How to create famous movie title cards all with practical effects, no CGI needed! Creating famous movie titles of your own can be done easily by following this InCamera practical fx tutorial; where we use the famous The Thing (1982) title sequence as an example of the practical filmmaking techniques used.

We provide an in depth tutorial for this practical effects masterclass and show you in an informative, entertaining show; how to recreate it. Demonstrating a mix of classic and modern practical filmmaking techniques.

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CREDIT/THANKS: All credit to Peter Kuran, who did the practical fx for the original film. All footage from 'The Thing' (1982) courtesy of Universal Pictures. The original 'The Thing' (1982) title burn - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWidoMhF9Qw

EQUIPMENT USED FOR THIS VIDEO: Camera - BlackMagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4k with a small HD 502 monitor, rigged by a Tilta cage. Lighting - Dedo 150w fresnel and used a full ctb gel to bring to it to daylight. Stencils - Stencils were machine cut by an external company from vinyl onto glass. Smoke - Concept Colt 4 smoke machine. Video Editing Software - The retiming and colour grading were all done onAdobe Premiere Pro.

WHY SUBSCRIBE TO INCAMERA? - We post original content monthy. - We have step-by-step, informative & entertaining tutorials on how to create amazing practical effects. - We're extremely engaging with our community across all social media platforms. - We'd love to make InCamera our full time jobs, so need all the support possible!

Crowd dynamics test using Miarmy for Maya. Shows the new servo force feature which allows struggling animation once the agent has become dynamic Rendered with ArnoldCast: Dave Fothergill vfxTags: crowd dynamic, dynamics, maya, mtoa, miarmy, animation, cgi, vfx and arnold render

It’s 2017 and computer graphics have conquered the Uncanny Valley, that strange place where things are almost real... but not quite. After decades of innovation, we’re at the point where we can conjure just about anything with software. The battle for photoreal CGI has been won, so the question is... what happens now? CREDITS: Written and animated by Alan Warburton with the support of Tom Pounder and Wieden + Kennedy. Music by Cool 3D World (cool3dworld.com/) Special thanks to: Leanne Redfern, Nico Engelbrecht, Iain Tait, Indiana Matine, Katrina Sluis, David Surman, Jacob Gaboury and Daniel Rourke. Animated backgrounds generously provided by: • Quixel (quixel.se/) • Katarina Markovic (youtube.com/channel/UCcr4QTtAK9N96pf_Z_zVqWg) • Roman Senko (vimeo.com/rendan) Featuring work by: • Al and Al (alandal.co.uk/) • Albert Omoss (omoss.io/) • Alex McLeod (alxclub.com/) • Barry Doupe (barrydoupe.ca/) • Claudia Hart (claudiahart.com/) • Cool 3D World (cool3dworld.com/) • Dave Fothergill (vimeo.com/davefothergillvfx) • Dave Stewart (vimeo.com/davegrafix) • Drages Animation (youtube.com/user/drakhean) • El Popo Sangre (vimeo.com/elpoposangre) • Eva Papamargariti (evapapamargariti.tumblr.com/) • Filip Tarczewski (vimeo.com/ftarczewski) • Geoffrey Lillemon (geoffreylillemon.com/website/) • Jacolby Satterwhite (jacolby.com/home.html) • Jesse Kanda (jessekanda.com/) • John Butler (vimeo.com/user3946359) • Jonathan Monaghan (jonmonaghan.com/) • Jun Seo Hahm (vimeo.com/junseohahm) • Kathleen Daniel (duh-real.com/) • Katie Torn (katietorn.com/index.html) • Kim Laughton (kimlaughton.tumblr.com/) • Kouhei Nakama (kouheinakama.com/) • LuYang (luyang.asia/) • Mike Pelletier (mikepelletier.net/) • Nic Hamilton (nichamilton.info/) • Pussykrew (hybrid-universe-emulation.net/) • Rick Silva (ricksilva.net/) • Sanatorios (instagram.com/sanatorios/)Cast: Alan WarburtonTags: CGI, computer graphics, uncanny valley, technology, software, art, film, history, catmull, pixar, ilm, VFX, animation, interstellar, Nolan, avengers, experimental, economy and cool3dworld

