Birds as big as humans have flapped our skies. Giant wings in slow motion through a nectar haze. Sometimes we glimpse these times gone by with our modern pollution enhanced sunsets. In downtown Berlin for example, the Ableton software company would no doubt stare out their windows, lamenting the lack of winged beasties feathering the horizon. Luckily they manage to keep themselves busy, coding one of the best audio applications to emerge in recent years. Founded by Monolake, Ableton have tried to provide flexible software which accurately reflects the needs and processes of contemporary electronic music making – and with Live & now Live 2.0, they’ve hit the jackpot.

Droppin’ The Live Sequencer Bomb
Late last year Ableton updated Live to version 2.0, their crankin’ audio sequencer for Mac OS9, Mac OSX, and Windows. Live 1 & 1.5 both offered excellent capacities for live music performance, and were also recognised as fantastic studio tools because the quick and flexible ways ideas could be executed and recorded. Live 2.0 continues refining the performance and jamming features, and adds multitrack recording and editing, making Live even more suitable as a tool to use both in production and performance.

Features
Best bet’d be to browse the online manual for Live 2.0 at ableton.com to get an idea of just how flexible and powerful this baby is. Even better? Try the demo version also available at the site. At a snap, some of Live 2.0’s key features include:
- the addition of multi track recording and editing, advanced automation handling
- DJ-like cross-fading
- easy tempo ‘tapping’ during performance or recording to adjust tempo on the fly
- easy ability to assign most software parameters to midi or your computer keys
- new FX and plug-ins
- presets to save and recall effect settings
- and what Ableton term ‘elastic audio’.

Elastic Audio
Elastic Audio refers to Live 2’s unique ability to treat audio as being totally malleable and to independently control tempo and pitch. This feature allows tempo to be set at anytime during recording, performance or playback. In addition, users can drop in recordings, loops and complete songs that will play in sync direct from disk. Live 2 makes it possible to synchronize loops and recordings of any length at any point in a session or performance. Time stretching is no longer limited to loops but can now be applied to any audio material.

Data Be Smooth
From the seamless way Live accesses files on your machine without missing a beat, through to the way it handles real-time effects, loop control, tempo warping and recording of sounds to be re-used almost immediately, everything happens fluid, everything happens fast. The interface is very well thought out and very effectively allows quick access to files or the programs various ways of treating samples or your arrangements of them over time. When you use Live, it’s easy enough to understand it was developed by experienced computer music makers, but you also get the impression this has been well coded too – it works fast, and it’s yet to crash on me.

Requirements
Mac: – Any G3 or fasta, 256 MB RAM, OS 9.1 or later, also OS X.1.5 or later.

PC: 400 Mhz CPU or fasta, 128 MB RAM, Windows 98/2000/XP
Windows compatible soundcard (preferably with a DirectX or ASIO driver)

And you’ll needing around 399 Euro to grab Live 2 from www.ableton.com. Alternately you can get it from it’s Australian distributors, majormusic.com.au. (02) 9545 3540

Verdict
Completely fun to use straight out of the box ( or modem). Samples are easily looped, matched, mutated, it’s simple and quick to record directly into the Live window and start playing with this material. Easy mapping of parameters or samples to your keys, means for easily customisable and very flexible performance. Great for jamming and mutation, great for composition and recording. And it all *really* works. Fun, fun, fun.

See Also:
Ableton Live 7 Suite Review
Ableton Live 6 Review
Ableton Live 4 Review

Most Swiss people are vampires. You can see it by the teethmarks they leave in their cheese. Sinking his fangs well deep into the visualisation of music and the live performance of inter related audio and video, is the krazy kat: Jasch, who relayed these insights from his northern hemisphere rooftop.

