skynoise

Having been meaning to post a sample of this project for ages, but the arrival of Melbourne winter seems to be helping nicely. So yes, ‘Animals Really Are Funny People’ is a screen panorama made in 2007 while in Istanbul with artificialeyes.tv. We’re talking an 8:1 screen ratio, 20 metres of pixels sync-ed up using Dataton Watchout software, and the combining of hand-drawn animations, photos in Barcelona and Istanbul, various green-screened characters (( monkeys on (actual) segways, giant squids, giant plant-men, etc )). Making a 3 minute piece for six screens seemed to plague it with rendering bugs, DVD burning bugs and courier delivery bugs, but perseverance paid off, as it ended up winning the 2007 MONA Horse Bazaar International Panorama prize. Music : “Egg Yolks Yo” by Lewis Cancut( Full track available over in the scatterblog sidebar ).

Below, a selection of highlights, crammed from six screens into one…

Animals Really Are Funny People from jeanpoole on Vimeo.

Electropical? Bleepy cumbia? Such hybrids are inevitable, given a generation raised on candied synthetic computer game sounds, and the speed at which localised bass variations now travel from shore to shore. They are also core chunks of the Meneo sound, alongside ‘electro-gameboy-reggeaton’, which describes their recent CD, Santa Nalga ( mastered @ Mad Decent ), as well as their recent EP, Papi. Rigo Pex makes the music, Raul Berrueco makes the video, both use gameboys to do it. Music, videos, nude performance photos and more : http://www.entter.com/meneo/istheshit.html

What’s your quick and easy definition of ‘reggaeton’ ?
Rigo: Old School reggaetón= booty marathon with ass sweat dripping down your ankles. Current reggaetón= boring ego rap, with some exceptions to both.
Raúl: Atún Con Pan!!!! Yeah… it’s kind of a joke ’cause the rhythm sounds like saying in Spanish ‘atún con pan, atún con pan’ which literally means: tuna sandwich.

I am gathering your happy blend with many other styles, which of these are you enjoying a lot at the moment?
Raúl: Gabba Lounge, nah kidding… we both love the new electronic cumbia made by artists like Uproot Andy and Sonido del Principe
Rigo: Yep, all that comes out from the Zizek and Bersa labels…also dubstep never stops to amaze me.

How does the Gameboy fit into your musical processes?
Rigo: I use LSDJ, a gameboy sequencer made by Johan Kotlinsky.. It’s actually a tracker. I love the way you can alter the values that define the sounds to come up with noises that you never heard before, digital rawness.

What kinds of tools and techniques do you use to get that chunky retro graphic style?
Raúl: At the beginning I go through a lo-tech process where I use applications designed by freaky programmers without girlfriends. I’m talking about ROM hacking and prehistoric hardware/software emulators, but I also use the pencil tool to draw pixel by pixel sometimes. When I put all this material together I use more conventional languages like Action Script while wearing my cool designer specs.

In what ways do you collaborate / build performances / audiovisual sync / themes?
Raúl: we are into creative freedom, so mostly we don’t talk about doing this or that, we both do our own stuff with almost no feedback and then show it ’till we’re on stage…like some Dadaists did back in the day. In that way, we keep the surprise even to ourselves and focus more on feeling than acting. When we let go, things flow depending on the stage, public and energy.
Rigo: Then there’s the part of capturing what happens on stage and communicating it through pics, blogs and overall media management, which is truly an important part where we really work as a military team.

Nakedness seems to be a visual trademark too, care to explain some more?
Raúl: we usually do it if we feel good on stage, so if the sound and visual equipments are working all right, then they get a technical seal of approval… MENEO √.
Rigo: It also means that we can safely climb up to the stage roof and then jump into the speakers while the crowd is licking each other’s sweat to a 280 bpms backward version of popcorn.
 
Santa Nalga was mastered by DJA at Mad Decent.. What were you happy with about that album, and what differences are there coming up in your next release _Bitnik?
Rigo: Santa Nalga was pretty much done in 2006, when reggaeton and 8bit was still something whacky for me, but since it was the first album it took some time to surface. Diplo liked us and pointed us to DJA, who was great for achieving that bouncy epileptic feeling we like. The soon to release BITNIK album has more of a band sound an less club breaks, since it’s mostly all 8bit coming from the game boy’s sound that shred more than a million distorted guitars and their marshalls put together.

Your thoughts on the wii, iphone and other portable competitors to the Gameboy?
Raúl: In 20 years will say “wow, we were really into waving a stick in the air, like it was a tennis racquet…hahah!
Rigo: there are no competitors to the gameboy… no portable game will stick around for more than 8 years these days… and even if technology didn’t changed so fast, it would be hard to achieve such a strong graphic and audio personality: the gameboy chip limits were it’s advantages.

What would be your ideal gig, and who else would be playing at it?
Rigo: Meneo playing on the greek coliseum with John Bonham on drums, the bass player from Primus, Milli Vanilli as choir…
Raúl: and a 3d screen so everybody could wear those amazing 3d glasses!!!

For those bunkering down to a winter of movie watching, a shared list from my pixel horizons.

On Paper Wings
When I think of World War II and Japan, the first thing that comes to mind is the hibakusha, a Japanese name for the surviving victims of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that literally translates to “explosion-affected people.” Long ago a documentary exposed me to horrifyingly surreal half-melted bodies of some of these people - some living survivors, and others the victims of radiation birth defects. This was the tail end of The Manhattan Project, a 3 year, 100,000 person United States project to develop a bomb.

On Paper Wings offers a little known flipside to that history. During WWII, the Japanese military developed a new weapon intended to strike directly at the American continent – the balloon bomb. High school girls across Japan were conscripted into factories where they built thousands of balloons made of paper. These balloons were then attached to bombs and launched into the jet stream to drift toward North America. On May 5th, 1945, a pastor, his pregnant wife, and five children departed on a picnic in Southern Oregon. When they found an un-detonated balloon bomb, the device exploded, killing the pastor’s wife and all five children. They became the only people killed on the continental U.S. as the result of enemy action during WWII.

