Just got back from visiting La Habana! La Bienal de la Habana has just begun and the city is full of art. My girlfriend had a week between jobs, so it was the perfect time to go and see completely different world just a half-hour away from Miami. Habana is in a completely different dimension, the city is beautiful yet in ruins. At times it felt like we were walking inside Piranesi drawing. The people are warm and the girls are beautiful. Its amazing to go down el Malecon at night and see it full of people talking, drinking, singing, and kissing on the sea wall. Things could be changing there soon, some seem to think nothing is going to change because they’ve been waiting a long time, but things stay the same until suddenly they’re not.  That one of the largest private art collections in Miami, Cifo, has gone down to habana for the biennial is already sign of change.  What those changes will we mean once they come no one knows, there’s lots of pressures pushing in different directions, but the pressure is growing none the less.

Here are some tourist pictures and videos I made walking around. I might update this post and add more later. I couldn’t document the names of many  of the artist while making the videos, I’ll try to get update those too.

The Electric Electric went really well. Benton was awesome in putting it together and helping get Time Piles live and running. There were some things that had to be scratched at the last moment, but hopefully there will be a next time and we’ll have another crack at putting in what we left out. This Heart Electric and The Jellyfish Bros played great sets, and it was fun trying to drive the videos to their music.

I was able to scrape together a few captures from while I was making the videos. They were really short because I was trying to use them as little samples that would loop in the background while I set up shots in the foreground. More things to learn as I go.  Staying up late to post this ’cause tomorrow I’m going to cuba! Que vuelta!   

Time Piles is great for partys! Tomorrow, I will be showing Time Piles live at the Electric Pickle! Along with this Heart Electric and The Jelly Fish Brothers. Benton has been organizing shows at the electric pickle and inviting artist once a month to bring you some culture while you binge on 2 doller drinks.

This isn’t the first time I’ve shown Time Piles live, but it is the first time it will be wireless and live. So now I get to fully exploit the ability to wander around and slice up what ever or who ever gets in front of me. I’ve made some adjustments to the app so I can transmit it wirelessly over an Apple TV unit. But what is especially new and fun is the ability to mix in previously recorded videos. It is an important part to what I’ve envisioned the becoming.

Since the concept of the app revolves around playing with time, I’ve always wanted the ability to go back a little further and have a wider breadth of moments to mix. Although the loop running in the background of Time Piles is potentially infinite, in reality unless your conscious and careful about it, moving around and playing with the app usually ends covering the past after a short amount of time. Now I can pull from deep in the past  and  push it to the foreground to mix with the present. It gives a wider breadth of possibilities of expression. Possibilities I will be exploring as the show goes, because I just got the feature working and haven’t had much practice.

Recently my dear friend Debbie D got back into town and teamed up again with Otto von Schirach to form Miami Booty Club. They just released a video for their new bass extravaganza called “Super Sucia” and snuck in a few Time Piles into the video. I also had a chance to shoot a little video of Debbie dancing in the dark to the ghost of whitney, painting her into a Time Pile using a flash light.

Miami has some beautiful skies, and I’ve made a few Time Pile videos of them. I sometimes happen to catch a plane flying through and I’ve always wanted to make a time pile to fill the skies with them like a swarm of dragon flies. Unfortunately though, majestic cumulo nimbus clouds make for a bad background for keying out and isolating objects in the sky. Finally though we had clear blue skies, and I had to jump to take advantage before a new set of clouds rolled in.

The new version of Time Piles has just been released in the app store! you can get on the app store now!

☆Audio now recorded and filtered when capturing video!
☆Smoother video capture!
☆Improved Performance.
☆Now works with ipod touch.

I wanted Time Piles to be a video instrument, like a musical instrument but instead of producing sound, you produce visuals. It is a tool for improvising the creation of visuals, the same way a musician might jam, or a dancer improvising a dance. The app gives you the ability to create a video by playing spontaneously with your surrounding, taking bits and pieces of the world immediately around you and recombining it into something new. Live video images filtered by the app are continuously composited into a loop, creating a pile of moments upon moments forming an interactive video collage. You see both the past and present at once in a melody of tangled time, engaging you to drive the visual song by what you point your camera at, and how you choose to filter it. The ability to use the application on a mobile platform frees you to be creative with the app anywhere and at any time. I want it to be a celebration of existing in the present, just as other performative forms of expression can be.

The Time Piles application which is currently available on the iTunes app store will soon be updated. The major new feature for this release will be the inclusion of audio when recording videos with the application. Not only is the audio recorded but it’s also processed so that it reflects the video mixing done by the app. Performance has also been improved significantly so that videos play back at normal speed instead of being compressed to 3x the speed. Also fixed a few bugs that didn’t allow the app to run on a iPod Touch. Can’t wait to put this out there.