state of technology from a new angle. Using a remote-controlled model plane equipped with a low-res video cam and transmitter, the Bureau invaded industrial airspace over the hi-tech campuses of Silicon Valley's major corporations, giving us a chaotic aerial mapping of the source-landscape of so much of our current technical necessities; a beautiful piece of pirate-radio surveillance. In her discussion of the Bureau's projects, theorist Natalie Jeremienko asks, "What is the political fabric of the information age? And what interventions can be made in a place where economics gets equated with politics, where diversity is rendered in homogeneous database fields, and where consumption forms identity?"
    Seid counters with a sobering glimpse into the future of consumer profiling: "You can go to a boutique on the Web, punch in your dimensions here, and they customize a mannequin with your dimensions. They put the blouse on you!"
    Owen O'Toole is a filmmaker and sound artist living in Northern California.

SEEKING A FRIEND

The apocalypse film genre is one that draws me like a moth to the flame, so I took a rare film pass to see SEEKING A FRIEND FOR THE END OF THE WORLD, not because I'm a fan of Steve Carell or Kira Knightley. They both did a fine job in the film, but this movie is in some ways akin to a Bresson film, wherein the actors are there more as models to deliver their lines and let the ideas, the atmosphere, do the talking. There are a lot of good actors in SEEKING A FRIEND, but the film is made with such a casual demeanor that everyone gets to downplay their usual serious parts, even though the subject here is pretty serious: an Earth apocalypse by giant meteor. It's enlightening to watch people have to decide what's truly important in their lives and throw everything else away. With 3 weeks to live people turn to doing what is really important to them. I have watched some of Laura Linney's TV show THE BIG C recently and, diagnosed with advanced cancer, she goes about life in an entirely new way, no longer putting up with the bullshit that we often settle for in our assumedly livelong days. Linney's character waits several weeks to tell her family she has cancer, not wanting to fall too quickly into the trap of their sympathy and condolence. Carell and Knightley are drawn together in their final 3 weeks on Earth by a similar mutual detachment that allows them to make the most of the wretched situation and approach death somewhat at peace. While some people fall into the pit of their own worst qualities, these blessed souls find their higher selves at the final hour. It's an encouraging prospect: that apocalypse could be an opportunity for redemption on Earth and entirely unrelated to Christian legends of rapture and ascension. Goodness is its own reward. There is a funny scene at a TGIF-style restaurant named somewhat akin to a Hitchcock film, where the waiters seem to be all on ecstacy and the meal devolves into an orgy that must be escaped. Breaking into old friends' abandoned mansions and feasting from the restaurant grade freezer never tasted so good. There are also faint whiffs of THE OMEGA MAN in depictions of streets wandered by lost souls awaiting the end. The music theme, the High Fidelity-ish love for vinyl-- Kira walks through half of the film holding a short stack of LP favorites-- is amusing in a Music For A Desert Island way, but the retro-romantic Bacharach section was a bit indulgent to me. The sweetness of Things That Will Be Lost if we lose this world is definitely worth stating again and again and is a great function for film: to remind mankind not to crap his own nest, but Bacharach pushes the kitsch button in this instance. Otherwise I do laud writer-director Lorene Scafaria for her accomplishment; it's well written and shot, and I'll seek out her NICK AND NORA'S INFINITE PLAYLIST (writer) to see what else she's made of.

A HOLLIS FRAMPTON ODYSSEY

Last week, my friend Jeff Plansker forwarded me a NYTimes article about Hollis Frampton's 1968 film SURFACE TENSION, which contains a race-walk through New York from the Brooklyn Bridge to Central Park using single-frame "timelapse". Writers Andy Newman and Michael Kolomatsky, as lovers of the New York they report on, have held the clip up for examination on the Times' website, including the repeated appearances by Frampton's then-girlfriend, and they also created a side-by-side comparison of the walking tour from Frampton's film and from their own cellphone.

