Featured Artists - Brian McKenna
| Name: | Brian McKenna |
| Date of Birth: | 1975 in Ottawa, Canada |
| Point of origin: | Grew up in Scotland and England, then Lethbridge, Canada. |
| Current location: | Living and working in Amsterdam |
| Homepage: | mediumrecords.com/brian/ |
| Boombox: | Sharp QT-12 Cassette Radio |
Vidvox: What is your background as an artist? How did you get started working with video?
McKenna: That's a long story. I've been playing around with video and audio stuff since I was a kid. My parents got a VCR in '81 and I remember taping cartoons on Saturday mornings when I went to roller-skating lessons. After some months or years we had just a few video tapes with all kinds of bits of everything t.v. all over the place.
In '85, my brother and I got this little ghetto blaster cassette radio thing, a QT-12 or something like that (I still have it somewhere, still works great). It was made of metal, super indestructible and it had one of those pause buttons with really nice action. We made kid radio shows, songs about tornados, and things like that. My brother was good at recording chunks of different radio stations and talking in between in various characters. I had a habit of recording my own stuff at the end of cassette albums.
In '87, I was in Japan on a family, university exchange thing and a university guy lent us a new video camera to play with for a month or two. We made dramatic movies with stuffed animals and skateboard videos along with video-taping everything we saw anywhere. We spent some time doing some basic tape to tape editing down of all the material we shot.
In the 90's I learned how to play musical instruments and played in some bands. Mostly bass guitar. Later on I studied percussion at the University of Lethbridge for 2 years and played in some ensembles and orchestra things as part of that. I also did string bass with some orchestras, amateur level. I migrated into the visual art department since they were way more focused on creativity than technicalities. I did photography classes and handed in audio tapes instead of pictures. Met some really great artists.
I made some sound installation things but I kept thinking that I would do better to give people something to look at whilst listening to audio work.
I did a whole bunch of animation with two VHS machines, creating rhythms from found footage and things like that. I made lots of music with some MIDI software, some keyboards, some reel to reel machines and eventually a Mac running Deck II.
VV: Cutting up and remixing short audio/video samples seems to be a big part of your style. Could you talk a little about your experiences shooting footage and the process of making the video on a project like Invention N.11? What software were you using?
BM: Video editing software, as I see it, has grown directly out of sound sequencing software, which in turn uses the same paradigms of writing notes on paper. This technology has a pretty rich history in that sense. Along with this we have the more folk-music-like traditions of live playing, dancing, and spontaneous collaboration. I think that there are interesting sociological considerations as to how well certain technologies lend themselves to certain types of cultural use. How well does a program allow its operator to be an equal participant in a project, rather than a sort of director or dominator?
Invention N.11 was completely easy to make because all it involved was shooting and editing a sequence which was written hundreds of years ago. Any number of arbitrary decisions could be made within the set structure.
VV: How does GRID fit into your workflow?
BM: GRID is really great for throwing ideas around when you're working with other people, musicians, etc. You can be really random and just try whatever, jam with different things. It's nice as a sketch pad because you can come up with all sorts of things in the moment, things that you wouldn't come up with in the usual NLE set up.
Working in the classic NLE environment is sort of like performance, but in a really long and drawn out way. I can't seem to make anything in lots of little sessions. If I start something and it's not really working, I usually stop and try again on another day if there's time; if there is a quick deadline then I'll usually start new sequences and go back and forth until one starts to flow. Once I get something going, I usually work with it as long as I can stay awake.
GRID stands out as a collaboration tool, particularly in performance environments. Doing the VJ thing with musicians and DJs is great fun, especially when you don't know what they are going to play, or when you've never met or heard them before. No matter where the music goes, you can stay on top of it and sort of transform with it, highlight different parts of it, dance with it, be spontaneous, and surprise yourself.
When I VJ, I usually prepare a set of clips. When I was in Poland, I ended up doing 3 nights instead of just 1. Since I had used all my prepared material on the first night, the second night I fished around the hard-drive for whatever DV material I had sitting around, and used GRID to improvise with whatever I could find... stuff I'd never really thought of using before. For the 3rd night, I captured an hour of Polish television and used GRID to noodle around with the material. It almost doesn't matter what material you have, GRID gives you enough control to do practically anything you want with it.
I'm into building rhythmic patterns from video which get progressively more complex. What I was really longing for is some sort of video loop/sampler so I could build an improvised loop from little clips and then layer any number of similarly built loops on top. The way I use GRID is to compile a row of short clips and play them on the laptop like a piano. What I like about GRID the most is the simplicity and high performance, it's great to have an actual performance instrument instead of something that tries to do all the performing for you.
VV: You posted a video in our user forums that really shows off how you build rhythmic patterns and ride the music. Can you tell us a little bit about this unauthorized Solvent video?
BM: It was all done in GRID, though I did a few takes and took the best one. Also, I practiced a few times before recording. The first approach was to use a DV file split into many clips and trigger each in turn. That failed badly for a number of reasons. What worked was to use 1 clip for most everything. a few extra clips for specific parts like: 'tram enters', 'tram loops', 'tram exits' and that sort of thing.
VV: In January you VJ'd for a percussion duo known as Thai on Top. Could you tell us about that collaboration?
BM: The percussion group, Thai on Top, duo is a part of the N Collective. I set up 3 live cameras, a video mixer, and GRID. I switched between live footage and prerecorded footage played back on GRID. Since their music is improvised, I used GRID to shape the prerecorded video in a way which added another synchronous/non-synchronous layer to what they were doing. In the future we plan to use picture and sound to trade back and forth between live and recorded material to make sort of live remixes during a performance.