An old man on the bus yesterday told me that all bunnies know something we don’t. If you dig a tunnel deep enough it’ll actually take you to Atlantis, not China. And the bus drivers there only accept juice and electricity as payment. Brim full of juice & electricity, and therefore sorted for the long Atlantis rides, are the four artists/ coders explored in the book Generative Design: Beyond Photoshop.

The Artist as Coder
Making refined art, and refining tools for artmaking, please make browser-welcome:
Lia – creator of www.turux.org, www.re-move.org, www.wofbot.org
Adrian Ward – creator of www.auto-illustrator.com, www.slub.org
meta – creator of http://www.meta.am
Golan Levin – creator of www.flong.com

These cats X-plore programming and a range of apps such as auto-illustator, java, DBN, director lingo, max and nato, which allow them to transcend software limitations and create new customised software or new ways of making art, or allow them to develop generative processes which continuously generate art according to the parameters defined by the programmer. And slowly, software itself is being seen as an artistic creation, not just a tool.

The Book in a Nutshell
Generative Design: Beyond Photoshop is broken into 4 sections, each delving into the personal processes and perspectives of each artist, then walking through a particular example of their code and showcasing its results. This involves web-site pix, graphic design, thru to snapshots from real-time apps showcasing the flexibility of the artists approach. Some of it looks fantastic, some was perhaps more fun to make than appreciate, but combined with the artists comments makes for a rewarding read.

An end-section shows the results of the artists remixing each others work and commenting on it which is a nice touch, and an accompanying website encourages readers to download and mutate the software, then swap it with others. See: www.friendsofed.com/4×4

Why You Might Like It – Seeks to demystify and encourage computer programming and coding for artists. – It has code u can type out and play with – Very interesting artist writings about their work – Nice pix – It’ll look better than Rugby League Week on your coffee table.

“Computers are capable of an unimaginably greater number of things than any specific piece of software might lead one to believe. I believe individual artists should dictate the possibilities of their chosen media, and not some big companies like adobe or macromedia.” – Golan Levin

“liquid crystal displays. 3d headsets. instrument panels in automobiles. electron microscopes. radar. sonar. infrared. x-ray. humanity is attempting to reinvent the optic nerve so that it may see again, and the inevitable next step will be to reinvent the creative process to free it’s imagination.” – meta

“Code shapes technology into whatever form it desires. Before code, any system was fixed by its design, no matter how flexible. With code, despite it’s structure being fixed and defined by the system on which it is executed, a new area of creativity is opened: a definition of process rather than product.” – Adrian Ward

“What I aim to achieve with my work, in general , is to show how beautiful mathematics can be when depicted. ” – Lia

Generative Design: Beyond Photoshop is from a series titled 4×4, the others tackling photoshop and 3D: geometry and chaos, photoshop and flash: time and stasis, and photoshop and illustrator: light and dark. Costs $US49.99, and is distributed in OZ by mcgraw-hill.com.

Next time some party-drunk starts spouting astrophysics from ‘A Brief History of Time’ to prop their IQ, just chill. Gently observe the feng shui of the room, blow spiralled smoke in their face, and ask if they’re familiar with Stephen Hawking’s hip-hop side project.

Yessiree, Jean Poole bee deliverin’ you the cultural advantage with this here candid interview with the world’s most famous wheelchair stricken scientist, about his little known MC activities.

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 prompted the move from quantum physics into emcee-ing?
A: Yo! Even before I was dropping wax I was a playa’. When I was just doing the science sh*t, I knew something was missing. Then I happened to see the Beastie Boys when they came and performed at the University and it was like: BAM!

Q: How has the scientific community responded to your hip-hop work?
A: Fuck them, the punk-ass mutha-fuckas! They all: “we don’t think that this is proper behaviour for a scientist of your stature” and shit. Although there are a few exceptions. Stephen J. Gould is a hardcore mutha-fucka; I got his back.

Q: And the hip-hop community to your science?
A: Yo! At first they was like, “who the fuck is this egg-head tryin’ to bust rhymes?” But once they saw I was legit they came around. I got nothing’ but love for my fellow hip-hoppers. Except for Dr. Dre (both those mutha-fucka’s, the one that was in NWA and the big frankenstein looking mutha-fucka who hosted Yo! MTV Raps like fifty years ago), those bitches ain’t got no Phd’s!

Q: Are there any other scientists you’d like to do an MC battle with?
A: All them so-called “Creation Scientists”, I’d like to go one on one with them ignorant punks! Them and Bill Nye the Science Guy, that bitch needs a beatin’!

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: If you don’t mind me asking, do you have much problem with mike control?
A:(Hits interviewer over head with microphone ) How’s that for mic control muthafucka?

Q: What’d you think of the eminem & elton john duet?
A: Don’t you mean SIR Elton John? That mutha-fucka’s been knighted. What the fuck’s up with that? I mean, I ain’t never seen Elton John jousting and shit. Fuck, I’ve never even seen him on a horse! And back when he used to wear all that fucked up Liberace shit, I never once saw him chillin’ in plate mail. Shit, bring me a goddamn Bastard Sword and I’ll cut that mutha-fucka up like Doomsday on a cross-fade! Fucking “knight” my ass!… What was the question again?

