How to hack your holiday
Michael Page is an artist/inventor who has been refining an electro-mechanical music sequencing machine for the past few years. After confronting the fact he enjoys performance but not studio recording with his machines, he started thinking about documentation, and how a happening or recording of an event can be the outcome of a project. He believes an event or a recording of an event is something with realness about it and appreciates the real incidental aspects – it all happens in a real place and time and is rich with “free data”, such as room / PA acoustics, performance errors, background noises, birdsong etc.
His project on PIFcamp will tranfer his outlook on documentation to the happening on the camp. Do you know how people’s holiday photos pretty much just show the good stuff? Or when people make their kids catch a Frisbee for a photo, but don’t actually play a proper game with them? Do they do this to conjure some sort of hyper-real hyper-idyllic family scene or something?
Michael’s project will try to remove as much of this bias as possible, by having photos, audio and video taken at arbitrary intervals. A starting point for exploration will be camera set to time lapse mode taking documentation every half hour or so, with the resulting material compiled into a very honest holiday slideshow. The project will investigate the physical process of hacking an audio/video device to record at arbitrary intervals and hopefully start discussion around the subjects of documentation and the consumption of media and experience.