Ernie Button

Written By Christopher Imlay

Ernie Button’s photography is best known for the portfolios Cerealism (landscapes and portraits created from breakfast cereal) and Vanishing Spirits: The Dried Remains of Single Malt Scotch. 

His photography has been featured in a collaboration with The Macallan Single Malt Scotch in their Masters of Photography series in 2015.  He has exhibited internationally including exhibitions in the United States, China, Scotland, the Czech Republic and Lithuania. 

Photo-Eye Gallery, based in Santa Fe, NM, has published Vanishing Spirits: The Macallan Collection through Photo-eye Editions. Ernie’s whisky photography was featured in the July 2019 issue of National Geographic and his work has been seen widely in publications like The New York Times, Whisky Advocate, Whisky Magazine, American Photo, Popular Photography, Esquire, Wired, Smithsonian and the Huffington Post among others. 

Scientific research explaining the Vanishing Spirits phenomenon was published in the Physics Journal Physical Review Letters in March 2016.  There is a book of his Whisky images that was released through Chronicle Books in May 2022 called The Art of Whisky.  His unique photography was featured on the CBS Sunday Morning program in January 2024. 

Find ernie button on Instagram and online
Videos by Ernie Button
San Jacinto
San Jacinto

ARTIST: Peter Gabriel

CREATOR: Jean-Luc Addams

SONG: San Jacinto FROM Peter Gabriel 4

ARTIST: Peter Gabriel

CREATOR: Jean-Luc Addams

SONG: San Jacinto FROM Peter Gabriel 4

Video info

San Jacinto is a very personal project (for me) as the person responsible for the iconic Fairlight CMI programming is a mentor and good friend. I took the lyrics and the story as mentioned in the So DVD footage and formulated a plan: Use the Native American Indian language glyphs to visually tell the same story in a dream-like and painterly style.

The glyphs were drawn and animated in both 2d and 3d. Some new techniques were created and everything was brought together into Davinci Resolve. Some of the visuals are stark, some subtle, I pictured them on a big screens with Peter’s vocals giving them life.

Song info:

San Jacinto is a track taken from Peter Gabriel's fourth solo album, released in September 1982.

Words and music by Peter Gabriel. Produced by Peter Gabriel and David Lord.

Published by Real World Music Ltd. / Sony Music Publishing.

‘San Jacinto was more about… culture clash came up in a few of the lyrics, but between Native American and contemporary American. I’d noticed, whilst travelling around the West, the bits of Native American culture that had been absorbed into the motels or casinos or whatever it was. It started me thinking about it anyway and musically too I was trying to build on what I’d begun on a previous album with ‘systems’ approach and repeated motifs.’ - pg

i/o (Dark-Side Mix)
i/o (Dark-Side Mix)

ARTIST: Peter Gabriel

CREATOR: Lee Beavington

SONG: i/o (Dark-Side Mix)FROM i/o

ARTIST: Peter Gabriel

CREATOR: Lee Beavington

SONG: i/o (Dark-Side Mix)FROM i/o

Video info:

“I Run like Water”

Water is a shapeshifter. This video moves in and out with the tide and rides along the veins of the Earth. As an ecologist, poet and philosopher, I bring these lenses to i/o’s theme of interconnection. Through the science of relationships, I follow the symbiotic threads from moon to water to mouth to cell to planet.

I titled this video “I Run like Water” after the i/o lyric. We begin on the shore. The intertidal is the zone of in-betweens, home to barnacle, anemone, and urchin. Like humans, each inputs and outputs in their own way. We evolved from the ocean and are born from water.

On the theme of in/out, my video moves in and out of the real world, of the river, and of the eyestalks of a banana slug. We move from the macroscopic to the microscopic, from planets to chloroplasts. Watch a cell become a city and sunlight dance with water.

In an ecological sense, everyone is reincarnated as earth, rivers, and trees. Life cycles and shapeshifts, and water is a frequent sculptor of the animate and inanimate. Our mortality helps us discern the illusion of separation. This video is a reminder that we are defined by, and utterly dependent upon, our relations with other life.

“I Run like Water” is a true collaboration of human, nature, and AI—or human and artificial nature. This video often blurs the line between the natural and artificial. When is the artist human, and when is it algorithm? The keen eye will also spot two blue moons, Jupiter’s Io, and even a hint of Peter’s famed flower mask. All the video footage is my own, mostly taken on SḴŦAḴ / Mayne Island, in rivers and shores throughout the Pacific Northwest, and in the Amazon.

This video starts and ends with sun glitter, which holds a fascination difficult to capture in words. These shimmers on the waves embody a vital link between sun and earth, water and light. A Buddhist nun once told me her vision of god: sunlight sparkling on the ocean. Each glitter, born from sunlight one million years old, holds the spark of life.

Song info:

i/o is a track taken from Peter Gabriel's album i/o, released on 1 December 2023. This is the Dark-Side Mix, by Tchad Blake.

Words and music by Peter Gabriel. Produced by Peter Gabriel.

Published by Real World Music Ltd. / Sony Music Publishing.

i/o means input / output. You see it on the back of a lot of electrical equipment and it just triggered some ideas about the stuff we put in and pull out of ourselves, in physical and non-physical ways. That was the starting point of this idea and then trying to talk about the interconnectedness of everything. The older I get, I probably don't get any smarter, but I have learned a few things and it makes a lot of sense to me that we are not these independent islands that we like to think we are, that we are part of a whole. If we can see ourselves as better connected, still messed up individuals, but as part of a whole, then maybe there's something to learn?

-pg

Intruder
Intruder

ARTIST: Peter Gabriel

CREATOR: Stéphane Laurencin

SONG: Intruder FROM Peter Gabriel 3

ARTIST: Peter Gabriel

CREATOR: Stéphane Laurencin

SONG: Intruder FROM Peter Gabriel 3

Video info

I wanted this music video to look like an '80s video, but shot today. I drew inspiration from the lyrics and the overall atmosphere of the song Intruder, but I also sprinkled in several references. These include nods to the character of Norman Bates, as Psycho was an inspiration for Peter when he wrote this track, as well as references to the promotional photos surrounding the release of his third album in 1980, and to other music videos by Peter. There are also a few other subtle details that serve as Easter eggs for fans.

No images generated by artificial intelligence were used in this one.

Song info:

Intruder is a track taken from Peter Gabriel's third solo album, released in May 1980.

Words and music by Peter Gabriel. Produced by Steve Lillywhite.

Published by Real World Music Ltd. / Sony Music Publishing.

‘There was a drum sound that Hugh Padgham had experimented with, using SSL gates, on the XTC record that I was very excited about. There was this huge resonant sound that would be trapped down in sort of square shapes and then flattened into nothing. It was a very big and aggressive sound. So I then thought I’d build a track around it, which was the track Intruder. Phil Collins who I got in for that, then went on to take Hugh and work on his own record using a lot of those sounds, but there was a real sense of discovery when that first arrived.’ - pg

Christopher Imlay https://www.command-x.com
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