Forget the image of people hand-knitting your brain conjures up each time you pull on a woolen sweater; in the dystopian version of the cutting room Niels Hoebers created for fashion designer Borre Akkersdijk, all you need are a few switches, dials and mechanical arms to create clothes.

Hoebers, an animator from  the Netherlands, created The First Cycle to play  before Bora Bora-based designer Akkersdijk’s Paris fashion week show. Intended to show the process of creating the garments in the collection—”from the yarn to the show”—the film is a sweet and childlike view of the creative process in which robotic hands replace those of humans to turn yarn into wool and wool into outerwear.

Dendrochronology—the study of tree rings—has reached a new level of cutting edge technology. Your average dendrochronologist would tell you that tree rings can tell you the age of a tree, or about environmental changes and weather patterns. Bartholomaus Traubeck will show you that tree rings can sing.

Traubeck is a visual artist who turns technology back in on itself to produce art. He works out of Rotterdam, Netherlands and Linz, Austria. He shifted base for this piece, Years, in order to create a record player that plays cross sections of trees through their series of rings.

It works in the following way; the specifications of each tree ring record are gathered and input into computer hardware. Things such as the texture, thickness, color, strength and rate of growth are taken into consideration by the system which then transforms them into piano music. The greater the texture, the more potent the music can be.

Traubeck produced the record player with help from Rohol woodworkers and Pro-Ject Audio.

There’s something so tangibly stirring about having something inherently familiar be turned (in this case literally) on its head. The impressively clever Scott Garner is blowing our minds with an art piece that shakes centuries of Still Life paintings to their very foundations. Using an army of complicated sounding contraptions Garner has created an interactive Still Life artwork that responds to the movement of its edges–a picturesque setting of a vase and fruit topple about the frame in real time as it’s shifted on the wall.

How it all works exactly is a little bit lost on us, but it involves a television that was custom framed; a neat spatial USB sensor; software that communicates with the sensor to create the 3D simulation and a camera that monitors the sensor data to create a parented image of the objects and light embodied inside the frame. Phew.

More than just another gimmicky 3D trend, Scott has brought a kind of artwork the 21^st century is bored by and erupted the traditional into life: a bland, still painting is ditched for something astounding, playful and innovative.

Hunter Longe‘s parents must be appalled. Through his art, he breaks one of the most fundamental rules of a 1990s childhood: Don’t Put Magnets Near The VCR. Studio/gallery space The Popular Workshop are forgiving, however, and presented Longe’s work in an exhibition entitled ‘Degausser’ in the middle of 2011. They made him bring his own video recorder.

This short film—directed by Cole Schreiber—is the first in a series commissioned by TPW which feature artists working across a range of artistic mediums. Longe’s technique involves ‘degaussing’, a process which uses magnetism to destroy a magnetic field—as Longe says ‘fighting fire with fire’. He is interested in the idea of creating through destruction, of taking something and giving it a new and altered meaning by reconstructing it in different ways.

Longe also talks about his idea of distortion, how the reproduction of images or of stories changes them into things which are unrecognizable from the originals. Schreiber focuses on this idea to present Longe’s interview to us on a television screen and projecting patterns and scenes from old films over the top, thus making manifest Longe’s own idea of what art is.

You can see another in the series here, which focuses on photographer Bob Chisholm.

If you cringe at the thought of seeing a McDonald’s on the Champs-Élysées (however white the golden arches may be) or Starbucks on the Great Wall, then you might be interested in teaming up with Brooklyn graphic designer/photographer/typography activist Molly Woodward.  The mission: save the world’s unique vernacular typography.

For the last ten years it has been Molly’s personal mission to archive photographs of unique typography from around the world on her site vernaculartypography.com.  Since its small beginnings in 2001, the site now houses over 5,000 images from places in the US, England, France, Italy and Japan.

The sad truth is that original typographic art is disappearing.  Global companies and advertising giants are quickly diminishing typography to vanishing symbols of our art and culture.  Think of 19th century shop names being covered over to open another KFC, or the old art deco signage for the Paris metro being replaced.  The loss of unique and creative typography is endangered with the rise of globalism, and Molly wants to revive the tradition of creating new and exciting signage.