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/surface-tension/

The interest and excitement, it turns out, comes from the fact that Criterion has just published a 2dvd set titled A HOLLIS FRAMPTON ODYSSEY, which contains 24 films by HF made between 1966 and 1979. SURFACE TENSION is one of the 24 films. Each of the films in the set merits the kind of re-examination that SURFACE TENSION has gotten on the NYTimes website. Last night, Jeff and I made our monthly pilgrimage to Amoeba Records in Hollywood, where I hoped to pick up the new Frampton set. What a long time coming... to be able to walk into a record store and buy the new Hollis Frampton record (Do You Feel Like We Do jokes aside) is very much a Holy Grail achieved. Similar to the recent find of film of the Rams vs. Giants Yankee Stadium game I attended with my father in 1970. In 1985 I made a short film titled FRAMES FOR FRAMPTON, an optical printer expansion of 1 roll of super8 film into 7 minutes of 16mm film. The super8 was shot in October of 1984 en route to Buffalo from Boston and back, to see a show of Frampton's work at the Albright-Knox Gallery. Frampton had died just earlier that year. The MIT Press publication RECOLLECTIONS AND RECREATIONS may have been the catalogue raisonne for that Frampton exhibit, which included many photographs, xerography, even books with bullet holes in them ("The Tortures of The Text"). The evening of my overnight visit, the entire HAPAX LEGOMENA series of films was screened, almost 3 hours of film. I shot my roll of super 8 around the Albright-Knox and ran into the nearby Forest Lawn Cemetary with the Beaulieu 4008ZM running around 8fps.

After finishing FRAMES FOR FRAMPTON, I arranged a screening of the film at a gallery in Boston as part of David Kleiler's Rear Window series. I rented Frampton's SURFACE TENSION to accompany FRAMES FOR FRAMPTON and to see the film myself, since no one else was showing his work. Fortunately, P. Adams Sitney and others had written gushing descriptions of Frampton's film triumphs. One of the great properties of Frampton's work is its conceptual nature: even a verbal description could create a strong filmlike image in your head. I devoted the next 5 or 6 years of my life to studying and promoting Frampton's work. I rented ZORN'S LEMMA and projected it one Saturday in the Somerville Theater on a Kodak Pageant arc projector the theater owned, part of a series of "Extended Theater" shows my friend Lenny DiFranza organized. I became somewhat obsessed with Frampton's MAGELLAN project, his metafilm history involving the creation of a film (or more) for every day of the year. I rented WINTER SOLSTICE and projected it on Dec 21 several years in various locations. WINTER SOLSTICE is the film that I most love Hollis Frampton for, and its inclusion in this Criterion set must be heralded as a landmark in experimental film publishing. I don't know of any film which has so completely taken me into a space of ecstatic film rapture. Focusing on the intense activity within a steelworks, we are treated to long passages of cascading showers of sparking steel fragments against an austere black background. The camera shutter creates motion effects akin to abstract animation, as flurries of yellow sparks fly in all directions. By his definitive capture of this light show, moreso than Dziga Vertov in Enthusiasm, Frampton has defined what an industrial art can be: a machine which reveals. He is a little bit Vulcan, a god of metals, through this film. I have't yet watched the dvd transfer. Frampton made films that made the day you saw them important. With Magellan, he also said that each day is invaluable, could be a day of Great Inspiration for the creative mind. I never met him but learned so much from him. He is sorely missed but finally celebrated publicly with this Criterion release.

Todd Edwards' LET'S BE FRANK at The Improv Lab

Todd Edwards is a filmmaker and comedy writer I met through our sons being at the same pre-school. He's from the midwest, where he made an indy film called Chillicothe, which went to Sundance and got a lot of attention. Todd and brother Cory then made Hoodwinked (2005), a feature length animated film which gained distribution with the Weinsteins and did big box office. Todd has since made another indy feature called Jeffy Was Here, a music video for the Hansens, he writes constantly and has several projects in the pipeline. In his spare time, or to create an outlet for his ideas outside the sometimes slow process of studio greenlighting, Todd decided to present a night of his monologues, which took place on Monday, April 9th at the Improv Lab on Melrose in Los Angeles. The event was a benefit for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society of Los Angeles. I thought we might see Todd do several long pieces ala Spalding Gray, but instead he curated a set of pieces by eleven talented performers, largely of his own writing. It was a variety show, almost like a radio show, revolving around the core of Todd's formidable talent.

LET'S BE FRANK opened with a musical introduction by Frank Simes, the only true Frank on the bill. Frank played amplified acoustic guitar and sang two songs, I IMAGINED YOU and TOUCH ME NOW, both examples of his power pop talent earned from 30 years in the Los Angeles music scene. It would make a nice opening to any Hollywood evening, Frank's music being so well rooted in the clubs and stages of this town, besides being freshly returned from a tour of Italy with Roger Daltrey's band. The chorus of I IMAGINED YOU has been running through my head ever since.