Describe Dyad?
Dyad is my duo-collaboration with video-artist Johnny Dekam. Central theme is improvisation with visual and sonic material. We both work within the same paradigm/software: max/msp/nato. This shared syntax for sound and visuals makes communication on several levels possible. Much of the collaboration deals with finding bridges between hearing and seeing. We’ve developed a set of rules describing events and processes and the communication about them via a network link. We’ve been focusing on live-shows, where we roughly know beforehand where we want to go with the material, but improvise all of the treatments and mixing in real time. The big challenge is that there’s no guarantee to hit the right combination of materials at the right moment. But that keeps the thrill in the performances and lets us develop new things from show to show. In a way Dyad is like an improv combo, except that the instruments are silicon-based and the expressions span visual as well as acoustic phenomena.

How do you approach creating for audiovisual performance?
Along two axes: structural and emotional. The structural level deals with form and the shaping of the flow of sounds and images in real-time. The development of personal software-tools is an important part of that, another is using the appropriate hardware to interface with the processes. The emotional level is about atmosphere. All sonic material can project a context and evoke feelings. It’s essential to have at my disposal a large palette of such material and treatments and intimately know it. To me that’s the key to improvising with electronic media, basically feeling the material and be able to expressively apply it. It’s still very much like an instrument that wants to be practised and demands a considerable level of dedication. The preparation-effort oscillates between creating and refining the (soft and hard) tools and collecting and organizing new materials and processes to work with. It sounds paradoxical that the time spent programming and researching tools and materials is directly linked to the level of intuitive control. But it’s the only way to reach a state without thinking about the processes and control. The real test can only be in performance, when all elements collide and hopefully merge.

What interesting issues come up with AV performance and composition?
The crucial issue is time. Composition is thinking about structure and sound by organizing it in time, working in a detached sphere outside of time where decisions can be examined and revoked. AV-performances happen in actual, ‘forward-running’ time. The experience of composition does help in perceiving structure and temporal evolution in the moment, but doesn’t tell how to act and react to the situation. Intuition is the key, the non-linear access so to speak, to the past experiences without the need of analytical thought. Improvisation is tapping into the experience-base formed through perceiving, performing and composing. AV-performances are unique in that the shaping of visual and sonic structures happens simultaneously with a high degree of flexibility. Composition for the visual and the sonic media do have a lot in common, but there are also rules of perception based on disparate physiological phenomena: the ear, for example reacts differently to dense layering than the eye. Improvising in a open and undefined visual and sonic context demands a high degree of awareness both from audience and performer.

How do you try to transcend the limitations of laptop based performance?
By moving away from it. By finding ways to give back meaning to gesture and physical presence. Using sensors and controllers away from the typewriter-interface helps play the machine like an instrument. Projecting presence with physical action rather than thought and click.

What was your role in the development of the AV software, VDMX?
small, actually marginal, since jdk did all the coding himself. my visible contribution to VDMX2 was a small interface-hack. conceptually of course a lot of the lfo-vfo ideas and routing architecture were developed in parallel in my sound-tools and vdmx. Many ideas developed in common between me and jdk stemming from performance-experiences were filtered into and implemented in VDMX.

What software interests you at the moment & why?
Max/msp with it’s growing set of visual extensions: nato/jitter/softVNS and my own. I’m also following with interest the development of Pure Data, a cousin of max/msp on linux/windows/ and OS X.

What software would you like to develop?
More advanced and powerful 3D-sound and 3D-visual improv-tools, auto-generative and autonomous sound and visual architectures.

Current/ future projects?
Working on ‘codespace’ – a system for abstract 3D-graphics and sound in realtime. I’ve been doing shows and developing software-pieces with abstract 3D-drawing and sound control, integrating ideas from generative arts and minimalist electronic music with the realtime aspects of improvised performances. www.kat.ch/jasch/codespace.html Laying down tracks for a CD release of my material.
Future projects include a feature length DVD with dyad, development of a full surround projection system and immersive sound/visual installation and a lot of hardware development in the field of wearable interfaces for gestural expression. http://www.kat.ch/jasch

Sheeeeeeyat, how much fun was Gulf War news footage? Delivered to be sure, from one of the sides at war, but at least the US made it entertaining. Apparently seeing human casualties of war in Vietnam footage changed too many opinions about that war, and so Gulf-viewers got missile-cam. And thanks to www.americasarmy.com, today we’ve got a computer game to play.

www.americasarmy.com
Why bother with one of the huge range of Osama Bin Laden game-clones available at google, when you could be shooting terrorists in a computer game made by the US army themselves??!! Players can undergo basic training and fight in 10 multiplayer missions, including one to defend an Alaskan pipeline. Now available for download, and soon to be packaged with popular game magazines and in Army recruitment centres, ‘America’s Army’ not only let’s you hunt terrorists but also doubles as a recruitment tool.

