Shooting two pretty girls

Soul in the City are a covers duo that needed some new shots to go with their new website showing that they're classy, professional and approachable.

To keep things looking as continuous as possible we orchestrated things so that we would shoot these portraits in the afternoon straight after they had finished shooting their new demo video in the morning at a hotel just around the corner. This worked out really well and you can see there is a strong visual aesthetic running through their new site over at SoulintheCitymusic.com

Once they had decided on their new look we talked about how the photos would look and I knew we would be shooting against black. Usually I stick with the standard two light set up of something soft (umbrella or soft-box) off to one side and above and a hard back light opposite the diffused light. I suppose I've been vaguely concerned with keeping things looking natural but end up with people bleeding into the black back-ground. So on this shoot I joined the crowd and lit everything!

I used one Sigma 530 Super (now replaced with the much cheaper 610 Super) and three Nikon SB26 flashes and went with soft light from a 24" soft-box and 45" umbrella) on their faces and bare hard light behind them to separate them from the black. The only problem I had was with the flags in the two rim/hair/separation lights. I attached flags to the back of them to stop them spilling onto the black back-drop and washing it out to grey and flags to the front to stop them flaring into the lens. This all worked great apart from I ended up with just a very narrow strip of light hitting the back/side of each girl. I couldn't quite work out how to get around this. I pulled the flags back so that they were as shallow as 2cm or so with no luck. Perhaps they should have been further away from the girls?

Whilst shooting I set up a timelapse on my spare camera body and an 18-55m kit lens so you can see exactly how we set everything up. Enjoy!

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Alien gameboy heads photo shoot

I did a really fun shoot with a band called D NOVA at the start of May. We came up with a nifty story to base the pictures around including an alien spaceship (complete with smoke and search light) and pulled it all off with a few small flashes and a tin of Pringles.

The story was this:
the gameboy heads partied a bit too hard after a gig and Dan Nova (the front man) was beside himself with what to do with them (the first picture, above). Then he tried to drag them into shape, then lastly the tables turned as the two gameboy heads tied him up on a roof-top and held him in place whilst an 8-bit alien space ship prepared to beam him up!

As you can see in the first image (at the top of the post), I went for a dark alley with a pink glow from a club, a street light illuminating the sick and a separate light on Dan Nova.

We shot this at about 7pm with lots of light to work in so I began with a shutter speed of 1/200 (the maximum speed with a flash on a Canon 550D) to keep it dark. As I only had one pair of Pocket Wizard plus IIs I had to start with my brightest light and trigger the rest of them in optical slave mode from this light. In this shot the brightest was the back light, a Nikon SB26 (in fact, all my flashes are Nikon SB26s, about £45 on ebay and really good!) gelled pink and sat on the floor facing up and to the left wall. Although it would have usually made more sense to next sort out the light on Dan Nova, this composition is based around the sick on the floor so I moved onto illuminating that as if it were under a street light so everyone could get into position relative to this sick. I had made a snoot especially for this shoot from a tin of Pringles suspended on the end of a 3 metre pole:

The 'snoot on a pole' idea actually came about as a way to simulate the alien space ship search light used in the third shot and it just so happened to work nicely resting against a wall for this first shot. Next I lit Dan Nova with another SB26 through a 33" umbrella. I didn't want the light to fall much further than his face so for this reason my assistant held the umbrella collapsed and right in his face (stood on the wall you see bottom right).

As I had eliminated the ambient light with the 1/200 shutter speed the gameboy faces were now completely silhouetted. Another SB26 on the floor camera left on the lowest setting 1/64 took care of them and the whole shot came together!

Here's a little behind the scenes of just the first shot:

The second shot was fairly simple: umbrella into Dan Nova's face from above camera right, a flash on the floor gelled pink between Dan Nova and the first gameboy and a backlight on the floor behind the female gameboy.

The last shot came together really well! Again we used the Pringle can snoot on the 3 metre pole, this time to represent the search light from the alien space ship. A 33" umbrella was held near Dan Nova's face for a bit of fill and another flash was on the floor just camera right to give a bit of a rim/separation light on the female gameboy. There was actually another flash on the floor on the left to give separation on the male gameboy but there were lots of drunk tourists around taking in the skyline whilst we shot this and someone must have got in it's way or something. All the smoke was burning incense sticks shot in my flat against a black towel and comped in.

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Car journey timelapse

I had a try at making a timelapse of a car journey whilst driving from Brighton to London.

My first attempt during the day was awful. There was too much light to use a long exposure so the timelapse was way too jerky, cars just flicked around all over the place. I also found it almost impossible to mount the camera anywhere so had it moving through the journey which I tried to cover with some random editing, holding on frames here and there. This basically looked crap.

On the second attempt from Brighton to Hemel I put the camera on the ledge behind the back seats at 24mm and tried to get an exposure that was just under the length of the interval on the intervalometer. I think I went for a 2 second exposure and a 3 second interval. The look was still not what I was really after, if I am called to do another journey timelapse I'll investigate some sort of sturdier mounting options. Perhaps an 18mm lens would have been better too?

The music in the video is a cover I recorded of one of my favourite Michael Jackson songs, Speed Demon I love it! It was a great excuse to whip out some slap bass and yes, I did have to slow down the chorus! Read more...

Event Photography

For almost two years I've been the official photographer for a club night called Freaky Electronique, run by my good friends Ash Wiggins and Jon Pigrem. As it's turned out, the club and my event photography abilities have grown in parallel at a similar rate. What was at first quite a difficult task has slowly evolved to become an opportunity to explore seat-of-your-pants portrait shooting and dealing with and keeping drunk people happy.

Sure enough it was a process of trial and error. Lot's of error.



My first hurdle was getting that slow shutter look (where all the lights in the background make lines) with the subject nicely illuminated and sharp in front of said lines. This part is actually nice and simple (room depending): 8th of a second shutter with the flash firing on the 'second curtain' (at the end of the shutter duration), ISO to taste. Possibly the handiest tip I've picked up is from the awesome flash photography blog of David Hobby, which is to treat your shutter speed as a way to control the light in the room and your aperture to control the impact of your flash. The ISO seems to end up affecting a bit of both as an overall exposure control (though not in RAW format).

This slow-shutter approach does need some kind of lights in the background to look good though though and obviously won't work outside in the sun.



Eventually I noticed the look could be improved/exaggerated by simply wiggling the camera during the exposure. Again, this is limited if there are no lights in the back ground to turn into squigles, but it helps make the whole picture a bit more dramatic.



Once I had this basic set up sorted I found it difficult to overcome the horrible orange look of most venues with little and/or rubbish lighting. For months I struggled with this and tried to get the blue bleached out look by bringing down the saturation of the red channel in Photoshop. Though a lot of these pictures looked quite good, they did seem quite flat and didn't have the 'punch' of bright vibrant colours that a night club should have. After a while some people even started telling me they thought they looked dead in previous pictures!