That’s where she wants you to get involved.  To extended the archive and even help create new signs that relate to their environment, a Kickstarter campaign has been launched to raise funding.  So if you’re feeling particularly inspired—or you’re just a huge anti-capitalist—click here to pledge some dollars.

Since time immemorial, art has gone on walls and people have been kept back in order to observe it. The relationship is fundamentally static; you see something that hangs in front of you and you move on, while the art stays where it is. Mexican artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer is set to change all that.

In a series of twelve installations commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Lozano-Hemmer has utilized a variety of high tech equipment—including thermal imaging, heart monitors, kinect motion sensors, cameras and computer software—in order to make the art interact with the audience.

This clip for the artwork Tape Recorders shows how it works. A motion sensor suspended above viewers controls a row of measuring tapes which are hung on opposite sides of a room. The longer a person stays in front of the bank of tapes, the longer the tape will extend up the wall. When the zenith of three meters is reached, the tapes crash back to earth in that very familiar handyman sound and slowly retract to start the cycle anew. Every so often, a printer at the side of the installation calculates how long people have been in the room for.

Lozano-Hemmer takes the humble measuring tape—a tool of the building trade normally used for the production of cold, hard information—and turns it into something gently poetic. The artwork is never exactly the same; it shifts and changes, challenging the notion of static data and turning common objects into things worthy of slow contemplation.

The show ‘Recorders’—which is featured as part of the Sydney International Art series—is on at the MCA until 12 February 2012.

Crossing boundaries of media and art is rarely as unique as this brilliant fusion of sound, motion and poetry from director Nathaniel Whitcomb.

In a testament for smartphones, all the footage in The Birth of Medusa was shot on an iPhone at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago.  The smooth, hypnotising images take a shift with the poetry and the strains of the score, created by RxRy.  The poignant poetry, conflicted with personal struggles and a bound consciousness gives birth to the monster of the earth, Medusa.  The slow but encapsulating ebb and flow of the video is designed to leave you feeling as though you’ve ‘suddenly found yourself in the deep’.

Whitcomb is a designer and an artist whose online portfolio explores digital media and experimental art, and his new project Think or Smile shares his ventures and experiments with a diverse range of technology and film (and occasionally cats).  As well as using his own personal footage, there was further collaboration with audio researcher RxRy to develop the sound design which accompanies the visual and literal with perfect emotion and intensity.

Sydney Cash is a sculptor that uses mirrors to manipulate light as if it were a solid volume. In this project with with French jazz musician Romain Collin and New York based director (and Portable contributor) Yaara Sumeruk, Cash takes light sculptures to another level by triggering interaction through music. The result is this beautiful, live Jazz music and light installation comissioned by The Falcon—a renowed music venue in Marlboro, New York.

Sydney had already been experimenting with music and light, creating some light sculpture pieces for other performances at this Jazz haven in Hudson Valley. Cash used The Falcon as his experimental studio and during the evenings, the lights of the sculpture jammed with the music. Since then, his light sculptures have been and integral element in the design of the Falcon’s Bar-room.

I thought to do it as a work-in-progress, changing it regularly. I could learn more, and it would be fun.
As the first piece was installed, I noticed that the stage outlets were attached to the light control board, and that we could vary the intensity of the lights. Then I realized that another bank of lights could show very different imagery with the same reflecting/shadow panels, and that I could fade from one set of images to the other.

Yaara Sumeruk’s film is fascinating in the same way that visualizing a jazz composition through light is fascinating. It’s a sensorial experience where all different elements of the installation come together beautifully, making us wonder if Sydney’s light sculptures and Jazz maybe were born to be together.

The subject of menstruation isn’t one we mention often on Portable, and, in fact, it isn’t one talked about much at all.  It’s a tad confronting, a little bit mmm…errghh, and a even a kind of “forbidden” subject—we basically like to pretend it doesn’t exist.  Which would be fine, if it wasn’t a reality for more than half the people of the world.  The stigma attached to this innate function of the female body is not widely acknowledged as a part of the beauty of human reproduction, but as a taboo—a contamination of femaleness.

Seven Days of Menstruation is a new video by artist Annie Wong, and, yeah, it’s exactly what it sounds like.  The almost abstract water formations appear intriguing and placid—and yet when we discover that the visuals are delineations of, well, someone’s period in a toilet bowl, our visceral internal reaction is of repulsion.  This substance, here distanced form the body, becomes its own entity and a potent representation of the instinctual reaction to this ‘contaminated’ bodily fluid.   Shot on a macro lens, the five minute silent film allows no reverie from the confrontation of the images.