“With this game we hope to educate young Americans and present them with a realistic, engaging view of today’s modern Army and its opportunities,” said Lt. Col. Casey Wardynski. Stay tuned – On 25 July, they’ll release the first of many updates, U.S. Army Sniper School.

Rambo Vs Osama
Post S11, the Pentagon tracked down several Hollywood screenwriters including Steve de Souza ( Die Hard ), to discuss ‘left-field, off-the-wall ideas’ about America’s war. The man they should’ve been speaking to, Sylvester Stallone, is reportedly working on a script for Rambo IV which sees him kicking some Taliban Butt (TB).

Arnie For President
While Ronald Reagan may have seen merit in the Rambo movies, like Sylvester, he was an actor. Politics these days needs more muscle, such as beefy ex-wrestler Jesse Ventura, a currently elected US Governor. Ain’t no finer branded beef than Mr. Schwarzenegger though, and rumours persist that he is preppin his way to the White House. Watch this space.

The War On Terrorism
” If they do it it’s terrorism, if we do it, it’s fighting for freedom,” said a U.S. Ambassador in Central America in the 1980s, when asked to explain how U.S. actions such as the mining of Nicaragua’s harbors and bombing of airports, differed from the acts of terrorism that the U.S. condemned around the world.

Since World War II, the United States has dropped bombs on 23 countries. These include: Korea 1950-53, China 1950-53, Indonesia 1958, Cuba 1959- 60, Congo 1964, Laos 1964-73, Vietnam 1961-73, Cambodia 1969-70, Guatemala 1967-69, Grenada 1983, Lebanon 1984, Libya 1986, El Salvador 1980s, Nicaragua 1980s, Panama 1989, Iraq 1991-1999, Sudan 1998, Afghanistan 1998, and Yugoslavia 1999, including Civilian targets during the Gulf war, Vietnam, Panama, Philippines, Korea, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 100,000 Iraqis died in the Gulf War and the suffering continues. 6,000 Iraqi children die every month from hunger and disease – the same number as died in the attacks on the WTC and Pentagon.

Beyond ants born on a merry-go-round, beyond yourself being born on the back of a galloping horse, lies the question of whether you choose to be born – or if it just happens to you. Not sure which side of that fence long-time pedaller and tech-nomad Steven Roberts sits. As you can see at www.microship.com, he’s certainly mobile though.

How hard was your transition to becoming nomadic?
Pretty easy; Central Ohio inspires long-distance travel. As this coincided with my somewhat antisocial desire to combine all my passions into a lifestyle (which can be a bit rough on relationships), the pre-launch phase was 6 months of exuberant stress. Departure was something of a relief, and since I actually *moved* to the bicycle, there was no easy way to quit when my knees hurt. After a while, the road became home… or, more accurately, the Network did, and I spent my time wandering around my huge neighborhood, dropping in on friends.

Why did u choose a recumbent bicycle, instead of say a skateboard?
I don’t like pain.

What are some of the benefits / pitfalls of being a tech-nomad?
Well, when you’re a technomad, your physical location is irrelevant. These days, that’s a pretty easy concept to grasp, since a growing percentage of the population more or less “lives” online anyway, but back then it was a bit of a shock to people. A technomadic lifestyle is immensely liberating, of course, though it’s hard to accumulate vast quantities of stuff.