Forty years later, a Japanese American man who had spent his wartime years in an internment camp found out about these deaths. He knew several women in Japan who as young girls had been forced to work on the balloon bombs, and the news of these deaths shocked and saddened them. These women decided to fold a thousand origami paper cranes to offer to the families of those killed in Oregon, and the groups eventually all met face to face. The friendships formed since have helped citizens on both sides of the Pacific cope with the tragedies they experienced during WWII.

On Paper Wings is the story of four Japanese women who worked on balloon bombs, the families of those killed in Oregon, and the man whose actions brought them all together forty years after WWII, and the balloon bomb project.

Général Idi Amin Dada: Autoportrait
Idi Amin, was a Ugandan military dictator and the President of Uganda from 1971 to 1979, with an estimates varying that 100,000 to 500,000 were killed during his rule. A confronting character for any film director to have to contend with, and with the constraints with which Idi Amin eventually placed on the film, French director Barbet Schroeder decided to call this a self-portrait by Amin. Upon release of the film, Amin sent a letter to Schroeder requesting additional cuts to the film. Schroeder refused, and Amin responded by rounding up 200 French citizens and confining them to a hotel surrounded by the Ugandan army. He also supplied them with Schroeder’s home telephone number and explained their release was conditional on the cuts. Within the 2 and a half minutes of cuts Schroeder inevitably made, he placed title cards crediting the gaps to Amin. These edits were restored after Amin’s fall from power.

The documentary promises : Amin trying to demonstrate his psychic control of crocodiles, Amin supervising a war-game simulation of an invasion of Israel, Amin dressing down his ministers at a cabinet meeting (two weeks after this meeting, the foreign minister, whom Amin criticizes here, is murdered).

Chris Marker - Vive la baleine AKA Three Cheers for the Whale (1972)
Most famous for La Jettee, his 1960’s black and white sci-fi short film made almost exclusively from photographs and narration, Chris Marker is also a formidable documentary maker, a film essayist of sorts. This short 17 minute film explores the whaling industry over the years, featuring historic photographs and paintings of whales and the whaling trade as well as real-life footage of whaling and harpooning. Marker sides with the hunted mammals in this film, and hunts himself, what it means about us that we have pursued such a past-time.

Many months of sampling and rehearsals with DJ Lewis Cancut culminate in a few days time, bringing together OJ Simpson, Prisoner, Molly Meldrum, Marshall McLuhan, Princess Diana, Jon Safran and assorted media luminaries into a 45 minute mix about television. It’s part of an ACMI series called Synaesthesia, curated by Eugenia Lim ( ACMI / Share Outpost ), which has already had great sessions by Robin Fox ( rocking the oscilliscope like no other ) and Abject Leader ( Brisbane’s infamous celluloid fetishists ), and with one further show still to come withQua (Jun 18, 6.30pm ) accompanied by visual work from Isobel Knowles and Paul Robertson. Great to have so many ‘live cinema’ events @ ACMI.

We’re excited anyway, and looking forward to having the work on the big screen and speakers finally.
Thu Jun 4, 6.30 ( with ACMI recommending to arrive before then to ensure a seat in small theatre )

I’ll be triggering and controlling videoclips (with sound) through VDMX ( reviews ), Lewis will be on the decks, playing back sounds and scratching video withMix Emergency (review) , and both of our signals will be going through an audiovisual Mixer: Numark AVM02 ( review ). Like so :

Half the work has been trying to figure out a good audiovisual dynamic between the turntables and my laptop, jumping the various tech-hurdles on the way, and just trying to figure out what actually works best in a live setting. Still a work in progress, but hopefully there’ll be enough of interest on Thursday night…. Drop a comment if you manage to make it along : )

UPDATE:
And whille you’re there, check out the United Visual Artists installation opening that night as part of the Light in Winter program at Fed Square.

No Swiss passport stamps for me, but Lucy Benson ( VJ Nosis / Melb - Belfast - Zurich - Berlin etc ) who has recently migrated to the Northern hemisphere, and is rad, found herself at the Mapping festival. And so, it seemed more than a good idea to let her have my technoscape column over at 3Dworld mag this week. Below is the edit to fit into print, over yonder, there are many more words, many more photos.

**
Over the last 5 years, Geneva’s Mapping Festival has earned a solid reputation for showcasing the world’s preeminent ‘Visual-Audio’ artworks and technologies, maturing into a lengthy 10 day event with a strong emphasis on live performative acts and VJ culture. Some highlights in 2009 :

Kine TXT

KineTXT is a live story-telling collaboration between *spark and another UK outfit, Novak that allows live-generated illustration, text and poetry to be composited together in realtime and manipulated via a wii remote to develop a meaningful progression of narrative. It’s a beautiful project and despite some last minute technical difficulties - including rain, the show delivers and the six busily active artists and live soundtrack make for an absorbing spectacle.

KineTXT’s live camera action turns out to be indicative of a clear trend at the festival. Performers from all parts of the world embraced the potential of a live feed, human involvement celebrated on stage rather than hidden away behind screens and consoles and bringing to mind the emergence of a certain folk-like inclination amongst the artists. It also signified a lovely return across the festival to a human perspective of time, the most real real-time there is; the time it takes a body to move, breathe, think and react.

Visual Feedback?

The deceptively simple work, Inside/Out, by Croatian artist Klif is made up of 3 computer controlled cameras, eight monitors and five projectors. The cameras, feeding into the monitors, pan and zoom across the installation sending glorious cascades of feedback across the large room. The open mechanics of the work provide a fascinating centre piece to the installation and lend themselves to a variety of spontaneous interventions from visitors to the exhibition.