From the album 'Jlin - Black Origami' https://planetmu.bleepstores.com/release/81750-jlin-black-origami

Directed by Joji Koyama

Choreographed by Corey Scott-Gilbert

Director Of Photography: Cezary Zacharewicz Editing: Matthias Graatz and Joji Koyama Stylist: Larisa Bechtold 1st Assistant Camera: Michael Schmidt Producer: Felix Knabel Creative Director: Joe Shakespeare Production Assistant: Felix von Stumm Runner/Driver: Peter Schuster Colourist: Jack McGinity at Time Based Arts Produced by ANORAK Film

Special thanks to: KAOS Berlin FGV Schmidle Berlin Gabriella Ferrante Lucía Méndez Falcon

http://billwurtz.com

patreon: http://patreon.com/billwurtz spotify: https://play.spotify.com/artist/78cT0dM5Ivm722EP2sgfDh itunes: http://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/bill-wurtz/id1019208137 twitter: http://twitter.com/billwurtz instagram: http://instagram.com/notbillwurtz donate: http://paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=VXTWA8CDYP4RJ

It’s our 50th episode!  To celebrate we sit down with four members of the Anthropocene Working Group: the scientists and experts who are deciding whether or not we formally adopt the Anthropocene into the geologic time table.  We discuss what makes the Anthropocene boundary different from all of the other boundaries in geologic history, how they deal with the increased public attention to this particular boundary, and some cultural ripple effects of the Anthropocene dealing with the Law of the Sea.  As we wrap up, the Generation Anthropocene producers take a minute to reflect on all of the rapid changes we’ve witnessed over the past 50 episodes.

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If you enjoyed this episode, you might also like:

1. Conservation in the Anthropocene

2. Welcome to the… Technosphere?

3. The rock hard truth of mass extinctions

Contributors

Jan Zalasiewicz

Jan Zalasiewicz is a Lecturer in Geology at the University of Leicester, and before that worked at the British Geological Survey.  He is a field geologist, palaeontologist and stratigrapher, and researches fossil ecosystems and environments across 500-million years of Earth history.  Jan is also the convenor for the Working Group on the ‘Anthropocene’ and has published many scholarly works on the topic.  Along with Mark Williams, he is the author of the popular science book The Goldilocks Planet.

Davor Vidas

Davor Vidas is the director of the Law of the Sea and Marine Affairs Programme at the Fridtjof Nansen Institute (FNI).  As an expert dealing with the Law of the Sea, Davor is currently investigating how international laws, all of which were written during our previous and stable geologic epoch, need to adapt to better fit the unstable environment of the Anthropocene.

Mike Ellis

Mike Ellis is the head of climate change science at the British Geological Survey.  Mike has worked all across the world researching the intersection of plate tectonics and landscape evolution, the environmental impacts of climate change, and the Anthropocene.

Mark Williams

Mark Williams is a reader in paleobiology at the University of Leicester.  His work deals primarily with the interactions between the biosphere and other Earth systems.  Mark also studies climate proxies and the application of numerical climate models.  Along with Jan Zalasiewicz, he is the author of the popular science book The Goldilocks Planet.

Interviewer

Miles Traer

For biographical information on Miles Traer, please click here.

http://web.stanford.edu/group/anthropocene/cgi-bin/wordpress/anthropocene-working-group-roundtable/

GENERICGIFBUTIN3D by Tim Booth / @grandadtim Part of the #GIFbites Project for Bitrates Exhibition L↺↻p it!

Benczúr Gyula 1896-os történelmi kompozíciójának teljesen 3D-s rekreációja. Az összes karakter le lett modellezve és szükség szerint újrafestve; tehát nem 2.5D mint azt elsőre gondolná az ember :) További információk és az "így készült" megtalálható az ekho.blog.hu -n sok más képemmel egyetemben. *** English "making of" is up and running! You can find it on my Behance page! behance.net/gallery/Buda-repossession/15531221 *** A modest sidenote: (the reason of the tipjar): i am saving mone for a cintiq, it would really-really help me to make my own cartoon show for the kids. Best wishes: ekhoCast: ekhoTags: lightwave, buda, render, 3d, painting, recreation, ekho, cgi and animation

The boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion.

Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto (1991) [1]

This is no fantasy... no careless product of wild imagination. No, my good friends.

The opening lines of Richard Donner's Superman (1978) [2] In a 1950 film serial entitled Atom Man vs Superman [3] television executive and evil genius Lex Luthor sends Superman into a ghostly limbo he calls "The Empty Doom." Trapped in this phantom void, Superman's infinite powers are rendered useless, for although he can still see and hear the "real" world his ability to interact with it has all but disappeared. Over the following decades this paraspace [4]—to use Samuel Delany's term for a fictional space, accessed via technology, that is neither within nor entirely separate from the 'real' world—would reappear in the Superman mythos in various forms, beginning in 1961. Eventually dubbed "The Phantom Zone," its back story was reworked substantially, until by the mid 60s it had become a parallel dimension discovered by Superman's father, Jor El. Once used to incarcerate Krypton's most unsavory characters, The Phantom Zone had outlasted its doomed home world and eventually burst at the seams, sending legions of super-evil denizens raining down onto Earth. Beginning its life as an empty doom, The Phantom Zone was soon filled with terrors prolific enough to make even The Man of Steel fear its existence.

Overseen by story editor Mortimer Weisinger, and the unfortunately named artist Wayne Boring, the late 50s and early 60s were a strange time in the Superman universe. The comics suddenly became filled with mutated variants of kryptonite that gave Superman the head of an ant or the ability to read thoughts; with miniature Supermen arriving seconds before their namesake to save the day and steal his thunder; with vast universes of time caught fast in single comic book panels. It was an era of narrative excess wrapped by a tighter, more meticulous and, many would say, repressed aesthetic:

Centuries of epic time could pass in a single caption. Synasties fell between balloons, and the sun could grow old and die on the turn of a page. It was a toy world, too, observed through the wrong end of a telescope. Boring made eternity tiny, capable of being held in two small hands. He reduced the infinite to fit in a cameo... [5]

The Phantom Zone is one of the least bizarre narrative concepts from what is now known as the Silver Age of D.C. Comics (following on from the more widely celebrated Golden Age). It could be readily understood on a narrative level, and it had a metaphorical dimension as well, one that made conceivable the depths contained in Superman's vast, but ultimately manipulable universe. The Phantom Zone was usually portrayed on a television screen kept safe in one of the many rooms of the League of Justice headquarters. It could also be used as a weapon and fired from a portable projection device—the cold, harsh infinity of the Empty Doom blazing into Superman's world long enough to ensnare any character foolish enough to stand in its rays. Whether glimpsed on screen or via projection, then, The Phantom Zone could be interpreted as a metaphor for the moving image. 

In comic books, as in the moving image, the frame is the constituent element of narrative. Each page of a comic book is a frame which itself frames a series of frames, so that by altering each panel's size, bleed or aesthetic variety, time and space can be made elastic. Weisinger and Boring's Phantom Zone took this mechanism further, behaving like a weaponized frame free to roam within the comic book world. Rather than manipulating three-dimensional space or the fourth dimension of time, as the comic book frame does, The Phantom Zone opened out onto the existence of other dimensions. It was a comic book device that bled beyond the edge of the page, out into a world in which comic book narratives were experienced not in isolation, but in parallel with the onscreen narratives of the cinema and the television. As such, the device heralded televisual modes of attention.

