Recently there was a collaboration amoungst the iDEA students at WNMU; students from the Movement in Performance class taught by Zoe Wolfe joined forces with the iDEA Lab 4d class to create an awesome video of light and music. We set up in the Fine Arts Center Theater. Jamie Ramirez provided strips of LED lights, used to light under kitchen cabinets and as yard decorative lighting (http://www.newmexicoled.com/New_Mexico_LED/Welcome.html), in several different colors, which were attached to 9 volt batteries and wrapped around the dancers bodies.
Several cameras were set up around the stage, some were filming, some took a picture every few seconds. Lights out, and the dancers created experimental dances using the improv techniques learned in Zoe’s class.
We did a few dances and then at the end of the shoot we did still pictures on a slow shutter 15-30 seconds of a repeated movement on the stage. We ended up with some pretty cool stills. This is the movement of a dancer doing a series of cartwheels across the stage.
The next step will be to render the footage in AfterEffects and edit a video! Coming Soon to the iDEA Blog…
Peter Bill is an Artist, Activist and Educator. He has, since learning photoshop v. 1.5, been interested in connecting under-represented communities with digital tools so their voices may be broadcast. He has been involved with large scale video projections, guerrilla art actions, and community building since the 90s.
Peter Bill's award winning paint and video landscapes have shown in such diverse venues as The Kitchen(NYC), the Henry Art Gallery(Seattle), FILE Festival(São Paulo, Brazil), and other international venues. He continues in his Oil paintings and video work to weave the painterly with the digital, pixels and paint, indigo and 191970 blue. He envisioned and realized the first time-lapse film festival in North America, the Gila Timelapse Film Festival and has curated and directed shows on three continents. "Art must be realized on the streets, as an agent of change and progress."
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Much of my art has been about creating a vessel, a space for meditation. Through my painting and video installations I hope to create a moment of quietude, a contemplation of this world we have built.
In my mural and documentary film work I have balanced a certain transcendentalism in my heart with my didactic scots-yankee bones. In the public sphere arts role is to inspire and provoke. Therefore in my mural projects I have attempted to involve the local community in the conception and realization of my projects. In my animations and short films I have attempted critiques of the bathetic apocalyptic culture we live in, the false utopia of the California landscape, the contested landscape of New Mexico, and tried to get to the situation on the ground in war torn Bosnia, among other subjects. The world is a complicated, granular place. We cannot oversimplify with our stories, but we can in their telling change opinions, and thus change the world for the better.
