Hey kids, why not make a creepy text-to-movie movie?

[imomus]

The nights are drawing in and the weather's crappy, so why don't you settle down in front of a crackling computer screen and direct your own frankly creepy text-to-movie movie? There are hours of fun to be had making wooden-looking 3D characters say rude things in bizarre settings. I know, I've tried it.

I discovered XtraNormal's text-to-movie site when Dr David Woodard sent me a short film he'd made, based on one of his essays, entitled Hans Blüher Story. I immediately made one of my own, a dramatisation of Chapter 2 of The Book of Jokes.

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Now, it so happens that Dr Woodard and I will both exhibit artworks in Vienna next week in a group show called Verausgabungssymposium ("Expenditure Symposium"), held at Contemporary Concerns (COCO) Gallery. Curated by Christian Kobald and Severin Dünser, the show is about waste. My piece, intended to be displayed on an electronic signboard, is called The Facebook Proverbs. For a while now, I've been using my Facebook page's status updates as a place to put proverbs. By re-cycling these "deep tweets" as an artwork (in a medium pioneered by people like Jenny Holzer and Claude Closky) I want to embody the logic of an old proverb: "Waste not, want not!"

So my second text-to-movie effort is a film of The Facebook Proverbs as -- and not as -- they'll be appearing in Vienna.

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Comments

[loveishappiness.livejournal.com]

The dance at the end of the facebook one! I lol'ed.

The weird pauses are the best.

[cutup.livejournal.com]

Nice, I'm trying the software now!

jolly good show

[(Anonymous)]

now this is worlds more interesting and creative than spoofing a newsfuckingpaper.

the engeneers, they did it!

[(Anonymous)]

will they destroy the human spirit with their machinization?! we should have a discussion one day solely about technology,

Re: the engeneers, they did it!

[(Anonymous)]

according to some psychedelic futurists, they indeed may free the human spirit through their technology. ironic, i know. just sayin...

[(Anonymous)]

Hellloo beckett.

[(Anonymous)]

Have you considered extending the project in the gallery environment, rigging up a screen with your facebook "live feed" playing on it so the dialogue can continue throughout the show? Your facebook friends could add proverbs of their own to keep it going throughout the show!

miles

[(Anonymous)]

For some reason I thought of you when I saw this:

http://dziga.com/family/reconstructions/

[krskrft.livejournal.com]

A quick one I made last March.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Remarkably realistic, subtly disturbing!

[vertigoranger.livejournal.com]

Wonderful stuff.

Some counter-proverb thoughts:

[(Anonymous)]

The aphorism is the graphic design of thought, it pitches at illiterates.

If art was infectious or inspirational the Frieze website would be more than an archive of journalism.

For some people women need to be in a constant state of 'becoming', to allow men a state of 'being'. Feminists and chauvinists are united in this.

Painting is as radical as any medium.

"Going further" is something the 20th century suffered from.

The new James Joyce won't sound like the old James Joyce. Otherwise he'll be Jonathan Safran Foer.

An idea is not a parallel world, unless my rent bill doesn't exist.

How can Japan get better press in America?

Re: Some counter-proverb thoughts:

[(Anonymous)]

japan can get better press in america (and probably the world over) if it would stop killing helpless whales for "science" (read: pawns the blubber off onto school children as "food"), fess up to their part of WW2 more clearly, refrain from using hanging as their death penalty (ban the death penalty altogether for that matter) and work on reforming their sexual politics ("women are just baby-making machines," etc). really, the men there are sooo infantile about the power women have over them, it's like a first world, hyper-captialized taliban regime.

Re: Some counter-proverb thoughts:

[imomus.livejournal.com]

One day internet cliché-relay node-trolls will be held accountable for their normative-aggressive parrot-crimes, which are much more likely to be preparing the next atrocity than texbook lacunae or research whaling.

Re: Some counter-proverb thoughts:

[(Anonymous)]

this sounds like a right-wing threat.

Re: Some counter-proverb thoughts:

[(Anonymous)]

and not a word of refutation about the actual points mentioned above. good show!

Re: Some counter-proverb thoughts:

[imomus.livejournal.com]

You managed to pack every single attack cliché about Japan into a single sentence, then you introduced a jibe about the Taliban. It's a bit like expecting me to respond, point by point, to someone saying Japan is full of cute robots, whacky gadgets, Hello Kitty and frilly maids. Oh, and that the Japanese are actually a bit like Eskimos.

Re: Some counter-proverb thoughts:

[(Anonymous)]

not every cliche; you forgot the bit about having a disproportionately low punishment for rape compared to other 1st world countries. god, there's so many more...

[dogsolitude-v2.livejournal.com]

Thank you so much for this. This is potentially one of the most important developments in the internet's history... :)

Seriously, making music on the PC is easy enough with free software like Reaper and Audacity, or the stuff off the front of Computer Music magazine. Making little animations and being able to share them is, well, wow!

Currently downloading the package, then I'm off to make a little film, perhaps about a cat who makes a pudding.

[pulled-up.blogspot.com (from livejournal.com)]

[vogdoid.livejournal.com]

Mark Leidner is a master of this thing

[(Anonymous)]

Interesting script marred by intrusively-swelling, unneccesary Romantic piano music.

[idletigers.wordpress.com (from livejournal.com)]

Such fun! My debut:

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Excellent, you should make an entire series!

It's a great tool for making a pilot for a sitcom.

Some of "Some Answers"

[cheapsurrealist.livejournal.com]

[yhancik.livejournal.com]

Excellent! I will have to try that :D

[fishwithissues.livejournal.com]

Text is right now what vlogging was for a minute. I think the sinister surveillance of youtube and facebook have pushed us to retreat from our facial tics and embrace the verbal. There's being only a tiny box of text tbat no one has to care about if they dont want to.