For his 1978 big-budget movie version of Superman, [6] director Richard Donner cunningly translated The Phantom Zone into something resembling the cinema screen itself. In the film's opening sequence, a crystal surface swoops down from the immense backdrop of space, rendering the despicable General Zod and his cronies two-dimensional as it imprisons them. In the documentary The Magic Behind the Cape, [7] bundled with the DVD release of Superman in 2001, we are given an insight into the technical prowess behind Donner's The Phantom Zone. The actors are made to simulate existential terror against the black void of the studio, pressed up against translucent, flesh-like membranes and physically rotated out of sync with the gaze of the camera. Rendering the faux two-dimensional surface of Donner's Phantom Zone believable required all manner of human dimensions to be framed out of the final production. The actors react to causes generated beyond the studio space, the director's commands, or the camera's gaze. They twist and recoil from transformations still to occur in post-production. In a sense, the actors behave as bodies that are already images. With its reliance on post-produced visual effects, the Phantom Zone sequence represents an intermediary stage in the gradual removal of sets, locations, and any 'actual' spatial depths from the film production process. Today, actors must address their humanity to green voids post-produced with CGI, and the indexical relationship between the film image and the events unfolding in front of the lens have been almost entirely shattered. In this Phantom cinema produced after the event, ever-deeper layers of special effects seal actors into a cinematic paraspace. Just as The Phantom Zone of the comic book heralded televisual modes of attention, The Phantom Zone of the 1970s marked a perceptual regime in which the cinematic image was increasingly sealed off from reality by synthetic visual effects.

   For Walter Benjamin, writing during cinema's first “Golden Era,", the ability of the cinema screen to frame discontinuous times and spaces represented its most profound "truth." Delivered by cinema, Benjamin argued, mechanically disseminated images were actually fracturing the limits of our perceptions, training "human beings in the apperceptions and reactions needed to deal with a vast apparatus whose role in their lives is expanding almost daily." [8]  The cinema screen offered audiences who were confined to finite bodies that had never before experienced such juxtapositions an apparently shared experience of illuminated consciousness. Far from inventing this new mode of perception through the "shock-character" of montage, Benjamin believed that cinema spoke of the 'truths' which awaited us beneath the mirage of proletarian experience. Truths which would guide us—with utopian fervor—towards an awareness, and eventual control, of what Benjamin called the "new nature":

Not just industrial technology, but the entire world of matter (including human beings) as it has been transformed by that technology. [9]

In short, cinema was less a technology than a new and evolving mode of machinic thought, both generated by and generating the post-industrial subject. Observing the relation between representation and visibility, Jens Andermann notes:

Truth, the truth of representation, crucially depends on the clear-cut separation between the visible and the invisible, the non-objectness of the latter. Truth is the effect of what we could call the catachretic nature of visuality, the way in which the world of visual objects can point to the invisible domain of pure being only by obsessively pointing to itself. [10]

As from the Greek root aisthanesthai – "to perceive"—the aesthetic conditions through which The Phantom Zone have been translated frame far more than a supposed fictional void. Called upon to indicate an absolute outside — the unfathomable infinity of another, ghostly, parallel universe — The Phantom Zone instead reiterates the medium of its delivery, whether comic book, television, or cinema, with mirror-like insistency. Such is the power of new technical modes of thought, that very often, they cause us to rethink the outmoded media that we are so used to as to be unaware. The Phantom Zone hides the cinematographic image in plain view. Its reappearance and reimagining over the last 60 odd years, in ever newer forms and aesthetic modes, can be read paradigmatically, that is, as a figure that stands in place of, and points towards, shifts, mutations and absolute overturnings in our perceptual apparatus. Its most recent iteration is in the 2013 Superman reboot, Man of Steel, [11] and in particular in a 'viral' trailer distributed on YouTube a few weeks before the film was released. [12] Coming towards us soars a new mode of machinic thought; a Phantom Zone of unparalleled depth and aesthetic complexity that opens onto a new new - digital - nature.

