I Am Sitting In A Video Room 1

Complete Mix: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icruGcSsPp0

Confused? FAQ HERE: http://www.ontologist.us/post/?blogID=96

An homage to the great Alvin Lucier, this piece explores the 'photocopy effect', where upon repeated copies the object begin to accumulate the idiosyncrasies of the medium doing the copying. Full words:

I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice as well as the image of myself, and I am going to upload it to YouTube, rip it from YouTube, and upload it again and again, until the original characteristics of both my voice and my image are destroyed. What you will see and hear, then, are the artifacts inherent in the video codec of both YouTube and the mp4 format I convert it to on my computer. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a digital fact, but more as a way to eliminate all human qualities my speech and image might have.

Please visit:

http://www.ontologist.us

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Sitting_in_a_Room

Category:

Music

Tags:

• lucier
• alvin
• liddell
• codec
• resolution
• filter
• repetition
• digital
• noise
• loss
• quality
• copy
• repeat

[rg0057]

You did not eliminate all human qualities.  Keep going.

[canzona]

@rg0057 It's so true! Failed experiment.

[JRCrowley]

Very interesting project. As a musician, I'm very interested in this from the audio side. Digital is fraught with difficulties when it comes to ripping, converting, copying and so on.

[canzona]

@JRCrowley Not to mention auto-tune, over compression, poor mastering, digital dithering, word clocks, MIDI synchronization, phantom power, sound bleed, speaker/room acoustics, cable interference, and the 1001 other things that can go wrong when dealing with digital audio. Transcoding seems easy in comparison! :)

[canzona]

@EktraKrispy valid question. (1) because there's no "video art" section. (2) because I'm first and foremost a musician (3) because the sound is just as important as the video and (4) because I like confusing people.

[canzona]

@Evi1M4chine when I started this project YouTube was still using .flac, then switched to H.264 while I was in the 600s. When they switched to H.264, I encoded using the "MP4 Improved" settings on my ripper, which are a different codec than H.264. Admittedly the change is subtle, but still noticeable after enough iterations.

[Taktiklnewk]

sucks ass

[Taktiklnewk]

Vid sucks yoh

[feoray]

@isaacracket All this tells me is everyone needs to use lossless codecs.

[ryanmshepard92]

@mybrotherbeelo OK?

[darkshewbacca]

you talk kind of like quentin tarantino

[TheBraveKitten]

wow this took him a year!

[genericwoods]

Alvin Lucier must be proud

[isaacracket]

Oh come on. It's not like he is getting paid for this. This is pretty cool. If you think about it, that's how we're losing our human touch by repeatedly using technology for every single thing. Thumbs up!