On the back of a motorbike, cliffside minus a helmet, you can’t help but imagine how your head would split like a watermelon were you to bounce off. Presumably, Mark Frauenfelder’s ukulelia fetish has never found him wearing a helmet either. Still, this hasn’t stopped him plucking away in Los Angeles, at one of the most popular blogs, co-editing The Happy Mutant Handbook and being the founding editor-in-chief of Wired Online. You can discover more about ukelelias, Mark’s illustrations and daily updates of tech-pop weirdness at boingboing.net. Here’s the boy himself:

If the Boing Boing zine and blog were TV characters, who’d they be, and how’d they get on?
The zine would be Jethro Bodine of “The Beverly Hillbillies”—curious, neophilic, xenophilic, gleeful, and eager to adopt any new theory or conspiracy as the absolute truth. The Blog would be Sherman from “Peabody’s Improbable History”—a traveler of time and space in search of beauty, truth, and the outre. I think Jethro bOING bOING and Sherman Boing Boing would be great pals. Jethro would invite Sherman’s dog, Mr. Peabody, to go raccoon hunting with him, and Sherman would send Jethro 40 years into the future to hang out at the Playboy Mansion.

How many hours do you average online, and in what ways?
About 8. I write and draw on my computer and take a lot of breaks looking at things on the Web.

How has the web surprised you lately?
I’m surprised that most people don’t think it is a marvellous as I do.

As one of the most popular bloggers, your thoughts on online micropayments?
I’m more in favor of macropayments, made directly to my bank account. Really, I wish someone would figure out a good way to make them work.

What were they putting in the water at Wired magazine in the early 90s, and what happened to it?
The water was unadulterated, but pot brownies were usually available on Friday afternoons. The accountants handed out acid and ecstasy like candy. I stayed away from it, because reality was weird enough for me. When Louis and Jane owned Wired it was a magical place and a magical time. A rare era. Then, Wired was sold to Conde Nast. It became a business. I don’t think acid head accountants would last long around there today.

What’s with the ukulelia fetish?
The ukulelia is the PDA of guitars. It’s portable and sweet sounding. It’s easy to learn to play songs right as soon as you pick it up, but it takes a lifetime to master.

And now that a few years have passed – what’d you really think of Billy Idol’s Cyberpunk album? (noticed you did the CD artwork )
I like it!

The vast possibilities of music, Example 1: Frontside 5-0 grind on the steps of a gargantuan Mozart statue in Vienna. Wolfgang Amadeus looking down at a fallen skater soaking music thru a scraped shin. Sharp pain soothed by a passing, distorted ice cream van, the sort of moment from which operas are born. Example 2: Sydney’s toy thrashin’ trio of romper room ravers. Romper stompers, even. You can visit them here: www.dirtymouse.net/toydeath Or catch them during the www.thisisnotart.org bonanza in Newcastle, Oct 2-7.

What was the spark that started Toy Death?
Coming across a little guitar called a Microjammer in Canberra Target. It had such an amazing sound that we just had to make music from it. We are always inspired by the toys turning up in the shops.

How does the songwriting work 4u ?
The three of us sit down with our toybox full of toys and we just start combining different toys until we find a particular sound or strike a great combination! We then arrange the song and write it down
(otherwise we forget!) and work out some silly choreography.

Ever play with / to very young kids? Reactionz?
We played a gig at a primary School in Utrecht in Holland. It was a Daytime treat to school for disadvantaged and at risk kids and we had to not use any of our gunz and cut out all the sexy stuff. They were transfixed by us! At one stage I had to wrestle my twin neck guitar from the clutches of about 5 kids in the front row. At the end of the gig the teacher said they could now play with the toys and there was a stampede. It was mayhem! a bit like Beatlemania but with 8 year olds. They went nuts playing the toys, all of which were still plugged in!

Fave gig moment(z)?
The Utrecht gig was a wild one but we have had so many. In Munster (Germany)we played on the back of a truck at an outdoor festival. Lights started falling over as we all jump up and down at one point!. We forgot to save an encore and were mobbed in our dressing room by people begging for more. One guy got down on his knees! We also played a gig supporting Killing Heidi at Penrith Panthers and got boo’ed offstage! We launched our 7’ at a game arcade so people could play the games for free while we did our set.

Any particular fun toyz u fond of @ the moment?
I’m still in love with my Kawasaki twin neck guitar! All the ‘circuit bent’ toys are really kickin’ and its adding a whole new dimension to our sound. We brought back a Dutch telephone toy from Amsterdam that is just a crazy machine.

