Brakhage's poetic interpretation of Dante

Stan Brakhage's "The Dante Quartet" is his abstract, visual interpretation of the 12th c. master' Dante's poem, "The Divine Comedy". Dante's original work had three parts: Inferno (Italian for Hell), Purgatorio (Italian for Purgatory), and Paradiso (Italian for Paradise or Heaven). Brakage was apparently obsessed with reading translations of the poem and found himself at a point conjuring images from the poem and equating them with the circumstances in his life.

Brakhage composed four movements for his "Quartet". He worked on the first, Hell Itself, while he was going through a divorce with his wife and experiencing the collapse of his "whole life". Brakhage's view of Hell was accompanied by a vision of how to get out of Hell, which he entitled Hell Spit Flexion and which apparently "shows the way out". These two movements are followed by Purgation and existence is song, which is Brakhage's interpretation for Heaven, as he did not suppose an after-life.

I found Brakhage's use of extra footage, super-imposed and blended with his hand-painted in Purgation and existence is song to be interesting. I also liked the explosive/colorfulness of these two movements, the rapid pace of the images and the use of fading from one image to the other and to blackness. Aside from this, I do not find the piece to be particularly obvious in its portrayal of Hell/desperation as juxtaposed with "a way out" or of Paradise/sublimity. I really liked the review Adrian Danks, a writer for Senses of Cinema, described of the film: "an obscure, off-centre and idiosyncratic perspective that is difficult to conceive – at least initially – as anything other than a glorious celebration of the experiential and material possibilities of film stock and projected light."

-Wikipedia, "The Dante Quartet"

Reggie's VJ clips

Stan Brakhage-Dante Quartet

The Dante Quartet is a short experimental film by Stan Brakhage, which he completed in 1987. The film is nothing more than changing still paintings that are animated by rapidly playing each frame, but I found its impact quite powerful. The imagery formed by seemingly arbitrary still paintings really captures the essence of Dante’s work. At points the animations look like the whirlwind of bodies on the level of lust. Other times, Brakhage overlays paint with still images in the background adding a whole new dimension in the message his short film conveys. It is amazing to think about how much work Stan Brakhage must have put into his film The Dante Quartet. I know that I personally would not have had the patience to paint each slide individually. Nevertheless, I found many things interesting from this work, such as the idea of perhaps slowing a digital film’s frame rate to achieve that animated effect, and that sometimes overlaying two images together, if done thoughtfully, can change the narrative and message of your projection entirely.

-Nathan D.

Three VJ Clips

Took a bit of searching, but here they are.







-Nathan D.

My 19 Images

I tried to send them to you Professor Pagano, but UF's email server keeps denying me. Well anyways here there are.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/42451756/ND%27s_images.zip

Nathan D.

Dante Quartet

The Video "Dante Quartet" by Stan Brakhage is a collection of abstract pictures collected and combined frame by frame to make a video. The video has a very trippy /acid and semi poetic fell to it. It is a non-narritive, although i am not sure what Stan Brakhage is trying to portray, but he does an amazing job of doing this frame by frame to make this video. I could only imagine the amount of time it must of taken him to create this video.

Stan Brakhage's The Dante Quartet

A series of abstract paintings (I forget the exact name of the style, but it's just throwing paint on a screen basically) in very quick succession. The title is interesting because it looks like some sort of visual component to a real music piece, in the way that some parts are slow and some are faster. Some are peaceful, some are chaotic. Some are filled with light colors and others dark.

It also kind of reminds me of the opening to the film Dancer in the Dark, only quicker and less structure in the paintings themselves.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkWd0azv3fQ

Stan Brakhage and the Dante Quartet

The Dante quartet is very, very abstract. I didn't quite understand it. Upon watching it, I felt as if Brakhage's mind was jumbled and possibly expressing his emotions through varieties of stop motion painting art. The piece I thought was particularly visually appealing, but very quick visuals and not enough time to process a meaning. Personally, It seemed very repetitive without true meaning, he just laid out his feelings into artwork. It reminds me a lot of the Coldplay video "Every Teardrop is a Waterfall." Coldplay's uses the narrative of the song to make the visuals flow more cohesively.

