The Cut Up Collective
Well I’ve been flat out lately and had no chance to post anything, but that said I did find myself with some free time up in Newcasle last week so I decided to take a trip to the Baltic The centre for contemporary art on the South bank of the River Tyne, which is a very impressive old mill conversion, if you ever get the chance to go there it’s well worth it.
The first exhibition in the gallery was from the cut up collective, these are a group of artists who take down billboard ads, meticulously slice them into thousands of pieces paste them back on to the billboard making a different image.
In my mind I thought the concept was a simple but clever idea, what didn’t occur to me until I saw the video of them producing one of these pieces is the scale of each project which now seems obvious, cutting a billboard ad into thousands of identical sized pieces and then re-organising them into a different image, it’s an immense amount of work. Work however that is well worth the graft when you see the results presented in their gallery.
What really got me thinking however was how this could be achieved digitally, is it possible to take someones web advertisment or even website, slice it up pixel by pixel and turn it into something completly different?
Watch this space!!!!!
July 15, 2008 at 1:45 am
http://www.cutupcollective.com
For one night CutUp present algorithmic and time-periodic objects as a momentary body of work.
Sound and image, will be deconstructed and reconfigured with seemingly functional and rudimentary process,
leaving systematic mundanity to prevail in the desolate confinement of a four-cornered pen.
Temporary Access 1, A hardware sound granulator, combining logic gates, sequencers, samplers and envelope generators to control the spread and speed of evolution of the sonic surroundscape. Utilising rhythm as its foundation ‘Temporary Access 1′ evaporates twentieth century sound.
Over the evening CutUp will gradually alter the parameters of the machine, generating creep, audio inertia and digital scree.
Stages of Permissive Aphasia, a series of television adverts cut and reordered into a 9 screen film.
Reflux, a synchronised digital clock installation.
Environment of Rapid Evolution, a reordered billboard animation.