Reflexus is Spanish audiovisual processing software developed in Open Frameworks for theatre productions, and allows live camera feeds to be processed with a variety of effects, linked to an audio synth (currently the project uses Reaktor GUI components) and played back to stage. Not exactly groundbreaking, but it allows dynamic manipulation of up to 80 or so(!!) layered video feeds. Without a single dropped frame. Impressive. And the hour long showcase performance, featuring seamlessly integrated dialogue and action between ten or so versions of an actor, was mesmerising and a real highlight (despite being delivered entirely in French).

Collectif Akrylonumerik, France

A collective of four or five street artists, dressed head to toe in white, a dj and a visualist on laptop projection. Starting with a blank white-papered wall, the artists build a foundation of graffiti and paste-ups for the projected illustration and video, creating a series of beautifully composed, continually evolving, hip-hop meets punk mise-en-scènes. The show is incredibly good at times, with an infectious street-party atmosphere and some mind-bending transformations between the physical artwork, the projections and the white-suited artists themselves. The real strength of the work however was in it’s thoughtfully constructed progression over the show’s duration.

VJ performances
The beautiful control and pacing evident in many of the performative artworks was sadly lacking here. Perhaps VJs are so used to their work being backgrounds that the tendency towards flashing, eye-grabbing graphics and technique, at the cost of meaningful imagery, is so ingrained it’s hard to break away from. One exception was Poland’s PussyKrew who built a controlled and considered show, utilising a restricted canvas area to great effect.

Overdosing
Noticed a surprising tendency for cheesy, overly-sentimental or effects-reliant material - often from an artist who a moment ago had been displaying something truly captivating. Perhaps as artists we all have our particular stylistic achilles heels - aesthetics that for some reason resonate with us, but leave everyone else scratching their head. Maybe something to be reckoned with as long as we are asking for a genuinely personal experience from these performers.

Outdoor Projections
Impressive video mapping technologies? French artists Exyzst certainly delivered with their closing night performance mapped to the riverside Façade de l’Usine. The piece was sonically and visually synchronised to that extent that stops you noticing either individual medium and simply transports you temporarily.

Germany’s Videogeist also stood out, breaking the mould with some painterly generative art and an augmented version of the building that differed from the neon neo-futurist vision inextricably bound to this technology at present. Another French team, Digital Slaves, also went for a more organic aesthetic with some particularly nice moments, however were let down by the lack of synchronicity between the sound and vision - unfathomably for each of their short sets the audio abruptly cut out before the visuals.

VIDEOHUAHUA
Videoman (Fernando Llanos, Mexico) brought his own take on the festivals tagline ‘deviant electronics’ with his invention: the Videohuahua. That’s a chihuahua with a mini projector attached. Of course! Fernando and the Videohuahua (a very cute fellow named Chamacos) were an unmissable pair at the various evening events as well as the clubs and parties backstage. Little Chamacos won many fans, tottering alongside Fernando, beaming his art into the night and lighting up more than just the Geneva streets.

(( Thanks to Lucy for the report, try her full version ( twice as long))))
Stay tuned for another report, the next one from the home of mozzerella de bufala, over at the LPM festival in Italy. So many festivals, such little time~!

Via the sprawling internet tentacles of@howthebodyworks ( no, really - subscribe to his delicious bookmark feed a while..), comes this great reminder of … well… actually, let’s not spoil it for you. Except to say it does involve eminent scientist Stephen Hawking, which reminded me of this MC Hawking interview from back in 2002, and that I’ve been meaning to mention I’ve been copying across ye olde octapod.org/jeanpoole articles to skynoise. Will list a few fave older pieces later, in the meantime, check the archives link on the side.

MC Hawking nabbed his 15 mb of net fame back in the day with ‘e=mc squared’, ‘fuck the creationists’, and other rap classics ( all available on mp3).

Q: What’s your next book or current research about?
A: I am currently trying to determine whether or not “Hammer Time” is relative.

Q: What do you think of the growing popularity of gangsta physics?
A: Yo, rap is all about dropping science. It was only a matter of time before rap and science converged.

Q: Got any lines / rhymes on artificial intelligence? (and when do u predict it?)
A: As far as predicting A.I. is concerned, I got no fucking idea; I’m a theoretical astrophysicist, not a fucking computer scientist. However, if that piece of shit movie Spielberg just put out is any indication, I’d say don’t hold your damn breath.

full MC Hawking interview here..

“I would go mad if I lived in the rainforest,” he laughs. “I like what human beings do, I’m fascinated by them, and if you want to know any of those things, a big city is the place.”

Is there anybody alive who has had first hand experience of as many species as the narrator of BBC nature documentaries across the last six decades? Maybe this makes him a prime candidate for alien abduction, but even at the ripe age of 83, he continues to expand his knowledge of nature, and ours in the process. Most recent doco? ‘Life in Cold Blood’, about ’solar-powered reptiles and amphibians’. Currently working on? A one-off documentary about evolution, other narration and radio work, serving on the boards of several wildlife organisations, making International news about population issues, and just last week, providing news commentary on the finding of the ‘missing link’. Ready for a nap yet?

Missing Links, Or Actually : Transitional Fossils
Rather than ‘missing link’, scientists prefer the term ‘transitional fossils’, to describe the fossilized remains of intermediary forms of life that illustrate an evolutionary transition. But if Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution is to be believed, argue the Creationists, why haven’t we found a fossil record of a species that is somewhere in between today’s higher primates ( humans, monkeys and apes ) and more distant relatives? Last week at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, a fossil with that potential was unveiled. The scientists responsible argue the skeleton ( nicknamed ‘Ida’) wasn’t merely a lemur, but a new species, with some closer resemblances to ourselves. Dr Jens Franzen described Ida as “like the Eighth Wonder of the World”, because of the extraordinary completeness of the skeleton. The full verdict is out just yet, but naturally, there is already a David Attenborough narrated BBC programme about it. Sayeth Dave : “the “little creature is going to show us our connection with all the rest of the mammals. The link they would have said until now is missing … it is no longer missing,” he said.

