I call this series The Essence of Motion. Over a hundred years ago Eedweard Muybridge famously showed us that photography could be used to deepen our understanding of the nature of motion. This series extends some of Muybridge's ideas for modern digital age. I work with dancers, individuals who have a deep connection with the motion and placement of their own bodies in space. Each image is a form of Time Portrait - the time component of a video source has been collapsed into a spacial dimension. Each image represents just over a minute of video, stitched together to create a still that demonstrates the dancers motion over time.
Special thanks to Mandy Greenlee and Tibisay Strazzera for participating in this project.
All of the images in this series were created using my own custom designed software. C++, Objective-C++.
Copyright © 2016 Phoenix Toews. All Rights Reserved.
Saturn is the god of time in ancient Roman mythology. These images represent the colors in Saturn's palette. Each of these images is formed from a collection of digital photographs collapsed together using an averaging process. The final images become indistinct, each simultaneously revealing and hiding its subject matter in a noise of abstract color. This series is the beginning stage of a larger, forthcoming project.
These were all created using a custom Photoshop plugin of my own design.
Copyright © 2016 Phoenix Toews. All Rights Reserved.
Palimpsest is an Augmented Reality Toolkit for iOS that I built as part of my Masters Thesis for the Digital Arts and New Media (DANM) Program at UC Santa Cruz. Palimpsest has since been used in numerous location based Augmented Reality projects, both domestically in the US and Internationally. This gallery contains images from a subset of the various projects that I have built for myself and clients. The images are screenshots from the program running live. Each image incorporates digital content that has been super-imposed over the visual landscape shown through the camera of an iOS (iPhone, iPad) device. The digital content is "pinned" to a physical geographic location. As the user approaches the digital content's physical location in space, by viewing it through the iPhone or iPad screen, the objects appear to closer or farther away based on the users position.
My augmented reality works have been shown in several festivals and art shows around the world, including the DUMBO Arts Festival, the Scope Art Fair (in New York, Miami, and Basel, Switzerland), the River to River Festival, Mobility Shifts: International Future of Learning Conference, the Zero1 Festival, and many others.
Special thanks to Mitch Miller and Meredith Drum for all their support and inspiration. Also thanks the Alexis Hubshman and Rachel Stevens.
More details about projects made with Palimpsest, as well as download links, can be found on the Augmented Mountain website.
Palimpsest is made with a combination of programming languages and technologies. These include C++, Objective-C++, Lua, OpenGL, OpenAL, Python (for Blender plugin).
Copyright © 2011 - 2016 Phoenix Toews. All Rights Reserved.
Screen capture
Screen Capture. CATT was designed with students from the Digital Arts and Animation program at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, for a class on Augmented Reality that I co-taught with Meredith Drum.
Screen Capture. CATT was designed with students from the Digital Arts and Animation program at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, for a class on Augmented Reality that I co-taught with Meredith Drum.
Screen Capture. CATT was designed with students from the Digital Arts and Animation program at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, for a class on Augmented Reality that I co-taught with Meredith Drum.
Screen capture. This was the first complete Augmented Reality experience made with the Palimpsest Augmented Reality Toolkit. forget me (not) was an exploration of place, identity and the journey one goes through to be released from trauma. forget me (not) was presented as my MFA project for the Digital Arts and New Media Program at UC Santa Cruz.
Screen capture. A collaboration with Raphael Shirley, Liubo Borrisov and Mitch Miller.
Screen capture. A collaboration with Mitch Miller, Meredith Drum, and the Scope Art Fair.
Screen capture. A collaboration with Mitch Miller and Meredith Drum.
Screen capture. A collaboration with Elliot Anderson, and the Silicon Valley Toxics Coallition.
The alien race called the Tralfamadorians in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, exist in all times simultaneously, thus allowing them to see every moment as a singular expression of time. I am fascinated by the idea of this collapse of a span of time into a single moment. This collection is called Time Portraits. Each video clip has had it's temporal dimension remapped to its horizontal spacial dimension, and vice-versa. This allows us to "see" each frame as a representation of just over 60 seconds of time from left to right.
Created using my own custom designed software. C++, Objective-C++.
Copyright © 2012 -2016 Phoenix Toews. All Rights Reserved.
Sticky Light is a technology I created for a production called Softly Spoken, produced and directed by leaf Tine. Softly Spoken was an interactive, storytelling experience told without recognizable language. Sticky Light is a controlled feedback loop between a camera and a projected image, that enables one to effectively sculpt light with their hands. Sticky Light had its first introduction at the 2006 Spring Electronic Music Concert in the UCSC Recital Hall in a production called Doctor and Janitor, a clip of which is also provided here.
Copyright © 2006 - 2008 Phoenix Toews. All Rights Reserved.
A performance by leaf Tine for his MFA Thesis at the Digital Arts and New Media Program at UC Santa Cruz. The video effects were all done using custom software of my design, in addition to the use of Sticky Light, a technology that I designed that allows one to "sculpt" light with ones hands.