Q: Who would you like to work with?
A: That all depends on what kind of work I’d be doing. If I was working on a house, I would like to work with Norm from “This Old House”.

Q: Who are you listening to at the moment?
I listen to all kinds of music, you know what I’m sayin’? Right now I’m chilling with Jurassic 5, and Tool primarily, but I’ve been dusting off my old Public Enemy platters. I’m also down with Zeppelin and shit, and I’m way into Rage Against the Machine. But if I had to pick one band, and only one band, to listen to for the rest of my life, it would be (without question), Tenacious D!—the Greatest Band on Earth!

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.

Q: Your thoughts on Australia?
A: Well, first I gotta say: where do you muthafuckas get off calling koalas ‘bears’? Have you ever seen a bear? They’re big-ass sonsabitches with sharp teeth and claws. A grizzly bear, that’s a bear. A polar bear, that’s a bear. Fuck, even pandas are bears. But a koala? Bitch please. Aside from that, Australia’s dope. We used to send our prisoners their; that makes Australia the worlds biggest maximum security prison. That means all you muthafuckas are hardcore! Oh, by the way, the world forgives you for Yahoo Serious; but don’t try that shit again.

Q: What ideas have you got for future film-clips?
A: I think my next video is going to be for ‘All My Shootings Be Drivebys’. Some serious gangsta shit, know what I’m sayin’?

Q: Any plans for an Australian tour?
A. I won’t tell, but time will.

Q: And finally – how do you cope without being able to skateboard?
A: Yo, I’m constantly rolling! I catch mad air on the half-pipe. Lately I’ve been working on a phatt 720, but I’m having some trouble landing it.

www.mchawking.com
Wanna hear what ‘e=mc squared’, or ‘fuck the creationists’ sound like? Check the lyrics, mp3s and letters section of this astrophysicist’s much neglected vocal side.

Star Wars gangsta rap
http://download.theforce.net/theater/gangsta/starwarz.html ( or youtubed )
The force like u ain’t nevah heard it b4.Flash animation of star wars with the mc flava.

http://www.africana.com/DailyArticles/index_20011025.htm
A Hip Hop Peace movement? Peace y’all, and none of that terrorism OR war of terrorism stuff now y’hear?

Corporate Gangstas
www.nologo.org
Maybe u herd Naomi Klein speek recently in Sydney or in Melbs alongside Broadway Squatters, bout her book about branding and globalisation? If not, this place b.good.2 check her intressin brand-o-politix.

E.T. never claimed Maxwell Smart was a phoney homey, hangin’ round Brooklyn talkin’ into a shoe. He was just trying to connect to da homelands himself. Can you imagine what it’d be like arriving on another planet and having to deal with call-waiting, elevator electronica, and never ending mazes of number menus all leading to the same cheerful, vacant, robotic voice? Press ‘1’ for what really clogged up the 3D spa last week, ‘2’ for a regurgitated press release, or ‘3’ for Jean Poole’s latest voicemail message.

Your Finger on ‘3’
(assorted frog and harmonica noises, followed by husky Swedish rollerskater voice: )
“Hi, you’ve reached the Technoscape laboratory. Dr. Jean Poole is currently unavailable (sigh). If you leave your name and number or email address, we’ll make sure the 3D homing pigeons get this important information to him as soon as possible.”

One of Those Weird Moments
You know, the ones where you both stop talking on the phone because you can hear another overlapped conversation taking place. And god you wanna find out just how saucy / incriminating / illegal / plain weird the other conversation is. And then you realise the other people are using finger phones.

Finger Phones
Obviously, they must be employes from NTT DoCoMo’s Media Computing Lab, who’ve snuck home a couple of their prototype fingerphones. You know, those finger phones < www.thestandard.com/article/0,1902,19264,00.html > currently being developed, those wearable wireless phones that consist only of a wristband. These phones vibrate rather than ring, and the wristband contains a tiny microphone the wearer speaks into. The wristband also contains a device that converts voice into vibrations that travel through the hand, the finger and into the ear canal.

To answer incoming calls, the wearer taps the index finger and thumb – that’s it – and then sticks a finger in one ear to hear the person on the other line. I kid you not, check out the website. NTT DoCoMo hopes to release the device in 2005. Thing is, what the staff are actually talking about on their fingers, is their favourite eyeball phones.

Eyeball Phones
How’s that ? You’ve just got an inside scoop from peeps in tha fone biz, overhearing that they like the stand alone orange video phones the best . And you were waiting for George Jetson to return your call with a mere internet phone using streaming media technology, a crappy webcam, a TV VideoPhone or from one of the video phone chat rooms? Kinda makes you feel lonely when no-one calls doesn’t it? Need to get yourself on one of those SMS mailing lists.

