MAT256 05W





QUIET DEMO - Brian Springer - Art Studio

"If we are indeed doomed to the comically convergent task of dismantling the universe, and fabricating from its stuff an artifact called The Universe, it is reasonable to suppose that such an artifact will resemble the vaults of an endless film archive built to house, in eternal cold storage, the infinite film."

Hollis Frampton, "For A Metahistory of Film: Commonplace Notes and Hypotheses,"Circles of Confusion. Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1983, p. 113.

   
Demo Description The Quiet Demo is an example of a media project that uses the MPEG-7 content description scheme as a tool for analyzing and re-editing broadcast media. Archiving and reorganizing broadcast media products based on MPEG-7 criteria such as scene detection, luminance, and color has been explored by artists such as Jason Salavon, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy. Anne McGuire, and Barbara Lattanzi.   I am interested in how this type of MPEG-7 media analysis can be tweaked and fine-tuned in order to create a meaningful dissection of the genres, formulas, codes, and algorithms of commercial mass media products. I am also interested in the accidental meaningful narratives that such a process generates, due in part to the limits of mathematical structural analysis.

The Quiet Demo is an example of what a half hour of television would look like if a person only viewed the moments when the TV was quiet. I recorded 30 minutes of television and extracted the moments that the audio channel was below 30db for more than half a second. Using this formula I was able to extract 30 seconds of quietness from 30 minutes of television. These clips of quietness are played back in their original order of appearance. It is interesting to note that in this brief sampling that people of color are in the majority when TV commercials are quiet.

The Quiet Demo was manually edited using Final Cut Pro. I am currently developing a software program to extract and assemble quiet moments from television.


Demo Download QuietDemo-QuickTime Movie-450k


Links

MPEG-7 Overview

Jennifer and Kevin McCoy

Jason Salavon

Barbara Lattanzi

Anne McGuire - Strain Andromeda The  

George Legrady Media Arts & Technology | Department of Art Courses