This week, no small task – rewiring the greatest delete key of them all. An attempted reanimation of debates about extinction. And in the face of such a large beast swooping down on us, all we can hope for today is a work in progress, but at least, let us hope, this can be a kind of rewritable excursion. An extinction list then, of beings, machines and hybrid combinations.

Cute & Pretty Animals
These are actually called ‘emblem species’ by some scientists, referring to the ways eco-lobbyists use cuties to appeal to the general public’s heart strings whilst aiming to conserve larger ecologies. This means that while koalas and dolphins are hanging in there ok ( well not all dolphins), plenty of uglier animals with their own important roles to play within the eco-system, are getting shafted. Sometimes the handsome ones have to take it on the chin too, such as the last Tasmanian tiger, who died alone in captivity in 1936. There’s a preserved tassie tiger foetus in the Hobart museum, and they’re hoping to recreate one by 2010 with DNA samples. While such Jurassic Park schemes are fascinating, The WWF ( not the wrestlers) put it bluntly: “At present rates of extinction , as many as 20% of the world’s 7-15 million species could be gone in the next 30 years.”

The Military Industrial Entertainment Complex
Presumably CDs & DVDs will be eventually relegated to the dustbins of history, given tech+media acceleration of late. Maybe they’ll find some retro respect and delayed redundance, who knows? A more interesting query: how long will the current systems set up to distribute these discs last, before caving in on themselves? Is Mp3 really the new radio? DivX the new cinema? Does this mean our grandkids’ll ask – what’s a record company? What’s a video rental store? There’s too much money in them there hills, for the data networks to miss out on developing, so although the methods of distribution and pie-slicing are in the midst of giant transitions, and change inevitable, there’ll undoubtedly remain pie slicers of some sort for the foreseeable future.

Even More Species
5 -10 million African elephants existed in 1930. Around half a million remained when they were added to the international list of the most endangered species in 1989. 1900 saw about 100,000 cheetah worldwide – present estimates place their number at 10,000 -15,000 with about one tenth of those living in captivity. Of the dozens of species of rhino that once roamed the earth, only 5 now exist. Where there were once over 100,000 black rhinos on the plains of Africa, there are now only 2,707 on the entire continent. Many more number games available online of course, but they all boil down to the same thing : we are wiping out more species than any time since the dinosaurs disappeared, neither a healthy or smart practice.

Music Containing Distorted Guitars
Is unlikely to disappear anytime before the mass media regime collapses, but there are other more interesting considerations for the guitar. Reanimating the exquisitely quirky corpse of everybody’s secretly favourite band, might be possible if we can say, somehow extract juice from recordings the Pixies have left behind. Some future maths head after anally analysing these discs, could concoct a series of algorhythms for producing endless genetic variations of music the Pixies might’ve made. Presumably with a lame filter to dramatically reduce it’s quality after 10 albums. For now, we can only face the music – the Pixies are gone. Kaput. Vamoosh. Extinguished. No more chances to witness live, Frank Black croon/ creak / rasp / threaten like a sad punk :

“I smeehhll smoooke that comes from a gun named extinction”.

Of course, where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

Fanning the Flames
As members of the species most effectively extinguishing others, it’s a mighty ripe time for behaviour modifcation. Scientists and technologists can also save us. All they have to do to turn back the tide of extinction, is invent a machine which stops crucial habitat destruction, limits human population growth, evens out our distribution of goods and foods, our wealth, and curbs human greed. The internet can be the loudspeaker on such a machine.

Arm wrestling with ghost limbs
Ghost limbs are what you get, when say an Afghanistani landmine claims one of yours and a lingering sensation sometimes convinces you that you really still have all limbs, really you do. This phenomenon really exists too, really it does. Some nervous system cache perhaps? At any rate, arm wrestling with ghost limbs is yet to exist, and thus is at no risk of going extinct. Never mind.

Humans?

If DVDs were migratory birds, then we should reasonably expect there’d be all manner of experimental audiovisual discs gliding across the skies by now, showing no respect to national borders and glistening in and out of our lives. Why isn’t this the case? Leaving aside the horrendous distribution splicing of the globe into ‘regions’, which stops DVDs from one region playing in another, there seems to be a lack of creative harnessing of the DVD’s technical potential. For the most part we get feature films with added behind the scene commentaries, but thankfully the likes of the Cinematic Orchestra are slowly swelling the alt.dvd shelf.

