Category: Featured Big

Trees of Rotterdam

by

Trees of Rotterdam

About

A breathtaking journey through the skies, streets and trees of Rotterdam, telling the story of past, present, and possible futures of trees in the city.

Filmed in a single shot, captured using high-tech point cloud scanners, the film takes the audience through the cityscape from a series of unique viewpoints. The camera moves over, under, and through the urban environment, whilst narration from experts (an architectural historian, a tree advocate, a naturalist and the city council tree expert) offers insights into how the urban and natural can co-exist.

In these times of environmental catastrophe, what can we learn from nature that already surrounds us? This film asks the audience to question their own relationship with trees: When’s the last time you really looked at a tree?

A collaboration with artist Alice Ladenburg. Full project information and press pack available at treesofrotterdam.com

Short film, 12 minutes; 4k UHD Apple ProRes file.

Screenings

World premiere: International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR)
27 January 2024

Credits

A film by Alice Ladenburg and Ollie Palmer

Written, produced and directed by

  • Alice Ladenburg
  • Ollie Palmer

Cinematography, editing, scan post-processing

  • Ollie Palmer

Original concept

Scanning and scan processing

  • Jens van der Zee
    Laboratory for Geo-information Science and Remote Sensing, Wageningen University
  • Scans originally for Fourteen Trees of Rotterdam (2021) by Alice Ladenburg

Voices

  • Herman van Bergeijk
  • Charlotte van der Heiden
  • Ronald Loch
  • Kees Moeliker
  • Adriaan Wormgoor
  • Phoebe Ladenburg

Voiceover recording

  • Ollie Palmer
  • Phoebe Ladenburg

Location audio recording

  • Alice Ladenburg

Supported by

  • CBK R’DAM
  • Wageningen University

Time Frames

by

Time Frames

A performative essay-film about the ways in which time frames our experience, perception, and the bounds of what is, and what isn’t possible. Made using a rules-based constrained creative process, the film ties together three perspectives – that of a fictionalised Italo Calvino, a petulant contemporary artist, and the archetypical joker (as described by Alan Watts), to create a new collage which reflects on our present relationship to time.

This is the second film (after Network/Intersect) to be created using the Reflexive Scripted Design process I developed during my residency at Palais de Tokyo, and described in detail in my PhD. In this process, two textual elements, and one contextual elements, are combined via a series of absurd rules, which are followed at every stage of production to create a piece of work. In this case, the works are:

  • Context: Artist in Rotterdam, 2023 (my own life!)
  • Text: Cybernetics and Ghosts, Italo Calvino
  • Text: The Joker (lectures), Alan Watts

Which led to the rules:

  • RULE 1: Everything is a game
  • RULE 2: The aim of the game is to reveal that everything is game whilst also keeping the game running
  • RULE 3: The voices of the corresponding elements of this work must be presented independently
  • RULE 4: Granular and continuous must be presented at all times
  • RULE 5: Everything is black and white

The result is a 25-30 minute long performance-film with live dialogue.
Bear with me, this is my first time…

Performance

The Multiple Arts of Schematism in the Depths of the Soul
V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media
Rotterdam, NL
27 May 2023
Delivered as a film with live performance elements.

Credits

Film, writing, editing

Voice

  • Ollie Palmer
  • Amy Thomas

Commissioned by

All the Worlds

by

All the Worlds

About

Through the use of a special headset, a member of the public is transported into a parallel cinematic world, where the familiar urban landscape, people and landmarks still seem to be there, but are now part of an immersive film plot. The player become a central figure in a dramatic story – but what is real and what is not? And who is pulling the strings?

Three parallel filmic worlds exist simultaneously.

Posters for the three worlds featured in the All the Worlds project: Death Wears a Red Tie, Eyes for You, and Steamship Frankietown

Immersive reality theatrical experience; live. Project in development.

Sign up for updates on this project (find out when we’re testing, etc).

Performance / testing

Tryday
V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media
Rotterdam, NL
10 April 2020
Cancelled due to Coronavirus lockdowns, to be rescheduled soon.

Year

  • 2019-21

Credits

Concept

Writing

Design, technology

Commissioning

Directory Directory

by

The Directory Directory project, a directory of fictional companies providing fanciful services.

Directory Directory

About

A directory of fictional companies, complete with mottoes, addresses, and phone numbers. Made for NaNoGenMo 2019, a month-long generative writing challenge.

See the directory online at directory.olliepalmer.com, and find the code for the text and website generation on GitHub.