The General Zod trailer for Man of Steel begins with a static rift that breaks into a visual and audial disarrangement of the phrase, “You are not alone". General Zod's masked face materializes, blended with the digital miasma: a painterly 3D effect that highlights the inherent ‘otherness' of where his message originates. The aesthetic is unsettling in as much as it is recognizable. We have no doubt as viewers of this 'viral' dispatch as to the narrative meaning of what we are witnessing, namely, a datastream compressed and distributed from a paraspace by an entity very much unlike us. The uncanny significance of the trailer stems more from how very normal the digital miasma feels; from how apprehensible this barrage of noise is to us. Indeed, it is ‘other', but its otherness is also somehow routine, foreseeable. The pathogen here is not Zod's message, it is digital technology itself. The glitched aesthetic of the trailer has become so habitual as to herald the passing of digital materiality into the background of awareness. Its mode of dissemination, via the Trojan Horse of YouTube, just as unvisible to us during the regular shifts we make between online/offline modes of communication. The surface of this Phantom Zone very much interfaces with our material world, even if the message it impresses upon us aches to be composed of an alien substance.   Digital video does the work of representation via a series of very clever algorithms called codecs that compress the amount of information needed to produce a moving image. Rather than the individual frames of film, each as visually rich and total as the last, in a codec only the difference between frames need be encoded, making each frame “more like a set of movement instructions than an image." [13] The painterly technique used in the General Zod trailer is normally derived from a collapse between key (image) and reference (difference) frames at the status of encoding. The process is called ‘datamoshing', and has its origins in glitch art, a form of media manipulation predicated on those minute moments when the surface of an image or sound cracks open to reveal some aspect of the process that produced it. By a method of cutting, repeating or glitching of key and reference frames visual representations are made to blend into one another, space becomes difference and time becomes image. The General Zod trailer homages/copies/steals the datamoshing technique, marking digital video's final move from convenient means of dissemination, to palpable aesthetic and cultural influence.  In the actual movie, Man of Steel (2013), Zod's video message is transposed in its entirety to the fictional Planet Earth. The viral component of its movement around the web is entirely absent: its apparent digitality, therefore, remains somewhat intact, but only as a mere surface appearance. This time around the message shattering through The Phantom Zone is completely devoid of affective power: it frames nothing but its existence as a narrative device. The filmmakers rely on a series of “taking over the world" tropes to set the stage for General Zod's Earth-shaking proclamation. TV sets in stereotypical, exotic, locales flicker into life, all broadcasting the same thing. Electronic billboards light up, loudspeakers blare, mobile phones rumble in pockets, indeed, all imaging technologies suddenly take on the role of prostheses for a single, datamoshed, stream. In one—particularly sincere—moment of the montage a faceless character clutches a Nokia brand smartphone in the centre of shot and exclaims, “It's coming through the RSS feeds!" This surface, this Phantom Zone, frames an apparatus far vaster than a datamoshed image codec: an apparatus apparently impossible to represent through the medium of cinema. The surface appearance of the original viral trailer is only a small component of what constitutes the image it conveys, and thus, of the image it frames of our time. Digital materiality shows itself via poorly compressed video clips arriving through streams of overburdened bandwidth. Our understanding of what constitutes a digital image must then, according to Mark Hansen, “be extended to encompass the entire process by which information is made perceivable." [14]

In its cinematic and comic book guises, The Phantom Zone was depicted as “a kind of membrane dividing yet connecting two worlds that are alien to and also dependent upon each other".[15] The success of the datamoshed trailer comes from the way it broke through that interface, its visual surface bubbling with a new kind of viral, digital, potential that encompasses and exposes the material engaged in its delivery. As cinematographic subjects we have an integral understanding of the materiality of film. Although we know that the frames of cinema are separate we crave the illusion of movement, and the image of time, they create. The ‘viral' datamoshed message corrupts this separation between image and movement, the viewer and the viewed. Not only does General Zod seem to push out, from inside the numerical image, it is as if we, the viewing subject enraptured by the digital event, have been consumed by its flow. The datamoshed Phantom Zone trailer takes the one last, brave, step beyond the apparatus of image production. Not only is the studio, the actor, and even the slick appeal of CGI framed out of its mode of delivery, arriving through a network that holds us complicit, this Phantom Zone frames the 'real' world in its entirety, making even the fictional world it appeals to devoid of affective impact. To take liberty with the words of Jean Baudrillard:

[Jorge Luis] Borges wrote: they are slaves to resemblance and representation; a day will come when they will try to stop resembling. They will go to the other side of the mirror and destroy the empire. But here, you cannot come back from the other side. The empire is on both sides. [16]

Once again, The Phantom Zone highlights the material mode of its delivery with uncanny exactness. We are now surrounded by images that supersede mere visual appearance: they generate and are generated by everything the digital touches, including we, the most important component of General Zod's 'viral' diffusion. The digital Phantom Zone extends to both sides of the flickering screen.   References

[1] Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women : The Reinvention of Nature. (London: Free Association Books Ltd, 1991), 149–181.