Renting A Crowd
Ahh, remember the ‘battle of Seattle’? A mass swelling of active bods, and a broad spectrum of peoples targetting the bad sides of globalisation at the world’s biggest corporate get togethers. It has also become famous for the sophisticated level of communications established amongst the protestors. The mammoth indymedia.org project was one outcome of course, the code contributed by Sydney’s cat.org.au. Another tactic was the use of text message mass-mailing systems for mobile phones.

The Princess of Pop
Apparently the Minogue vocals were ‘lame-assed’ on a recent TV appearance, but fans can still find ‘information, gossips and a forum to discuss freely about one of Australia’s best exports’ at a mobile phone community established at upoc.com. And if keeping up to date with Radiohead’s Amnesiac tour, or getting voicemails from Dave Navarro of Jane’s Addiction doesn’t ring your bell, you can always start your own mobile phone community at this website, a free service that enables you to exchange text and voice messages with your friends/ fans on your mobile phone or text pager.

Typing Messages To Save Money
At upoc.com you can send messages from your mobile phone, net phone, or PC, but as obsessive ICQ users (such as DASE Team 5000) know, ICQ has been able to send sms text messages for quite a while now. You can also send messages from the web, from sites like www.freesms.com.au along with wads of text based advertising.

And Still You Want More
If you’ve read this far, it’s bordering on a fetish. Take a walk in the park. Feel the sand between your toes. Try zen and th eart of skateboarding. Obsessive phone users shouldn’t give fetishes a bad name. Do you really want junkmail in your spinal column? Or internal beep noises everytime someone sends you a message?

Some people do
www.media.mit.edu/projects/wearables
& www.i-glasses.com

Outta credit.

Sidebars:
www.a1h.com
Revenge of the Nerds. You might have noticed Telstra provoke the wrath of BigPond Cable users with their recent 3Gb a month download limit. This is where the data-gobblers fight back.

Videophone.net
Catch up with George Jetson, and a complete run down on the latest in internet phones, crappy webcams, TV VideoPhones and video phone chat rooms.

Time to get your pixelated gowns and tuxedoes back from the dry cleaners, swat the millennium bugs away with a Scientology magazine, polish your mouse, and for one day we can all remember our modems ain’t no shopping trolleys. Let’s celebrate the sites that bloated your browser in 2001.

Best Boat People Website:
www.boat-people.org
See what some guerilla projectionists did to the sails of the Opera House after conspiring at the recent TILT media fest. And read what’s missing from mainstream media: intelligent and humane exploration of refugee issues.

Best Religious Use of Technology:
www.xtywebworks.ns.ca/lavalamp.html
The Miracle Mother Theresa Lava Lamp – Omigod dat’s sum fun key sheet. The perfect accessory to go beside your imac tinted, 3-D, glow in the dark, revolving crucifix. Close runners up included the Hare Krishna karaoke chanter’s walkman, and the Taliban’s modified version of Microsoft Flight Simulator.

Best Government Website:
www.toiletmap.gov.au
Who’d have thought a map of all Australia’s toilets would cum in handy? Proudly, we’ve built the world’s first national public toilet map, listing more than 13,000 facilities. Something kinky’s going down within the Dept. of Statistics, I can feel it.

Beast Government Website:
www.systemcorrupt.com
Aye, when ye beasties wanna get nekkid and party, howlin’ like a Michael J.Fox werewolf under a full mirrorball, and dippin’ yer head in the acid-punchbowl, this seems to be the first stop for the free-party circuit listings.

Most Hyped Technology
The SEGWAY: www.segway.com/consumer/segway
Formerly known as ‘IT’, what’s essentially a new form of scooter was being put forward by people like the head of apple, as ‘more revolutionary than the net’. Capable of reaching around 13 km/h, speed is not it’s attraction, but the gyroscope which provides it’s unique fuel efficiency and balancing qualities. With only a tiny battery charge, the Segway harnesses your momentum – lean forward and you move forward, lean back and you stop, and it won’t fall over no matter how hard you try. The website lets you try out these controls in a way, but while they still cost a few thousand dollars it’s hard to see how they’re gonna set the world on fire.

Best Overall Search Engine:
www.google.com
Plain simplicity and effectiveness earns google the top spot in most netters books, now able to search 3 billion documents, find images and search through all newsgroup postings ever made, which is proving embarrassing for some.

Best Video Search Engine:
www.altavista.com
Not a bad search engine in itself, u can find .mov and .avi files here for most imaginable topics, and occasionally end up with unimaginables as well.

Most Horrible Search Engine:
www.horrorfind.com
Fer all yer ghoulish and ghastly needs.

Best Crackz, Warez & Virii Search Engine:
http://astalavista.box.sk
Met someone in a pub once who explained that they were doing a good thing by spreading virii on the net. Helping build the nets immune system they said.

Best Science Website
www.mchawking.com
Ain’t bean no scientist like Stephen Hawking b4, and ain’t bean no MC quite like him either. If u crave the nu-science of ‘ip-’op, be chekkin’ the grand ol’ mp3 collection here, including everybody’s favourites like ‘e=mc squared’, or ‘fuck the creationists’.

