A blog and portal investigating the adventure of making and collecting Mysteriam in the digital realm.
Click on hyperlinks to follow the crumbs and find the source of things you can't explain, but love anyway.
These are the coolest and simplest internet toys we've found lately. One is for animated-movie making, the other is a simulated voice that will tell you whatever you want to hear.
MovieMaker is a simple, speedy way to make something hilarious or profound out of basic cartoon settings, characters, and scenarios. Write your own dialogue, add music, and make animated movies out of one scene, or as many as you like. From SubmarineChannel.com, which offers a wealth of interactive work such as this.
Text-To-Speech (TTS): AT&T Labs has presented the online public with speech simulations a la Stephen Hawking, and although the voices here are more advanced and less Swedish-sounding (they even have English, Indian, or French accents and can translate into other languages), they retain a stilted roboticness that can be so, so amusing and pregnant with potential.
One hurtle that must be faced early in making Mysteriam is trust in the confluence of separate events. The idea that things that happen at different times or in different places can be of a piece, that if we refrain from forcing and monitoring, events will coincide of their own accord. One way to demonstrate this is collaborating long-distance, which we've done in past years with dance companies in Colorado and Mexico.
Generating one media to be presented alongside another media that you have only had fragmented glimpses of is certainly a challenge, and a risk, but it seems that if the two disparate streams are made from the same seed ideas, and in the same spirit, they always marry beautifully when put together.
A more exotic option is to work with someone who died before you were born. GlassMask Nos. 1-5 (see No.2 below) is a series of short video artworks that traces the rise and fall of a tiny metal action figure with a marble head, through the rearrangement of a lecture of the Rev. James A. Pike, Episcopal Bishop of California until 1966. Before I began researching his fascinating life, I had used his voice in the music for No.1, which was made in 2002, and is taken from his introduction of Vince Guaraldi at Grace Cathedral in 1965. A minister friend of ours related that Pike had died wandering the desert outside Jerusalem, and had led a famously influential and perverse life prior to that; I was hooked, and began reading his biography.
The only other speech to be found on the Web is here, "Today's Crisis in Religion," a speech at Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions at UC Santa Barbara, Nov. 7, 1966. I proceeded to select the strangest parts of his lecture, transcribe them, rearrange them into a script, and put the recordings in their new order, which told a very weird story of the excitement and disillusionment of a philosopher. I did not know this was going to be the story before Pike revealed it, honestly. It was there, perfectly clear in the phrases of his 40-minute lecture. What makes this possible, I think, is that whenever we say anything, we give ourselves away-- Pike himself had followed this exact path of rise and fall in his life, and by the time he composed and delivered this speech, his son had committed suicide and Pike had begun holding seances to reach him, and the Rev. died in the desert, lost and overheated, three years later.
We listen for what is being murmured at us by the universe, we look at the materials at hand, and trust that everything we need in order to play and make art is already there. To find out more about Pike, go here. Watch the result of this collaborative process in GlassMask No.2, below.
No practical application allowed at these addresses. Each one has interactive programming that is in turns beautiful and primitive, each more one than the other. There is more to these entertainments than I can explain here, go and play for yourself.
POTATOLAND Generate music and images with lines and colors that have a mind of their own, and break corporate sites into tiny pieces at www.potatoland.org
NORM Pure art in digital form, simple shapes, and an ingenious navigation system of multiple windows at www.norm.to
TYPORGANISM Program music with a step sequencer and set it to fireworks, upload images to convert to ASCII code, explore the weight and three-dimensionality of fonts, and play in general with language and programming at www.typorganism.com
RANDOMWEBSITE Find sites you'd never know about, and maybe wouldn't visit on purpose (family-friendly though it is), through www. randomwebsite.com
A multidisciplinary artist who was trained as a musician (B.M. 2000, Berklee College of Music), Corbett Lunsford is artistic director of Mysteriam, a collaborative arts project synthesizing video, music, sculpture, and performance. His work has been commissioned by dance and theatre companies across North America, and his improvisational skill was honed through his work as an accompanist for modern dance and by touring nationally and abroad with The Second City as Music Director. His first album for Mysteriam, Entryway, was released in 2006.
Corbett's work revolves around the importance of technology and the synthesis of concepts in modern America. There is a complexity of contemporary life, an excess of stimuli that all are presented with in the everyday condition, that his group succeeds in capturing, condensing, and making delightful and mysterious. His creativity is heavy on collaboration, the use of whatever tools are at hand, wonder, the potential for fun and beauty in apparent mistakes, and the fusion of decaying elements and electronic components and processes.
MovieMaker is a simple, speedy way to make something hilarious or profound out of basic cartoon settings, characters, and scenarios. Write your own dialogue, add music, and make animated movies out of one scene, or as many as you like. From SubmarineChannel.com, which offers a wealth of interactive work such as this.
Text-To-Speech (TTS): AT&T Labs has presented the online public with speech simulations a la Stephen Hawking, and although the voices here are more advanced and less Swedish-sounding (they even have English, Indian, or French accents and can translate into other languages), they retain a stilted roboticness that can be so, so amusing and pregnant with potential.