Next, Todd hit the stage, dressed in the 80's finery of a leather jacket with sleeves pushed up and a kamikaze headband, to tell us the story RECORDS, about a sad sack who lost his record collection to an ex-girlfriend. Deciding to re-take his collection, he stands outside her apartment with field glasses and explains the convoluted reasoning behind his predicament. The absurd honesty of the character's self-absorption is familiar to any of us who live in our heads and depend on others being "less smart" than ourselves. Stalking appeared as a theme across the evening, in the over-the-top physical comedy of Vanessa Ragland, whose FRANKIE loudly pantomimed a hussy's unelegant attempts to mate at a dance bar, and with Katie Hooten she drawled the hip-hoppish girl duo music video HEY BOY, warning a one-time lover of how she would return to fuck up his world. FRANKIE and HEY BOY, written by Ragland and Hooten, who just happens to be Todd's sister, are both Fatal Attraction nightmares. The night could have been dubbed STALKERS, a night of monologues.

Cooper Thornton did a great Marine commander in MOON ATTACK, the pep talk given to a squad of soldiers preparing to offload on the moon and fight a group of threatening aliens. Again, Edwards' non-stop twisted reasoning corners the listener at the corner of fucked-up and funny. The story is a twist to the homophobic and plays well in our era of Santorum. A simple bleak drone in the background created an appropriate doomsday vibe.

Phil Lamarr performed POET, a spoof of radical chic poetry crossed with a pop culture crash on Billy Joel's ass. His delivery was a Howl and hootin was had later on. Jeff Grace did Todd's ORIENTATION, advising the audience as a group of maternity ward babies on the dos and don'ts of joining the general population. Samm Levine and Vanessa Ragland (again!) did a spoof of the I Can't Believe It's Not Butter commercial, each trying to overreach the other on how buttery or not the darn stuff might be.

There was not an INTERMISSION. But then Todd was back in a gentile wig and light blue windbreaker for SMUT CUTTERS, his portrayal of a religious video editor on the phone assuring a client he could and would rake any improper languange, violence, nudity or sexual situations from their movies, although he might also masterbate. Tim Hooten, the evening's MC and host/representative for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, blasted us with a parody of his own doctor's visit, when he was informed of his own leukemia. Fortunately, I have drunk beers with this man and know when he's being funny. In much of the evening's work there was a thin line between humor and frightening, and thus: LET'S BE FRANK. Todd and Tim and Vanessa and Katie are Seriously Funny, to quote the title of a book on the great American comics of the 50's and 60's (George Carlin, Woody Allen, Syd Ceasar, Lennie Bruce, among others). Finally, Cristine Rose turned the night upside down with GRAND OPENING, the hilarious telephonic brainstorm of a businesswoman trying to create an unforgettable store opening and throwing the kitchen sink at the problem.

Much of Todd Edwards' work depends on his deep resources for conjuring laundry lists of absurd ideas and situations, akin perhaps to another FRANK: the great radio theaterist Joe Frank, heard for many years on Pacifica Radio. Todd put together a night of entertainment that flowed like a radio show. There were many clever musical cues. He made it look easy to put on this kind of show and I could imagine him doing it again and again. A curator of smiles to beat the shit out of cancer.

Christian Marclay's CLOCK at LACMA

Christian Marclay's 24-hour video piece THE CLOCK was presented at LACMA (Wilshire Ave., Los Angeles) through the month of July of 2011, allowing viewers to watch a work which precisely charts the passing of time through thousands of shots of clocks and watches pulled from films and television programs, all laid out to be played synchronous to actual local time. Most days, museum goers were limited to viewing the part of this piece that is up during the museum's open hours. An 8 hour chunk of this thing must be a pretty exemplary part of it. The museum also offered 2 opening and closing events where THE CLOCK was run for its entire 24 hours. Due largely to the time constraints of parenting, I rushed out to see THE CLOCK on its final night in Los Angeles, Thursday, July 28. I believe the entire museum was open to the public for free that night, although only the Marclay piece, projected in the 600 seat Bing theater, was an all-night affair, starting at 7PM and ending at the same time on Friday. I don't know if Marclay made his CLOCK with a preferred starting point or is it intended to have no definitive beginning or end, up to the curator or viewer. En route to the Museum Row of Wilshire Boulevard around 9PM, I considered that "being there" for the midnight moment might be a highpoint of the piece and hurried to catch what I could leading up to that. Any time after midnight might be a bonus or like the cigarette after sex for some...