Ida Vs The Creationists
Hard to imagine writing hate-mail to the curious brained David Attenborough, he with the ever-infectious popping from behind bushes kinda joyous way of explaining some obscure facet of nature. His lack of crediting God in his documentaries however, has inspired creationists to write and tell him to ‘burn in hell’. Famously he responded on a BBC interview by saying how he always remembers a little child in East Africa with a worm burrowing through his eyeball. The worm cannot live in any other way. “I find that hard to reconcile with the notion of a divine and benevolent creator,” Attenborough said.

The Breeders
1950s, When David Attenborough started making TV? 3 billion people.
At Time of Writing? 6,836,787,487 people.
2050? An estimated 9.1 billion people

The latest of many organisations Sir David has thrown his weight behind, The Optimum Population Trust believes that Earth may not be able to support more than half its present numbers before the end of this century, and that the UK’s long-term sustainable population level may be lower than 30 million ( currently 61 ). “For the past 20 years I’ve never had any doubt that the source of the Earth’s ills is overpopulation. I can’t go on saying this sort of thing and then fail to put my head above the parapet…. If we don’t find a solution to our population problems, nature will. Other horrible factors will come along and fix it, like mass starvation.”

Last word? His astonishing list of documentaries speaks for itself.

Flippin Chips
CHIPFLIP is a new blog by Swedish 8-bit wunder-kid, Goto80 ( also “Extraboy, Susanne, 4D-Man, Skrubier, or other even sillier names”), where he aims to collect and discuss things regarding chip music and 8-bit art for an MA degree. “It’s about low tech visual and sonic creativity, not nostalgia.” In other words, lotsa links and projects to explore, downloads to be had, things to read. Which you’d expect from one of the boys behind the 365 songs project.

Sample post?
“8-bit noise music is not very common, which means that good 8-bit noise music doesn’t really have best of compilations (yet!). Maybe .. the certain particularities with a genre that make it so good, are quite tricky to reproduce with an old soundchip. Here are a few examples of 8-bit noise music I appreciate, and if you have more suggestions feel free to leave a harsh / random comment with maximum content. I must have left out a lot of gems, right?” (( post goes on to list extensive links ))

The sidebar sections are especially interesting, featuring extended sections on - plagiarism where artists have heavily sampled videogame use without acknowledging ( or paying ) the original artists, - timeline of chipmusic from 1951 ( in Sydney!) to today, - a how to section for emulating commodore 64’s with today’s machines, - and an exploration of chipmusic as medium, form and culture.

More Feathers in Your Life
Stunning sculptural feathery works, from the Frozen Mammoth.

Travel Bug vs Swine Flu?
The 1918 Pandemic flu, now that was big, carving a fair chunk out of the global population, right at the tail of world war one as well. AIDS? Also declared a pandemic. As of 2007, lived with by 33 million people worldwide and having killed 2.1 million. Swine flu? So far around 1000 people have been identified as infected, a much smaller number killed by it. Worryingly, it especially threatens the artistic population - as people cling to their bunkers with stocks of baked beans, travel prices inevitably come down, inevitably luring starving artists to other pastures, great for cross cultural dialogue an fertilisation, but maybe removing artists from the gene pool in a cruel twist on the viral media they hope to create. In other words : lots of my friends seem to be travelling to lots of far-flung places at the moment.

Hungry Like A Domesticated Wolf
Or How to Get Rid of Stuff : A guide to downsizing your belongings by Bruce Sterling. I first read this in 2008, but I found it in the back of my internet lounge again recently, and it jumped out more on a second browsing. Lots of fun in there, and extensions of these ideas :

- As long as I’ve got broadband, I’m perfectly at ease with the fact that my position on the planet’s surface is arbitrary.
- You need to re-think your relationship to material possessions in terms of things that occupy your time. The things that are physically closest to you. Time and space.
- The things that you use every day should be the best-designed things you can get.
- Sell – even give away– anything you never use.

Which maybe vindicates a recent decision to spend a fair bit of money getting my bicycle fixed, and upgraded in various ways at the same time. In other news, The Human Powered Cycle crew who did the job are starting up a cafe on 562 High st, Thornbury beside their shop, hopefully featuring muscly thighed boys and girls pedalling under desks to provide banana smoothies, grind coffee beans and the like.

Netlabel of the week? Acroplane, with free downloads including Mad EP’s ‘Twenty Four Breakbeats’, a composition project that started off to compose a breakbeat in every major and minor key. ( via Lucy Benson, who has a new blog )

Have been helping with a design course recently, and amongst other insights, it’s been interesting to see where ecology and design processes have been intersecting of late.

Biomimicry
Beyond just using natural materials to solve a design problem, advocates of biomimicry endeavour to learn how natural solutions and adaptations work, and think about how these processes could be applied to various design challenges. Some examples of this in action can be found at The Biomimicry Institute, who say “after 3.8 billion years of research and development, failures are fossils, and what surrounds us is the secret to survival.”

Kingfisher Efficiency
The Shinkansen Bullet Train of the West Japan Railway Company is the fastest train in the world, traveling 200 miles per hour. The problem? Noise. Air pressure changes produced large thunder claps every time the train emerged from a tunnel, causing residents one-quarter a mile away to complain. Modeling the front-end of the train after the beak of kingfishers, which dive from the air into bodies of water with very little splash to catch fish, resulted not only in a quieter train, but 15% less electricity use even while the train travels 10% faster.

Lotus Plant Cleaners
Lotus leaves are water repellent because the myriad crevices of its microscopically rough leaf surface trap a maze of air upon which water droplets float, so that the slightest breeze or tilt in the leaf causes balls of water to roll cleanly off, taking attached dirt particles with them. And so, microscopically rough surface additives have been introduced into a new generation of paint, glass, and fabric finishes, greatly reducing the need for chemical or laborious cleaning.

Humpback Whale Wind Power
The humpback whale’s surprising dexterity is due mainly to its flippers, which have large, irregular looking bumps called tubercules across their leading edges, which allows humpbacks to keep their “grip” on the water at sharper angles and turn tighter corners, even at low speeds. Wind tunnel tests have demonstrated the aerodynamic improvements tubercules make, and a company called WhalePower is applying these lessons to the design of wind turbines to increase their efficiency, while this natural technology also has enormous potential to improve the safety and performance of airplanes, fans, and more.