Best Disappearance Act
www.???????.com
One of the most heavily competitive awards, I fielded a lot of personal calls for this one, with former CEO’s of formerly high-flying, high-spending youth-culture websites, begging for some recognition. Some days can b.a real (k)grind, make u feel like there’s no e-scape, kinda tribe-less. Don’t believe the hype I would tell these CEOs, most people will forget these awards as easily as they’ve forgotten … um where did you say you were calling from again?

Best news / current affairs
Tie: www.mediachannel.org & www.indymedia.org
Media Channel provides a great overview of independent news sources the world over, its own high quality articles and mailout, as well as a great collection of resources to help wade through the media-sphere more effectively. Indymedia is fast becoming the brand for anti-branders questioning the ways globalisation is being administered. Possibly the world’s most successful self-publishing X-periment, with anybody able to upload alternative text, audio or video stories, Indymedia has a wealth of amazing stories, but sometimes suffers from a lack of diversity and the editorial issues that emerge with group publishing.

Best Napster Replacement:
www.slyck.com
So you like file sharing, or what computer journalists call the ‘peer to peer revolution’? Butt donut know which app to pick now napster’s nailed to the cross by the record companies? Contenders include gnutella, limewire, audiogalaxy, mesh or hotline, but to b.honest, I’ll have to let you decide. Above link is your passport to mp3 nirvana and details them all.

Best Music Community Website:
www.micromusic.net
Bleep Bleep. Uploaders of trax gets stars beside their name in the chat community here, which glitters with the sounds of computer game yesteryear. Everyone’s got their fave, this b.mine.

Best Soft Toy Site:
www.lindqvist.com/bert.php
Bert and Bin Laden’s special relationship is worth a special mention.

Best Live Video Site
www.audiovisualizers.com
Gets the video glitch trophy hands down, for the best overview of live vidi-yo software available, complete with X-tensiv lists of links that cover so many aspects and angles of live video that if you’re interested at all, you’ll find it very hard 2 leave inner hurry.

Best Gangsta Rap Site:
http://download.theforce.net/theater/gangsta/starwarz.html
The force like u ain’t nevah heard it b4. Hilarious Star Wars flash animation with an emceed narration.

Best Urban Renewal Site:
www.cleansurface.org
Graffiti, billboard modifications, stencil aesthetics, xerox art, political scribbles and other clikkable city debris. Lots to graze on, textz to chew, and then some.

Best Car Technology Website:
www.bloodyfist.com.au
Closer inspection of the Bloody Fist homepage reveals the secrets behind their sound – a love of cars, and in particular, a love of car demolition. Check the pics for a lovingly painted Bloody Fist logo on a car in a smash ‘em up derby just outta Newcastle. Also x-plains why 9 out of ten panelbeaters prefer Nasenbluten to Ultrasonic.

Hook in the ceiling is for a mirrorball, you can tell the landlady. A miniature camera behind every mirrored panel for an artwork in progress you’ve dubbed ‘disco kama sutra’. Should keep her off your trail. Give you some space to reflect on the human condition, your condition, the diseases in the air (conditioning), and the chemicals in your hair (conditioner). The contemplation will do you good. Like that vhs tape someone slipped under your door last week, there’s a clue.

The cast of neighbours deconstructed, refried. Staccato cut and paste rhythms, with dialogue spliced and diced, mood music that gangs up on itself, emotional glitch splicings and Craig McLachlan getting a beer from the fridge in his speedos, looped outta control. U can almost smell the ghost of art skool on the edit decks, but somehow the storytelling by fragments and glitches reveals more than you
d expect, transforming Ramsey streets polka dot-atmospherics in ways that reveal the urban decay everyone knows itched underneath the surface.

When a characters motions become mechanised to the point where you wonder where the humanity is, then interesting things occur. There’s a few homoerotic glances between the boys in neighbours that get amplified by repeated looping, and a few melodramatic moments that reveal absurity at the hands of these editors. As the sun comes up, a closer inspectoin of the tape reveals the editors to be ‘Drew & Seddon from Perth’. And there is an email address: bloodhead01@hotmail.com (where peeps interested in the vidi-yo should contact Sailor Seddon) A few questions get these replies:

….Hey sorry about the lateness of this i hope i haven’t caused grief. more soon.
FUCk thepolice >>>>sed

What inspired the neighbours remix?
Those moments when television just fucks up on its own. Television is so controlled and contrived like all mainstream media but sometimes the codes and conventions work against themselves uncovering something whose meaning is out of their control.

Any favourite moments where u just wet your pants?
When the boys just can’t stop laughin. (Craig McLachlan & Jason Donovan caught in loop hysterics).

How long did it take to make, and what was involved?
It took us about two months on and off. We had to search through about 7 episodes finding the choice moments. Some scenes were obviously gold, some moments took a bit more digging. Then we strung them together is some kind of structure.

