ROJO®nova Rio de Janeiro second week: Flash vs. avi Cinepak

Last month, I prolonged my stay in Rio for one week, during which I got the chance to work together with Rafaël Rozendaal, ISAN, Evan Voytas, Elen and Jeffers Egan. It is pretty hard (if not impossible) to develop a 70 minute performance in 5 days, with a group of people you have never met before; working methods, perspectives, aesthetics and aims differ per artist. This is why the artist talks that were given at Parque Lage, were (albeit a bit late into the week) very useful for me. 

During his lecture, Rafaël noted: "normally we are used to interactivity as a goal, but I am more interested in interactivity without a goal." A conceptual use of meaninglessness that kick-started my wish to connect my methods with Rafaëls work.

Rafaël also said that for our performance, he wanted to use already existing flash work, because "Flash works are both scalable without quality loss and have a very small file size" - which he described as some of the most important material qualities of his work (and which reminded me of some neo-demoscene-gen). Besides this, the development of a new concept and a new work would take much to long.

Normally I also take a long time for the creation of a work, but given the purpose of ROJO®nova, I decided I wanted to take the chance and make something new. Rafaëls talk inspired me to base all the visuals for the final performance on badly compressed remixes of his work (to counter his arguments for flash use and to show my favorite digital material - the avi Cinepak compression). Our visuals were on either side of the screen of the performance, framing Jeffers projections, to try and let the whole visual element of the performance come together. 

Here are some gifs of the remix-visuals I made and above is an excerpt of the final performance.

Flash vs. Cinepak pugilism T.K.O.

TowardsAndBeyond.com by Rafaël Rozendaal (flash), compressed by Rosa Menkman (avi cinepak 256 greys).

From the Rafaël Rozendaal remixes I made during our residency in Rio de Janeiro.

original: 90kb, interactive, scalable and endless, now: 1.7mb, linear, scalability limited, and looped.

beefchickenpork.com by Rafaël Rozendaal (flash), compressed by Rosa Menkman (.mov animation 1000 colors).

From the Rafael Rozendaal remixes I made during our residency in Rio de Janeiro.

original: 12kb, scalable, interactive and endless, now: 1.7mb, linear, scalability limited, and looped.

beefchickenpork.com by Rafaël Rozendaal (flash), compressed by Rosa Menkman (gif with dither).

From the Rafael Rozendaal remixes I made during our residency in Rio de Janeiro.

original: 12kb, scalable and endless, now: 3.9mb, linear, scalability limited, and looped.

aestheticecho.com by Rafaël Rozendaal (flash), compressed by Rosa Menkman (avi cinepak 256 greys).

From the Rafael Rozendaal remixes I made during our residency in Rio de Janeiro.

original: 74kb, scalable and endless, now: 1.6mb, linear, scalability limited, and looped.

electricboogiewoogie.com by Rafaël Rozendaal (flash), compressed by Rosa Menkman (avi cinepak 256 greys).

From the Rafaël Rozendaal remixes I made during our residency in Rio de Janeiro

original: 16kb, scalable and endless, now: 1.9mb, linear, scalability limited, and looped.