Unfortunately I didn't overcome this with any one step, more so it was a gradual process of adhering to the create, share, feedback, review flow chart with particular attention paid to the last point: review. As I was still shooting in JPG the colours in each photo at the time of shooting were kept and difficult to edit effectively. I tried using a 'portrait' colour profile on my Canon 550D which helped get rid of some of the red in peoples faces. I also moved the white balance centre over to the blue side. These two things helped a bit but people were now quite yellow.




Probably the most effective step I took was to turn up my flash to overpower the venue lighting almost completely on peoples faces. So as to keep people from being bleached out I just closed the aperture down a bit so I ended up around 1/8 on my flash and f/9 or f/11. With this set up peoples faces were almost entirely lit by my flash with a nice colour and the horrible venue lights made up the back ground.




For some reason I didn't really notice until I shot in a venue with much nicer lighting how the quality/look of the light from my flash not only changes with what power setting it is on but also changes depending on how close I am to the subject. I suppose it is something to do with it bouncing off of my bounce card in a particular shape that is lost with every extra inch that the light travels before hitting the subject. To be clear, I don't just mean that the light from my flash diminished as I move further away from a subject, it actually changes the way it looks on their face, when I'm closer it looks better, even if they are illuminated to the same degree.

So my current set up is to shoot with the flash quite powerful, the aperture quite small, the shutter varying from a 3rd of a second to a second and a half (depending on how much light and movement there is in the room), the ISO at 400 or 800 for monitoring purposes, as close as I can get to peoples faces and in RAW format.




I've found people are more friendly the bigger club and the more official I look. I wear a t-shirt with the club name on it and a big picture of a camera on the back which really helps distinguish me from an over-zealous party goer. It's also handy having a big SLR with a battery grip, flash and bounce card. I'm yet to make a DIY ring flash but (as long as it doesn't look to crappy) this will probably also put people at ease in approaching me for their photo. Usually I can get one or two pictures of someone before they're ready to move on and continue enjoying their night but about once per event I will get someone who will never be happy with their picture and keeps asking for another and insisting that I delete all the previous ones. I've not yet worked out a perfect way to deal with these people, but insisting that this 7th photo really is the last one and just leaving it at that seems to work OK for now.





I like the idea that some people who perhaps don't have any nerdy friends that are into photography might come along to Freaky Electronique, have their portrait taken and it turn out to be the nicest/flattering/most fun picture of them to date. With this in mind I don't skimp on the teeth whitening, spot removal and general beauty retouching in Photoshop and it has become quite standard for me to see a handful of people after each event with my pictures as their profile pictures which makes me happy and keep to stay up all night taking pictures yet again.
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Phantoms in the Brain

I just finished reading Phantoms in the Brain: Human Nature and the Architecture of the Mind by Ramachandran after coming across a few good quotes from it in Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction. Ramachandran seems to be in the same circles as Oliver Sacks and the book very much reads like a more in-depth version of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, almost a follow up to it, perhaps with a bit less sensationalism, depending on your take of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.


It jumped straight into a full on explanation of phantom limbs and his experience of the whole strange topic. Although I at first felt like this was more than I ever wanted to know about phantom limbs there were some amazingly simple 'cures' for a phantom arm for example, that sounded like they should have been discovered two hundred years ago, yet were from the late 80s. He talked about patients suffering from a phantom lower arm where their hand was permanently stuck in a clenched fist position, so much so that the phantom muscles in their phantom arm ache chronically and the phantom finger-nails in the phantom fingers dig into their phantom palm causing excruciating, incurable pain.

One way he found of relieving this pain was to construct a simple black box with two holes on the front and a removable lid. The patient inserts their two arms, both fists clenched, into the box (one arm is a phantom) then upon removing the lid of the box the patient actually sees two reel fists in the box via a mirror in the middle of the box, reflecting the real arm in the position of the phantom. When ready, the patient un-clenches both fists and for the first time (via their own visual feedback system) is able to feel the relief of the phantom hand relaxing and un-clenching.



This hasn't turned out to be a cure for phantom limbs but more of a hint to their nature and whereabouts in the brain and within the human condition. Ramamchandran lightheartedly mentions how patients have been dispatched with magic black boxes of their own to work with for 20 minutes a day to relieve the discomfort of a phantom limb.

The main reason I wanted to read the book was for its insights into our consciousness and our ideas of self. This was touched on quite a bit in the first chapter in relation to perfectly sane people feeling like they can reach out and pick up an object within arms length, even though they are completely aware of having no arms. There were interesting points raised about our visual feedback system and how easy it is to distort our image of our physical self by closing our eyes and engaging in simple exercises.

The more interesting points were mentioned in what I felt was the best chapter called 'The Unbearable likeness of Being'. It was centred around a case of Capgras' delusion where the patient insisted that his parents were in fact impostors that looked just like them but lacked the particular 'isms' of his real parents. There were extra twists where the patient would accept them as his own parents whilst talking to them over the phone, but not face to face. Through this case and Ramachandra's experiments with the patient all kinds of links between our various sensory input systems were uncovered and illustrated in their use in making sense of the world around us (when not suffering from a neurological disorder).

Throughout the book Ramachandran laid down interesting ideas about how we construct our own reality and how we rely on particular functions to do so (using interesting examples of how we fill in our blind spot because we can't function with holes throughout every scene we look at "it's clear that the mind, like nature, abhors a vacuum and will apparently supply whatever information is required to complete the scene" (p.89)).

Although not as focused on consciousness as I might have liked Phantoms in the Brain is a good read, has given me new ideas and understandings and I will be recommending it to my Oliver Sacks fan friends.

I think my favourite quote from the book is
"Most organisms evolve to become more and more specialized as they take up new environmental niches, be it a longer neck for the giraffe or sonar for the bat. Humans, on the other hand, have evolved an organ, a brain, that gives us the capacity to evade specialization. We can colonize the Arctic without evolving a fur coat over millions of years like the polar bear because can go kill one, take its coat and drape it on ourselves. And then we can give it to our children and grand children." (p.190)


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Homemade intervalometer

Back at the start of 2008 when I made my first explorations into using a series of photos in a timeline to compile a video either as stop motion or timelapse, it was quite tricky to get hold of an intervalometer for less than $200. On top of that, I was using a Panasonic Lumix point and shoot with no remote triggering option so was firmly stuck pushing the button by hand anyway.

This didn't stop me from making timelapse videos, they were just shakey from all the interruptions of pushing the button by hand and the speed of the motion would change and drift as my fingers froze over time and I found it almost impossible to maintain a regular interval between pictures.

Fast forward to the start of 2009 when I acquired a Canon 450D and my options became many for accurate interval shooting to create better timelapse videos.

Another huge benefit to using a digital-SLR camera is that you can leave it in full manual mode (everything: ISO, shutter speed, aperture, focus, no image stabalisation) so the look of the finished video remains consistent and flicker free.

As mentioned above, at the start of 2009 intervalometers were very expensive and only came with connections for the more pricey Canon cameras. So initially I was limited to hooking my 450D up to my laptop and controlling it via the included Canon EOS utilities software. This method is really effective and gives you a nice option of saving your pictures to either the camera's SD card and/or your computer hard drive.

