HarS@etay [dindag]

february 17, 2005.

[quick link: Etay web site]

The cameras in the Etay loft react to movement. When switched on, and as long as that there are things moving, they will record, and automatically save all that's going on to the main computer's harddisk, as a "continuous" series of small .mov-movies, each lasting for something between 10 and 20 seconds. Below a series of stills from the video captured during yesterday's visits to the loft, by i8u, David Turgeon and Tomas Phillips ...

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[ next related SB-entry: HarS@etay [wondag] :: previous related SB-entry: HarS@etay [mandag] ]

HarS@etay [mandag]

february 16, 2005.

[quick link: Etay web site]

Had a great flight. On monday morning Air Canada flight number 871 took me (and many others besides, mind you :-) in 7 hours and 45 minutes all the way from Paris to Montréal, a distance of some five thousand and five hundred kilometers. I read a bit, dozed a bit, looked with half an eye to some of the things shown on the tiny (economy class) video screens ("Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow"), then out again into the blinding sunlight, onto the vast oceans of clouds

The plane left Paris Charles de Gaulle, with a slight delay, at about 11h in the morning, and we arrived at Montréal Trudeau airport early afternoon local time, at about 12h45. That was pretty early. But it did take a while to walk all the way up to the customs, to get through the customs, get my big red suitcase, and a fistful of canadian dollars. It was but shortly after three that I arrived at my final destination, on the corner of Ontario and Moreau, and - for the first time in real person - met David Johnston (aka jhave), the curator of the Etay project.

The Etay loft is a wonderful, very flexible space. A more detailed description of what that means will have to wait until another time.

David gave me a quick introduction to the functioning of the camera- and audio set up (this morning, before catching a bus back to the USA, Nick Fox-Gieg, who has occupied the loft last week, gave me a more thorough tour of the loft's 'digital wiring') and I checked that the laptops I had brought over from Paris were still functioning and were willing to connect, one wireless, the other through an ethernet cable, to the Etay network and the internet. We then hurried over to the Museum of Contemporary Art, for a lecture by 'new media [theory] star' Lev Manovich, at 18h. "Info Aesthetics" ... From culture as compression onward to the dawning of a 'new' art without compression ... Should I say more? Lots could be said, and interesting things actually, but let's wait ... Or just this: I found it - event wise and, au fond, even content wise - curiously similar to Steve Jobs 'keynote performance' at the Apple Expo in 2003 (but Jobs did have more 'flair', did have quite a bit more 'style', though ... :-) ...)

My first Raudio podcast from Etay is, mainly, a chain of cassette 'snapshots' made on monday while travelling to, and later on in Montréal. (The 'safety on board' passage is dedicated to Zoë Irvine ...) You will notice that at some points I am humming. Was surprised hearing that back myself. Apparently sometimes I hum. Or make other strange noises ... I wasn't aware of that, as I really do forget that I am recording (with my lapel microphone).

While doing the editing of the PodCast (on MacOSX, in the very simply one-track editor Sound Studio) I could not but be reminded of a short passage I read on the flight, in an essay by Bruno Guiganti ('Entre bruits et silences'):

"Il y a [...] dans les moindres des faits réels un potentiel de fiction fantastique. Mais il ne s'agit pas de les 'irréaliser', il suffit de les découper pour les reconstruire, et pour les narrer, les imbriquer dans un récit qui à la fois les authentifie et les imagine."

[ To subscribe to the Raudio Podcasts, get the feed's URI by clicking the green podcast button in the sidebar. Alternatively, you may simply download the mp3-file. ]

[ next related SB-entry: HarS@etay [dindag] :: previous related SB-entry: HarS@etay [intro] ]