Shanghai Traces by Ben Houge

Here’s a 5-minute excerpt of a real-time video piece I presented as part of the Make Over show at OV Gallery in Shanghai, January 23-March 13, 2010.

The show was a response to the dramatic beautification campaign that has overrun Shanghai in anticipation of hosting the World Expo this year. The falling objects in the video are the wares of street vendors who are being forced from the city center during the Expo.

The piece was originally presented as a silent video, but in rendering a linear version to post on-line, I added a soundtrack in which recordings of interviews with Shanghai street vendors are algorithmically chopped up, layered, and delayed, very similar to what’s going on in the video.

The audio and video were both generated in Max/MSP/Jitter, using simple non-linear deployment methods I’ve been using for years in my videogame work, to ensure constant variation. I think the medium of real-time, generative video is well suited to commenting on a city’s continual cycle of reinvention. [1]

Find more of Ben’s work, including an interesting entry about how one of his pieces recently got banned, at his blog Aesthetic Cartography.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YvoHcsviPc

Tags: algorithmic, banned, Ben Houge, generative, jitter, maxmsp, video