It seems we are most confronted by the repulsiveness of what our own bodies create.  While we should be used to the bizarre ways of the human body (just think of child birth for a second), our own disgust ironically stems from ourselves.  When artist Andres Serrano created his Piss Christ in 1987 (a small crucifix submerged in his own urine) people were scandalised across the world, and if anyone has seen Stan Brakhange’s Window Water Baby Moving, you’ll know the graphic depiction of the birth of a child is unlike any other media seen before on the subject.

When it comes to menstruation, child birth, and female bodily functions, art tends to shy away.  Yet with this video, Wong becomes one of the few to break the societal conventions of avoidance within private femininity.  Within the unwritten practice of tight-lipped, alluding concealment, this video breaks the period rulebook simply by talking about it.

Created as a dialogue between the approaches and techniques of scratch film artist Rey Parla and digital movie maker Michael Betancourt, Viral Underground combines scratch, glitch, analog processing and digital compositing to create a hybrid art film reminiscent of white noise, visualized.

We caught up with Rey and Michael, two friends who turned their mutual respect for each other’s work, thinking, and interests, and years of conversation into a visual experience.

Michael, you are an artist, media historian, critical theorist, and a curator. How did you arrive at the point you are now and what exactly is your true passion?

I don’t agree with the assumption that I must have a “true passion” and simply be “faking it” in the other areas; this reduces art and artists to a single dimension, and it’s not something I agree with doing at all. Making something interesting requires knowledge of other work, in-depth knowledge. If anything this is the old belief that artists are not allowed to also be highly skilled, intelligent people: the Romantic fantasy that being an artist somehow requires incoherence, foolishness, or some other mental incapacity. My work as a theorist is informed and shaped by experience as an artist, just as making the kinds of movie that I do requires the same theoretical skill and capacity produces my work as a historian and curator. These are different dimensions of the same procedure.

Rey, tell us about yourself? And what inspires you to create?

I am an artist, photographer, and filmmaker living and working in Brooklyn. I was born near the equator and lived in the beautiful island of Puerto Rico for several years. Overall, I’d say I have an experimental attitude with a contemporary view intersected by the histories of the avant-garde.  Yet, I remain open to all meaning or non-meaning; the nonverbal silence of color, this is what interests me. Reality inspires me to invent my own universe. The seen and unseen; the public and the private; life; forgotten memories; death; the awareness of loss; struggle; my own history; childhood; the unknown and the larger human story are themes in my work.

Can you explain what exactly a ‘scratch’ artist is? Take us inside your studio, what’s it like?

Rey: A scratch filmmaker is an artist who uses all possible tools to scratch off or on the emulsion of the celluloid stock no matter what its size is.  My professors and colleagues in Miami used this term to describe me and my work after they saw a Super 8mm I made titled Sporadic Germination, which was selected by Bruce Posner of Harvard Film Archives for his curated program at The 12th Annual Miami International Film Festival: The Avant-Garde Returns.

This year I’ve worked in several studios, so the setting and environment changes depending on the project, ideas, things I am making and doing. My lab is usually very clean, and my photo-based works are usually hung around the space. I’m always surrounded by art, so in the studio this informs new work, directly or indirectly.

You’ve said before that you create images that are metaphors or analogies meant to evoke the unnamable, or deliver a shock to the eye bringing us directly into focus with the stories of our inner-selves and times, now.

Rey: Yes, it is all relative.  We are all searching for the Architect, taking the time to view art I feel is part of what allows us to sculpt our time and space to make sense of it all.  There are other ways to put the elephant together; this is one of the experiences that make us human.  Seeing, letting our eyes softly dance with the subject as we arrive at a personal conclusion and realization of a feeling is extremely important for all of us.

What sort of tools do the two of you need?

Rey: Anything with a sharp edge – keeps the work contemporary.

Michael: I use a bunch of simple software applications: a Hexadecimal file editor to make changes to the video files which makes the glitches and several different freeware programs like the VLC player to convert these into stable video that I can work with. The final assembly is a combination of Photoshop and After Effects—mainly since the large file sizes and HD resolution means there are many fewer options than for working in the older resolution of TV.