My created VJ clips

I uploaded them to video, but the amount of time it was saying it would take for itt to begin converting was insane, so I unlisted them on my youtube account and gave the links here. Of course, it's going to make them look like crap on youtube, but oh well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IN0NcydZpfQ


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYVZ4y1Kdr4


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgIIibS6R48

VJ Clips

Already posted mine but here's some more!!









EXTRA CREDIT ;)

VJ Clips

I have some more complex videos, on my flash drive i will upload later

Veejay Videos

Insanity from Alexa Henderson on Vimeo.

Writing about the AV Club

The AV Club at Santa Fe Community College was honestly very successful for its debut showing last Saturday. I was gifted with an inside look at the process of how the show was set up, and can say that a lot of hard work went into the preparation for the show. Beyond that thought, I won’t say anything more about my experiences behind the scenes the event. I intend that this blog post in going to come from the perspective of an attendee rather than as a post mortem to the event. With that being said, let me get on with my review. The selection of artists covered a wide array of styles. From the distinctive, native sounds of the “Hear Hums” to the relaxing, melodic tunes played by Nicole Miglis on the piano, there was definitely a big sampling of musical tastes. From a continuity standpoint, the event was well divided and pretty balanced overall with the way the AV Club dispersed the acts. The electronic music artists, DJ, and VJ sets (Hear Hums, Euglossine Industires, Ghost Fields, DJ Adrian Villaverde) were all framed by more traditional acts involving pure lighting (and occasionally some projection) work like Nicole Miglis’s piano pieces, the Infamous dance team of Santa Fe College, and UF’s hip-hop poetry group, Signs of Life. Regarding the VJ sets for each artist, they were amazingly well done, and really helped to augment the experience of audience members as the artist played their music. I personally thought that the best sets were the VJ sets for Ghost Fields and DJ Adrian Villaverde, which were just mind-blowingly spectacular. While there were some hiccups at points, considering that it was all done real-time, the VJing was very well put together. The lighting also worked out extremely well, and was excellently cued for the most part, as well. The only criticism I can say about this event was that the spare DJ playing during the break-times really didn’t have much to work with, as moments between acts varied between long and abrupt starts. At times it left me wondering, “Why bother having the DJ anyway?” “Why not just play a prerecorded intermission track?” Nevertheless, like I said before, the event, overall, was just plainly awesome, and I’m definitely looking forward to the next one whenever that may be.

-Nathan D.

What He Wants

Story board: Your name, When the show is, To whom... (Pat)... scenes, etc.

Show Font, Show Design concept, ideas, Draw out the frames,

Due: who knows? Maybe tuesday?

MAX CLIPS

These are three of my clips using MAX Jitter patch. I used the freeframe Kaliedoscope, Chromakey, Directional blur and Gaussian Blur on some the clips. See if you can see where!

MAX Clips x3

These are my 3 clips using MAX. Each clip features a combination of the ROTATR, PANNR, ZOOMR, TWIDDLR, and CHROMAKEYR. Each one is a variation of the modes. The first and second clip use fold mode for the first three effects mentioned, while the third clip uses a combination of fold, wrap, and clip mode.

Jitter/Max/MSP/Jitter/Vizzie Slabs and Shaders

I am feeling frustrated with the lack of understanding of Jitter/Max/MSP/Vizzie. I am hoping that we can have a little more of an overview of the program(s) and what even the differences between the three of them are? y are they rolled into one app? and which is the best to use for which situation?

I am unable to get the slab objects to work in the jitter2011.1 patch, but have a few patches saved which attempt to add new shaders to your work. I tried to understand a little more about the slab and shaders by checking out the "Jitter Tutorial 42 - Slabs and Data Processing on the GPU" (found both online and within Max) . I loaded several of the Color shaders to the demo videos the tutorial accesses to see what effects they added. Many of the Color shaders did not seem to visibly affect the movie clips, but I took screen shots of the effects which did...

Tutorial's default cf.emboss.jxs, cc.scalebias.jxs


cc.grgb2rgba.jxs, cc.planemap.jxs


cc.saturate.ip.jxs

co.inverse.jxs