There was a line of about 75 people qued on the stairway leading up along the stepped fountain outside the theater building. It was exciting to see so many people interested in what is essentially video art; the theater is full inside and there are almost another hundred people waiting in line for insiders to depart. The staff did a great job of keeping track of the theater's capacity; I don't know how they decided to fill the hall, maybe allowing 550 people inside at any time. The room was full to capacity, viewers came and went, but it was orderly and civilized. People chose their moments to leave. There were no riots. I sat down at 10:09PM, checking my telephone--yup, 10:09--as I turned it off, and was swept into a 2-and-a-half hour tour, not of a clock but of every imaginable image of clocks, with thousands of tangential action, asides and punctuation shots to make the piece move and "work".

I think THE CLOCK is about the plurality of time, how we each have the story of time running across us, all checking our timepieces and connecting with the little meanings that time has for us in our individuated worlds. Nam Jun Paik may have shown a single clock, second hand running, for 24 hours and called it art (if he had done the piece), but Marclay has done what is only possible today in the world of huge portable hard drives, culling images of clocks from innumerable films to stitch together a quilt of film history grander than almost anything else rendered by a filmmaker. The meticulous nature of Marclay's Clock connects it to a history of duration-oriented film and performance, though with film long duration can be an hour or 45 minutes, as Michael Snow's WAVELENGTH or Hollis Frampton's ZORN'S LEMMA. In performance some connecting points might be Marina and Ulay's walking the Great Wall towards each other or Linda Montano's year-long performance/deprivation pieces. Although piecing together a huge video piece might seem very different, certainly not a BODY ART like those just mentioned, perhaps OUT OF BODY ART and symbolic of the time we live in, so much of our lives sucked into the ethercable. And Marclay is no minimalist; I'm sure I've heard the term MAXIMALISM bandied about over and under his name. (What is Maximalism? Well, if Minimalism relies on very limited materials to make its claims, Maximalism could be considered a kitchen sink genre, a field of art-making where "everything goes" and quite often at the same time. Mash up land.) Marclay's Clock also comes out of a long line of found footage filmmaking, the use of pre-existing footage to make new statements (see Bruce Conner's work and Jay Leyda's classic little film book FILM BEGETS FILM). A healthy tradition. I don't want to think about whether Marclay had to secure rights to any of the thousands of shots he used, some of them in brilliant HD video it seemed; the image quality was very good for this kind of work. Found footage collage films often suffer from low quality duplication OR they try to use that aspect as a new Quality (see Craig Baldwin) that implies the distance from an official source and permissions.

And now to discuss SOUND. Since Mr. Marclay started his visible "career" as a musician, playing turntables in the Lower East Side improvisation scene of the 1980's (see John Zorn) and has produced numerous records and CDs before turning his eye more recently to video. (Although he has used video along the way to document other aspects of his work and has always worked on images presentable to the gallery/museum world. Marclay is a talented art entrepreneur or else his level of productivity is so high that he does not stand still for long. He lives in Europe and New York, say no more.) SO, as a musician or SOUND ARTIST, you can be sure that the soundtrack to THE CLOCK is rife with as much audio mayhem and frisson as CM could summon from his thousands of selected shots. He may have added sound effects for punctuation or forced himself to a set of rules limiting himself to the materials at hand. The snatches of dialog heard (during my 2 hours and 35 minutes) never seemed random, but rather elements of some kind of larger crossword puzzle unfolding through film history. Quite often a shot showing 2 people would come up, a troubled look on one of their faces, then turning to the other and asking existentially: "What time is it?" to be replied most certainly by the other with something like: "It's 10:42." Much of the pleasure of "watching THE CLOCK" (besides spending some of your work day in daydream) is in dashed expectations like those; a build up of suspense is dropped in the pratfall of the everyday. And the audience loved it. The humor in all the little mis-associations and screwball juxtapositions rippled across the full theater. Single shots contained little visual and auditory puns and then were followed rapidly by 3 more going in different directions. Every actor you could think of was represented in the interval I sat through.