A performance at the 2006 Spring Electronic Music Concert at the UCSC Recital Hall. Although the video quality is not great, there is enough there to get the idea. The screen projection is a system I invented called Sticky Light. A controlled feedback loop is created by pointing a camera directly at the projection. The feedback is then modified and controlled by a custom coded, digital system that causes the light from the flashlights to "stick" to the screen. The light on the screen is also run through custom software to generate the sound directly from the light present on the screen.
An assortment of older video work.
Copyright © 2005 - 2008 Phoenix Toews. All Rights Reserved.
A collaboration with Leralee Whittle. Sound by leaf tine. I did all of the video production, editing and processing. The video was a dream backdrop that played during a live performance. After Effects, Photoshop, Max/MSP/Jitter.
A collaboration with leaf tine. The sound is generated from the motion and light of the video source, using custom software of my design. Max/MSP/Jitter with custom plugin written in C.
A test video for a live effect I created in Jitter. This was created for Rituel III, a live performance where I was the assistant to the media director, Elliot Anderson. The dancer is Aeju Lee. Max/MSP/Jitter.
Each of these stage performances incorporate video and interactive media of my design. Interactive media is especially well suited for use with dance performances on stage. Lubricious Transfer and Rituel III both include interactive media - a camera pointed at the stage is used to capture movements of the dancers, which then has a live effect, that I designed and programmed, projected onto the screen (or screens) behind the dancers. The Train uses some of the same techniques, but applied to standard video.
The train was written and choreographed by Leaf Tine and myself. I designed and programmed the effects for the video projected on the backdrop. Videography, Photoshop, After Effects, Max/MSP/Jitter.
"Lubricious Transfer is a dance theater experiment in digital media and remote collaboration, using the Internet2 to produce collaborative, interactive, and simultaneous performances broadcast live to local and remote audiences in Santa Cruz and New York City." (website) I designed and program live, interactive video effects triggered from the dancers movements that can be seen on the background projection screens. Max/MSP/Jitter.
Rituel III was performed in Melbourne and Sydney, Australia, and at the UC Santa Cruz Recital Hall, the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, and at the Disney Hall in Los Angeles, CA. I was the Assistant to the Media Director, Elliot Anderson, and I wrote the code that created the majority of the effects seen in the video. The following people were involved in the production: Elliot Anderson (multi-media), Nicole Paiement (conductor), Brian Staufenbiel (voice, stage director), John Sackett (clarinet), William Winant (percussion), Jean-Michel Fonteneau (cello; chair of string department, San Francisco Conservatory of Music), Sylvie Vray (lighting Artist), Phoenix Toews (multi-media assistant). The contents of this video are Copyright 2005 by Elliot Anderson and are used with permission of the copyright holder.
Photoshop, After Effects, Max/MSP/Jitter.
I am fascinated by interactive media and it's effect on the viewer. The immediate feedback loop between the viewer, video project, sound and other factors can create a visceral, transcendent experience for the participants. Here is a small sampling of some of my installation work.
Copyright © 2005 - 2007 Phoenix Toews. All Rights Reserved.
Passage was an installation for the Irwin Scholars 2005 Show. A long hallway filled with long, semi-transparent silk scarves hung in staggered rows. A projector was at either end, each projecting separate images that merge in the middle of the hall. One projection is of a short clip from a David Attenborough film of ducks jumping from a log. The clip plays for 2 seconds, and then appears to jump back the beginning. But if one watches long enough, one realizes that the film is advancing very slowly, and over a period of about a half hour, the entire film is revealed in 2 second loops at at time. The second video at the back of the hall is of nature scenes that slowly fade in and out of one another. The entire piece is a meditation on the passage of time, and how we place ourselves in relationship to beginnings and endings.
One of my early attempts at converting light into sound. The light from the projection is picked up by a camera, which then sends to a computer that converts the light from the image into sound. Uses custom software of my own design.
Silk hangings, projections of nature that interact with participants movement using custom software of my own design. This was showing during the 2007 Autonomous Mutant Festival in the Lassen National Forest.
Silk hangings, projections of nature that interact with participants movement using custom software of my own design. This was showing during the 2007 Autonomous Mutant Festival in the Lassen National Forest.
Silk hangings, projections of nature that interact with participants movement using custom software of my own design. This was showing during the 2007 Autonomous Mutant Festival in the Lassen National Forest.
Silk hangings, projections of nature that interact with participants movement using custom software of my own design. This was showing during the 2007 Autonomous Mutant Festival in the Lassen National Forest.
Silk hangings, projections of nature that interact with participants movement using custom software of my own design. This was showing during the 2007 Autonomous Mutant Festival in the Lassen National Forest.
I am not a professional photographer, but I dabble in digital photography. This is an assortment of some of my better photographs. All of these photos were shot by myself. I use a combination of Lightroom and Photoshop for post production. You can see more of my photographs on my Flickr page. All photographs on this page are Copyright © 2016 Phoenix Toews, All Rights Reserved.
