I’m in here
Just started a new image blog here: blog.edmadrid.com
Goodbye!
Hi guys. So this post marks the end of this blog and the end of the project called Ed Muscle’s Interweb Deathbed. I started this project in April 2006, mostly as a way to push the image-making strategies I’d been working on toward some kind of breaking point. I also wanted to play with issues of online identity, and manipulate the conditions which determined how my work was received. It’s a little too soon for me to say anything insightful about the success or failure of this project, so I’ll just let things sit for a while.
I am working on a new project which I feel will push against the limitations I began to sense toward the end of the Ed Muscle project. In the near future, I plan to update edmadrid.com, if you’d like to follow me there.
Thanks for everything,
Ed Madrid
A Brief, Cursory Attempt At Describing the Next Project
Stills from Godard’s Woman Is A Woman
Okay, so I want to take another stab at describing this project I’m working on (note: it’s only tangentially related to all these little video clips I’ve been posting). Basically, this: I want to create a web-based sequence of, say, 12 images, where each individual image is made up entirely of pixels pulled from multiple live online video feeds. I’m imagining the end result as a series of video loops that the user can click through. Here’s how I described my hopes for the project in an email recently…
I want these images to confront a lot of the issues typically ascribed to painting, but I’m also interested in how new technologies can replace the receding, illusionistic space of painting with the chaos of the living, self-conscious web. Also, I want to do something that actually looks really good online, something with visual kick. I want the mostly low-resolution source video I use to find new life within the context of a carefully constructed, visually refined sequence of painterly web images.
(Sorry about quoting myself)
I’m leaning more and more toward structuring the images around some kind of narrative device. But what I’m most interested in at these early stages is packing as much visual information into these images as possible. The fact that the images will be loops — I’m thinking 20-30 seconds each — means the viewer can take in the images (maybe I should call them ’scenes’) more than once, or however many times it takes to feel safe in moving on. I like video as much as the next guy, but as a viewer I’ve always felt a certain anxiety in not being able to control the flow of images in that medium. Invariably, I want to linger on something, or watch something again, before moving on to the next scene. I thought about this while watching Woman Is A Woman this morning in bed. I kept pausing the damn thing, wanting to look at Anna Karina just a few seconds longer.
I think allowing the user to control the flow of images, actually building that technology into the very way the story is received, will help ease the anxiety of the visually arresting moving image, and maybe lead to a kind of pleasant hypnotic affect.
Parenthetical Girls, Unmentionables
Anyway reader, I sure hope this works. In exchange for your unconditional support, I offer you my tireless devotion to detail, and what I hope is an honest life-long attempt at teasing out new meanings from shared experience. Also, I will buy you a drink if we ever end up in the same bar.
Cheers, and all my love,
EdM