Old Hall Theatre Test Projection

Date: Thursday, August 4th, 2016
Location: Projecting from the roof of Pizza Tree onto the north-east corner of the old Hall Theatre (opened in 1916 but discontinued as a theatre for going on decades now): Cherry street, between 9th and 10th, Columbia, Missouri.
Equipment: Epson EX5220 Projector 

The Occasion:
   A test for a possible future LOCD projection site - including a kind of inaugural first outdoor public projection featuring four images related to the project.
   My brother, Micah Fletcher, was about to move away from his hometown of Columbia for the first time in his life to go and live in Princeton, New Jersey where he has been accepted into the Graduate Program in Quantitative and Computational Biology. I wanted to mark this exceptional moment in some way, so I included the following from a trailer for the 1956 science fiction motion picture Forbidden Planet :
 
    "Today, man prepares to take
     his first step outward into space
     - tomorrow he will explore the stars."

   The clip shown below involves some of the initial set up - including the sounds of the rumblings of  Pizza Tree's  hood and hvac systems with birds and summer cicadas thrown in here and there to punctuate the space.

Clip duration: 10:18
0:00 - 3:49 set up and waiting for the sun to go down a little more with ancient greek kylix
3:50 presentation begins

Images shown in above clip:

1. A portion of an Attic red-figure kylix painted by Douris c.490-485 BC (Berlin Museum)
2. Clip from a trailer for Forbidden Planet. 1956. The first motion picture soundtrack to be comprised entirely of electronic music.
3. Jackson Pollock in East Hampton, New York - filmed by Hans Namuth in November, 1950.
4.  Part of the final sequence of  Henri-Georges Clouzot's 1956 film Le Mystère Picasso.

   Thanks to my dad, Randal Fletcher (whose projector we used), and brother, Micah Fletcher for hanging out with me on the roof as we staged this test on a classic hot and humid Missouri summer evening. Also, thanks to John Gilbreth (owner) and Scott Hampton of the most excellent Pizza Tree restaurant and to Stan Kroenke, owner of the old Hall Theatre, and his agent Gina Rende for allowing us to make this temporary video installation happen.

Test results:

   The above side-by-side comparison of the last part of the July 1st Orr Street Studios LOCD Project tells you just about all you need to know regarding how well this particular machine (EPSON EX5220) performs from this particular distance in this particular setting. Highly constrasting masses of value relationships like the kind used in the ancient greek vase paintings seem like the only visibly reasonable solution in this context, which I think is a good challenge in that it forces practice to keep from getting lost in a kind of "where's waldo" field of subtle refinement that sometimes tends to happen when the feel for the larger masses gets lost.

   Finally, all of the views you have seen so far have been from the roof where the projector is. Here's some footage to give you an idea of what it looks like at street level:

Recorded 9-9:30pm central Thursday, August 18, 2016

Drawing with Chris (white marks) and Sara Fletcher (black marks) :

"A Non-Verbal Debate: Digital Collaborations" by Matthew Ballou

Norbert Marszalek just posted a link to this new article by Matt Ballou featured in the online art magazine Neoteric Art. 

from Monday, July 11, 2016 with Carol Heft

With Carol Heft and Chris Fletcher :

1:51pm (all times are central) :

3:09pm:

3:53pm:

5:03pm:        

When we came back to it later that evening things got kind of crazy and some drastic changes were made:

9:49pm :

10:04pm

10:10pm :

10:35pm :

11:23pm :

11:51pm :

Here are the several stages all together (including a key intermediary stage where the yellow ground starts to spread aggressively - missing from above) :

First Live Online Collaborative Drawings (November 2015)

Sunday, November 1st, 2015 was the date of the earliest live online collaborative drawing that I've hosted.  If I recall correctly, the participants included Matt Ballou, Jennifer Wiggs, Sara Fletcher, and myself, Chris Fletcher. The title reads "Second Board" because I'd stayed up late the night before trying out Realtime Board by myself on the "First Board".

It quickly became clear that the zoom feature was going to make it hard to see where everybody was working. It was so frustrating, I resolved to try and keep the screen at the same viewing size for all participants if we ever did this again.















There were four collaborations that first day but only that first one was on Realtime Board. The other three were on A Web Whiteboard, The next was with Joseph Podlesnick:

The last two were with Demian Garnero. I posted the final image from this first session earlier in this blog, but here are some shots of it in earlier stages. We worked on it for about an hour.

Here is the final state again:















And here are few stages of the last one we made on that first day (again, with Demian Garnero) :

Over the next few days, I would post the links to open boards and start drawing and eventually someone would drop in or out but I never found out who they were. This one is from November 2:

November 3rd: More with as yet unidentified participant(s):

and another:

Then one from November 4th, also with unidentified participant(s):

Then there was one more of these first collaborations, this time with Joseph Podlesnick again on November 5th:

After these first few days of November 2015, I put the live online collaborative drawing thing aside altogether until June 2016.

 

July 12, 2016

With Ron Shelton, Carol Heft, Sara Fletcher, Matt Ballou, Jennifer Ann Wiggs, and Chris Fletcher.

Using the IDroo platform.

Part One: 8:00 - 8:45pm CT (recorded live and replayed here at 32x speed)

Part Two: about 8:45- 9:15pm

1st Public Projection: Orr Street Studios, July 1st, 2016

Part One recorded between 6pm and 8pm, Including:
Demian Garnero, David Schell, Connie Luebbert, Jennifer Wiggs, Matt Ballou, Mike Sleadd, Frank Stack, Bette Fletcher, Sara Fletcher, Beatrice Fletcher, Chris Fletcher, Danielle Hampton, Scott Hampton, Penelope Hampton, Richard Alexander, and others as yet unnamed...

A still from part one:

with Michael McJilton

Michael McJilton and Chris Fletcher  

Part One:

Part Two:

 












further developments:

with Carol Heft

Carol Heft and Chris Fletcher

with Nick Ruth

Nick Ruth and Chris Fletcher

with Ali Sultan

Ali Sultan and Chris Fletcher

with Jennifer Wiggs and J. Doe

Jennifer Wiggs, Chris Fletcher, and J.Doe at 32x speed

with Carol Heft, Michael McJilton, and Seth Remsnyder

part 1: Chris Fletcher :

part 2: Carol Heft and Chris Fletcher:

part 3: Carol Heft and Chris Fletcher


Not every minute of the session was motion captured but there were
some still screen captures:


















part four: Carol Heft, Chris Fletcher, and Michael McJilton:

part last: Carol Heft, Chris Fletcher, Michael McJilton, and Seth Remsnyder:

the entire session lasted about two hours

with students in Columbia College's 2016 High School Summer Arts Intensive

 a few of the different stages