Taos Talking Pixels Archive and Repository

July 16, 2004

Taos Talking Pictures was the technology-oriented component of the late, lamented Taos Talking Picture Festival held in Taos, New Mexico. The original site went down when the Festival closed its doors, but has been restored here in effigy to preserve the information, essays and accomplishments of Pixels participants.

This site is very much a work-in-progress and will be shaping up over the coming weeks into a finalized archive of Taos Talking Pixels. References to "current" events and Festival-related info will be removed and the site trimmed down to its essential function: a record of a cool, forward-looking technocultural confluence.

Curator: Spiros Antonopoulos

"When we say expanded cinema we actually mean expanded consciousness."
--Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema

It can be said that the 20th century began in 1895 when the Lumiere brothers publicly presented their film, L'arrivée d'un Train à la Ciotat and the audience jumped back from the screen as if they were going to be run over by the oncoming train.

Here are the results of T. Foley's "Animated Paintings" workshop conducted during the Taos Talking Picture Festival's 6th Annual Teen Media Conference. In this experimental session, students learned about the process of animation production by shooting a cinematic exercise exploring the choreography of motion. Each student group used techniques of stop-motion animation brought into the digital realm via DV camcorder, Powerbook and an animation program called FrameThief.

Curator: Kyle Silfer

As digital works become the dominant expressions of our culture, it’s time to worry about their longevity. The headlong rush to embrace the latest tech has already left us with a mountain of orphaned media: Laserdiscs, 8-track tapes, and even cassettes are on their way to obsolescence—soon unreadable except by enthusiasts who have hoarded playback devices against the dying of the light. The ugly secret of the computer age is that digital media is just as susceptible to this junkyard procession.

iBrotha

Revolution OS

As the computer becomes the most significant tool ever placed in the hands of humanity, control of its future becomes a political issue--a situation explored both seriously and humorously in these two films.

Sundance award-winning filmmaker Stephen Marshall of the Guerrilla News Network--an underground news organization that produces "music videos for people who think"--provided a surprising and sometimes shocking look at the darker side of the American political landscape.

Students who attended an animation workshop at the Teen Media Conference with T. Foley created this short pixilation sequence using one Mini-DV camcorder, an Apple iBook, a FireWire cable and an application program called FrameThief.

As Marreen Furniss says, "Pixilation is a technique that closely borders on live-action practice, although it clearly falls within the realm of animation. Whereas clay and puppet animators move inanimate objects incrementally before a camera and shoot them frame by frame, the pixilation animator shoots 'live' objects--essentially people--frame by frame."

Disney appropriation

Musician and activist Mark Hosler examines the vast changes that have taken place in the world of sampling since his band Negativland was sued for borrowing sounds from a U2 record over a decade ago.

Our Secret Century

Rick Prelinger, a film archivist and proponent of “copyright conservancy” offers a way around the wars of attrition raging over intellectual property rights: his partnership with the Internet Archive leads by example with over 1,500 films in high-resolution MPEG2 format for use by anyone, anywhere.

State of Emergency

Black and White

Curator: John Alderman

The world of artificial intelligence is becoming sophisticated enough to provide rich material for artists and designers of interactive experiences. Pixels 2002 presented a sampling from the spectrum of AI work that overlaps with the program's usual interest: how digital tools are changing the world of storytelling.

Starting with the pioneering