And MIDNIGHT was spectacular, as I'd hoped. The buildup, crescendo and release into a quieter, new sequence of meaning was quite an experience after waiting for it for almost 2 hours. I can only imagine other significant daily representations: 8AM, 12noon, 5PM: they all may have terrific little collage dramas encoded for them. Each moment of the day given its little moment on screen, a star for a few seconds. I've seen reviews of the piece range from "boring" to "masterpiece" and I'd put it somewhere in between with moments of both. I've only seen one-tenth of the thing, what do I know?

THE IDEA and audacity to create (a 24-hour clockpiece video collage) something so grandiose may be enough these days to make a successful art piece. There is great hunger for new, innovative work in the world. I wonder how THE CLOCK would play in a smaller gallery installation or on home video. Sold to 6 museums for $150,000 each I wonder if THE CLOCK will come down from its tower anytime soon. It's impossible to evaluate given the current conditions of its presentation.

Sincere thanks to the staff of LACMA for this unusually good art experience.

Bill White's Reviews for The Seattle Post Globe

My friend Bill has written thousands of reviews for the Seattle Post Intelligencer, and when the paper stopped printing about 2 years ago and he was laid off, he and some colleagues decided to continue what they do as the Seattle Post Globe. Bill continues to view and write about legions of films I will never see. He wrote a short remembrance of my Filmers Almanac project in his blurb for the youTube sponsored movie "Life in a Day".

http://seattlepostglobe.org/2011/05/21/siff-pick-of-the-day-for-saturday-may-21-tom-tykwers-3

Sunday, June 12, 2011

Screening today at the Cinerama at 6:00 pm

Life in a Day

When an an apparently fresh idea surfaces in the mainstream, it often has an antecedent in the distant obscurity of an earlier decade’s avant-garde. In the eighties, for instance, David Lynch plundered Kenneth Anger’s “Scorpio Rising” for the visual and sound motifs in his otherwise pedestrian detective thriller, ”Blue Velvet.” Now we have, as the gala closing film of SIFF 2011, “Life in A Day,” an assemblage of blips from filmers around the world, all shot on the same day. Three decades ago, an adventurous young film-maker from Boston accomplished something very similar. His “Filmers’ Almanac” covered one year, with each filmer choosing one day on which to shoot a three-minute roll of Super-8 film. Whereas the material for “Life in a Day” was instantaneously delivered through today’s internet technology, the rolls of film to comprise “Filmer’s Almanac” were acquired through detailed and extensive mail correspondences, by which O’Toole became acquainted with his 365 contributors. Rather than a festive screening at a film festival, “Filmer’s Almanac” was screened in a room on a college campus with some very hardcore cineastes in attendance for the multi-projections that continued for several wondrous hours. I am looking forward to seeing what kind of world-beat extravaganza the mainstream has assembled out of the 4,500 hours of footage submitted to Youtube by 80,000 people from 140 countries. The 95 minutes chosen from such a wealth of material is bound to be a reductionism of real life into the carefully selected imagery meant to represent a particular point of view towards all the peoples of the world. O’Toole showed his film unedited, and the activities of his 365 filmers reflected the unity of all peoples rather than a colorful array of cultural differences. One thing to remember when watching this movie: Thirty years ago, one guy without any money did the same thing and received nothing for his efforts except the satisfaction of accomplishing a crazy mission.

SpaceUp San Diego February 12, 2011

On Saturday, February 12, I traveled to San Diego for the SpaceUp unConference, a gathering of people interested in space exploration. As I researched past and current space histories the past year and a half, SpaceUp stood out as a new and exciting nexus of information about citizen movements to get into space. This is a post-NASA world to some extent, although I think we as a society are struggling to balance public and private interests, we are in fact in something like a civil war over issues of the value and purpose of government and the place of corporations in our culture.

I found the video and photo documents of last year's (2010) SpaceUp to be quite intriguing and so had a strong interest to attend this year. I decided it would be a valuable forum to pitch my memoir-film concept about growing up under the space program, the child of a space writer. The rapid T-5 talks presented last year were a bit of a phenomenon, particularly Andy Cochrane's "Space is Boring" rant, which kicked some strong opinion and energy into the meetup. I expected a fairly friendly audience and an opportunity to get a document of me presenting my story pitch in public. While I only attended the afternoon and evening of Day 1, I had a great experience at SpaceUp and think it is a terrific annual forum for space enthusiasts from all walks of life.

