User Profile on Upstage

Click on the photos to enlarge, so you can read the text on these screen shots from the live performances of User Profile

I seem to have a persistent attraction to the steep learning curve. I am always putting myself into situations where I have to learn new things through total immersion in order to publicly achieve high goals quite quickly. And then, having (at least superficially) got the hang of that thing, I move onto the next challenge. I admire anyone who spend years mastering their craft or becoming expert in their field, but I have finally come to accept myself as a dilettante*.


This 'insatiable craving for novelty' is one of the few things I have in common with the narrator of my poem, User Profile. The poem is the object of my latest dabble, in cyberformance, which involves typing in the lines of the poem which appear as text on the screen and in a computer generated voice, and clicking on different icons to change images on the 'stage', play sound recordings and move avatars around like actors. The audience can type in comments which also appear as text, but silently, so it's a very interactive form of theatre!


Earlier this week I did four live online performances of User Profile, as part of the Upstage Festival 090909. Online performance proved to be challenging, exciting and fun. Here are some of the screen shots from the performances. If you click on the photos to enlarge them you can read the text. The words in bold are being spoken by my avatars, and the light coloured words are the audience, commenting throughout the performance.


The images I used are all from my collection of vintage sci fi novels which I scanned and edited into backdrops and avatars. At the very last minute I had some help from Mem, to upload some sound effects (from FreeSounds), and the spooky space noises were a great hit. In fact I had great feedback in general, and even got asked to do an encore of my second show. Hopefully someone recorded one of the performances as video, that I can post/link sometime, so you can see and hear the whole thing.


I also managed to see most of the other performances in the Upstage Festival, which were all quite different, although there was a tendency towards the absurd/dada/advante guarde, which made my little story seem quite conventional by comparison.


*Dilattante, is of course a pejorative term, like bureaucrat, another of my careers. Along with my attraction to novelty, I seem to have tendency towards despised identities such as wowser, feminist and greenie (though this latter has suddenly become fashionable which is quite disorientating).

Daintree Calling- The Film

I recently had the good fortune to participate in a project to learn digital storytelling. Through my involvement in Art Makers 'Glass Hedgehog' project, I was buddied with Dylan Calhane, a talented third year computer design student at Waikato University. Dylan applied his digital design skills to turning my photographs, painted paper collages and words into a beautiful video poem. You can see the results of our collaboration below.





Dylan is not only talented and knowlegable, but also a generous teacher. Although the techniques of the 3D animation he was creating in AfterEffects went totally over my head, it wasn't for lack of his patient explanation and demonstration. I did absorb heaps of Photoshop tips while preparing the paper collages and photographs, and enough basic digital storytelling techniques to have sparked an appetite to make lots more video poems on my own.

Dylan and his classmates in the Computer Graphic Design Degree are having their Degree Project Exhibition this week at the New Place Theatre at the University of Waikato. If you are near the campus, I recommend checking it out.

May Giveaway- The Book of the Film

It's been a little while since I've editioned an artist's book, and this one was kind of spontaneous, inspired by the spontaneous little film I made called Non-Linear Time. This book consists of the unbound letterpress printed tissue pages that feature in the film, presented in a handmade portfolio. It is an edition of 12 and they are for sale in my Etsy shop.

Or you, dear reader, can go in the draw to win one by commenting on this post. I'm not requiring any particular kind of comment this month, as an experiment to see if I get more entries. So now is a good time to delurk and let me know you are out there! Comments received by 7am May 29th will go into the totally random draw (disinterested passerby co-opted to pull name from hat) and the winner will receive a signed copy of Non-Linear Time, the artist's book of the film.


Of course if you want to read the whole of the original poem that Non-Linear Time is extracted from you should buy Voyagers: Science Fiction Poetry from New Zealand, edited by Mark Pirie and Tim Jones (2009) on Amazon.

Non-Linear Time

I'm learning to make digital stories from my poems. I have just finished my first attempt and proudly posted it on You Tube. Have a look! Its only 44 seconds long.



I made Non-Linear Time using Windows Movie Maker, the software that came bundled with my laptop. It's very easy to use, but with limited flexibility, which is why I've gone for a very simple little film. Anything fancier could only have been cheesy.

The images are of some letterpress printing I did back in the early days at Te Kowhai Print Trust in 2007. I was going to make an artist's book of my poem, Two Kinds of Time, but my ambitious experimental approach outstripped my letterpress skills at the time and after printing these pages I got frustrated and went onto other, easier projects. But I've hung onto the printed pieces of tissue, thinking that one day I would go back to making Two Kinds of Time.

Two Kinds of Time actually does have a book existence. I was inspired to write the poem a few years ago when Tim Jones first mentioned that he was going to be editing an anthology called Voyagers: Science Fiction Poetry from New Zealand. After a long wait Voyagers, edited by Mark Pirie and Tim Jones, is finally out on Amazon right now and will be available in NZ early June. But for some reason Two Kinds of Time is one of those poems that has kept nagging at me for concretization*.

So, last week, inspired by the digital storytelling course I am taking through Artmakers and impatient to be doing more than I could in that context, I thought I'd try to make a little film on my own. I've developed a storyboard and worked on images for the whole poem, but it's a demanding project to squeeze into a busy life and I've decided to do a George Lucas and start in the middle of my story. Eventually I hope to make parts one and three of Two Kinds of Time (Linear Time and When You Sleep) but for now, I have released Non-Linear Time on its own.

*There are a few nagging poems waiting in the wings, they know who they are!