Presume u must meet many online friends while travelling. Do many of them join you for a while on the road?
In the bike era, it seemed to be a sort of all-or-none situation: I did the first 10,000 miles solo (with occasional friends joining me for a day or two). The next 6,000 was with a girlfriend, then the last little
trip with BEHEMOTH was more or less solo but for an unforgettable on-the-road 3-week romance.

I am approaching the Microship project quite differently. Two boats (canoe-based amphibian pedal/solar/sail micro-trimarans) are under development here in the lab, but the plan is to travel as a technomadic flotilla of 4-8 travelers, with other nomads joining the group for varying periods over the 2+ year expedition. We are building the wireless network and other toolsets to accommodate a
variable number of participants in the community.

Strangest encounter u’v had on the road / waters?
The band of convicts in the woods who plied me with pastries from a truck wreck is right up there…

Why a solar powered linux server on a boat?
Well, how else would I manage pier-to-pier networking? Solar because I don’t have a big diesel engine to crank up whenever I need power, and Linux because it’s wonderful what you can do with commodity
hardware when you install a decent operating system. Besides, the open source community is a rich resource of clever people who like to build interesting tools. (My personal productivity machine is a Macintosh 14″ iBook running OS X.)

What sort of environmental data-collection are you doing in your expedition around North American waterways?
I’m collecting dozens of time- and location-stamped telemetry channels, streaming them to a publicly accessible server, and publishing all the tools and protocols with the hope of inducing other travellers to do likewise. Some of this is purely pragmatic (system diagnostics and the like), but the real goal is creating a huge amorphous archive of environmental data. Think of it as corporate urinalysis. In the
current political climate, it’s more important than ever for us to use our technology to expose environmental abuses and keep people suspicious. That’s not the central theme of the expedition, though: I’m actually doing this for fun.

How nomadic was your partner b4 u coaxed her to join u travelling?
Well, the partner you are probably referring to split in December… a 10-year development project is rough on relationships. There is a position vacant…

What would bring u back to the city?
Hmmmm. Free symmetrical broadband? A geek commune? Actually, it would be very hard to get me back to the city… my development lab is on a forested island in Puget Sound, and I only make it to Seattle about twice a year. I like calm places, one of the reasons I’ve migrated from road to water.

The best 3 pieces of hard earned advice you�d give someone wanting to become a pedalling nomad?
1. If you think too much about where you’re going, you’ll lose respect for where you are.
2. The greatest risk of all is taking no risk.
3. Don’t underestimate the importance of your hospitality database.

Future plans?
I’m currently working on a book about the Microship project for O’Reilly & Associates, and expect to launch the expedition in the Spring of 2003. I welcome flotilla participants, project volunteers, and other input… see http://www.microship.com/latestnews/live.html for a new photo and short text update almost every day.

Blogging. It started as web-logging – a convenient way of recording your daily trawl through web esoterica and current affairs for others to see. Now all manner of news sites, embarrassing online diaries and gossip sites are using blogs of sorts to keep their site freshly updated.

Just Another Buzzword
Well yeah, of course it is. Web-critters do love to add new bookmarks in their vocab. But give blogs a chance? For starters, ‘Blog’ sticks a little better than ‘frequently updated personal commentary’. The word has also become the glue of sorts for a whole treasure of sharply written, informative, often hilarious and mostly daily updating website authors. Exploring only a few of the following blogs will quickly show you just how interwoven their links can be, and the extent to which people are banding together around the concept of the ‘blog’.

Do It Yourself
Probably the best thing about a ‘blog’ is that it facilitates very easy online publishing and continual updating. A thriving collection of online software allows you to create and maintain your own website merely by visiting a particular webpage and typing in your new entry and sending it off. Voila. Your website now has a new commentary pushed to the top of your page for all to read. www.blogger.com is one of the more prominent offerings, although for a thorough listing of blogging tools, u needs to be chekkin:
www.lights.com/weblogs/tools.html & for blognews – http://blogdex.media.mit.edu

Cream of Da Blogs?
Like beer, taste in a blog is a personal thing. Some though have floated to wider recognition within the blogger community, even flirted with earning an income for their authors. Cult bloggers include Metafilter, milkandcookies, Memepool, fuckedcompany.com and Boingboing.net, but while their relentless delivery of weird to profound bounty impresses the socks off me, my barefeet do prefer to be tickled by some of the more offbeat blogs you can find in the side caverns linked by these or other blogs.

