Tate Modern Art Gallery

The approach to Tate Modern, across the Millenium Bridge.

Thursday. With mobiles phones and eyes over shoulders, Stuart and Dan rendezvoused at St. Paul's Cathedral. They made their way south through office buildings and across pedestrian overpasses. No danger. Breaking out of the crush of steel structures they met the water's edge. Millenium Bridge a few meters off.

They would be exposed for a good three hundred fifty meters crossing it.

Stuart carefully scanned the shoreline. No danger. Receiving the "go ahead," Dan quickly climbed onto the bridge and darted for the other side. Halfway across he stopped short and froze. Slowly, he lifted his head, seeing the muzzle of a camcorder, arms poised to fire, and the eyes. Tanj.

You could say I liked Tate Modern from the start. The huge stencil they had posted on the gallery's outer wall made a great first impression. A man wielding a video camera like a rifle, perfectly placed for a bridge ambush.

I love it when art takes advantage of context.

Inside, they had big names I recognized and big names I didn't. We checked out the exhibits of Cubism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, and Pop Art.

As you might expect from a Modern Art Gallery, there was a lot of stuff that an everyday person (like me) would consider junk. Lucio Fontana cut a canvas and framed it (Spatial Concept "Waiting"). Rothko painted an entire canvas red. Several Austrians did enough grotesque art to fill a room. Viennese Actionism is visually quite offensive and most of the images from the collection aren't "available" on the Tate website.

I'm sure there are all kinds of reasons for putting these pieces in the gallery and I just haven't climbed far enough down the rabbit hole to understand it. I think this Alice will stay drinking tea in the garden.

Stuff I did like were the interesting shapes and strokes (spills?) in Pollock's Number 14. I also really liked a piece called Riverbed D by Australian artist Fred Williams.

Oh, and Cy Twombly's detailed mushrooms combined with doodle strokes in Natural History Part 1. And a bit of the Lichtenstein and Warhol.

There were a few video installations there, too. Paul McCarthy took the win for the most visually perverse, but Susan Hiller had an interesting exhibit called Psi Girls which combined clips of female movie characters using supernatural powers. Girls from the likes of The Craft and Firestarter.

A longer video we sat down and watched was called "Meshes of the Afternoon" by Maya Deren. It was a little confusing but reading about it afterwards, that seems to have been at least partly intentional. The filming itself definitely kept my attention. In terms of style, it reminded me a bit of my friend Kyla's piece, Cognitive Error.

Video Cubism Idea

As often happens when I visit galleries or even paper stores I've got myself all worked up about art and design. Right now I've settled on an old idea integrating video and cubism. I really want to get a hold of twenty or so webcams and mount them around some dynamic object like a sitting person or an insanely fast-growing plant. A building might be cool, too.

Then, I'd combine the video streams' different perspectives into a single feed. The angles would have to be cut into interesting shapes and arranged, perhaps by projecting the video onto the faces of a broad-faceted geometric shape.

Whenever I have an idea for a project I always Google around to see what others have done. Earlier is better. This time I found a couple videos and the one below is pretty close to what I was thinking.

It would also be interesting to have time offsets, since painting from different angles had an inherent delay. Yet another possibility is to detect motion in each frame and emphasize or subdue them accordingly. Video streams could shrink or disappear as the subject changes.

Problem is, I get excited about these things and more often than not these ideas end up in a pile of projects-that-could-have-been. It's frustrating to know, even in my excitement, that I'll probably never do build this but at least this time I'm getting my idea out there.

Who knows, maybe someday I'll have a good reason to pursue this kind of creative digital wanking.