The Price Student Union Loft at UCSD turned out to be an excellent venue, with 30-minute seminar sessions running in adjacent rooms, the center being a large bar-restaurant with a staging area. It was just the right size for the number of attendees, which was probably around 100, including organizers. Funny to enter the building and find SpaceUp across the hall from a student group rehearsing The Vagina Monologues. How diverse.

Pretty soon I was standing around a group discussing the topic "Making Space Sexy", which didn't draw me in initially but I observed from a distance and eventually took some part in. Many good ideas were shared, some questions like: why should celebrities and other millionaires have access to space before well-trained scientists? I expressed my concern that we are a schizophrenic culture: on the one hand rewarding hard work over time and on the other offering lotteries and get-rich-quick answers to the same questions. A woman from England told us how baffled she is at Americans' blase opinion of space. It dawned on me later that we are so caught up with cyberspace that we have largely lost our farsightedness, can longer peer into space (or is it the city lights that blot out our night vision?).

Another seminar session was titled Space Exploration and the Arts, in which a small group discussed everything from the literature that initially got them into space (Ray Bradbury and the recent Red/Blue/Green Mars series came up) to the most recent television depictions of space travel: Firefly and Defying Gravity. The same room then hosted a group discussion of how commercial projects could lead the way and finance continued scientific progress in space. There was talk of space as a manufacturing zone that can withstand pollution byproducts in ways the Earth's atmosphere no longer can.

A nice vegetarian buffet meal was offered, at least no one around me noticed any "space meat". I also had a pint of Stone IPA and a Racer 5. The mood was mildly festive and a lot of people seemed familiar with one another from last year's gathering. There were about 6 members of the SpaceX private spacecraft venture at the conference and quite a few other professionals. SpaceUp seemed a bit like a recruitment and job fair opportunity for some who were there; several young student enthusiasts were there to meet and greet representatives of companies they'd like to work for. I paced a bit and worked on my prepared text.

I spoke with a handful of people, met Chris Radcliff, organizer and liaison for the event. Talked with a photographer named Michael, who told me that there was also an air show going on that day celebrating 100 years of aeronautics in San Diego, that his wife and kids were stuck in related traffic. We also talked about the excellent PBS special ASTROSPIES we had both seen last year.

Around 7PM the T Minus 5 talks began, starting with a discussion of the group from Michigan University who have succeeded in launching their own cubesat, a small satellite payload. For a full survey of the T-5 talks you can go to:

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/spaceup-sd-pod-one

And to view my particular presentation:

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/12659844

I was sure at the time of giving the talk that I had botched it. I do not frequently speak to assembled audiences. The attendees seemed much more interested in current space-related activities than 30 or 40-year old stories. Fortunately, these video documents show that I WASN'T HALF BAD! I generally communicated my piece and did so with some humor, stumbling a few times.

I had a couple of great coversations after the T Minus 5 segments. I was talking with Andy Cochrane, who gave another lively talk called "Space Is F@@king Dangerous" to close the night's event, telling him how impressed I was with his Powerpoint expertise. Again, his "Space Is Boring" address last year helped enliven the whole conference, and this year he received a good ovation again. Andy is a young filmmaker living in Los Angeles and his approach to presenting is informative to me, as someone who wants to win over supporters and financers to make film. His talk this year was good, including several "slides" which contained video clips in them, so he worked in a few surprises beyond the static 15 slides up for 20 seconds each. Andy said he hadn't slept for several days, and his talk may have suffered for that a little because he seems to make a weird factoid error in saying that we've only explored to 380 miles, when he must mean we only have a quasi-permanent presence at that distance.

Anyhow, another conference attendee and part of the oragnizing committee, Dave Dressler, approached Andy and me as we talked, and I was certain he wanted to speak with Andy: star of last year's conference and he'd just closed out this day, but Dave turned to me, told me he'd appreciated what I'd said and we had a great talk. After a short while, Dave commented, "Yeah, I could see that you are kind of living in your father's shadow," which was a small revelation to me, just having it put that way. This project of telling my father's story, and my own alongside it, has become a consuming goal. It speaks to having grown up under extremely interesting circumstances, with a father whose involvement in the heavy activities of the period I did not appreciate or understand then. Having drifted apart since my parents' divorce, I didn't have an active or helpful paternal voice in my life. This project is a way to redress that.

More soon.