Details

  • 2019
  • Code, website

Code, libraries, and languages

Rules of the Game

by

Rules of the Game

About

A short film made for the 2018 Sci Fi London 48 hour film challenge, in which participants have to write, shoot, and edit a sci-fi film in 48 hours. Each participant is given a title, a prompt and an action, and a line of dialogue, and have to use these to write, shoot, and edit a film in 48 hours.

My prompts were:
Title: Rules of the Game
Prop and action: A character opens a sealed padded envelope and pulls out a card.
Line of dialogue: The count for this stuff is off the chart, probably best you don’t get it on your skin.

My 5-minute film is about Larry Hammer in the midst of an experiment, and his relationship with Tony.

Credits

  • Film by Ollie Palmer
  • Script supervision: Amy Butt, Pippa Palmer

Details

  • Year: 2018
  • Medium: film

Scriptych

by

Scriptych

About

A couple attempt to communicate from afar using an interface which translates their movements into words.

Structured across three micro-acts, Scriptych takes precision in choreography to an extreme, embedding sensors on dancers which measure their movements and control both the music and the words spoken aloud, in real time. The couples’ communication becomes increasingly fragmented as the piece develops, posing questions about the location of meaning in messages and movements, and the impossibility of communicating true intent.

3 x 3-minute choreographed sequences for 2 dancers.
Custom computer interface with machine-learnt three-dimensional word database.

Process

Ina, the French Audiovisual Institute, made a video about the collaboration between myself and Simon Valastro below. More information about this project can be found in Chapter 2 of my PhD thesis.

Pavillon Neuflize OBC / INA #9 Scriptych / Ollie Palmer – Simon Valastro – VA from Institut national audiovisuel on Vimeo.

Photo © copyright Justine Emard / Pavillon 2016.

Prints

A limited number of signed prints of this performance are available for purchase. Please get in touch for details.

Performance

La Rumeur des Naufrages
Opera Garnier, Paris
18 June 2016

Film screenings

Arctic Moving Image and Film Festival
Harstad, Norway
October 2017

Architecture Film Festival London
Institute of Contemporary Arts / Oxo Bargehouse
June 2017

Film | Making | Space
Royal Academy, London
February 2017

Credits

Concept, script

  • Ollie Palmer
  • Simon Valastro

Choreography

  • Simon Valastro

Design, technology

  • Ollie Palmer

Dancers

  • Eve Grinsztajn
  • Mathieu Contat

Thanks

  • Thanks to the Opera National de Paris
  • Director Stéphane Lissner
  • Dance director Benjamin Millepied

Commissioning

  • Project realised under the Pavillon Neuflize OBC programme 2015-16 (research lab of the Palais de Tokyo), during its collaboration with the Opera National de Paris, the Institut national de l’audiovisuel and the Groupe de recherches musicales (INA – GRM).

Details

  • Performance: 2016
  • Film: 2019
  • Performance, film, technology

Network / Intersect

by

Network / intersect

Synopsis

A palindromic film about the production of fake news and fake profits, and the impacts they have on the people who produce them.

W and M see the world differently. For W, a low-level government propagandist, objective reality is an illusion. Truth exists on a gradient and can be manipulated and distored. For M, a financial executive, the world of business is a large image-making machine. Every business deal is just another set of mirrors or lenses to position. These abstract worldviews creep into the lived experiences of both characters, with unexpected consequences.

Information
This film is experimental. It is a mirror, playing forwards and backwards simultaneously, the characters’ worlds intersecting halfway through. The production techniques were adopted from real Russian propaganda agencies, covertly filmed in false locations, Paris standing in for Seoul. The entire form of the film and its production accurately reflect the characters’ abstracted worldviews.

This is the first film to be made using a process called Reflexive Scripted Design, developed as part of my doctorate thesis work at the Bartlett School of Architecture. The entire film was created using a set of four rules ensuring that the final form reflects the film’s subject.

More information about this project and the Reflexive Scripted Design process that was used to develop it can be found in Chapter 4 of my PhD thesis.

512-second loop on dual-projectors.

Public display

Urban Legends
Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA)
5 April – 29 May 2016

Architecture Film Festival LondonOxo Bargehouse
7-8 June 2017

IMDB

IMDB link

Credits

Direction, cinematography and script

  • Ollie Palmer

Actors

  • Patrick Ng
  • Hokyoung Im

Technical assistance and model making

Production support

  • Chloe Fricout
  • Justine Hermand

Script consultant

Commissioned by

  • Gahee Park and Fabien Danesi
    Seoul Museum of Art / Palais de Tokyo
  • Shot on location in Seoul in 2016
  • Made during my residency at Pavillon Neuflize OBC, the research lab of the Palais de Tokyo

24fps Psycho

by

24fps Psycho

About

A performance visually remixing and reinterpreting Alfred Hitchcock’s classic Psycho (1960).