I made a few timelapses using this camera tethered to laptop method and got good results but there are quite a few limitations, the most obvious being that you have to have a laptop with your camera. Another consideration is the minimum interval which the Canon EOS utilities software can get down to; only 5 seconds. I'm not sure why they've imposed this, Shirly it would be easy to start at 1 second and offer 0.1 second increments? It would be great if they could also include some kind of ramping option in the interval and remote control of the shutter speed in 0.1 second increments (again, this must be fairly easy to integrate into the software?). You could start your timelapse with a shutter speed of 1/400 while the sun is shining, move down to 1/50 as the sun sets, 1/5 just after and eventually end up at 30 second shutter speeds while the stars are out.

The only intervalometer I know of that offers this kind of control is the Little Bramper which seems to get awesome results. Again, there are limitations. It's expensive, it needs an adapter to work with a camera using a micro-jack connection for it's trigger release (like the 450D) and it uses a fairly basic analogue approach, open to all sorts of interferences. To use the little bramper you must put your camera into bulb mode and the little bramper does the rest. This means that the accuracy of the shutter speed and ramping is not just down to the intervalometer but also the ability of your camera to respond instantly to it's shutter release trigger. Because of this the little bramper is reported to work better with some Canon body's than others.

Anyway, I digress. To be able to make timelapses with ease out in the field I needed my own intervalometer and leave the laptop at home. After much research I decided to build one using an adjustable timer circuit. My soldering skills are rubbish but I managed to get the whole thing together in an afternoon (should probably only take 30 minutes), the instructions were pretty shabby and the relay in the picture on the packaging is back to front.



Once you've built the timer kit the only way of connecting it to anything is to stick some wires in it's two relays. You can think of these as gates, one relay lets current pass on the click, the other relay stops current from passing on the click. You want to hook your micro-jack cable up to the first relay. I used a regular mini-jack to attach to the timer kit then a mini-jack to micro-jack adapter to plug into the camera to keep things modular and flexible. This means I have the option to wire up other triggering gadgets in the future and can use the much more accessible mini-jack cable salvaged from an old pair of headphones for example.



Using my DIY intervalometer out and about was great! As the circuit spends most of the time doing almost nothing the batteries last for ages, I mean like 2 weeks of use 24 hours a day. Whilst out on the side of Arthur's Seat, Edinburgh, in the cold I came across my first stumbling block. The timer kit is controlled by two tiny variable resisters, one for the interval and another for the shutter speed (if you're in bulb mode). As these are analogue they are open to interference from temperature (among other things) and so the colder they get, the slower the interval. I was fiddling about with it for ages up the side of the mountain/hill with the camera firing off shots at all kinds of speeds (in the above video Edinburgh you can see the clouds change speed in the shots from the very highest bits of the mountain/hill).

Eventually I (my Dad) figured out that this was being caused by temperature and the easiest way to get around it was to keep the intervalometer in my pocket to keep it warm. Obviously not the best method but it worked!


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A public diary

I've never kept a proper personal diary but upon receiving a Canon 450D for Christmas 2008 I decided to do a '365', attempting to take some kind of self portrait every day for 365 days. As I would be uploading a photo to flickr each day that was specifically tied to that day I thought I may as well write a little bit of text about that day to go with each picture, so soon enough the whole thing had turned into a kind of photo diary of the year 2009, hosted on flickr.

My usual practice is to make any personal pictures private when uploading them to flickr as I can't see why anyone outside of my friends and family would find them interesting. But much like taking the plunge in uploading my unresearched ideas and doings on this blog, I decided to make a good few of the pictures public and with that, any personal text that might go with them.

As I expected, it was a strange feeling to put up online any thing remotely personal and to my surprise, I very quickly (like, by February!) ran out of ways to photograph myself other than looking at the camera like a vain teenager. I tried not to get too worked up about how good or bad the pictures were looking or about how many days I had missed a photo (I think in the end I took a photo 307 days out of the 365).

A little further into the year I really started to notice the benefits of the diary side of the project (both through text and image). There were loads of things from just a few months previous that I'd completely forgotten about, little details mentioned in the text that may have seemed trivial at the time.

Of course I couldn't resist making a book out of it using the fantastic Blurb.com.


Seeing the whole collection together in print form really gives it a context and lets me revel in nostalgia over moments otherwise forgotten. I particularly like any text that referred to someone met that day or very recently as "Dan's girlfriend" or "Jedd the singer", but who later became my good friend and flat-mate, or the lead singer in my band, for example. For one reason or another there are quite a few examples in the book where I either meet someone for the first time or mention an acquaintance who has since become a good friend and/or a bit part of my life. It's as if 2009 was a year of seed planting and corners approached, but not turned.

Another way of looking at it is that 2009 was in fact not any different from any other year and that the simple act of documenting the year highlighted all the details in the passing of time otherwise lost.

"The little things, there's nothing bigger, is there?" Vanilla Sky [2002]

You can see the whole set on flickr, or at least those photos set to 'public'.
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A picture book

Making a book is like making a t-shirt. It costs loads of money but it's really easy to do.

In January and April 2010 I was in Rome, Italy and collected quite a few snaps. I whittled the 3,000 or so down to 800 to less than 200 that I edited and popped up on flickr, after which, it seemed silly not to spend an afternoon choosing a final bunch and arranging them in a book.

I used the Blurb Book Smart software which was mega easy to suss out. I didn't really use it in any far out way, so don't know what the limitations are in terms of customisation when compared to doing the whole thing manually in Quark or whatever. This is not really a fair comparison though, as so many of the tricky bits (like bleed, spine alignment, etc) have been sorted out for you already in the Book Smart software.

My main challenge was purely aesthetic. Although I have made a book before (as a birthday gift for someone), I still found it tricky to maintain a restrained look that gave room for the photographs to speak for themselves. This has also been true of my photo-taking where I have only recently managed to try composing shots that are not full of colour which then get pumped to the max in Photoshop. Aside from a few black and white shots there is only one or two of these modest, desaturated shots included in the book. It is something I shall endeavor to work on.

P.S. For anyone interested in making a book using Blurb; perhaps it's blatantly obvious for everyone else but it took me a while to work out how to do a double page spread of a single image using the BookSmart software. The best work around I could come up with was to load up the same image on adjacent pages, zoom in to taste and move the left picture to only show it's left half and the right picture to only show it's right half. I found that the software doesn't do a great job of illustrating how much of the image will be lost in the fold to binding and so a bit of bleed (perhaps a centre metre or two) proved helpful.
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Making t-shirts

When ever anyone says some cool catch-phrase people often perk up with "that would be good on a t-shirt". I'm just as guilty as anyone for laughing off such observations, t-shirt making is Shirley for t-shirt makers? Not so.

I found it need not be a laborious task slapping a few words on a t-shirt. At the very least a bit of text would do, and with a bit more effort most designs could be elaborated further with illustrations. If the t-shirt ends up looking crap, who cares? A t-shirt exists where no t-shirt previously existed, this alone could be reason enough to realise t-shirt ideas. In my opinion at least.