What would you say to Craig McLachlan if he walked up to you in a bar and said he was upset at how he was portrayed in your video?
I’d tell him he’s very lucky we didn’t remix “Hey Mona”

And your reply to Kylie Minogue, wondering why she wasn’t in it?
Kylie is her own phenomena. She’s sort of transcended her neighbours days. But I have a secret Kylie/ neighbours video which involves Kylie in bed with a sweaty forehead having a nightmare about Scott cheating on her, so she did get something.

What video work / artists have impressed u lately, ‘&’ why?
Spanky’s smearing head video which was screened at Cinema Concrete for its potent and beautiful strangeness. Gary Hill’s tall ships at agnsw.

Any differences between the West & East coast electronic arts scenes?
I think they’re both equally developed, but the East has access to international work which just doesn’t come to Perth. There seems to be more things going on in the East due to the population and the dialogue with other cities/ countries.

Perth is the most isolated city in the world – has this meant artists have embraced the net over there?
Many have. Many just embrace isolation.

Any plans for further neighbours remixing?
It’s neVER OVER.

www.cartelcommunique.co.uk
Cut paste beg blag steal borrow blur destroy deface vandalise corrupt subvert inspire pervert respect recycle invent – sez the site, and u can see some great remixed vids including kid606 and globalisation footage, posh spice, Pat ‘n’ Peg and more.

www.rroom.org
With a mantra of record, rewind, and reassemble, this site aims at reconfiguring commercials, billboards and other corporate messages into more positive and/or hunourous forms, taking swipes at the soft drink industry, fast food and mcdonalds as they go. A few movies worth a peek here.

www.killyourtv.com
Picked this one for the url more than its relevance to neighbours remixing, but a good range of links and a good list of current affairs articles.

This week in Codec Sports World, we’re gonna look at improving your swing, George Bush’s pretzel-cam, some people doing things with balls while other people watch, plastic-wrapping your internal organs for better steroid use, and of course, the latest in codecs and file compression for all your music and data needs.

Hands up who’d even heard of MP3s 5 years ago? The adoption of this audio codec has been so successful, so widespread, that one might be confused into thinking it is the only method of compressing a music file into a smaller size. And while it’s good at what it does, good is the enemy of great, as we like to say in our 3D motivational meetings.

In the silver corner, wearing a tartan skirt and star trek top, is the Ogg Vorbis project, hoping to shrink your files further, and deliver better sound quality. If ever something was named by role-playing computer science students, then Ogg Vorbis surely is it. Marketing savvy aside, it turns out they’re nifty at what they do, and have deeper motivations.

The Ogg Project
Designed to create a fully open multimedia system, the Ogg project is being developed by the Xiph.org Foundation, a non-profit software development group with the goal of ‘protecting essential tenets of Internet multimedia from corporate hostage-taking’.

Xiph.org is also the home of the popular Icecast streaming media server, as well as many other important open source projects, indeed they believe ‘Open Source is the net’s greatest tool to keep everyone honest’. The Ogg Project will eventually include other codecs, like Tarkin (for video) and Squish (for lossless audio). At the moment though, OggVorbis is the only functional part of the Ogg project .

Free Software & Open Source
Free Software refers to software distributed in source form which can be freely modified and redistributed, or freely modifiable and redistributable software. It does not refers to zero-cost software. “Open Source” also refers to source code free to modify and to reuse, however there are many debates about these definitions once profit motives and control of the software comes into it. Either way, a community of developers collaborate and use their combined skills to develop software with these methods.

Did Someone Say Ogg Vorbis?
Ogg Vorbis is a completely open, patent-free, professional audio encoding and streaming
technology, developed with Open Source. Vorbis is the name for the specific audio compression scheme used to create OggVorbis files. Vorbis files have the extension .ogg.

Ogg Vorbis unlike MP3 and other formats is truly an open standard. MP3 relies on a patented compression algorithm, its German owners Fraunhofer, sending a now famous letter in 1998 claiming royalty payments on several MP3 encoders. More recently they have stepped forward again claiming (their right) to royalties from streaming MP3s and royalties from musicians selling MP3s. Enter the Star Trek fans.

Audio Loss
MP3 is what is known as a “lossy” format. Thus, much of the sound data is removed when MP3 files are created. This results in a file with inferior sound quality to a CD. Vorbis is also a “lossy” format, but uses superior acoustic models to reduce the damage. Thus, music released in Vorbis will sound better than a comparably sized MP3 file.

Vorbis Audio Quality
Vorbis sounds much better than mp3. Two files encoded at the same bitrate, will always be the same size, if they are both encoded with constant bitrate. Vorbis encodes files in variable bitrate which can produce smaller files with better quality, since it doesn’t have to waste data for audio that is easy to encode. The current Vorbis encoder also supports much wider encoder bitrates than mp3 encoders: 64-500kbps stereo and 32-256kbps mono (at 44.1kHz sampling rate).