Working with footage from the Institute National Audiovisuel (France), the Prelinger Archives (USA) and my own material, I have built software to analyse the visual and audio content of each frame in Psycho. The frames are then compared to a database of archival footage, and replaced with ‘matching’ stills and video clips.

The rate of frame-replacement varies according to the volume of the film’s iconic soundtrack – so that the audial freneticism is reflected on the screen. The result is a mesmerising, chaotic experience, and a reworking of a highly memorable film.

This is part of an ongoing body of work examining the technology of cinema.

Process

L’Institut National de l’Audiovisuel made a short film about the making of 24fps Psycho:

Pavillon Neuflize OBC / INA #2 Taking “Psycho” to Pieces from Institut national audiovisuel on Vimeo.

More information about this project can be found in Chapter 3 of my PhD thesis.

Public performance

Do Disturb Festival
Palais de Tokyo
9 + 10 April 2016 (full performance)

Lundi du Pavillon
Palais de Tokyo
18 April 2016 (short performance and talk)

Credits

Footage provided for experimental purposes by L’Institut National de l’Audiovisuel
Made during my residency at Pavillon Neuflize OBC, the Research Lab of the Palais de Tokyo 2015-16

86400

by

86400

About

A real-time film composed of images that show up in a Google Image Search for the exact time at that moment (e.g. 11:41:14). The film plays in real-time, and takes a full day to watch.

Images do not necessarily bear a relationship to each other, besides a similar metadata tag. Thus, it is the audience who read meaning into the assemblage of images, creating stories and hypotheses about the images.

The images were gathered using the Google Image Search API, using masked IP addresses so that a search would appear to be from a random global location. As an unconnected string of images, the film forms a visceral snapshot of the US-indexed internet in late 2015.

This piece is a digital homage to Christian Marcklay’s The Clock (2010).

Video: ten minutes of 86400, at 22:00:00

Viewer version

A limited edition of ten specially-made film viewers is available to purchase (they also function as clocks); please contact me for details

Process

More information about the development of this project can be found in Chapter 3 of my PhD thesis.

Public display

Do Disturb Festival
Palais de Tokyo
8-10 April 2016

AIADO Hallway Gallery
School of the Art Institute Chicago
27 March – 6 April 2017

Publications

Film as resonance
4 minute excerpt from 86400 published by Film + Place + Architecture, 2017

Credits

Made during my residency at Pavillon, the Research Lab of the Palais de Tokyo

Nybble

by

Nybble

About

In 1984, philosopher John Searle asserted that there can be no such thing as “hard” artificial intelligence through the now-famous Chinese Room argument. Searle asked whether a non-Chinese speaker, locked in a room with nothing but a book with instructions for translating one Chinese symbol into another – and given the task of translating Chinese symbols passed to him on slips of paper – could ever truly learn Chinese.

The answer, according to Searle, is “no”. There is no difference between the process that the person in the Chinese room is following (i.e. manipulating symbols according to a pre-fixed routine) and the information transfer in computer systems. Thus, Searle argues, if the man in the Chinese room could never learn the meaning of the symbols he is changing, no computer could truly learn the meaning of the symbols it is manipulating, and thus, there can be no “hard” artificial intelligence.
More about the Chinese Room

This installation is a diagram of Searle’s argument; a human-computer, comprised of four dancers and an unseen controller, parse a coded message. Only the public, who are given code-sheets, can read the message over the course of a 45-minute dance. In computing terms a “Nybble” is half a byte of information – that is, four bits (or dancers).

The Nybble codebase

Process

More information about the development of this project can be found in Chapter 2 of my PhD thesis.

Public performance

Nybble was commissioned for the V&A Museum’s Digital Design Weekend 2013, part of London Design Festival. It was funded by Design With Heritage, an AHRC Creative Economies Project between the V&A Museum and University College London.

Credits

Project

Production

Costume Design

  • Magdalena Gustafsson

Dancers

  • Anastassia Bezerko
  • Maria Fonseca
  • Raimu Itfum
  • Olamide James
  • Alexandra Katana
  • Roberto Leo
  • Monica Nicolaides
  • Ughetta Pratesi
  • Prisca Pugnetti
  • Rudi Salpietra
  • Kathryn Spence

Casting

  • Andrea Mongenie

Photography

Thanks

  • Amy Thomas
  • The staff at the V&A Museum

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