After discovering how easy it was to knock up a one off t-shirt I tried to make it a given that any nifty idea I came up with would be on a t-shirt and available to the world as soon as possible. It feels good to make stuff and seems silly to shrug off good ideas, however trivial.

With this in mind I have begun to reconsider other previously shelved projects that I perhaps considered insubstantial (what is one lonely poem after all?) irrelevant or insignificant.

How can any idea be insignificant?
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Digital Name Assimilation

Digital Name Assimilation is a sound composition/installation that uses DNA (Deoxyribonucleic acid) data taken from a dairy cow and her three daughters and realises it as audio through a process of synthesis using the computer software Max/MSP. The Max/MSP patch also makes predictions based on the mother’s DNA of what the DNA of her three daughters might be like, then outputs this as audio.

The piece is suitable for fixed listening over seven speakers in a large space (speaker layout diagram included below), I'm yet to fathom out a decent way to present this online. I'm not yet familiar with many people browsing blogs whilst hooked up to an 8 channel surround system, so for the time being I will resort to presenting the work as a textual commentary. Through this commentary I hope to draw attention to the extensive similarities of the DNA data (and that of a computer prediction also) and the comparisons that can be made between a digital representation of life and digital media.

As the music industry slowly responds to the internet age, specifically the loss of profits through illegal downloading of music, we have seen an adaptation of copyright into a technology called Digital Rights Management (DRM). This is currently a form of access control technology designed to restrict and control our use of digital media, as a digital recording of a work is still the same work that was encoded on the original CD sold to the consumer. This is similar to our ability (as consumers) to use software for a period of time. We never own the digital media (software), just a license to use it on a given number of devices. This confusion over the ownership of digital media has meant that it has only very recently been possible for insurance companies to offer coverage for not just downloaded software (that never existed physically, yet cost $450 to use in the case of Max/MSP) but also for a person’s digital media collection. It is quite reasonable that a person embracing digital music owns the licence to over £1000 worth of media when considered that I have a collection of over 500 physical CDs and that one song costs 79p to download from Apple’s iTunes store.

DNA data has been subject to similar protection rights issues, indeed, attempts have been made to ‘own’ a sequence of DNA, although most attempts have failed due to the ubiquitous nature of genes (Engineering the Farm: The Social and Ethical Aspects of Agricultural Biotechnology Britt Bailey and Marc A. Lappe 2002: p.72). It is of immense importance to human kind that this information stays in the public domain because subtle differences in sequences of base pairs create disease resistant plants, animals that grow more quickly and humans that are more or less susceptible to disease; this last point is of particular importance to insurance companies.

All animal life is made from one cell (the fusion of one sperm and one egg). Inside this one cell are the instructions on how the cell will function and ultimately divide into two cells, each of which will then both have their own complete set of instructions of how to function and divide yet again. Eventually a living organism will exist, made up of about 10,000 trillion cells (A Short History of Nearly Everything Bill Bryson 2004: p.450) which will each contain the full set of instructions on how to construct (by this method of division and growth) the same living being yet again. The process of organised and controlled cell division and differentiation is called growth. Uncontrolled it is called cancer. The instructions are the same in both cases.

This set of instructions is contained in DNA. The typical illustration of DNA (shown below) of the double helix represents the two parts that make up the list of instructions, which run in order along the double helix. It is these two strands that divide in two and each side goes into each of the two new cells(*1). Once in these two new cells it replicates the one strand into two and becomes a whole new cell (a complete double helix structure) ready for dividing again.



Joining the two sides of the double helix together are a pair of one of four types of molecules (one attached to each side of the double helix). This pair of molecules is called a base pair and is in fact a pair of amino acids. The instructions of how to construct an organism from just one cell are contained in the order and type of these base pairs joined to the backbone of the double helix (genes). That is, to observe the order of base pairs is to observe the genetic make up of a living being.

The four bases (amino acids) contained in DNA are Adenine, Guanine, Thymine and Cytosine, hence the short hand AGTC. A will only bind to T, and C only with G(*2). The sequence of the base pairs determines what type of protein is produced and the shape of the protein molecule, which in turn goes on to establish how it acts in the cell. So we can see that the sequence of the base pairs determines directly how the cell operates and what it produces (Almost Like a Whale Steve Jones 1999: p.120).

The technological ability to extract and analyse this quantity of base pairs at a reasonable cost is very new (available since the end of 2007) and demonstrates the increasing rate of insight we can gain of the natural world around us.

Incidentally, the 54,000 base pairs taken from each cow are not the first 54,000 of the sequence of billions. They are evenly distributed across all the chromosomes (like street lamps spread along a street). In the future, technology will allow us to extract 300,000 base pairs in a similar manner to adding in street lamps between already existing ones to observe the finer details of the street.

In animal breeding the best animals are mated together to theoretically produce the best offspring as a form of artificial selection (also referred to as selective breeding). This was first noted by Robert Bakewell (1725-1795) who is "usually regarded as the pioneer of livestock improvement as we know it” (Genetic Improvement of Cattle and Sheep Geoff Simm 1998: p.4). He spent time noting the best animals in his neighbourhood then followed the basic idea that ‘like begets like’ (Darwin) which itself draws on comparisons between animals favouring ‘good’ families. Of course for like to beget like there would need to be additional information passed on in the DNA from one generation to the next on top of the general blue print of the making.

There are large similarities between the DNA (both in data and audio form) between the daughters and their mother, even though the mother’s DNA is only responsible for half of the genetic make up of each daughter (the father being responsible for the other half). The same striking similarity is present between each daughter and the prediction of the daughter, even though the prediction of the daughter is only based on the mother’s DNA. If the father’s DNA were available, the prediction could have been made upon both responsible contributors. So large similarities and small variations in DNA make up the huge selection of species present in nature, much like the large similarities and small variations in sequences of only twelve notes that make up the massive variety of melodies in Western music. This relationship between cause and effect (along with most of the technical aspects of DNA) is much better explained in the generously thorough The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins.

At the core of my Max/MSP patch is a sound engine based on very simple FM (frequency modulation) and AM (amplitude modulation) synthesis and the relative levels of these modulated sounds (dry/FM/AM). There are actually seven of these included inside the patch correlating to each of the cows (including the predicted cows). The sound engine receives data from the DNA file of its cow in the form of one of sixteen numbers every 10 milliseconds. Each of these sixteen numbers represent the sixteen possible combinations of the two base pairs available in the DNA data. The DNA file is stepped through in order and the numbers one to sixteen are fed into a unique table for each DNA file. This table acts as a probability distribution for the random object that (through the use of a coll object) triggers the pitch of the sound engine. So as to cover a wide pitch range I mapped the sixteen combinations of base pairs to a four-octave major 7 #11 arpeggio.

