Who are you then?
Hi, I'm Thomas Newton and I've always been into pulling stuff apart to see what it's made of. I use this approach with pretty much everything I come into contact with in life, and find it highly rewarding, even if it occasionally gets me into trouble!
I have a flat in Swansea, UK, which I share with my robotic companion Ralph, who is a 2nd generation Sony Aibo.
Any questions, drop me an
You can download a copy of my current Arts CV (3.6Mb .pdf format) by clicking here.
What about the Wingbeats video?
This was nominated for Best of Welsh Design at Cardiff Design Festival 2006, was shown at the Swansea Open 2006, also on a gigantic screen in Manchester, the British Film Institute , Modulate in Birmingham, back to Manchester for Springwatch , and most recently the Greenpeace dome at Glastonbury!
I've put together a 10 minute version specifically for the numerous Film Festivals around the world that require it. You can see a clip of the 'slow movement' from wingbeats on my MySpace profile right now! Make sure you switch the music off at the top first though, or it may sound a bit confusing.
What's with the weird titles and numbers?
The names I give the images are mostly in two parts. Firstly, I think of words that sum up how I feel about a picture and I meld these into a single homogenised clump. After that I usually include a number separated by a hyphen which indicates how many individual frames were composited together to form the final image.
Hence, this picture entitled quidge-033 is simply the motion-trail of a quick pigeon comprised of 33 frames of video, or something like that.
What kind of kit are you using?
For my early works I was used an old secondhand analogue video camera I got from eBay. This was a tad frustrating as it restricted me to working in a resolution that would horrify most photographers working in the world of multi-megapixels. Standard PAL video works at less than 0.5 megapixels, though anyone who watches TV from across a room hardly ever worries about loss of resolution.
My PC was an old AMD 1800XP with 1Gb of RAM to cope with my rather roughly coded time-altering programs. As an example of how heavy the processing is; Flatland is about 9 minutes long, but took 500 hours to render!
Thanks to the Arts Council of Wales I have recently been able to invest in an HDV camcorder, allowing me to record my source footage at a resolution of about 3 Megapixels, not bad for video! Unfortunately, this has made all my new pictures too wide for this website, so the whole thing needs a drastic rebuild. At the moment, there are only links from my Blog to the newer pictures.
The Flatland music's pretty wonky, is that you too?
Yep, I threw it together in under two hours from bits of DAT recordings I made about ten years earlier when I had a small electronic studio. I wouldn't normally be so slap-dash about anything, but I was working to a deadline and only had two hours left to complete it!
Have you done any other music?
Oh yes. Music was my main driving force for most of my life, until I managed to get some stuff published and suddenly lost interest! In 2000 I had three tracks on a U.S. compilation called 'Diskatopia's Intimate Gathering' and had BBC Radio1 airplay on two separate occasions. Then, for some strange reason, as soon as I heard my stuff on the radio I thought, "Oh, is that it then?", flogged all my gear and never wrote another tune, until now!
For you delight and delectation, here's the stuff I did for BBC Radio1 Session in wales back in 2000, in all it's FM glory.
I have another couple of tunes on my MySpace profile if you fancy a listen. Actually a London internet label called Kahvi contacted me just after I made the page and released an EP of some of my older stuff from 2000. I've recently got back into tunesmithing as a pleasing diversion when the arty stuff loses its gloss. Check my MySpace page for the latest on that sort of thing.
As far as listening goes, the sort of stuff I'm into is Add N to (X), Air, Amon Tobin, Aphex Twin, Autechre, Biosphere, Boards of Canada, Bogdan Raczynski, Casino Versus Japan, Cinematic Orchestra, Cylob, Luke Vibert, Microstoria, Oval, Saint Germain, Scanner, Seefeel, Squarepusher, Steve Reich, The Future Sound of London, Tim Hecker and µ-ziq.