Guess What The Date Project is?
http://thedateproject.blogspot.com/
One computer types online diary of his attempts to get a girlfriend. On Saturday, June 29, 2002 he writes – ‘K’ and I have gone out a few times more, things are getting serious and continue to look promising. Of course, the journey is often more important than the destination, and this romantically entrepreneurial coder wants to keep going. “The introverted side of myself enjoyed the challenge of having to start three new conversations a day and go out to meet people”. See? Rivetting, isn’t it? Tha boy wants to keep these social experiments up though, so maybe keep your blog dial tuned for how this will affect him and ‘k’.

A Popular Blog
www.metafilter.com deals tha juice nicely, with a wide assortment of unusual stories and links. Catching my eye halfway down the page was their link to another blog ‘Supermodels Are Lonelier Than You Think!’, which combines ‘two of the best things in the world, blogs and beautiful women’, giving all manner of weird model related stories and updates. Clicking through to this blog, www.saltyt.com, showed them proudly noting their link from metafilter and commenting on an extra 16,000 visitors in the day since it was added.

NonBloggers
Ok, just gotta add – to anyone with a sampler, do chek www.CelebrityPrankCalls.com and please – run riot.

Network gamers are breeding. Slowly, tense laughter and twitchy nervous systems are spreading throughout our inner-cities. Perhaps you have already been claimed. How long since your last game of “Counter-Strike”? Did you notice ‘Velvet-Strike’ on the walls, ceiling or floor? Anne Marie from opensorcery.net is responsible for this joystick war on the war on terrorism. You are welcome to join her.

Why spray paint grafitti inside a computer game?
Using the built-in graffiti function that comes with all half-life mods was a good way to propogate our messages.

What sort of responses have u had from Counter-Strike gamers?
Some long involved responses from people who really thought about what we were doing. A number of creepy and sometimes hilarious hate mail: woman-haters, gay haters, military pro-american patriots, a couple right wing pro israeli american jews, and gamers angry we intruded on their normal game play environment. We seem to have pissed off the 14 year old CS game playing boys, judging by their spelling. Spammers keep bogging down our discussion forum and calling us gay faggots.

Have many people submitted their own “spray-paints” relating to this theme?
Presently there’s about 24 sprays by 9 different authors including some by Chris Burke, who made textures for the retail version of Counter-Strike. And at least one from Australia – by Rebecca Cannon from selectparks.net.

What other game modifications have inspired you?
Joan Leandre’s flight sim mod that he’d put aside due to sep-11 shock. That piece was recently finished and shown at the Moscow art software show “read-me” (He has a beautiful approach to modifying games while reusing original movement algorithms.) http://www.retroyou.org/retroyou_g_nosltalg/g-nostalg.htm Brody Condon was the major inspiration for the “intervention recipes”. He had done interventions inside Tribes2 and recorded them on video.

And disturbing game-mods?
Brody’s work also disturbs me in a nice way. Pretty virtual blood and gore. It can make you nauseous. Adam Killer is classic. http://www.tmpspace.com/

Why do you think military network games are so popular?
1) The gameplay in Counter-Strike is engaging and complex and exciting, regardless of whether the theme is militaristic or not.
2) Military fetishism is on the rise. The culture of gamers who play counter-strike is increasingly misogynist, homophobic and intolerant. A boys training ground. The intense reaction to our project seems to confirm this ( I thought most people would take Velvet-Strike as a little joke).

What sort of games do you think might succeed them?
I’m not against in-game violence (i often enjoy it). I’m concerned with what game violence is coupled with: militaristic, heterosexist boys clubs in the real life, outside the game, war time environment of the “war on terrorism.” We are also opposed to military fantasy masquerading as “realism”.