My first experiments in sounding the data involved attaching a pitch and an attack to every step of the sequence of base pairs, resulting in 54,000 notes taken from a range of sixteen pitches, all occurring with the same rhythmic interval. At eight notes per second (equivalent to 16th or semi quaver notes at 120 bpms) each pitch was detectable to the ear and nice harmonic combinations would become apparent between the cows/speakers (whether the 16 notes were of a scale or chromatic). These would manifest spatially, as different pitch interval relationships would appear in different areas between the clashing speakers (when ever two or more speakers played the same pitch the sound would appear to originate from in between the given speakers, similar to ‘big mono’).

One of the problems with this arrangement was that it would have taken 1 hour, 52 minutes and 30 seconds to get through the 54,000 steps. On top of this, aesthetically, it sounded very similar all the way through the running time as each cow just sounded one of sixteen pitches. I also tried a similar set up by stepping through the data at a much faster rate, somewhere near 32 notes per second. At this speed, many of the same attributes existed; to complete the 54,000 steps still took a considerable amount of time, but now the pitch of each step was mostly indistinguishable and the overall sound was close to noise. In either of these arrangements it would have been reasonable for a listener to gather all they could from just observing a random two or three minute segment.

So as to get away from the minute details in the data and move toward the surprisingly subtle differences in the overall architecture in each cows DNA(*3), all further sound manipulation is the result of groups of base pairs present over a period of time.

For example, a parameter of the sound engine (say for this explanation, the FM depth) will count how long it has been in milliseconds since it last received two hundred of the first combination of the two base pairs (A-A). Once it has counted two hundred of those base pairs the time taken is reported, scaled to a usable number and applied as the new FM depth. A very similar mapping applies to all aspects of the sound machines, counting different amounts of base pairs (ranging from fifty to five hundred) and a different combination of base pairs per changeable attribute.

Upon opening the master patch the mothers DNA is automatically loaded into a table which acts as a probability distribution map for three random number generators (with range 1 to 16) that feed the remaining three sound machines representing the three predictions of what each daughters’ DNA will sound like. This simple method offers an unbiased resolution, not dependent on chemistry or biology that yet still contains a foundation in the mother and so if one were not able to consider this mutant creation a prediction of the mother’s daughter, it could at least be considered a further new daughter (and a bastard daughter at that).

My choice of purely synthetic sounds is founded on the notion that although the inner parts of a living body may make noise (as everything vibrates), this DNA data is a step removed from the real physical world and is simply a list of instructions on how to create the real and physical, similar to a life score. “Sounds are inaudible usually because they are small, they take place where we cannot hear, or we cannot hear them unaided.” (Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts Douglas Kahn 2001: p.201). Representing something aurally that is not just inaudible to the human ear, but that is just inaudible period (data as data) takes us toward either a realisation of the unreal or back to a form of the real in which the unreal has been derived (Baudrillard). This also touches on Frayn's idea of information 'traffic' in the amazing The Human Touch: Our Part in the Creation of a Universe.

The way synthesised sounds are constructed is by a similar method as biological development from a genetic code; a set of simple generic data organised into an appropriate and manageable arrangement that can be applied to waves and inform them (and their modifiers) on how to operate, thus creating physical movements in air from digital information (that never once existed in the real world, but was generated digitally).

The context of this work lies in the extreme notion of a digital life, or a digital representation of life. This notion seemed difficult to grasp for people introduced later in life to virtual reality, owning (a license for) digital media, social networking websites and advanced artificial intelligence in video games. Yet for anyone born after circa 1996, these ideas form the foundations of their acceptance of a very small and blurred boundary between real, unreal and physical and virtual. In the works’ current form, it is most suitable for fixed listening of some sort. With the inclusion of n more mother’s and three daughters’ DNA files, the Max/MSP patch could be installed in a gallery and could run through the DNA of family after family. It could even be linked to a network so as to update its database of DNA when more became available.

Listening to the piece in a space at least 5 metres squared at a volume you could just about talk over allows the listener to move around the speaker array and observe overlapping aural arenas of each cow with out too much interference from the room itself (listening in an acoustically controlled studio is helpful). This size of room and volume is preferred to limit (but not destroy) the overlapping of these aural arenas and to preserve the mono quality of each speaker. It is suggested that the listener begin by familiarising themselves with the sound of the mother, followed by her three daughters and lastly the sound of the three predicted daughters by standing in close proximity to the relevant speaker. The listener might then explore the overlap that should occur in a vertical line (shown on the speaker configuration diagram as the interphonic knot (The Sonic Composition of the City in The Auditory Culture Reader Jean-Paul Thibaud 2003: p.335)) through the middle of the speakers. Moving in and around this line is perhaps the most interesting activity as the relative differences (and extreme similarities) are not only most apparent here, but can also be changed dynamically by moving around the space.



The Max/MSP patch is laid out in the same way as the speaker array with outputs 1-7 matching up with the numbered speakers in the SPEAKER CONFIGURATION diagram below. Pressing space bar will start the sequence and a silence of anywhere up to thirty seconds can be expected before any audio is heard. Additionally there is a bar at the top of the patch that charts the progression of the nine minutes; the blue LEDs in the centre will also go out when the piece is finished.



ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank the Scottish Agricultural College (SAC) for the use of DNA data from four anonymous cows from their Langhill lines of dairy cows.

Footnotes:

*1: The process of cell division is called mitosis where the DNA strands separate, move to opposite ends of the cell and the cell membrane closes around each end, making two new cells.

*2: Upon inspecting the included data of the 54,000 base pairs taken from a mother and her three daughters it may seem confusing that A appears able to bind with C, G and T and indeed, that all sixteen combinations of amino acids appear to be present. This data actually represents 54,000 base pairs taken from two chromosomes (in the text document: one chromosome is on the left, the other chromosome on the right). Since A will only bind with T, the data only requires one letter per base pair as we always know what the other letter will be.

*3: Humans share about 95% of their genes with fish demonstrating that very small changes in a DNA sequence produces large variation in the final organism. Animals have about three billion base pairs and may differ between each other at only one million of these. However, this small group of differing genes may govern how the remaining shared genes operate. The genes are not immune; they can be transformed by the mother’s uterus and be passed on to offspring in an altered fashion. If that alteration is not favourable then death is inevitable, but out of all successful pregnancies comes variation, and improvement, hence evolution.

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Documenting the mundane - part 3

In film the focal plane moves with the action, and sometimes without for effect. I really like this look and as I don't have a video camera I tried to achieve it in a time-lapse video.

I found that no matter how quick or slow I wanted the focal plane to move, it had to be made via completely even steps. Of course as I was doing this by hand it was very difficult. Just like a panning camera, the movement of the focal plane looks abrupt and jittery if it is not completely even. I expected I would be able to make a small change every other shot but this is not the case.

The best option would probably be to continuously turn the focus wheel with a very slow motor. I have since tried this with various small motors attached to elastic bands and have found that none of them deliver enough torque. On my most flimsy lens the focus wheel almost moves how I want it to, but it seems the elastic band absorbs the tension up to a point, then twists the focus wheel, then the process starts again. I don't want to get into chains and what not and so am trying to come up with some kind of string that is perhaps everso slightly elastic and abrasive enough to grasp the focus wheel. If I can get this balance right I may be able to get the results from one of the small motors I have already been playing with.

