Slightly gone wrong experiment number 1

For the first week I took a clip from the first season of The Wire where Omar is trying to gun down Avon. Unfortunately for Omar, Wee-Bey turns up at that moment and shoots Omar. As Wire watchers know there is a whole load of squabbling over space in the show - specifically over the corners, which is where the drugs are sold. This scene is a little different as Omar is out for revenge after his boyfriend has been tortured, mutilated, and killed by Avon's gang. Omar is one of the finest TV character I've ever seen. He is an armed robber who only ever steals from drug dealers (usually the Barksdale gang), he takes his Grandma to church once a month (she believes that he works at a diner in the airport - he believes she'll never pop in to check that) and uniquely in a show where everybody is a muthaf**king muthaf**ka he doesn't swear.

So in homage to the mighty Omar, I filtered the clip through a Processing app to bend the output from the regular intent of a piece of video. The app looped through the pixel array replacing the pixels with letters drawn from the phrase "Omar shoots Avon". The colour of the letter is taken from the colour of the pixel that is replaced.

By mapping the character size to the brightness of the pixel it could be argued that a spatial dimension is being added into a linear piece but I'm not entirely convinced on that as it is still displayed in a two dimensional screen.

There are parallels with space and the re-appropriation of space by its users which is often significantly different than that which it was designed for. This is more interesting and gives more scope for investigation. From this point of view the experiment can be seen as re-appropriating Quicktime or as de Certau might have said we have a tactical practice toward Quicktime, we are Omar while Quicktime is the Barksdale organisation :)

There is a technical problem with this experiment which is that the original clip loops a number of times. I think this is because the original clip has been compressed with H264 and the processing app is not actually grabbing each individual frame properly. If I look at this again this is an issue to check.

I doubt that this will be the experiment that I take to a further level.