Who stars in toy death the movie, and what genre is it?
I definitely think that it would be Manga, a cross between AstroBoy And Vampire Hunter B. Starring voices? either the original Marine Boy cast or Allan Fels, Ita Buttrose and Tom Hanks as SuperTalk Barbie.

Toydeath unplugged =?
I don’t think that it would work, some toys are just too quiet. More likely to see us Un-Masked although I think that it really was a bad move for Kiss so learn from history. Maybe we play semi-acoustic style all casual like sitting down being very sensitive…..

Future planz?
Keep on having fun and finding great new toys! Time for a film clip set in a dolls house and maybe our next release will be a game or CD-rom thingy. Do some more exciting gigs in unusual venues! Next gig in Sydney. November 17th at Brett Whitely Gallery. GO TO JAPAN!!

Ain’t nothin quite like an ollie to nose-grind on a piece of the old Berlin wall. Scratchin that forwards and backwards and inside-out, is John De Kron, bringing his vidi-yo wizardry to electrofringe shortly.

What’d u learn from studying the vidi-yo aesthetics of 60s und early 90s?
Not to forget the 70s! and the 80s where video really started. Feedback and kaleidoscope effects that were applied back then (mostly by some odd technicians) to tube camera feeds transported the feeling of a generation on the black and white tv set in my parents living room. In the 90s I studied at a “media academy” where they’d gathered all that out of use stuff from several video studios. We could play around with U-Matic equipment, humongous video mixing desks, teleprompters, intercom and so on. I still prefer that blurred tube aesthetics to contemporary digital exactness.

And what’ll Vidi-yo in 2010 be like?
All the hip VJs born in the early 90s gather in front of their favorite VJ merchandiser in order to grab one of the first new released materials of that strange guy- John deKron. O.k., he is pretty old but his clips are out of sight. They’re sampled in night theatres all over the hemisphere. And the audience just loves the neotechno style of this North Korean VJ. He has a very rare collection of clips and combines them with his video suit in a virtuous way. I attended one of his last years shows and even the security guys started to cry. But then he performed the climax… You just got to experience that yourself. And tomorrow we will go to a movie theatre.

What interests you about real-time vidi-yo at the moment?
I consider most interesting an effective interface that offers instant and intuitive control on the performance. The result may be something totally different to conventional media like music video clips, and the challenge is to explore the possibilities of these new tools. In today’s realtime video, the language of the media is far from being discovered. It’s similar to the early days of film when it was used to frighten people by showing trains approaching the screen. After twenty years the first attempts appeared with close ups and cuts to tell a story with those tools. And it totally differed from just filming theatre. Maybe the filming of theatre acts is similar to the state where realtime video is now – many shows try to resemble pre-fabbed music video clips.

Searching for possibilities of live video me and some other vjs perform alongside to the same music. We call it the “Videokonferenz”- where the videos communicate with each other. We and the audience can compare different styles and content. Simultaneous performances allow comparison, and coincidences and mistakes happen – intentionally and by accident, which brings new ideas and develops the whole thing.

Cool features of your to-be-released video software?
The ES_5 is a software video mixer that routes 2 sources (video clips, live input or generated graphics) on 2 effect tracks, mixes them, applies more effects if desired and outputs the result to a screen. It’s more designed for longer sequences than short loops. With an attached midi keyboard and a faderbox the ES_5 can be played like a music instrument rather than a piece of software. It’s the excerpt of three years of live performance with all kinds of different concepts for the “best” way to show some moving images. ES_5 has proven to be very usable, stable and fast, so the user may focus on content and not on technology.

>> X-plain the “dirty pot” project? What motivated this?
Computer buttons and faders offer 2dimensional on/off and numeric controls only. I was looking for a more organic interface than that. In the “dirty pot” project the performer has several balls with different colours that may be moved in pots of different shapes. The balls represent video clips and the way they are moved in the pots determines how the videos are screened. By moving the pots the balls are kept in motion(or not). Different regions of the pots define different behaviors. The performance becomes more fluid than possible by pressing buttons. Some of the pots are not totally clean (dried cereals are still in there), which gives a chaotic component. The balls jump over the cereals and you don’t know what will happen. But with some exercise you can use the cereals pretty well. The computer rests under the table and doesn’t bother you. See www.videokonferenz-berlin.de/dirtypot

Good/bad in the Berlin arts scene?
The worst thing in the Berlin art scene at the moment is that the city totally ran out of money. Money for cultural projects is totally cut. Who needs culture in hard times?

John De Kron will demo his software and Berlin pixxxels @ Electrofringe 2002 between oct 2-7 in downtown Newcastle. Also chek johnnyweb: www.thisserver.de