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Sleeping

I was so surprised to hear in The Pocket Book of General Ignorance that on average a person falls asleep in about seven minutes. Like a lot of people I was sure that I take a long time to fall into a deep sleep, but wondered if perhaps all the waking (apparently around 35 times a night) was clouding my judgment. It's quite reasonable that I could fall asleep in seven minutes then wake fifteen or thirty minutes later for the first of thirty five times and assume I had never been asleep.

Clearly a time-lapse video with some cool music was in order.

There are lots of mysteries involved in sleeping; how much tossing and turning occurs, under-cover/without-cover, whether or not you stay in bed, etc. As I found out, a time-lapse video only really reveals the general goings on of sleep because the sleeping is played back so fast, no small details are revealed though the footage is interesting. It is however, a little like old family photos where the person most interested in the video is the sleeper themselves. I suppose in the case of unusual sleeping practices interest may stir in a wider collection of people. This of course doesn't make creating the video any less fulfilling, making cool stuff is always good.

As with pretty much every time-lapse video I have made so far, there was difficulties. If you want to take pictures of anything you generally need light to do it (I don't have any night vision stuff), if you don't have an intervelometer you need to use a laptop to trip the camera.So this means you have to sleep with the light on and a laptop whirring away. I sleep like a log and so this didn't bother me (video above), but Jody on the other hand, is not such a heavy sleeper. Probably even more annoying than the light or the laptop is the sound of the shutter mechanism on the camera which seems to get really loud once you turn the lights off and try to get some sleep! On top of all this the interval at which the camera takes a picture is 10 to 15 seconds, too far apart to feel like a rhythm, regular enough to be ongoingly annoying.



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Sunrise

A lot of times the doing can be just as fulfilling as the end result. When this is true it can be great because it allows you to enjoy the smaller stages of a project's development, even if it all goes wrong.

This time-lapse video of the rising sun didn't go completely wrong, but didn't go exactly to plan.

Before we even chose a location Jody and I were well aware that the making of this video could be quite fun. Our intention was to record the rising sun in a time-lapse video somewhere in the town we grew up in. We chose December so that we could get out of bed later and so one very chilly morning we got up around 6.45am, made a thermos-flask of coffee and with scarf and gloves, set off with our extensive amount of prepacked photography equipment (a point and shoot and a tripod).

We walked about a mile and a half out of town to the top of a hill that looks back down on where we came from. As we approached the top of the hill we realised that we could have left a bit earlier to get more of the sunrise, turns out the official time of sunrise on bbc.co.uk is the time when you can actually see the sun pop up over the horizon. Still, it was dark enough so we set up the tripod facing east back down into the valley and began taking pictures at what felt like regular intervals (at around 4 seconds) whilst trying not to kick the tripod.

The first problem (and only real problem) was that in December, the sun does not rise in the east. It rises in the south east(ish). Jody pointed this out after we had been taking pictures for about twenty minutes (we planned to take pictures for two hours in all) while the sun was yet to make an appearance, but we (I) felt too invested in the easterly direction and besides, the south east direction was a boring motorway. Jody turned out to be right and the sun rose in the most spectacular fashion (just out of shot) that it would have made the motorway look like the most exciting motorway you'd have ever seen.

Unfortunately this was before I had realised that a time-lapse video doesn't have to be a long single shot. I perhaps felt like cutting between shots was not doing justice to the presentation of manipulated time. It probably would have looked pretty cool cutting from the awakening town in the valley to the amazing sun appearing over the brow of the motorway with the streaking traffic and migrating flare. Determined to get some kind of video out of the expedition, we soldiered on, clicking until our hands were too cold to take any more pictures and the sun was in the sky (to our right).

This video I have described is not the video above. Once we lined up all the pictures it was a rather unfair portrayal of the majestic sunrise we had witnessed, so we decided to have another attempt in a different spot of the same town. We found a bridge going from a car park to a shopping centre, over looking a busy round about (indeed, a magic round about) and facing the direction that the sun was due to rise in. As before, we set off early with our stuff and began shooting. After about forty-five minutes some pencil pushing security guard came over to escort us off the premises! We didn't bother arguing or unleashing any judo chops, we just quickly chose another spot close by and carried on.

At the time we were quite bummed out about having to move in the middle of the video, but carried on anyway, this being our second attempt and all. As it turned out, the scene change in the middle went some way toward not making this a really boring video. Although the sun did rise (it rises everyday - in the south of the UK (that rhymes)), it was barely noticeable and not very exciting. Still, for the sake of doing, we finished it all off, recorded some sombre guitar and went with some words from a poem I wrote about how sad you can feel when you get out of bed late and miss the day:

How it pains the collection
To dream unhindered the night's rejection
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A yearly retrospective

Once upon a time I was browsing videos on vimeo and came across an interview someone had filmed with their granny. Needless to say, after 30 seconds I was bored stiff, but it got me thinking. Of my Grandparents I have one Grandmother and one Grandfather still alive, one from each side, both over 75 years old. As far as I'm concerned, they have both always been 'old person' age and I have no idea of how they would be in their teens, mid twenties, late fourties, etc.

If video technology were as available then (say 1955) as it is now there would be no excuse for there not to be at least some footage of them doing their thing. Indeed, there is now no excuse not to document the present!

With this in mind I began to consider ways to best capture in video format each of my Grandparents frozen in their current state of being. A short interview seemed sensible but I was struggling for ways to avoid a full on autobiography told in their own words, you know how grandparents like to go on. A specific brief topic was needed, either something significant in their lives (would most likely be something from twenty or more years ago), or just something recent.

Recounting an event or series of events that had occurred over the last year seemed like a good idea as it could potentially be quite brief and would be relevant to the time the video was made. It would represent each Grandparent at that moment (or that year).

Unfortunately both of these Grandparents of mine live very far away and I see each of them rarely. Still, the idea of capturing a moment remained poignant, so I instead turned to my immediate family.



What began as a warm up interview turned into a small project in itself of which I am very glad to have undertaken. I asked each of my three immediate family members to bring their 2008 diary, planner, or what ever they had that would help them remember what they got up to that year. Then we each wizzed through our diaries, jotting down in bullet point form any things of significance that we had done that year. These things included moving house, getting fired, being on the TV, finishing a degree, jogging a record needle at a club, etc. Between the four of us there were quite a range of things, not just events that happened but also outcomes of events, lessons learned and hopes for the future.

I was filming the interviews with two Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX55EBpoint and shoot cameras that appear to (most of the time) have a fifteen minute maximum in video mode, whether there is a two or four gig card installed. So each person would sit in the hot seat and have fifteen minutes to get through their piece of paper. It proved more than enough time and I think quite nice to have a time limit. Though I knew next to nothing about how to light an interview I had a try. I had three identical cheapo desk lamps which I placed either side of the interviewee, just a little in front and the third went behind the chair facing up with a red Quality Street wrapper over it. To try and make the two lights shining at the subject act as a key and fill (strong light and softer light that eases off shadows, I think) I hung tissue paper over them both and moved them closer or further away to control their relative brightness and resulting shadows.

