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Oct 01 2011

Bookmark: James Clar

by The Contributing Artist

For Bookmark, ArtAsiaPacific invites an artist to spotlight some of their online sources of inspiration. This week we asked young Dubai-based artist James Clar, known for his playful mixed-media and light installations. AAP also visited Clar in his studio for the Sept/Oct issue of Where I Work.  

1. Kutiman-Thru-You: Mother of All Funk Chords

I’ve seen a lot of youtube mashups but this one is really skillfully crafted. Taking individual snippets of live instrumentation videos on youtube and then composing a new piece of music from it. Very well done.

3. Manual Input Sessions

Good friend Zach Lieberman and Golan Levin created this interactive sound performance piece in the early 2000s and its still amazing to see. The system they created was great; live camera tracking to create screen based graphics, which would then interact with computer based physics systems (gravity, movement, etc), which would create live sound and visuals.  Having seen them perform this live, it’s a real treat to see how they pushed their system and had fun making music with it.

5. Google Flights

I can’t wait for the international version of this!  

2. Les Twins

I became obsessed with the French hip hop dancers, Les Twins, about 6 months ago. It was totally refreshing to see new forms of hip hop dance and that people were evolving from breakdancing which has been around for over 20 years now.  You can definitely see elements of other new forms in their dance, like turfin, flexin, krump, etc, but they move with such control they sometimes describe their style as glitch.

4. Hachiya Kazuhiko’s “disCommunication”

Hachiya Kazuhiko a great media artist from Japan who’s had some amazing projects (like PostPet or more recently his OpenSkies project), but I especially like his work “disCommunication” from way back in 1993.  Basically it consisted of 2 virtual reality helmets with video cameras placed on the front, but the live feed from each camera was switched to the other helmet.  So if you and a friend wore the helmets, your friend’s vision and head movements would be displayed on your screen, and vice versa. If your friend moved their head to look at you, inside your helmet you would see yourself in the 3rd person.  Essentially it let you trade perspectives with another person. Simple but so powerful!  Unfortunately, it was done so long ago that there isn’t really good documentation online