What was the thought process behind Viral Underground?

Rey: To answer that simply, it was the thought process of combining the analogue with the digital to form a convergence of these two different types of physical forces and that is what the film represents.  I like to think the viral part is the digital domain and the underground representing the analogue sphere for a time when things where not so interconnected.  These are the two different types of flavours: viral and underground.  Whether it fascinates people or not is not the point.

On a more spiritual level, abstract forms have the power to alter states of meditative thinking and enact change in the world by conveying universal themes of the human condition. Expressing ideas or feelings about creation and its playfulness produces a mercurial shift between these states of mind.  The images are metaphors or analogies meant to evoke the unnameable, or deliver a shock to the eye bringing us directly into focus with the stories of our inner-selves and times, now.

Michael: My approach to this project was to start with what we had, do some tests and see how they came out, and then proceed. The glitching process is very much the least-controlled part of the whole thing, and while I have enough experience with it to generally know what different procedures will do on screen, there is also a degree of uncontrolled variation that happens. So for me, the starting point was the glitching, selecting the different protocols for that, and seeing what I’d get. My own footage that I made was only added to what Rey sent and the glitched material after I’d finished these experiments.

It seems that the result of Viral Underground is a very complex visual conversation. From your perspective, what’s going on? What are the two of you talking about?

Rey: I see it as being a give-and-take over issues of rhythm, complexity and thematic development, one that reaches a degree of agreement at the end.

How easy is it to create a scratch film, and how did you wind up creating them yourself?

Rey: A scratch film that’s worth seeing will usually take about one year to make.  I’ve made three and I am in the process of making a fourth now, after a long period of experimenting with other mediums.  My early background is in narrative filmmaking, theatre and a high affinity for documentary film and photography.  After documenting my brother Jose for several years and seeing him work, several ideas, historical points, and knowledge intersected which allowed the scratch film process to be born.

Michael, in your work, what interests you most?

One of the main interests has been the relationships between tradition, the differences between interpretive theories and productive theories, and the ways that specifically technologies impact our aesthetic choices. Much of what we call “art history” is simply an account of the particular answers that different artists have had to these questions. Plus, I’ve always regarded the field of aesthetics as history—those choices chosen by some artist in the past, choices, which have proved effective and popular with others. The difference between historian and artists is largely a matter of emphasis and focus, resulting in very different kinds of production since these roles proceed from related, but diverging, engagements.

What the past century of structural changes in the art world means, among other things, is that artists are, perhaps now more than ever, free to create their own frameworks for their work—but to do so effectively requires artists to specifically become theorists of their own work (even if they keep their theories to themselves). The kinds of hybridity, which are apparent in my practice, are neither unique to my work nor unusual for artists working today. I think it is important that we insist on these multiple roles, interdependent, since the Romanticist view of artist as mute “expressor” is one that greatly damages what we do, limits the possibilities of what art is and artists can be, and reiterates what amounts to little more than the condescending view that art is somehow different and distinct from what everyone does on a daily basis. All that, without providing a constructive alternative; the idea that what everyone does can be art, and that it is an integral part of daily life and experience is inherently challenging to a social order where thought, history and understanding are systematically devalued.

Could it be said that the two of you are motivated by digital convergence?

Michael: I don’t think so. Viral Underground was more about doing a project using our different approaches than it was about commercial ideas like “digital convergence.” The contrasts between physical and digital media emerged more as a result of the different technologies we’re using than from a programmatic attempt to forcibly combine them.

What do you hope others will gain from watching?

Rey: That truth doesn’t have an end and that it is perpetually mutating it-self into hybrids to create other selves.  This is all a rehearsal for a future time.  As much as this piece is sculpting time and space it is psychologically manifesting the definition of becoming human by seeing, feeling, thinking, reacting, questioning, formulating an idea or opinion; negative or positive and that’s its capability to transform and continue its path.  This is an autonomy that directly impacts where we are going.

So, what’s next? Will the two of you continue to collaborate?

Michael: We’re talking about a few things to do next, and since I think we’re both happy with the result that we will probably do more projects together.

Rey: I am working on a picture book titled Random Attitudes that OHWOW is publishing.