shawn rider dot com

Back in 2003 or so, Sarah and I made a piece for a show called Geoscapes at the Carnegie Art Center, North Tonawanda, NY. The show was curated by Chris Borkowski, our old pal who was at SUNY Buffalo at the time.

The video was originally exhibited with no audio on a flat panel monitor mounted on the wall surrounded by arrangements of large-format digital prints. The entire piece was approximately 12 x 4 feet. The monitor displaying the video was only 17 inches. This was still in the very early days of flat panel displays cheap enough for gallery use.

The video was also originally composed on the fly by a random playlist generated continuously by the DVD player. For awhile I was really into the idea of making DVDs that recompose themselves on each playback. The elements of this video seemed to lend themselves to this kind of presentation, especially in the infinite-playback environment of the gallery.

Needless to say, infinite video loops are not the best for the BlipTV format, so we re-edited this. It lost a lot of weight and gained a soundtrack.

Back in 2003 I made a video for a composer named Johnston's track "Imagine." Johnston and I met through the online musician community, Acid Planet, and we collaborated on several of my favorite tracks over the couple of years that we were really working together. This video was one of the last things we did together.

The footage was (obviously) shot in the Paris metro. This was my first experiment with different timings on different video clips and spatial juxtaposition of video images.

I retouched this just a little to eliminate some digital noise and make the colors pop. I have since lost touch with Johnston, but his website (http://johnston3.org) was recently updated to say something new is coming. I will be keeping an eye out — and in the meantime, if you see this Johnston, drop me a line, yo!

So once upon a time back in 2003, Sarah took a course on women in the workplace. And for some reason (I can't claim any responsibility here) she decided to write an in-depth research piece on labor laws as they regard to dancers in strip clubs. Not surprisingly, exotic dancing is not known for its benefits.

I had just finished a new media piece about masculinity that tried to combine several discreet types of writing/imagery. Sarah was looking for an interesting way to combine her primary research, much of which was gathered from different personal websites and discussion boards. And Flash video was new on the scene and seemed like it might offer even more interesting possibilities than it turns out to have actually inspired.

Hence, the "new media documentary object" came about. It is a strange beast, which you can experience at http://wdog.com/dance_club

And in the meantime, enjoy this portion of the larger project. We interviewed a manager at a local gentlemen's club who really illustrated perfectly the information Sarah had gathered. This video clip is kind of the central element of the documentary object.

It's a little Booth Babes (for better and worse), a little Raised By Wolves (if only in aspiration) and a little bit funny.

Back in 2001 Sarah and I teamed up with our friend Matt Blackburn to make a short film at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles. We wanted to see what people would say about the whole "booth babes" phenomenon, which was an infamous component to the male-dominated E3 Expos. We were at E3, of course, with GamesFirst.com, and Matt was a videogame reviewer for the site. He agreed to be Sarah's sidekick and together they conducted interviews with all sorts of folks around the show.

I really had more of a technical production role in this one. I borrowed the Hi-8 video camera we used from Jason Frank, and I edited/mixed/finalized the film in the end. We all collaborated on the questions Matt would ask, and Brian Clark (aka DJ Funken Wagnalls) provided a custom soundtrack after I had a rough edit.

Overall, it's not bad. It's quick and lite and has some sound issues. But it's quick… This has been available online for a long time. In fact, I received an infamous cease and desist letter for hosting it on my website via a BitTorrent tracker. That was funny, here's an archival link. So this vid has a special place in my heart.

I made this in a few days as an animated GIF on my old P1 333 back in 1999. For some reason it seems a lot older than that. I remember that ImageReady couldn't handle that many frames in the GIF, so I had to use a command-line animated-gif builder and then conver the GIF to AVI to use in a video editor for the final machine. I am absolutely positive there was a better way to do this, but I was in an English course making a digital animation using a 1.2 megapixel Fugi digital camera I borrowed from an old prof. So… you get what you pay for, I guess.

This is really just a test of the Shawn R broadcasting system. I am hoping to use this to upload vids from my phone for the most part. But it's always fun to share the old stuff.