Streams of Vorbis
While it sounds like a cheap sci-fi novel, streaming is also an important component of Vorbis. The format has been designed from the ground-up to be easily streamable, the designers working alongside Icecast streaming media to make Icecast Vorbis-compatible. Streaming Ogg files from the web will be supported by the player plugins at the 1.0 Vorbis release.

Players & Encoders
Wide variety available. Download a player / encoder for Ogg Vorbis files, or a plugin for a player you already have. eg Winamp, Sound Forge, Windows Media Player etc

Ogg Vorbis Futures
To it’s credit, Vorbis already sounds like the product of some phutcha pharmacy, but does it really have a future given the spread of mp3s, and the billion dollar corporate interests in Microsoft, RealNetworks and other proprietary digital audio standards? Linux advocates would think so, and who knows what might happen in a shapeshifting cyber-year? If they keep improving quality and reducing file size, who’s to say they won’t nab the market?

Sidebars:
www.vorbis.com
Worth a click if only to check out their wonderful corporate logos featuring creatures from other worlds.

www.free-soft.org
This site presents alot of good history and links about free software and open source, though nothing on recent debates between the two camps.

MP3s ‘R’ Evil
http://mondodesigno.com/music/ogg.html
And you thought Bert was evil. Bit evangelstic mayb, but interesting articleanyway: about computers and content creation, copyright, music and your good self.

Paper waves cluttered the riverbanx like endless unfolding origami. A last goodbye, and she stepped into the paper boat. Then photoreal in the waves of paper, she grew giant like, or maybe I found where my zoom lens’d bean hiding. Asked if I was coming too, and we were sailing before I could explain our destination wasn’t coastal. Was it mere coincidence Belgians make some of the world’s best chocolate and video triggering software? Taste buds of Jean Poole this week you see, be checkin’ out da Arkaos VJ sophtwarez.

While most of us are used to hard and software that allows audio choppin’ N changin’, manipulatin’ N mutatin’, sequencin’, distortin’, and scratchin’ – in realtime y’hear, it’s only in recent years that tools have become more widely available which allow the same treatment to vidi-yo. Of the code-based pixel-tweekers, VJ by Arkaos now stands as the best dual platform piece of realtime vidi-yo software, havin’ bean recently ported from mac to PC.

The Basic Concepts
Ye bee turnin’ yer putah into a vidi-yo / imagery sampler with this software, to be sure to be sure. With a databank of quicktime movs for mac, avis for PC, and jpegs for both, you can use yer silicon chipped beasty to trigger and effect clips or pictures in real-time. This works by assigning your samples to particular keys on screenshots of your computer or MIDI keyboard, a simple drag and drop operation from your VJ library. You can save 128 sets of these keyboards or patches, within what they call a synth, and have up to 5 synths open at a time. Ram and computer speed may limit how much you stretch this, but performance is then as simple as selecting your patches and pressing keys in sequence. This is then outputted to another monitor or directly to your vcr / projector.

Real-Time FX
VJ FX can also be assigned to each key, either on the same key as a sample meaning the sample will be loaded pre-effected, or on a separate key, meaning you can use that key as say a blur effect on whatever sample is currently loaded on screen. Response time is surprisingly fast on the mac, utilising it’s built-in quicktime effects, and the effects range from downright tacky through to dat=delicious. Each of the effects can be double clicked on and it’s parameters altered, and the effects can be layered on top of each other as well, so let it be said >> this baby can customise your clips on the fly, with style.

Beat Detection & MIDI Input
VJ allows audio input or MIDI based beat detection to trigger events, sample or effects automatically, and with a MIDI keyboard you can control sample parameters such as the transparency of images by how hard you hit your MIDI keys. The arkaos engine is integratable with any MIDI sequencer, which can be run internally on your computer, on another, or on an external MIDI keyboard.

Udder Features
Neet option numero uno, is the recording of your key presses, which you can then process as a movie file, meaning you can mash up some of your files, save as a movie, then reload this newly created and remixed movie into the program and keep playing with this process to create visuals as multi layered or abstract as you like. You can also record your key commands as files which can be used within the free arkaos MP3 visual plug-in available from their site, which plugs zap bang into various MP3 players.

Pros: Quick responsive sample loading and effects. Simple to use and very adaptable, especially with access to a MIDI keyboard. Pretty stable too.

Cons: Some effects are quite tacky. Doesn’t have a simple ability to scroll through, pause / restart clips or control their speed in real-time. Unsurprisingly slow with 640×480 clips. 320×240 clips work fine though a projector though.

What You’ll Be Needin’
A pentium II with windoze98 as minimum, preferably win2000 with quicktime 4 installed, or a mac Power PC with 32mb of ram, though they recommend a g3/64. And moola, US$299 of it in fact, though there’s a free demo for download at arkaos.net which is fully functional but keeps arkaos written in one corner of the screen. All in all, it’s one of the best overall vidi-yo real-time manipulation programs currently available, and so the demo’s well worth a download for vid-peeples, even just to have a peek.