[2] Richard Donner, Superman, Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi, 1978.

[3] Spencer Gordon Bennet, Atom Man Vs. Superman, Sci-Fi, 1950.

[4] Scott Bukatman, Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 164.

[5] Grant Morrison, Supergods: Our World in the Age of the Superhero (London: Vintage Books, 2012), 62.

[6] Donner, Superman.

[7] Michael Thau, The Magic Behind the Cape, Documentary, Short, 2001. See : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYXbzVJ6NzA&feature=youtu.be&t=4m12s

[8] Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility," in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media (Cambridge  Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 26.

[9] Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (MIT Press, 1991), 70.

[10] Jens Andermann, The Optic of the State: Visuality and Power in Argentina and Brazil (University of Pittsburgh Pre, 2007), 5.

[11] Zack Snyder, Man of Steel, Action, Adventure, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, 2013.

[12] Man of Steel Viral - General Zod's Warning (2013) Superman Movie HD, 2013, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QkfmqsDTgY.

[13] BackStarCreativeMedia, “Datamoshing—the Beauty of Glitch," April 9, 2009, http://backstar.com/blog/2009/04/09/datamoshing-the-beauty-of-glitch/.

[14] Mark B. Hansen, “Cinema Beyond Cybernetics, or How to Frame the Digital Image," Configurations 10, no. 1 (2002): 54, doi:10.1353/con.2003.0005.

[15] Mark Poster, The Second Media Age (Wiley, 1995), 20.

[16] Jean Baudrillard, “The Murder of the Sign," in Consumption in an Age of Information, ed. Sande Cohen and R. L. Rutsky (Berg, 2005), 11.  

Gail Zappa (Frank's Wife, Executrix of Estate) Applies to Trademark the Name Captain Beefheart? http://t.co/4CGI3zEpG5 ht @richXXIII – WFMU (WFMU) http://twitter.com/WFMU/status/347375975731961856

I am looking for some good documentaries about digital art. What do you recommend? Biographical movies about artists that make art with PhotoShop would be great. Movies about the history of CGI would be fascinating. Documentaries about art made for the internet could also be fun to see. Any suggestions would be most appreciated.

An excellent example of distributed cognition.

The hope that swarms of gamers can help to solve difficult biological problems has been given another boost by a report in the journal PLoS One, showing that data gleaned from the online game Phylo are helping to untangle a major problem in comparative genomics.

The game was created to address the 'multiple sequence alignment (MSA) problem', which refers to the difficulty of aligning roughly similar sequences of DNA in genes common to many species. A DNA sequence that is conserved across species suggests that it plays an important role in the ultimate function of that particular gene.

Although computer algorithms can do very rough alignments of sequences across species, they have proven inept at getting the answer just right. "It is fair to say that present alignments are not just a little bit bad, they are really pretty crude because we have to take a lot of heuristic shortcuts," says Adam Siepel, a computational biologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who was not involved with the study.

That is where human gamers can make a difference. "Understanding when something breaks a general rule is very difficult for a computer but that is what human visual intelligence is very good at," says lead author Jérôme Waldispühl, a computational biologist at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

