Hello Steemit community, I posted a general 'Introduce Yourself' last week but I decided to follow up with a more focused self-introduction. I hope this will also serve as an introduction to my current project - um, my current obsession! - which I think many of you are uniquely qualified to respond to.
Nearly my whole life, I have been dedicated to an emerging art genre. This genre goes by different names - Visual Music, Realtime Media, or A/V Performance. As the general public gains awareness of this little movement, me and my colleagues are often being called "VJs". I have been VJ'ing and making collaborative, immersive media performances since I was a teen, when I was first inspired by the book "Expanded Cinema" and artists like Laurie Anderson, Nam June Paik and DEVO.
My commitment to real-time was cemented by a teenage experience. One day, right after piano practice, I picked up a roll of Super-8mm film back from the 1-week round-trip to Kodak labs. It was a total fail - the film was underexposed and my abstract food coloring experiments could barely be seen. I said to my Mom - "how could I ever learn to play piano if I waited a week to hear the notes I played?"
So I abandoned film for the immediate feedback loop of video, and since then I've spent decades exploring the possibilities of live visual performance in solo and group jams, whether improvised or pre-composed.
Fast-forward to our moment: after happy years working in the underground, me and my fellow realtime fanatics around the globe, it seems to me that now the world is ready to embrace Visual Music, Video Synthesis, and live Image Processing and other manifestations of the Realtime Media ideal.
This is where you come in...
I am looking for feedback from the Steemit community about my latest project, which launches next week, here in NYC and globally on the internet. I've co-founded an artist-run digital gallery called MovingPictures.Gallery. We're opening our next exhibition with Artlery at Harvestworks, a small but legendary arts space in Manhattan that supports technology art. For this show, I'm wearing two hats - I'm both gallerist, and artist. The one week exhibition is called Lisa Joy.
I'm asking anyone who's interested to comment on this project - both the digital media art on the blockchain concept, and the A/V Synthesis work I'm using as a test case. Don't hold back - give me your unvarnished opinion. I have a thick skin, don't worry about being nice. I want your honest criticism.
I'll be posting updates to Steemit as the project progresses. Let me know what you think, or if you have questions, or how I can do better to present this work and explain the concepts. For starters, here's the Press Release I wrote about the project - does this make any sense? If you know people I should write to and who'd be interested in the PR, please let me know.
Thanks in advance for your time and thoughts!
Cheers, Benton
Here's an article about the first MovingPictures.Gallery exhibition of Jonas Bers.
Here's a picture of the Lisa Joy sound and image synthesizer.