Inspiration of course also lies on the microscopic and chemical level, with many newly engineered materials mimicking the structure of natural materials. One holy grail in the field seems to be the relative strength of a spider web - apparently if a human sized spider was to make a web ( yet one which could fold up into the size of a tea chest - this would be strong enough to catch a jumbo jet at landing speed.

Cradle to Cradle
Biomimicry folk are also keen observers of the lack of waste in natural systems - in a working ecology, all components break-down and form something useful for others. Zooming on this, chemist Michael Braungart and architect William McDonough set about trying to change the way we produce and build. The film Waste=Food documents their inspiring efforts so far ( the hour long video is a heartening watch ). Core idea? “If waste would become food for the biosphere or the technosphere (all the technical products we make), produc­tion and consumption could become beneficial for the planet.” Inspiring to see the extent to which those such as Nike, Ford and other giant textile companies are keen to integrate these ideas where possible.

And a final eco-design shout-out to sci-fi author Bruce Sterling, whose Viridian Manifesto argues eco-design needs to be glamorous to succeed in winning people over. In relation to the cradle to cradle idea, and the consideration of the whole life cycle of a product, he is also famous for suggesting the idea of ‘SPIMES’ ( objects that can be tracked over space / time, a lot like RFID tags.. ), and what these kinds of tech advancements might mean for sustainable processes.

Amazingly, the world’s population has grown by 500 million people since I reviewed Ableton Live 2 in 2002. And while each year brings a new version, it’s surely getting harder for Ableton(.com) to convince all these people that Live comes from the future, like it seemed to back at the start of the 21st century. Nowadays people just expect to be able to ‘extract grooves’, ‘deep freeze tracks’, ‘add pseudo warp markers’, and other sci-fi sounding techniques - all of which should work in real-time thanks. So whats’s a software company to do? Sometimes you just need to consolidate, and 2009 seems to be one of those years, Live 8 delivering a range of incremental adjustments, a couple of new effects here, a couple of new workflow enhancements there. The calm before the storm perhaps, when the release of ‘Max for Live’ takes us back to the dizzying multi-dimensional future ( Max for Live = full Max/MSP/Jitter functionality inside Ableton Live - including video synthesis and animation via Jitter objects ). Where were we?

Ableton Live 8
So what stands out as new?

I like the simple addition of Looper, a new audio effect modelled on people you’ve seen in a pub pressing their foot on a pedal, while they’ve layered beatboxing, violins, weird noises, singing and the like into a buzzing swarm of sound ( and if you’re needing a foot pedal for this, try a $10 DIY one).

There is a new warping engine which now allows a more intuitive manipulation of time markers, and adds a new complex warp mode, plus you can slice audio files to MIDI tracks based on transients. Also baked? A new groove functionality which allows subtle or extreme control timing controls on a per clip basis, including the sci-fi option of being able to extract grooves ( which get stored in a ‘groove pool’ for application onto other songs later ).

Being able to create crossfades between adjacent clips in arrangement view? That’s a win. Or a little victory at least.

Session view tracks can be easily grouped together, to allow easier control of many at once.

The interface comes with a zoom option - allowing nice customisation to suit the current screen being worked on, and preferred number of tracks visible.

Operator has a new waveform editor - draw your own waveforms, and there’s a new Vocoder.

Supports ogg vorbis and flac file formats now* ( for those seeking better sounding, less license restrictive formats than mp3 )(*at least it’s the first I’ve noticed that support)

The browser tab previews samples nicely now - showing a waveform for them, allowing them to be scrubbed, and giving the option of them playing back at native tempo, or matching the current tempo of the session being played.

Instruments and FX can now be copied and pasted with standard clipboard commands. ( That won’t excite the 500 million digital natives too much )

And supposedly all computing happens in the cloud these days, so it shouldn’t be no surprise that Live 8 comes with an option to upload your current set and media files to your area at the ableton mainframe, with options for sharing this publically or storing for private use.

What You’ll Need :
Cash - Ableton Live 8 (Download) EUR 349/USD 449
Australian Pricing : Ableton Live 8 RRP $999.99 Ableton Live 8 Suite RRP $1399.99
Enquires: ableton@musiclink.com.au Australian dealer listings

Machines - Mac: 1.25 GHz G4/G5 or faster (Intel Mac recommended), 1 GB RAM (2 GB recommended), Mac OS X 10.4.11 (10.5 or later recommended), DVD-ROM drive. Or Windows: 1.5 GHz Pentium 4 or Celeron compatible CPU or faster (multicore CPU recommended), 1 GB RAM (2 GB recommended), Windows XP or Windows Vista, Windows compatible sound card (ASIO driver support recommended), DVD-ROM drive, QuickTime recommended

Verdict
Another fine release from Team Ableton. While there’ve been some grumblings online about the mac version of Live 8, it has worked flawlessly for me ( albeit without pushing it in multi-dimensional hell for leather ways ), and others have reported it feeling much snappier. With the upcoming Ableton + Akai hardware controller, and the release of Max for Live, the refinements continued with Live 8 further solidify their key position in real-time performance software.

( And going back in time : reviews of Ableton Live 7 / 6 / 4 / 2 )

Live overdubbed cinema depends to some extent on the films being used, and their ripeness for satire. Hard to go wrong then, with the cartoon-like post-apocalyptic worlds of the Mad Max trilogy, currently being pulled part at the Melbourne Comedy Festival, hot on the heels of it’s Sydney roasting.