My sprawling review of the Goldsmiths Art MFA Degree Show, 2011 Originally published by Groupe d’Etudes Interdisciplinaires en Arts Britanniques The labyrinth. Turning; coiling. An allegory of improbable human journeys. Physical; mental; spiritual. Beyond; behind; within. But underneath the mythos and symbolism labyrinths are simple structures. The maze is corners, mere corners. Unfurl them all and the labyrinth becomes a cul de sac; a doorless hallway; a vanishing point leading nowhere. Browsing an MFA final show can feel like an endless hall. No matter how many artworks you peruse, how many studio spaces you violate, how many £3 lukewarm beers on which you ruminate there’s always another curtain asking you to draw it back. I don’t mean to begin this review on a downer, indeed, given a few more paragraphs I hope to have you cursing yourself for missing this year’s Goldsmiths Postgraduate Degree Show. What I do want to do is move you away from the grand figure, the thread of Ariadne convincing you with its singular lineage that degree shows tell you something about the institutions that house them. Goldsmiths’ reputation, were I to spend 1,000 words bullying and poking at it, might tell us more in fact about the figure of the labyrinth than it does about the artists who have scrawled its name all over their curriculum vitae.

Consonants and vowels featured highly in this year’s degree show; ‘Nada’ carved in giant, pink wooden lettering marked a studio of ‘Nonsensical objects I made with my neighbours’, with no indication as to the identity of the artist (or the neighbours). The admission “I was going to install a video piece here but I fucked up” is scrawled in black ink on the cupboard of an electrical circuit breaker. Located on its own floor this year, the Art Writing MFA showcased words and sounds in ways the Fine Art show could not manage alone. Behind one particularly black curtain the text “This image has nothing to do with the video that shall begin imminently” overlays a freeze-frame of old age pensioners in a work by Liam Rogers. As the image finally ebbs away droll, haunting bass tones punctuate a narrative milieu: two black cats lounging in digital shadow; an extreme close-up of a flea, trapped between strands of human hair; a strutting chicken and the voice of Ayn Rand “I will not die, it’s the world that will die.” In another recess of the Laurie Grove Bath studios Noam Edry’s politically anarchic sketches and suggestive graffiti were being photographed, constantly and throughout the opening event, by two neutral looking observers. Upon entering the room my bag was searched by a mock custodian. To one side, beside a massage therapist actively working on the spine of a fellow ‘member of the public’, an arrow on the wall labeled “Groovy Little War Mix” pointed to a monitor propped-up on chunks of rubble. On its screen the letters G-O-L-D-S and M exploded in successive puffs of computer enhanced tom-foolery. Clutching university issue headphones to my ears I watched a performer dressed as a giant date taunt one of the MFA’s directors into dancing with her. Before I could move on to the next room (an imaginary ICA show on comedian Andy Kauffman, compiled by the Curating MA) a team of volunteers enthused me into having a Turkish coffee. Titles and scrawlings; etchings and subtitles continued to surround me. “Remember Taj Mahal, India” Johann Arens’ video work implored: “Close your eyes.” Caught between two HD flat-screen televisions (two eyes? two halves of the brain?) Arens’ work ‘Effect Rating’ engineers a confusion between the object and its representation. In this case, the object was the human brain, slowly conveyered into the centre of a donut-shaped MRI machine. The film blurs ‘actual’ footage and foam mock-ups of an MRI scan into a meditation on neuroscience and the art-object. Like the corpus callosum separating my cerebral hemispheres, I longed to be scalpelled in two, each half of me finally free to rove the rest of the show unhindered. In the basement, hidden by shadow, I followed my ears to another series of video works, this time by Jill Vanepps. Horrific flesh-puppet-orifices attempted to penetrate one another with elongated, furry tendrils. Two Davids (Cronenberg and Lynch) seemed to fight for recognition in these dark works meditating on the (dis)order of female puberty. A projector restricted with layers of tape and Vaseline punched me with its flickering half-light: “Witchlike” a woman’s voice said, “of low intelligence.” I listened, “Style…” alone, “comes out of conviction…” until other bodies came to linger with me in the dirge. This was an experience I wasn’t willing to share. Before I moved on to the more official looking Ben Pimlott building, I paused to consider the physics of Hirofumi Isoya’s sculptural works. Like computer generated frames, suspended