By Ali Rahman & Ashley Wong
2005

Post-millennial technophilia and the ubiquity of laptop computers conspired to form a new class of electronic musician, the laptop musician. Often times their faces were obscured by their screens as they sat on stage and played intensely sophisticated compositions focused on timbre, pulse and collage. Are these people actually performing? Are they just pressing play? What is the difference anyway? This short documentary sought to explore these and other questions surrounding the laptop scene that was peaking in 2004.

By Ali Rahman & Sarah Taylor
2005

This video made effort to visually articulate the principal of phasing as explored by Steve Reich in his early tape experiments. Here, a single layer of video is shot, doubled, and overlayed upon itself. The second layer was then trimmed (ever so slightly), so upon repetition, it would fall out of phase with the first. The result is a weird, profoundly cute and oddly haunting visual of a dancer chasing herself through a corridor. Time seems to circle itself, orbit itself, but our dancer never tires, nor does she find what she is looking for.

By Ali Rahman
2007

Probably not the best item to post on a client-facing blog, but alas. This video was shot using the built-in Apple iSight camera fixed on my desk in my semi-private cubicle. On this particular dull afternoon, I was endlessly awaiting proofs from my designer. Being impatient and bored, I rolled camera and hacked this thing together between angry phone calls to said graphic designer.

By Ali Rahman
2005

In art school, one is generally expected to privilege symbolism over narrative, medium over message and circular over linear. In art school, the term “abstract” is often perverted not to mean “essential” but to mean “ephemeral”. This video was a reaction to a particularly frustrating art class. Rahman decided to buck convention and make a relatively convential video. It was originally projected on three-screens synched to a single soudtrack. The framing, editing and rapid-fire narrative all demonstrate Rahman’s comfort with the medium and with himself as subject. Even if the content seems a little
puerile now. Chalk it up to youthful indiscretion.

During a break in a North Eastern USA tour, Ali and friends Marc St. Louis and Tillie Perks found themselves staying at a secluded mansion in rural Vermont. Ali used the down-time to shoot this music video for the Flames! track, “So Phallocentric”. The budget ran a little under $20 and the entire video was shot using the built in Apple iSight camera and a 1-megapixel digital still camera. Skillfully edited and over-saturated, this no-budget masterpiece successfully evokes the introspective sunny suspension so characteristic of the dog days of summer.

Not sure why I’m putting this up. Been sifting through the old files, and well, came upon this.

Edmund Lam, Heidi Donnelly, Rick Coluccio and myself, Ali Rahman comprised, arguably, A Vertical Mosaic’s best incarnation. During this late-mid-point in our career we were halfway between an electronic and acoustic band, halfway between pop and noise. There was strength in straddling dichotomies. This 10-minute opus oozes with drippy synths and cracks under jazzy drumming. I can’t remember what this song was called. Ed pretty much wrote the basic verses, asked me to come up with spacey poetic lyrics. I was listening to a lot of Built to Spill at the time so I remember my lyrics being a lot like “Randy Described Eternity“. Anyhow, still have a soft spot for this tune. It’s weird and long and bold in a way that was only really allowed in that post-rock era that had it’s crescendo sometime around 2002. Live footage shot by Sarah Taylor, grass footage shot by Ali Rahman. Editing by Ali Rahman.

Edmund and Heidi are presently in Hexes and Ohs.
Rick and Ali are current members of Flames!
Rick also plays with Amanda Mabro and has a solo project entitled Cozmos Quazar.

Excuse the self-indulgence and nostalgia folks. This is a blog after all.

By Ali Rahman, Seb Speier & Darren Ortiz
(Unfinished) 2004

Until the computer age, narrative form has always been the standard for communicating and sharing knowledge and ideas. Facts were imparted in the form of a storyline complete with characters, climax, and a moral. Now, we are having to become accustomed to a new form of storytelling…the database.

The storyline is non-existent in a database driven world. Information is presented in a non-linear format where one bit/byte of info bears no more significance than another. The database and narrative formats are forced to live together in our world yet are in direct juxtaposition with each other.

Nonversations seeks to address the opposition between database and narrative, in the context of the electronic age. It does this by directly challenging the concept that a story/information cannot be told in both a database and a narrative format at the same time. Nonversations is a storyline complete with characters, plot, subplots, etc… yet is presented in a non-linear database format.

Our story is set in an apartment complex, inhabited by the various archetypal characters. Each character has been written with their own individual back-stories, and each into a larger unspoken narrative.

The form of the videos is designed to reflect the scattered and fragmented nature of the postmodern experience. They deliberately distort traditional perceptions of time, identity, and interaction. They abstract the experience of the characters until they turn into nothing but scattered, dichotomized data bits. These characters hardly know themselves let alone each other. They don’t really care about each other, they couldn’t really give a damn about what the other is saying. They aren’t really having conversations, they’re having “nonversations”.

Note: Nonversations was never finished. Many interactions are inactive. That said, it was a tremendous endeavor. Writing a non-linear script required two hundred pages of notes alone. Execution of the project with a two week timeline taught us a great deal about logistics, casting and pre-production.

Launch Nonversations