This is a Atari 2600 project I’ve been thinking about for a while but never had the chutzpah to go in there and mess around with Assembly Language.  It wasn’t nearly as difficult as I thought it was going to be.  And after I got the hang of it, it was as exhilarating as learning how to ride a bike for the first time.  I had always thought it was too difficult to even mess with, but then I got in there and was doing it.  I stayed up till the sun was coming through the windows because I was so excited.  Then after taking a quick sleep, I jumped out of bed and rushed over to start messing with more code.  I still don’t understand Assembly Language, but I took the piece as far as it is going to go for now. It’s running on an Atari emulator, Stella, which is available as a free download for just about any operating system.  It takes a minute to figure out the interface, but after you do, you can play just about any Atari game in the history of the console.

I’m still going to change a few things with the project, but I’m pretty happy with my progress thus far.  Plus I’d like to figure out how to actually get it inside a real cartridge, but I’m going to save that for a rainy day.

Here is the Tiananmen Square binary file if you want to run it on your Atari emulator. 

Eight Years?  Today marks the eighth year of the Notes to Self project.  For the past 2920 days I’ve gotten up and written a two page (~1100 word) letter to myself, stamped and sealed it, then mailed it to the house that I grew up in on Tompkins Road in Ohio.  My parents collect the letters then give them back to me (because they are addressed to me) and then I have about eight or ten boxes holding these still sealed envelopes.  I’ve put them up in galleries and even made a little animation on the fronts of a few of them and now, even eight years into the project, I still enjoy it. 

This is the most recent animation that I’ve finished for my Slate Landscape Animation project.  It will get projected on top of the drawing of an empty park.

I finished this animation in January of 2007 and have had it sitting on the hard drive for a while now.  It’s all done in stop-motion with a camera on a sixty-second timer and me drawing spurts on and off for about a nine month period.  You can see the weather changing as it goes from summer t-shirt to winter hat and sweaters.  The whole thing was done in the old BF Goodrich factory in Akron, Ohio.  They’ve converted the spaces into light industrial and although they’ve since kicked most of the artists out, there are still a few in there.  The factory scene in the middle of the animation is the view that I saw out the windows.  

Like I was saying earlier, the whole animation is done on a timer, so that once I get started drawing I don’t have to worry about advancing the frame, and I can just draw and not worry about it.  After about an hour exhaustion starts to set in and the drawing gets a little more real and most of the time I don’t even know where it’s going.  

Gary Millus and Josh Elrod did all the music for it.  I went through about ten of Gary’s tracks trying to find something, and when I heard this I knew immediately that I wanted to use it.  I could see a subway scene and a foot splashing in a puddle.  Those came up later when I was drawing.  It was odd those drawings came because I was like, “…oh yeah, i remember thinking about this when i first listened…”  

The sound byte is Willem de Kooning and honestly, when the project first started I didn’t know all that much about him, but I went to the library and took out every book available in the Cleveland Public Library system and started reading and spread out the colorful pictures all over the floor and started smoking cigarettes by Phillip Morris.  It ended up that he was the perfect artist to study while doing this animation for a buch of reasons.  He ended up being in the Abstract Expressionist school, so he was concerned with the brush stroke and the emotion of the event more than getting each stroke in it’s exact position.  He also mentions the “Glimpse” and that’s what a lot of this is.  I would spread out the water on the slate and then look to see if there was anything in it that resembled anything else, and I would follow that until the end, or more likely until i got tired or until something else distracted me.  

I pulled out each of the slates when I got them to a certain point and put up a new one and started working off of that.  I know where most of them, but a few are getting scattered about.  I hung them in a gallery, but a few didn’t sell.  I heard someone say if art isn’t hanging on the wall, it isn’t art, it’s a storage problem.  100 pound slates quickly become storage problems.  So if you want one, let me know.  I’ll see what I can find.

Please, please, please, do NOT watch this whole video.  It is only a reference video and I put it up there only to give a better idea of what I’m planning to do.  The first slate animation I did back in May is of the Northwest corner of Madison Square Park.  This next one I’m going to do is of a subway station platform.  I sat down in the station with a camera to see how often the trains run, get a general idea of the movement of the people, and get a better understanding of what the environment is like.  I’m going to do this maybe twenty more times to gather somewhere around twenty hours of footage.  I want to go during morning rush hour and late night on Sunday when there’s just a few people sleeping there and not many passengers.  I want to visit the tourist stations and the businessperson stations.  I want to gather a broad assortment of footage so  I can translate it more realistically.  On the slate I’m only going to draw the empty platform.  Anything that is stationary, the pillars, the stairs, the seating, the lights, the rails, the back wall, will be drawn onto the slate.  Anything that moves, the trains, the people, the rats, will be animated and projected onto the slate.  So when the projection is turned off, it looks like a slate drawing of an empty subway stop.  When the projection is on it is filled with the ebb and flow of the station.  I’m planning on programming the different animations to play at different times.  The suits and white shirts and ties animations will play more around the 9 and 5 hours, but the late night party kids animation will be played on Saturday night, after midnight.  I’ll code all of that into the video player.  I’m even thinking that I can do little special secret animations like Halloween kids with costumes that only plays on October 31st.  Although now that I said that it won’t be a secret.  I’ve got some other ideas as well though.  Oh yeah, about a minute into the video there is this funny conversation between a passerby and I.

A few months ago Julia Heyward let me set up my studio in her loft.  It’s been the perfect place to work.  About a year ago I wanted to find a place but there aren’t very many accessible places, I’d say about 10% of the places in New York are accessible, maybe less.  So I posted this animation begging for something, anything that would work.  Here it is a year later and I feel like Simon, not to be confused with  Simon Le Bon.

In February of 2009, while working on Prayers for Peace, my previous animation, I let the computer play back a short sequence of animation on top of the image of Madison Square Park.  I sat and ate Tebaya’s curry chicken and watched the short thirty-second loop projected on top of the slate chalkboard.  I sat and watched it over and over and thought that I could make this the entire piece, just this one little loop.  I thought that I could treat the scene as in the same way a landscape painter looks at a landscape, the only difference is that the scene can move and change.  I realized that the projector is a light source and I could imitate in real time the light of the sun throughout the day.  For my first gallery installation I sped this function up because I wanted the viewer to understand that there was actually something changing on the slate, and not just a static image.  I put the project away over the summer because I was focusing on other projects, but in the past few weeks have found an overwhelming excitement in the multitude of puzzles this project will challenge me to solve.  Here’s the snippet that I was watching during dinner that night…