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What I’m Watching this week

The Great British Bake Off – I binged every season of this show that I could find during the first year of the pandemic. This is really good tv where skilled craftspeople are challenged and supported in a really enjoyable way.

Star Trek : Discovery Season 4 – Not the strongest start to the season but any time that gravity is involved, so is time. Im hoping the writers add something new to this rather overdone “let’s change time” storyline.

Dexter Season 9 – I just started watching episode 1 of season 9 of Dexter. I did enjoy this show when it was on a few years back. I’m hoping that this will be a “must watch” in my weekly rotation.

OMG I hate American Survivor. I much prefer the Australian show but hate-watch this show with friends. I cannot stand the entire cast and the show itself is off the rails.

However, last week we had pizza from Pizza Nerds and we were all very pleased!

Blade Runner Black Lotus. I have only seen two episodes but this Japanese-American anime builds on the franchise. I re-watched both Ridley Scott’s and Villeneuve’s before I started. I can’ even count how many times that I have watched the original. The original movie is embedded in the symbology of media culture. The Blade Runner universe is vast so I look forward to the rest of this series.

Another animated series that is ongoing that expands on the Star Wars universe. Star Wars : The Bad Batch was a good series so I am giving this one a shot too.

Murder Island. This was only six episodes where 4 teams of amateurs work with actual police to solve a murder written by Ian Rankin. I binged this last week during the first snow of the season. Its a good concept since most people think that they are Sherlock, Poirot and Ms.Marple rolled into one. Spoiler alert – they aren’t.

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Re-starting

Starting to reintegrate blogging back into my life.

I’m posting some of my older assemblages as video files. I was thinking to export them as gifs but I think that mp4 is a better format cross platform and across devices. Unsure. WordPress is giving me a 2mb limit on video files so I can’t get more than 10 seconds at that rate. I was testing HEVC but it might not be as ubiquitous as required to not worry about accessibility. This reminds me of when Macromedia Flash was a thing and designers like Hillman Curtis were looking at how to compress animations to take advantage of limited bandwidth. The solution might be to just post videos at Vimeo and link to this space.

This Philip Guston video is very first one that I did on completely on my iPad Pro in Affinity Photo and LumaFusion. And while my iPad Pro is a great tool, perhaps I am too old school? I haven’t been too productive with Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer or LumaFusion compared to the desktop apps like Photoshop, After Effects or Avid that I learned my craft on. I have chalked it up to the whole pandemic and the shift to working from home. I wanted to completely transition to my tablet but it didn’t work for me without a way to integrate my desktop media catalog into a new workflow and using my scanner for my analog work which is an important component of my artistic assemblages.

I will blog more about Guston but one way that I think through art is by dis-assembling it. When I dis-assemble art into component objects I get a better understanding of the compositional choices made by the artist.

More to come on this as I integrate a laptop back in.

The basic elements of each workflow is the following:

  • Media creation
    • Camera + SD card – Digital and devices images
    • Tablet – content assemblage / edits
    • Laptop – DAM, photo/vector, 3D, edit, motion graphics
    • Image scanner – Mamiya and legacy Analog devices
  • Content / Media Storage
    • NAS shared folders – cloud enabled
  • Tools
    • Digital Asset Manager
    • Photo Manipulation
    • OBS Broadcast
    • Video editing
    • Motion Graphics
    • 3D
    • Audio
  • Output
    • Blog
      • Text
      • Visualizations
    • VLOG – TBD

Fujikawa, from the series Fifty-Three Stations of Tōkaidō – Edo period, 1840-1842

This is another one from around 2010. Like Guston, it was originally Flash but rebuilt in Luma Fusion on my iPad. I really enjoyed working on these prints.

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Unripe tomatoes and other herbs from my garden

It is so hot and humid this long Canada Day weekend. I did find the energy to shoot some macro photos with my Olympus 60mm before I water my planter boxes in the back yard. My basil is starting to flower but the mint is thriving. 

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Flowers from the front yard

The weather has been fantastic for my planter boxes. The sun was bright this morning and some new flowers are blooming.

These are with my Olympus 60mm and Panasonic GX-8.

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More London 

Brick Lane was great for graffiti and saw some work by Space Invader and the street sign guy – have photos of his work from Paris, Rome and Florence. He sells tshirts and prints at his shop in Florence. I saw the shop but it was closed, across the Arno on the way up to Michelangelo overlook. I digress. Skateboard park was great along the South bank, as was my taco.

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Some photos from the recent months

The deer below are from Norway Bay, below are London from last month. And while the diesel smell wasn’t ideal, London’s art galleries, architecture and food were outstanding. I kept popping in to the National Gallery to admire the Crivelli and Fiorentino paintings. The Tate Britan had an amazing show with paintings from post war Britain focused on representations of the human body called Human, All too Human that i found fascinating. The Turners as well at both. 

I was most pleased to see the Kusama’s at the Tate Modern and loved the Tacita Dean exhibit(s). And the curry!