Pros: Quick responsive sample loading and effects. Simple to use and very adaptable, especially with access to a MIDI keyboard. Pretty stable too.

Cons: Some effects are quite tacky. Doesn’t have a simple ability to scroll through, pause / restart clips or control their speed in real-time. Unsurprisingly slow with 640×480 clips. 320×240 clips work fine though a projector though.

Other ideas for development?
Chroma keying!
Being able to turn fx on and off with one button? fadeable? ie fade fx in or out..?
Being able to switch between image sizes, so a full screen video could shrink to half and quarter size and be centred, left or top according to key presses?
Text on screen?
Importing gifs so u can have transparent backgrounds, and be able to import strange shapes and silhouettes… guess chroma keying’d fix this…

sidebars:
www.arkaos.net
Download a demo of VJ / VMP for mac or PC and see what it be made of.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/eyecandy
Biggest list of people discussing video triggering software, with a range of apps for mac, PC, atari & even Linux!

www.audiovisualizers.com
Da biggestestest list of vidi-yo triggerin’ und manipulatin’ software der is.

Nostradamus nearly became the most popular boy at school last year, accordian to search engine google. Wonder whether he would’ve predicted that we’d suffer burst eardrums in 2002, from fearsome flocks of birds evolved to whistle mobile phone ring tunes together?
Alas, probably not. Sadie Plant on the other hand, has the sort of juicy mind that may have predicted such an occurrence. And she spoke on the fone, about fones for 3D.

And I’ll tell you why she’s worth a read too, why excited little me sat recording her voice on a dodgy kitchen table answering machine. Wasn’t b.cos she was commissioned by a phone company to produce a paper on the social and cultural implications of the mobile phone, though that’s how I snared the interview. Sadie Plant is also the juicily electric author of ‘A Most Radical Gesture‘, ‘Zeros & Ones’ – the hidden history of women’s role in the development of communications technologies, and most recently ‘Writing on Drugs‘.

“It was a straightforward commission – would I be interested in doing some research?,” said Sadie across the wires, and so began her ‘opportunity to focus on the mobile phone’.

What did you learn from your research?
It made me realise how quickly the mobile has gone from a yuppie toy to being so widely available in so many parts of world.

What do you think of the digital divide and that half the world’s never made a fone call?
Well the mobile is making a big difference – obviously that’s by no means happened yet… but it’s the first piece of technology with the potential to do that… and increasingly mobiles can be used for accessing other information such as the net. In the UK it’s bringing change to people who had been cut off from all kinds of useful information and economic information actually. In a future Afghanistan, it’ll never be easy to put in telephone lines, but mobile phones can bring telephony and net to remote places like that. (Sadie spent 4 months in Pakistan on the Afghan border b4 s11).

Have u had any phone dreams?
God what a question, I don’t think I say I have – though that would be a good sign of how well mobile phones are integrated into our everyday lives.

What are some of the politics of the mobile?
There are some very imaginative and politically interesting ways of using sms, and sms is almost the most interesting thing about mobiles. People seemed to find that capacity by themselves and it’s been marketed to them later. Text messaging adds to their capacity to communicate with people around the world. The technology of communication is only one side of a broader thing happening – increasing mobility. People get spread but networks of friends survive in ways they never would have before. We have a new culture of mobility, of working on the road, with huge movements of migrants etc…

Reading of Late?
All sorts – 19th Century novels – Joseph Conrad, lots about Afghanistan, this Swiss playwright, Friedrich Durrenmatt… who is becoming more popular now that he has had a book filmed (‘The Pledge’, directed by Sean Penn).

So where are we when we’re on the phone?
Er Birmingham..(laffs) I have no idea. You and I are in our own little space that somehow involves you, me, our telephones, Brisbane and Birmingham. So many people just say now – I’m on the mobile…?

What’s next?
I’m trying to write a novel, not exactly a novel but something a bit more fictional. I spent some time recently in Islamic countries – and I hope this book will somehow draw on those experiences.

Sadie Plant Stuff:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sadie_Plant

www.phonebashing.com
Some people dislike public mobile fone usage so much, they wear giant mobile phone suits and go around stealing and smashing stranger’s fones. Conveniently, they videotape these moments so u can see them too.

www.phonelosers.org
Page title: “This page makes me want to cream on myself”
Frontpage quote : “I wish I was black. Then I could have a white girlfriend.”
Like you’re not already there.

Big Cancerous Things
http://members.ozemail.com.au/~arundell/bigthing.htm ( now dead )
There seems so many pages with ‘scientific’ reports with postive or negative things to say about cancer’s relationship to mobile phone usage. You can always try telepathy, or maybe soothe yourself by these pictures of oz-icons from the big prawn to the big peanut.

Slender gloved hands in my mouth, complimentary shades to undazzle the dentist lights, a healthy stream of nitrous oxide, and fish swimming in the convenient, overhead TV. Floating with tha fishes, I could wish that the stateside kru from www.honeygunlabs.com were in control of the television.