Anime Noir in a nutshell?
A_N is an erotic role playing game I co-designed with Melinda Klayman, inspired by Japanese Anime. A_N emphasises social interaction and flirtation with other players. Advancement occurs through seduction. Players navigate the city through a 3-D map and use an action palette of erotic actions on each others’ little naked bodies. At some point we hope to add further levels of increasing complexity. http://www.playskins.com

What attracts you to surreal Japanese erotica and computer generated characters?
The mutability of the characters, the transgression of boundaries. What’s disturbing and tragic in RL is delicious in fantasy life. Bodies morphing into sea creatures, animals genetically mutating into sentient sexy creatures, chemical spills that cause a whole city to mutate. We love our female scientist and cat girl characters. Computer generated and even non-realistic digital 3-D bodies, have a kind of doll-like fetish appeal. There’s also a fetish appeal to flat anime style drawn graphics, which appear in the intro story of Anime Noir.

Had any dreams influenced by the way you use software?
When I’m scripting or debugging code sometimes I have dreams where I spend all night debugging strange dream logic word problems. The words just float in space in front of the world. It’s a little boring and not as satisfying as actually writing script. Sometimes though I have a new solution to try in the morning.

This week I thought I’d delve into the genetic engineered stew we seem to have cookin’ round the globe. And you can fess up if you don’t quite understand what all the fuss is about. Starts with a brief explanatory blurby just for you.

Genetic Engineering: Wassup????
Individual living cells make up all living things from single celled bacteria to complex organisms with billions of cells, like ourselves. Genes control the chemical messages within cells that determine the form and functioning of the cell, the organism’s various organs, and the whole organism.These codes of life consist of four chemical building blocks, arranged in pairs, like the treads of a spiral staircase. Millions of different combinations of the basic chemicals determine the different genetic make up of each kind of organism.

Genetic engineering is a set of techniques and processes for altering these genetic codes. Plants, animals, micro-organisms or even humans, that are different in some way from their natural counterparts, can be engineered. Some examples include: blue roses; research mice containing a human cancer gene; pigs and fish with added genes to grow faster and bigger; and herbicide tolerant crop plants.Changes may be passed on to the off-spring of the engineered organism if its germ (reproductive) cells are altered.
(Adapted from an Australian Conservation Foundation pamphlet )

Alba the Flouro Green Glow in the Dark Rabbit
http://www.ekac.org/gfpbunny.html
‘Designed’ by Eduardo Kac who has a lot of trangenic experiments under his belt, Alba sure is pretty. So she should be. She’s an artwork. Born in February 2000 and brighter green than dishwashing liquid, Alba is actually an albino rabbit with pink eyes. Alba only glows when illuminated with the correct light. When (and only when) illuminated with blue light, she glows with a bright green light. She was created with a synthetic mutation of the original wild-type green fluorescent gene found in the jellyfish Aequorea Victoria.

The Pink Castle Mutants
http://www.sayhi.to/thecastle
Obviously if you want to protest about the growing of some genetically modified crops, you go and maybe do a crop pull and get some media attention. Must be a lot of crop pulls happening in the UK, because these kids seemed to think they’d need to build a flouro pink castle at a farm on top of the genetically modified crops to get media attention. Surprisingly their tactic worked for them and the crops were never properly maintained. The pics alone are worth checking out.

CopyRight Your DNA
http://www.creativetime.org/dnaid/copyright.html
At this point, it seems YOU DO NOT OWN YOUR GENES. That is to say you have no personal authority to prevent your genome (your unique DNA sequence spelled out in genetic code) from being replicated by others for a variety of potential uses. What to do? Download the Genetic Code Copyright certificate. This simple fill-in form offers you a means to proclaim ownership of your individual genetic identity. It is a symbolic gesture of your claim to rights that is not a legally recognized act at this time.

Grow Your Own Opinions
http://www.geneethics.org
Explore the ethics behing genetic engineering in plants and humans.

http://www.geneart.org : ‘See Paradise now on this genetics art stie & Picture the Genetic Revolution with a range of art projects.’

http://www.monsanto.com/
One of the most victimised biotech companies in the world, poor things.

