Television Maps

I have taken a new direction through many failures and a change of heart. I have become very interested in low quality video this year. The sheer volume of low quality video out there in the world vastly outweighs the HD, which is an odd phenomenon considering the image quality of existing cameras and how inexpensive HD has become for consumers. Last semester I made a video of television feedback by filming it with a crappy cell phone camera and then re-filming that video about 60 times. I took the change in pitch and images and created a composition out of it (see video below).

My roommates watch a lot of TV so I am going to start mapping what they're watching by filming it with a portable video camera I got cheaply. I may also explore filming some epic moments in television history (man landing on the moon, first ten minutes of MTV...I don't know).

I have some crazy plan in my mind that I am going to combine this with Jitter (Max/MSP/Jitter) because I've been teaching myself how to use it and I think it would be a good thing to incorporate into my learning experience. Right now the thought is that there would be a television or a series of televisions that would show different pieces of the map. When someone physically changes the channel of the TV, the clip would change.

I could edit these piece of the map--each as a separate entity that is composed to be a part of the whole--or I could let MSP & Jitter do some of the manipulation work for me by using data and the drunk or random functions. More video data to come...

Surfacing from Laura Thompson on Vimeo.