Describe your current act, honeygun labs?
Honeygun Labs is a collaborative live video experiment. The group consists of Bec Stupak (me), Carl Mok and Fabian Tejada. Our material is made in 3D Studio Max, Maya, After Effects, etc. We create loops in our machines, output them to miniDV and DVD, then mix them live at large raves and concerts.

What gear do u use and why do u like it?
All our material is in MiniDV format. The basic set-up includes MiniDV players, a Roland V-5 video mixer, an Alesis midi drum-machine (to interface with the mixer using midi) and 40-50 tapes. For longer, more elaborate shows we’ll add another Roland mixer, a few more miniDV decks, a spy camera, a couple DVD players and a switcher. Its a good setup because it can be very small and compact or infinitely elaborate.

What would u like to use?
We’re looking to move our setup onto DVD and stand-alone digital hard-disc recorders. Its slow going but the technology is coming around. We’re hesitant to convert everything to computers, because they’re unstable and could crash at any time.

What are the crucial elements for good visuals?
Anything that looks good – strong concept, design, that sort of thing. Sometimes we’ll go with abstract narrative, other times pure design. Lots of color, lots of excitement and energy. We also try to change our imagery frequently so it doesn’t become stale.

How does your creative audiovisual jamming / creating processes work?
Mostly in our studio, preparing and editing clips. We’ll shoot video, import it, tweak it, loop it, then output it to tape/DVD. The fun part happens when we get to go to the parties, combine it with good music and see how people react.

How much live flexibility do u have as an AV act?
We can bend and stretch all of our material the same way a DJ can. We have a lot of footage that can be grouped in different ways so we’re always finding new juxtapositions of our material. The mixers also contain some basic effects that can be used in moderation to change things up a bit.

Do u sell many of your VHS tapes?
We sell a few online. There’s always a really positive response to the tapes we send out – I think people enjoy having something like that they can chill with in their house and check out closely.

Favourite live moments?
A show in Saskatoon, Canada. Whenever I put a new piece of footage on the screen, the kids in the front row would bug out. It was really funny. They were watching it like TV. I’d switch tapes really quickly just to see how they’d react and they’d always bug!

What do u do to rest your eyeballs?
Sleep. If we’re not sleeping, we’re usually working on video stuff. Or working to earn money to make video stuff.

Gaff tape is an indispensable and versatile part of any electronic artists toolkit. It’s especially useful for wrapping round the lips of the too gadget conscious and those who talk tech underwater. Gaff tape can also help mimic a blind person’s sensitivity to sound, as most sensory deprivation float tank fiends may appreciate. U&I Software undoubtedly have many rolls of gaff tape in their soft-warehaus, having created metasynth which creates sound from images, artmatic which creates animations and now V-Track – a multi-track video art and special effects tool for up to broadcast quality video and DVD authoring.

Breakin’ It Down
Basically: V-Track is a video sequencer of sorts which intends to bridge all of the U&I software apps, sequencing both audio and visual elements from any of their apps to produce customised video, transition and titling effects. With easy bpm grid-structures, VTrack’s tools, effects and interface make particularly suited for creating music video, with lots of post-production scope for anyone wanting to tweak it’s parameters til things melt n’ mutate.

VTrack can be used either as a standalone video editor/sequencer for creating and rendering high-resolution, professional-quality QuickTime output or alongside traditional editing software. The built-in tempo-based grid makes VTrack especially well-suited for creating music-based video, and each of VTrack’s eight tracks can have its own transfer mode, allowing complex track interactions not easily implemented with traditional video editing tools.

So you’ve got these 8-tracks right, and you can mix QuickTime movies, DV streams, still images, and custom effects and animations from U&I’s Artmatic software, but what makes V-track any different or better than say adobe premiere, final cut pro, after fx or other video editing software? Mostly it’s simplicity, the one window V-Track interface benefiting from Eric Wenger’s (Bryce) simple and intuitive design, and an easy learning curve that gets you remixing pretty quickly. While it lacks the depth of control of the above software, it does allow an endless variety of special effects, filters and transitions to be created, by the way it integrates the ArtMatic rendering engine into it’s sequencing. ArtMatic Pro ‘systems’ can be imported into VTrack and used to process VTrack’s tracks.

VTrack also provides a powerful built-in library of video effects, and the VTrack CD includes a library of over 3,000 ArtMatic presets that can be used in VTrack projects to provide decorative elements, special effects and a huge range of transition effects and color processes.

What You Need
mac os 8.6 or later, recommended g4 but works ok on g3/333. And cash – yer lookin’ at US$249 for a web delivered app, $US299 for a CD-ROM $299 and US $499 for a version bundled with the ArtMatic graphics and animation synthesizer.

Bonus Points
A very easy intuitive interface and learning curve that lets you make interesting video quickly.

Buggy Bits
U&I claim cutting-edge motion graphics, but some of the effects lack customisation and control and suffer from a little cheesiness? In the end it’s a powerful and easy to learn tool that is a useful addition to any vid-headz toolshak. See http://www.uisoftware.com for more.