For sound recording I used a single Rode NT5 condenser microphone placed at about waist level. This proved quite acceptable and the moving around of the interviewee didn't seem to matter.

Just like the interview with the Granny that I mentioned above; if anyone else watched even just thirty seconds of any of these four interviews they would be very bored. Yet we are all really pleased that we made them. I edited them around March (just to get rid of bits of shuffling around, sipping water, etc) and in just that short space of time I had forgotten a lot of the stuff I had recounted and it felt like I had found some long lost archive. So whether we choose to watch our interviews back this Christmas or in five, ten or twenty years time, we are bound to be super glad we filmed them and recorded, not just the events we all took part in in 2008, but our mannerisms, hair-cuts, vocabulary and all sorts.
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Numbers in aesthetics

I had been reading about numbers and maths in Coincidences, Chaos and All That Math Jazz by EB Burger and Daniel Tammet's Born on a Blue Day, both mentioning the relationship between numbers and aesthetic beauty, mostly in nature.

I didn't bother doing much research into numbers in music via Pythagoras, etc, I just jumped straight in. I took a sort of number that I liked and made a video out of the first hundred of them. The blocks going from right to left are counting one to one hundred and every clear box resembles one of these significant numbers, also revealing two further ways of counting to one hundred.

The music also counts, though not exactly to one hundred. There is an electric piano going up a major scale during every non-significant number and a synthesiser going up a major scale on every significant number, both over a simple drum beat in common time. You will notice that as the numbers rise the frequency of the significant numbers drops, this would continue to drop if I kept counting past one hundred and beyond. There is also a nice coincidence (perhaps?) that both major scales finish their octave by the end of the piece.

I think it is pretty obvious from this description what kind of numbers the clear boxes represent, but I'll let you work it out.

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Ice timelapse

Everyone that makes time-lapse video has to do something involving ice at some point. I never really paid any attention to how long it takes for a glass of ice to melt, I found out it is quite a while, like as long as five hours!

I started making this video late in the evening with my little point and shoot camera on a sturdy surface, snapping away by hand at what felt like regular intervals. About an hour later the ice didn't look much different to how it started and I had taken a load of photos and used up a load of battery. Eventually I had to put the half melted lump of ice in the fridge for an hour or so while my battery charged. This added to the list of problems associated with making a time-lapse video using a point and shoot. I had originally planned on making a single shot video where the ice just melts right there in font of the camera, but I was now presented with a collection of scenes showing the ice in varying states of being from various perspectives and zoom settings, etc.

I like how it turned out with different scenes, it breaks the process up a bit and gives more mileage to what is essentially a very simple thing: melting ice. This prompted me to have another go at incorporating flash for some little animated cracks and snow flakes that I think go quite nicely with the lack of perspective I managed to create with the black back ground.

While the music might appear over dramatic for the visuals, I am very pleased with it. I like the mixture of synthetic sounds, real acoustic instruments, folly and ambient real world textures.
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Off camera flash - part 2

I got hold of a hot shoe flash with the hot shoe attachment broken off. This didn't really matter as my point and shoot camera doesn't have a hot shoe fitting anyway.

Nevertheless, I was going to hook the two together so I could have off camera flash without the problems of working in the dark with slow shutter speeds as mentioned in part 1.

I found that the flash unit has two pins poking out the bottom, one sending a current (or voltage?) and the other waiting to receive it. By touching these two pins (or the adjoining wires) together I could fire the flash on demand. To link this up to my point and shoot I stuck an LDR across these wires and placed the LDR against the flash of the point and shoot camera. This means that the LDR is not letting (resisting) any electricity go round the loop of the two wires of the flash. Once the LDR gets enough light (in the form of a camera flash) it lowers it's resistance and lets the electricity flow through the loop, thus completing the circuit and firing the hot shoe flash.



Sticking this LDR on the end of some lengthy wires allowed me to get some distance between the flash and camera. The first problem I expected was that the flash might not trigger fast enough, but this appears not to be the case. Even in brighter situations where the point and shoot camera would choose a fast shutter speed the external flash still fires and is visible in the shot. In darker situations the camera needs to fire it's on body flash to focus in which case it is easiest to hold the LDR clear of the flash whilst focusing, then just press it against the flash to take the picture.
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Time Away

As previously mentioned; I like those glossy HD video portraits of places. I had a little trip planned and whilst I really wanted to document the trip in video form, wasn't really sure how I would do it. What would I film? What order would I edit clips together, chronologically, day to night?

To get myself started I wrote a list of shots to capture, kind of like an egg hunt. The list was simple and lame, just something to get me collecting footage with a purpose and also a fall back plan. It included things like a dog, someone asleep, a vehicle, sun through trees, rain, dinner, stairs in a public space, etc.



I probably ended up collecting less than half the shots on my list but still found I had more than enough for this four minute video. As with a lot of the things I document, I like the way that however boring this video may be, it has added weight to the memory of this trip, much the same as a load of photos would have (I took a few photos too).
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Biological time-lapse

On the 13th of September 2008 I was set upon by approximately fifteen youths after absolutely no provocation. Having been kicked and punched to the ground, half halfheartedly helped out by the police, documenting the healing of my bruise over three weeks as a time-lapse video felt like a good intermediate distraction and a method of 'closing the case' as it were.

After editing the video I realised how uncomfortable I felt about any explanatory text I might include with it. Generally it seemed to me that if someone posted a note about being violently attacked that they would be seeking sympathy and praise from anonymous internet goers for both their ordeal and heroism. This was far from what I wanted. My physical injuries were very, very minor indeed compared to a sadly large number of people that fall victim to all kinds of unimaginable acts of cruelty. I was very concerned about the possibility of this documentary video coming across as some kind self righteous dramatisation of the incident in an attempt to level it with other kinds of violent crimes.

This was my main reason for considering posting the video with no accompanying text. This of course could be construed as an invitation for inquiry as a cheap 'get around' of the above scenario. After much thought I decided that writing an explanation free from self importance, a little drama, perhaps bias opinions (they are like ass holes after all) would be impossible and so the only way to proceed would be to attempt to be as neutral and fair to the facts as possible, avoiding unnecessary details that may appear extraneous.

The day following the attack one of the first thoughts that came to mind (a very silly sounding thought but one I couldn't ignore) was "Why don't any of my friends with PhD's spend their Saturday evenings in large groups looking for lone people to afflict injury upon?" This led to the more reasonable and common question "What set of circumstances come together to make a group of people that appear to think that engaging in violence with nonparticipating strangers is acceptable?"