The Dub Team
Writers and directors : Zoe Coombs Marr, Eddie Sharp.
Live Foley Sound Effects : Lil O’Neil and Blaine Cooper
Whenever Max spoke onscreen : Eytan Messiah
Whenever a female spoke on screen ( eg Tina Turner ) : Zoe Coombs Marr
Whenever anyone else spoke onscreen : Eddie Sharp ( including many accent gear-changes )

Previous Credits : The Willy Wonka Chocolate Factory Remix

And So..
Wander into Bar Open, Brunswick st Fitzroy before April 26, drift upstairs into that weird carpetted split-room that usually hosts clusters of experimental musicians, to discover a vaguely cinematic setting. Up-high, a screen to display an edited highlights package of the Mad Max trilogy, which will showcase over the hour, various re-composited scenes, super-imposed characters, various pop cultural inserts and a grab bag of editing tricks ( eg a wounded Mel Gibson crawling along the road, re-edited to suggest a dance sequence ). While nowhere near Soda Jerk in scale ( see their gargantuan remix efforts ), there’s still a considerable amount of work involved here, in retwisting the various Mad Max threads to suit the remaker’s new premise : Maxas a5 year old, dreams of being a dancer, and one day being accepted into Tina Turner’s Bartertown Dance Academy ( aka the thunderdome gladiator to the death set of the trilogy’s final chapter ).

Underneath the screen @ Bar Open, sit 3 microphone holding characters, faces lit by the tv monitor they take their cues from. And to their side, a pair of foley artists stand amidst a junkyard of soundmaking debris ( a lettuce to punch for fight scenes, a toy car with toy siren, various instruments, bells, gongs, a vacuum cleaner tube to emulate a V8 muffler, paper to rustle etc etc ). The edits flow thick and fast, leaping from film to film, all sense of the original film’s chronology dismissed in the servicing of the new narrative. And to their credit, the journey of Max to the dance academy mostly flows well, despite the consistent leaping between different eras of Max’s life ( y’know - before and after some unthinkable big catastrophe like an economic meltdown / global market collapse ).

The new lines being delivered live, to suit the on-screen edits, are for the most part hilarious and the obvious enjoyment in the faces of the microphone wielding folk on stage, adds nicely to the show. The glee with which the foley artists mangle their vegetables and ‘molest their balloons’ doesn’t hurt either. And the new script they’ve crafted is quite playful, characters shifting through quite a range of accents, scenarios and surreal possibilities ( time travelling cops, playing with the age of Max, and gay bdsm and feral raver parodies which’d seem almost inevitable ), and pockets of improvisation ( including many references to Mel Gibson’s recent divorce announcements ). And yet, the cult status and over the top of absurdity of the films themselves, clearly evident in the assorted cinematography presented, leave the remix feeling ‘not quite there’. An awesome first draft maybe, and very enjoyable, but needing to sharpen it’s claws somewhat before properly savaging that worthy flesh.

Update : Mad Max, the 2005 breakbeat remix, via toby *spark in the comments.

Sydney’s development laws and rental costs make any new arts space something worth celebrating. The scope of the artist and activist run Red Rattler, makes it doubly so, now offering in a converted Marrickville warehouse, a ‘creative playground for performers, musicians, artists, designers, multi-media makers, experimentalists, film-makers, theorists, activists, and collective organisers’. Penelope Benton is understandably excited:

What was the catalyst or the final straw which inspired the ambitious Red Rattler plan into motion?
The shut down of LanFranchis and the close of Space3 were the big ones, on top of a big list of artist run initiatives (Squatspace, Phatspace, Gallery Wren, Imperial Slacks, The Wedding Circle, Mekanarky Studios, Knot Gallery and just this year Gallery 44, and Medium,Rare) that’ve been forced to close in the last decade due to developers, landlord trouble, rental increases, neighbour complaints and other systematic shut downs including government and council regulations that make building compliance inaccessible and impossible for non-profit artist run spaces.

The constant police appearances, shut downs and fine threats were exhausting. Our events didn’t fit into pubs and clubs, we couldn’t afford other spaces, and the atmosphere was all wrong. So a group of us (five women: Meredith Williams, Patsy Black, Teresa Avila, NDY and myself) got together and started talking about ideas for a permanent space, a legal independent creative playground. We knew that the kind of budget and workload required to set up a legal space under today’s legislation would be huge and investing that into a rental was risky, so we emptied our pockets, shelved our personal dreams, harnessed the security that comes from working full time for 10-15 years, and collectively bought a warehouse in industrial Marrickville.

Is there something of a resurgence in artist run spaces in Sydney now?
Spaces open, run for a while, then get shut down and people spend some time feeling loss and remorse then start getting active and open up new spaces, its a cycle. In Marrickville, there is a buzz of new spaces brewing incorporating artists studios and one-off events. There are five or six ARIs currently looking into establishing themselves as legal places of public entertainment, rather than exclusive galleries, there are a few galleries already, but it is a bit difficult to get people to come to the inner west for art on the wall, don’t know why, but they do come out here for performance nights, film screenings, workshops, and sound or music events.

What have been some of the biggest challenges in setting up the space?
In NSW you need a POPE (place of public entertainment) license to host an event in a space. This legislation, full of exorbitant fire safety compliance, toilet quantities, and disability access requirements is the killer. Dissecting the BCA (Building Code of Australia) is a nightmare, funding it is horrifying and currently there is no support network for helping ARIs through this process. This is by far, the biggest challenge we faced. After months of research, a zillion meetings with Council, external consultants, and certifiers, our set up costs doubled.

We project managed the process ourselves and completed much of the work ourselves (electrical, carpentry, tiling, plasterboarding, general building works) with an incredible amount of help and support from friends and family. It was hard and overwhelming, but we did get through, our DA was approved in November, our approved construction certificate in Dec and received our Occupancy Certificate in March this year, so we’re now legal, yay, we’re very excited.

Our latest challenge is wearing the ongoing strain of extra set up costs and not being able to run properly yet - we applied for a liquor license under the new state laws that came into effect in July last year and were advised this would be a thirty-day process, however after almost ninety days now, we’re still waiting.