Recently X-hibiting at Melbourne’s Game Trigger X-hibition of computer game inspired art, were the dynamic duo behind www.reconnoitre.net. Rather than spring naked out of a soy cream cake with chicken masks on, Tom Corby & Gavin Bailly chose instead to present one of their popular Uk creations: Gameboy_ultraF_uk.

Can u describe Gameboy_ultraF_uk?
The project is a renderer of the type you can download to play old arcade games like asteroids. What we’ve done is re-write or modify an open-source gameboy emulator. The changes in the code mean that the rendering of the games is unpredictable.

How’d u mangle the gameboy (emulator)?
Game entities mutate into background and interface elements, or appear as fragments of the games binary code. Memory is blitted into sections of the screen, as the inside of the game seeps to the outside. Variations in the rendering behaviour are triggered by user game play and manipulated by a Cellular Automata ‘metabolism’ giving rise to inter-related rendering symptoms. We call this “bit rot”.

What drives the desire for ‘digital dirt’ ?
To paraphrase filmmaker Robert Whitman “we just want to understand what we’re being threaded through.” We tend to work with and against conventions concerning interface, interactivity and productivity in order to highlight, how software/code hugely affects the way we access and exchange information and thus perceive a highly mediated world. Software code isn’t neutral, it’s socially formed, it’s production is a ripe area for artists to colonise.

What is Gameboy_ultraF_uk like to play with?
Obviously it problematises the playing of the game as it deconstructs the interface, foregrounding the fact that the games are ultimately made up of code and that the interface is a site of language. In this sense it’s fundamentally anti-immersive, as it denies the transparency of the interface (the supposed goal of “good” interface design).

U.V made your own browser too. Why?
Reconnoitre (1998) is a 3D browser that performs a kind of “cut-up” technique to the web pages loaded into it. It explores alternative metaphors for describing/ navigating the net. Rather than present the web as a homogenised, corporate and over designed “McWeb”, it re-purposes the information it finds to highlight the net’s hidden structure, it’s programming languages, links and other protocols… The web is an intricate ecology, a thing of beauty in it’s own right, we thought that should be celebrated.

What inspires u to play with code as an artist?
Understanding code and being able to use it, puts artists in a very powerful position. Being able to code means that you can work at a very deep level. This really opens-up the creative process and allows the generation of new artefacts/ideas/possibilities. You have much more control over what you’re making because you’re not reliant on other people…or programs for that matter. By code, we don’t mean shockwave or flash. Pre-packaged authoring packages like these, can lead to pre-canned work. Flash/shockwave forces you to work within a narrow band of possibilities, i.e. those allowed by the designers of the program.

What attracts you to open source software?
Old fashioned virtues of collaboration and participation as opposed to corporate obsessions with control and the implementation of closed proprietary systems (Flash/Shockwave). It’s highly political, it’s visionary and very exciting. Strictly speaking gameboy_ultraF_uk is “Free Software” and falls under”copyleft”. Everyone has permission to run the program, or copy and, modify the code. They can distribute it in any manner they like but don’t have permission to add restrictions of their own. Everyone benefits, as the code is freely available in all its versions.

Information wants to be free, but artists, musicians and coders want to be fed. How do you see the next generation of creatives being fed?
For painters, film makers, musicians it’s getting tougher. Very few artists actually make a living from their work. The new generation of artists who code, are in a unique position, in that they have transferable and highly lucrative skills……you really shouldn’t have any trouble getting work to fund your practice. For everyone else I’m afraid it’s the same old story of struggle and fitting in studio time around (generally) badly paid jobs….I guess we’re lucky we can code.

Your advice for wannabe artist-coders?
Don’t disappear into the black hole of programming, read lots, go to exhibitions, take plenty of exercise and don’t forget to get out to see your mates!

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 x 480 clips. 320 x 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 x 480 clips. 320 x 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.