Mainly Spam 1 - 3

This trilogy continues a fascination with the interrelationship of aural and visual, and the rhythmically-governed appearance of visual material which is traceable to pieces including Text Field and Splice. The texts are taken from authentic spam collected over the Christmas and New Year period 2007/8.

Vector Paths

Created in July 2008 using footage filmed at Middlesex University's Trent Park campus in March 2005, as part of the Memory Pool research project, and initially used for the piece Trace. A single sequence of improvised movement was translated into Vector Paths using the application Motion, with the original sequence manipulated to appear three times, in differing directions and speeds. The particular and distinctive visual patterning was uncovered by accident while exploring a motion blur filter. The resulting output shows the filter's calculation process in action in what is effectively a diagnostic mode, not intended for visual display.

The piece has not yet been screened anywhere, and is currently in the process of being sent out for inclusion in festivals during Autumn/Winter '08.

You Are Here

Created for Rebecca Feiner's ongoing Fictitious Exhibitions series in London in March 2008, the piece reduces the journey by road from Oxford to St. Matthew's Gardens, Cambridge to a time frame of one minute. The piece was created by inputting the start and endpoints into Google Earth, with the journey recorded using screen capture software, and the resulting video altered in speed using Final Cut Pro.

Text Field

Text Field is a zero-budget piece, created as one of the first Shiftwork projects in 2002, using footage filmed in November 2001 at The Robinson Studio Theatre, Hills Road Sixth Form College, Cambridge. The footage was then translated into an ascii-based animation using the program Pict2ascii, and was structured as a single continuous sequence in order to qualify for inclusion in Dance On Screen's One Minute Wander strand. The piece was not accepted for screening for the 2002 festival, but from 2003 onwards, it has been shown at a wide variety of events worldwide.

In Britain, Steve Hill first programmed Text Field as part of the sadly no longer operational Northern Exposure festival in London, and it received its first international screening as part of Videodance'03 in Athens. Since then, the genre-crossing nature of the work means that it has been included in a wide variety of screendance festivals, animation, digital arts and Flash-related events, and was included in the Pocket Cinema mobile phone strand of the 2006 San Francisco International Film Festival.

During summer 2008, Text Field has been included in London-based Renderyard Film Festival's One Minute Film Challenge; Lumen Eclipse's typography programme showing on a public screen in Cambridge, Massachusetts; LACDA's Digitalart.LA exhibition and the Microcinema-curated Virgin Mobile Festival in Baltimore.

Full screening history can be accessed here.