What’s the Red Rattler plan for “running the space largely on renewable water and energy sources”?
The Red Rattler has a five-year eco-sustainability plan - we’ve installed water wall tanks for rain water catchment and have low-flush toilets throughout the venue. We’ve fitted low-energy lighting and power systems including LED stage lighting rig and low-wattage light fittings throughout the bar, toilets, theatre space and rooftop garden. We’ve installed whirly birds in the roof and smoke exhaust vents that double as air vents in the ceiling, which we opted for instead of air-conditioning. We hope to install solar panels to our roof down the track to ensure maximum use of green power, with a vision to feed power back to the grid. Plus our bar stock will include local, organic, and preservative-free products. We’re taking a 50c eco-tax off door tix, or for free gigs we ask punters to donate 50c as they come in to contribute to this sustainability plan.

As a member of a Artist Run space, what do you think of the proposal to spend $1billion dollars to upgrade the Opera house?
Injecting even a bit of this sort of budget into a support organization for ARIs and non-profit performance spaces would completely revamp this city. Firstly the POPE legislation needs to be revised for like spaces. Then we need a service to guide artists and small businesses through DA and BCA processes, and a funding program for fire safety and toilet upgrades. Even if funding came with a condition that once you did start to make profit, from running a bar lets say, you paid back into the fund to support new non-profit creative spaces. A sustainable grant program. Sounds great!

Upcoming events you’re looking forward to at the Red Rattler?
PERV - Queerotic Film Festival Apr 23, The Box Brownie Flash (celebrating AV in performance art ) Apr 24 and much, much more~!
( see redrattler.org for full list )

Syd-Arts Related URLs provide by Penny :
http://www.myspace.com/tortugastudios
http://www.myspace.com/dirtyshirlows
http://www.billandgeorge.org
http://quarterbred.blogspot.com/
http://www.cadfactory.com.au/
http://www.officialsydney.com
http://www.workshopshowroom.org
http://quarterbred.blogspot.com/
http://www.figureight.org
http://www.blackandbluegallery.com
http://www.rizzeria.com/

Or : a journey through time and space, via the humble hyperlink. A recent post at onlinejournalismblog.com reminded me how important links are for online interaction, and yet how often they are overlooked or under appreciated by less savvy web writers / publishers. Obviously links are economically important (more in-bound links for a site = a higher google ranking), but there’s also a significant social dimension to links. Why do the better sites take a lot of effort to ensure they reference their ideas, and provide links to everything they mention? Sure, they understand it often means the site linked to, will often link back to them - but more importantly, it helps make the web function better for everybody. As illustrated by the following single link :

“Web Comic Guru Interviewed”
What we have here is a talkshow host who thinks impersonating a hyperactive foghorn is a good interviewing style. Thankfully the guest, web comic artist Nicholas Gurewitch manages to avoid being steamrollered and retains some integrity throughout. Mostly this is of interest, if you’re familiar with his comic Perry Bible Fellowship, which has recently made the transition from adored web comic into sold-out-book-and-people-are-knocking-at-my-door-for-movie-scripts-etc. But it also serves the purpose of letting us explore the social value of links. Where did the video come from?

10zenmonkeys.com
The above video link was within a post that explored the PBF rise to fame, and discussed the reasons for Gurewitch’s recent lack of web-activity ( hey - a pilot tv show for British TV, remastering the book for re-prints, working on a feature script etc - keeps you busy! ). I’m not subscribed to the monkey site, but I found it through a subscription to :

Waxy.org/links
Waxy.org is the site of Andy Baio, a software developer, whose steady stream of eclectic ( well, eclectic within the mostly tech/online ballpark ) and succinct links and commentary quickly found its way into my RSS feeds. Where did that come from?

Kottke.org
The Kottke radar stretches out to include the design world, the arts, cinema, tv, with perioidic snapshot reminders that the world is a very strange place. Although posts are longer than waxy’s, they are similarly succinct, regularly appearing and well written, drawing the reader into merits of a particular topic. At one point, Jason Kottke’s popularity could be measured by a one weekend donation drive, where he asked his readers to donate, so that he could concentrate on blogging links full-time and gave up his designer job for a year. He raised an annual income in one weekend, but later returned to design work, claiming the paid responsibility of blogging changed it’s nature for him. Found via:

Boingboing.net
“A directory of many things”, co-curated by a busy bunch, each contributing their particular thread-flows of interest. Pointed to many mooons ago by:

alexburns.net
After a certain number of emails were ping-ponged, projects were intersected ( ask him about DIY rocket-launchers ), and because he was the Australian based editor of:

disinfo.com
Back in the pre-corporate mall days of the web, this site emerged as a repository of alternative culture / politics / weirdness in general, albeit weighed down by a conspiratorial component ( the overall mix kept it worthwhile though, and nice being kept on your toes ). Founder of the site, Richard Metzger produced a cool spin-off TV series at one point, and is currently guest blogging on boingboing ( noticeably ramping up their weirdness ratios). Found via…

marcuswestbury.net
Marcus was one my the earliest pingers of links, and although his current site is relatively fresh ( and not where I would’ve discovered disinfo.com), I’ll credit him as the first link in the chain here, given his infamy as a 20th century bean-cans-and-string-modem-type-hacker.

Whether it’s the economic downturn, your choice of looming eco-pocalypses or just a desire for healthy food, there’s plenty of reasons why interest in growing your own food has recently skyrocketed.

Guerrilla Gardening
‘Anyone interested in the war against neglect and scarcity of public space as a place to grow things’ can browse through the photos and stories at guerrillagardening.org, which show a variety of reclaiming / replanting projects from all over the world by teenagers to grandmothers and all in between. And remarkably in Australia, this process has recently been documented on prime time television ( watch episodes, vote on the best guerrilla member etc ). Inevitably there are stylistic choices made to try and fit into prime-time television (( Welcome to the show where six young warriors are armed to the teeth with attitude and gardening tools …. the six Guerrillas will stop at nothing to reach a potential site – they will abseil, rope and parkour (picture the opening scene of Casino Royale) to get to the make-over site on a 20 foot high ledge… )), but still it’s quite remarkable to see channel ten producing such a show, with it’s tagline : ‘Against the law? Guerrilla Gardeners – bringing your city back to life’. Interestingly, while most online feedback was highly supportive, the negative responses tended to be people annoyed that the show seemed a ‘blatant rip-off’ of the site and group mentioned above. Aside from Tony J that is, who added his caps locked two cents, “They should be given 3 months jail each. It is ENVIRONMENTAL GRAFITTI.”