To someone like me with no qualifications or knowledge in the field of sociology or psychology the answer feels like "anything and/or everything" and so impossible to lay out as any kind of manageable explanation. It seems likely that each individual of such a group would have at the very least an inert notion that this behavior is wrong and more likely would be well aware that it is unacceptable behavior. I find it easier to analyze the conundrum of someone carrying out behavior that they know to be unacceptable when thinking about people dropping litter.

I have dropped litter in the past, knowing it's wrong and would say that I did it by justifying it to myself, by trying to out-weigh the wider problem of dropped litter with reasons why I deserve to drop it. "I don't want it in my pockets", "someone else will pick it up", "there is already a load of rubbish on the floor" (Broken Window Theory) or "I'm always picking up other peoples rubbish." No matter how you spin it, there is no way of arguing that dropping litter is good. I'm sure there are some people that genuinely think it is OK to shoplift small items from large stores that make up large chains. Not only would these people justify it with reasons like "no individual person is losing money", "I needed a pint of milk" or "they shouldn't be able to charge these prices", but they could actually believe that shoplifting on a small scale is a good idea and teaches big corporations a lesson.

Back to dropping litter; I would imagine it almost impossible to find anyone anywhere that could honestly say that dropping litter is a good thing. Speak to a serial litter dropper and sure they would begin by justifying it with the above excuses but I really do believe that after raising a few of the obvious dilemmas (like "someone has to pick it up eventually") it would impossible for them to be unaware of the problem. It's a strange situation, regular people doing things they agree are wrong and shouldn't happen.

Like I previously mentioned, I expect that a good proportion of the people involved in mindless violence would acknowledge that it is wrong but would justify it by trivializing it or disassociating themselves from the effect of their actions. However, this still doesn't really take me any further than my second question "What set of circumstances come together to make a group of people that are capable of justifying violence against nonparticipating strangers?"

As you get older you find more of the things your parents told you whilst growing up were true "one day you won't hate your siblings", "drugs are bad", "there are plenty more fish in the sea", "working hard at school is a good idea", "if two trains are traveling at the same speed . . . ", etc. I remember when I first realised that I agreed with a few of these I felt ashamedly old and boring! I have always liked films and whilst under fifteen was often allowed to watch titles like Terminator, Friday The 13th, etc which I guess my parents decided I could handle watching without turning into a violent psychopath. As a twenty three year old I was rather dissapointed when Rockstar's most violent video game Manhunt 2 was banned before hitting the shops.



It felt patronizing that a grown up wasn't given the opportunity to decide for themselves if they wanted to witness such sickening senseless violence that was reportedly carried out in the game. It is quite likely that the sensors didn't think the game would corrupt a large number of geeky adults (indeed, Rock Star say the game is aimed at a more mature audience), but more so the impressionable under eighteens who might experience the video game. The game was of course due to be released with an eighteen certificate and so it felt like an added frustration that us adult video gamers were being denied entertainment to cover for the parents who were not responsible enough and could not accurately asses whether their child was mentally stable of playing an eighteen certificate violent video game. The eighteen certificate is only a legal matter when selling a video game, if an adult buys it then the eighteen certificate is there to act as a guide (in the UK at least).

Major studies have shown no conclusive link between video game usage and violent activity and I am not proposing otherwise, just that irresponsible exposure to violent material (of many mediums) is very likely to be one of these (perhaps in the thousands?) circumstances that join together to create a justification of violence. The youths that attacked me were trying hard to look and act like rappers, they called me Blood and walked like they needed the toilet. When the police spoke to them it looked like I was watching a play where the police said their parts with their puffed out chests and the hip hoppers played their part of speaking in faux-maican slang and shuffling their feet. This social appeal of being involved in a violent gang must be yet another contributing factor, a modern human equivalent to being in a pack.

As I stated above, I have no knowledge in the field of sociology and present all these ideas in their raw form as they have come to me for the sake of documenting ideas. It seems way too easy and simple to say that in late teens the sporty kids are in sports teams, the musicians in bands and the naughty kids in gangs. Going back to my first question of "Why don't any of my friends with PhD's spend their Saturday evenings in large groups looking for lone people to afflict injury upon?" It also seems too simple and easy to tie this to education. Shirley you can be educated and enjoy dishing out violence in situations where people can't defend themselves?

Malcolm Gladwell has a very interesting chapter in his book Outliers where by heavily referencing a study carried out by Annette Lareau (and documented in her book Unequal Childhoods) he discusses the difference in attitudes to education in a working class and middle class environment. I won't attempt to go into any detail, but the jist of it is that a middle class family takes an active interest in a child's education and a working class family views their child's education as a duty and responsibility of the school. Throughout the book you get to learn how not only are both methods good and bad, but that both methods lead to a surprising number of seemingly unrelated factors. This book led me to think that it would be mostly middle class kids being encouraged to join the school band or sports team while the working class kids would be left (and encouraged?) to entertain themselves, learn how to occupy their own time, organise activities, take responsibility for their own time, or just join a gang and kill time loitering on the streets. This goes some way towards answering the question about the lack of PhD holding street gangs ready to talk victims into submission, but does (like all the other suggestions put forward) seem too simple and easy, taking me back to my original vague answer to the whole collection of factors that make a violent youth: anything and everything.

Making the video

The main problem in assembling this time-lapse was the change in perspective and framing between all the shots (over six hundred in total). When I began taking them I tried to hold my camera out in front at such an angle that would be comfortable and natural to repeat often. Once I lined them up and began watching it was clear that there was too much change between shots. I wanted these photos to be played back at twenty four frames per second and at that speed they mostly looked like a jumbled mess. The painstaking fix I chose to use (I am sure there must be quicker methods) was to make a cross-hair jpeg, import two copies into my video editor, chroma key out the back ground and line each cross hair up with each of my pupils. I then went through every photo zooming in or out and moving it until the pupils fitted as best they could under the two cross hairs. Even after this lengthy corrective measure it was still very jerky. In trying to disguise it some what I came up with the cool look of 'jogging' the video on every kick drum that you hear in the score. The general panning and zooming that goes on also appeared to help.

The look of the healing bruise and scabs got me thinking about other biological time-lapse video's that I'd like to try, including fingernails, facial hair and other injuries.

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Time keeping

I was interested in how steady I could keep a pulse and how obvious the drifting of a pulse would be to a listener. To explore this I recorded a piece of music and used said music to generate some real time visuals to accompany it.

I clicked a pair of drum sticks together along to two bars (eight clicks) of midi click, then the midi click stopped and I tried to continue clicking at the same speed for about ten minutes. I recorded this process eight times.

Interesting rhythms occur as each recording speeds up or slows down. In theory, a similar thing to the '1000 monkeys typing on 1000 typewriters' idea is possible, where if I kept the clicking up for long enough, every rhythm fathomable would be generated. This would not really happen to it's fullest extent because the speed will only drift within a particular margin and so some kind of rhythm with a big gap in the middle would not occur. Slowing the master tempo of the piece could make this a possibility though.

The bars on screen represent each of the eight clicks and whether they are speeding up or slowing down. If a line moves up then the corresponding click has sped up, if a line moves down then the corresponding click has slowed down.
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