in real space, Isoya’s works ‘After brick slips’ and ‘Test on a mimic facade of an experimental house’ monumentalise the equal-and-opposite-reaction. Made-up of a bed of smashed tiles with a wire mesh extended in a peak above it, each work isolates the physics of destruction in single, free-standing, art objects. Being a child of the freeze-frame, of time-lapse photography and ultra-high-speed video I had little trouble figuring the events that created these fragmented craters of tile and cement. Had I not the technical grammar I might well have seen in these works the splash of a hailstorm on the surface of a lake, or the arching curvature of a daphodil: each inverted wire trumpet spoke of wrecking-balls and flower petals just the same. Making sure the Goldsmiths brand still adorned its roof (they were CGI explosions weren’t they?) I entered the Ben Pimlott building. Winding its concrete staircase to the 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th floors the second labyrinth of the evening seemed to offer its secrets more readily than the first. Spaces felt more open, corners more isolated, free-standing structures more free to stand. My beer was icy cold. Jie Hye Yeom’s works were the first to grab my attention. Video pieces projected on or nearby a series of awkward objects: a red ball with a 5-foot circumference; a grey plastic sheet quivering in the projector fan; a giant brain made out of builder’s insulation foam. From inside a long metal cylinder ‘The ffond’ coughed and spluttered from its projector, heating up the surrounding air that was then blasted into my face. A synthetic voice with a strong American accent narrates as the artist’s journey through the ffond, an imaginary engineering marvel connecting two distinct points on the Earth’s surface. The words “Where is here?” flash up, written in both Korean and English. A stooping old woman guides her through foreign wreckage, “Can you help me get to Korea?” In another work, ‘Solmier’, partially blinded by headgear made of baguettes, Jie Hye Yeom is guided through an African village by a giggling group of children. At the edge of the forest the artist stops, her mission accomplished. With glee the children gather around to eat her mask. On the floor above a cartoon tapestry welcomes me into a two-tiered space shared by Soheila Sokhanvari and Hans Diernberger. Parodying the work of Jeff Koons a taxidermied pony rests, snug, in a sculptural figure of a beanbag, or perhaps a balloon. As I nervously turned on my heels to leave a well dressed woman urges her children, in hushed tones, to leave the thing’s backside alone. In the centre of Diernberger’s space a rectangular recess sweeps the floor. Within it, prefigured on a video loop, we can see the head of a trampolinist directly from above. Bouncing carefully (presumably so as not to knock the camera mounted above her) she taunts us with a warm-up, the final elastic bound never arriving. On the top floor of the Ben Pimlott building the tone of the show takes a swerve as I reach the Art Writing MFA Postgraduate Show. A text by Tone Gellein asks me to unfold it in 4-dimensions. Sealed in a pretty glass cabinet are a series of etchings, like some blueprint for machines from other, equally improbable worlds. ‘Catalogue for Detecting Mystery Riders’ the wall exclaims, a work by Emily Whitebread. In another darkened video room (perhaps the 20th of the day) I wait for the loop of Jennifer Jarmen’s work to repeat. A dual-screen conversation ensues between Jennifer and a voiceless friend; between a ventriloquist and his dummy. The unmistakable voice of scientist V.S. Ramachandran ponders the role of the mirror in phantom limb patient therapy. As one video interrupts the other I feel the severed halves of my cerebellum stitch back into place once again. As the crowd began to trickle from the studios the night came closing in. On Tuesday morning the deconstruction will begin. Temporary walls will be torn down. A hundred projectors will be taken back to their dusty cupboards to lie forgotten for another season. Fragile sculptures will be dismantled and lugged home, piece by piece, on the number 21 bus. Perhaps amongst everything I’ve seen, every studio I’ve poked my head into or artist-contact-card I’ve stuffed into my wallet, a few works will make it into private galleries, or be mentioned in articles and essays like this one. In the pub someone asks me which works I think they’ll be. I shrug nonchalantly, “That’s up to the market, not you or me.” As I finish speaking a laugh erupts behind me. From my pocket, and trailing along the pub floor, comes a long reel of string. “Silly me,” I say to no-one in particular, as I begin to follow it back out of the pub, back through the grey South London streets, back to the labyrinth of the Goldsmiths’ Postgraduate Degree Show.