Permaculture In Cities

“When I first went to New York, I helped start a little herb-farm in the South Bronx. The land was very cheap there because there was no power, no water, no police, and there were tons of drugs. This little farm grew to supply eight percent of New York’s herbs. There are now 1,100 city farms in New York.”

- Bill Mollison, who along with David Holmgren, founded Permaculture in Australia in the 1970’s.

Permaculture is an approach to designing human settlements and perennial agricultural systems that mimic the relationships found in the natural ecologies ( thanks Wikipedia!), and started with Mollison’s realisation that no one had ever applied design to agriculture. “We’d had agriculture for 7,000 years, and we’d been losing for 7,000 years — everything was turning into desert. So I wondered, can we build systems that obey ecological principles?”

Some of these principles include looking at a whole system, observing how the parts relate, mimicking patterns in nature, layered stacking ( growing tall, medium, and low plants together to maximise the effectiveness of shade, pollination, watering and mulching), valuing diversity etc.

Transforming That Garden Plot
Sometimes a helping hand or seven can help springboard a garden into bountiful existence much quicker. A little planning and preparation and a group of people can gather together and focus on one garden at a time, taking turns to do a quick day’s work-over on someone’s backyard. This can happen between friends easily enough, but it’s also the insight being used to drive the hugely popular permablitz.net - once you’ve donated time to help other gardens get a kick-start, you qualify to have your garden selected as the one where a team of gardeners will come and re-jig it all in one day.

And an even less DIY approach, some of the permablitz crew have started veryediblegardens.com, recognising the usefulness of having the option for having people come to install a raised vegie-patch kit for you. “Package deals come to suit every price range, from DIY edging kits, through to soil-filled, fully planted packages with pest netting and an automatic timer-driven drip-irrigation system installed.”

Actually Growing That Food Stuff Yourself
Seasonal planting guides abound, these are two good ones.
Healthy soil is an important part of every good garden and making a good compost heap will help that process tremendously eg http://www.milkwood.net/content/view/53/50/

“With every revolution, from wood to coal, from coal to oil and now from oil to the renewables, profits have increased. That’s just the way the world is. I would like to see business people rewarded for doing the right thing.”

Tim Flannery, scientist, author of ‘The Future Eaters’, quoted in the Financial Times.

The Changing Shape of News
Although the Tim Flannery quote above is directed at climate change and big business, pointing out the opportunities with renewable energy, it applies neatly to the shifting news environment too. There’s currently a lot of panic about the health of newspapers, as exemplified by the recent piece by media theorist Clay Shirky, whose argument can be summed up with two lines from it :
“Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism,” and
“Here’s how we’re going to preserve the old forms of organization in a world of cheap perfect copies!” ( the newspaper industry have seen the internet coming, but their plans were inevitably flawed as they chose not to face various technological and social realities ).

The opportunity is in how the need for journalism and news is harnessed, regardless of media format, and a good example of how blurred things are getting is ‘Newspaper Video : Will It Survive?‘, an article discussing the merits of newspapers producing video and visual material for their online sections. Elsewhere on the Endangered Charts?

What’s Happening With Those Bees?
The ones that are propping up our food chain, and were recently thought to be in danger of being wiped out in large numbers? The greatest development seems to be that there is now a name for what is happening to them, though the jury is still out on understanding why it is actually happening. Colony Collapse Disorder describes the mass die-off of beehives which has been happening lots in the last two years, particularly in North America ( 1/3 of commerical U.S. beehives suffered CCD in 2008), and there are a large range of possible culprits : pesticides, environmental changes, disease, predators, infestation, stress, and radiation from phone towers ( or any combination of the above). Modern life is rubbish apparently, as Don De Lillo covered a while back in his White Noise novel, a Professor of Hitler Studies living in a small town, observing his kids school having to temporarily close down because of allergies to one or a combination of a huge range of chemicals involved in the school building’s construction, and the town itself being menaced by an ‘Airborne Toxic Event’, a floating pollution cloud of unknown toxins and origin.

McSweeney’s Journal
And while on the literary thing, I’ve been meaning to plug these cats a while… Although their site stands up all by itself very well, thank you very much, ( see their regularly published reviews such as THE WRESTLER: A CINEMATIC ANALYSIS IN A 1989 VOLVO STATION WAGON 240 DL ), McSweeney’s Journal is a print beast which can arrive in your letterbox every few months, jamming together a motley crue of contemporary writers, the juxtaposition of each writer’s world likely to leave your head spinning fondly. They also dabble in DVD compilations of filmic esoterica ( see Wholphin, so named after a mythical dolphin-whale hybrid ). It should also be noted, that this whole enterprise was started by Dave Eggers, a decent author and screenwriter in his own right, who more recently has branched out into non-profit writing centres to help young people : see http://www.826valencia.org, which typically are set-up as super-hero accessory shops or as San Francisco’s “only independent pirate supply store” ( the latter being done to avoid some kind of zoning law problems ).

In Other News
- The Resolume folk have developed a new video codec for super-fast HD playback ( uses the GPU, only works on their software though).
- State Priorities? Victoria wanted Tiger Woods ( and got him for a golf tournament). NSW chased Brian Eno instead, to lead a new Sydney Festival ( yes, generative art on the Opera House exterior ).
- 137 Gb of BBC documentaries await you. ( Best be using a torrent application that let’s you select which files to download ) via VJ nosis.
- The Obamas are planting a vegetable garden at the White House. No word on their Hemp For Victory plantation yet though.