Orchestral Manouevres in the Dark
The ever-stealthy Ninja Tune cats have long been enamoured by the flickering of lights. Knowing the label was founded by av pioneers ColdCut probably explains their enthusiasm for shifting the territory of album releases to include films with soundtracks, much audiovisual clippery, and even software to splice it up. Neotropic, Funky Porcini & Hexstatic have all delivered tasty av in recent years, and you can now add The Cinematic Orchestra to that list – with their just released ‘Man with a Movie Camera’ DeeVeeDee.

Dziga Dziga Dziga
While that sorta reads like someone transcribing an early scratch record, it does in fact allude to the infamous director behind the 1929 Soviet celluloid classic, The Man with a Movie Camera, a film which uses radical editing techniques and cinematic pyrotechnics to portray a typical day in Moscow from dawn to dusk. Dziga Vertov was part of the Kino Eye movement of Soviet film-makers who wanted to create cinema different to literature or theatre, an artform that transformed our perspectives of the everyday with the unique capacity of the camera and technique to show us the world anew. To create a cinema that had its own “rhythm, one lifted from nowhere else, and we find it in the movements of things.” And Dziga Dziga Dziga ( whok whok whoooook ) especially loved to explore the ways technology and the mechanical enhanced our lives, extending our vision by strapping his camera in all manner of weird places to take our eyes where they had not been before – such as the underside of moving trains etc etc.

Red Curtains Then
In late 1999, Ol Cinematic J Swinscoe was asked by the Portuguese festival organisers if the band wanted to score a soundtrack to Dziga Dziga’s movie, and the seeds were sown for a 21st century soundtrack to what has become a landmark film. Quite an undertaking, and one with a certain responsibility to do it justice. Where perhaps in the spirit of Dziga Dziga zigzag, we might expect the soundtrackers to explore the use of machines to take our ears someplace new. And indeed, the laid back jazzy swerve of the Cinematic Rock Opera is imbued with a restrained amount of machinic manipulated sound. They’ve been performing it live in cinemas to rave reviews everywhere, and the disc also includes a few snippets of these performances which look and sound a treat indeed. the Disc is great value though – bringing a classic film with soundtrack worth listening to by itself, interviews, edited remixes of the movie, various live grabs, super8 versions and biographies etc. Check it out thru ninjatune.net

Homegrown digital animation is becoming easier and easier to implement – from using flash to create Southpark style cut-out animation, through to the home computer’s growing range of image manipulation & VJ tools. See for yourself at the showcase of computer assisted animations within the Melbourne International Animation Festival (Jun 24-29 ) ( later repeated in Sydney). Or tear up the screen, throw out the traditional rule book, and animate some of your own ideas – like Lindsay Cox, who with Victor Holder, co-directed ‘S-Crash’ – an Australian hi-light of the M.I.A.F.:

Your animation in a nutshell, Lindsay ?
An ambitious DJ plays loud beats to the annoyance of his irritable neighbors : let the battles commence – the DJ uses sampling technology to mix his neighbours complaints into an ever louder and aggressive soundtrack. Co-directors – Lindsay Cox & Victor Holder. Sound by Marco Biasion, Lindsay & Victor.

What processes did you go through to make it?
S-crash began as a white gloves entry – meaning it was planned, and shot in one weekend. That deadline forced us to think of ways to convey a story using the simplest and quickest of animation techniques. Using 16mm and Black & White reversal film with an intervalometer advancing the frame every 2 seconds we were able to improvise in very slow motion much of the action. We’d stop the camera often to talk of the next section but many times we’d talk about what was happening as we did it. Using our pixillated silhouettes allowed for a margin of error also – although we had no monitor we’d look often look sideways to make sure the image was clear enough. After telecine transfer (thanks Iloura!) the film was tailor cut for the Berlin Short Film festival section called ‘3 minute quickies’ to the theme of ‘neighbors’. The sound was recorded and the images tweaked in After Effects to roughly fit the tracks. Foley was quickly added. Total production time was no more than 5 days. The name S-crash came via co-director Victor Holder, who suggested ‘Scratch’ but his Venezuelan accent made it sound more like ’s-crash’. The distorted name suits the remix idea so it stuck. It was also 4am at the time.

Employment & the animator – do they mix well?
There are so many big players out there yet some people fall between the cracks. I mean there are many talented people out there working other jobs because they don’t fit the commercial profile. It’s a tough call to keep on at it.

What animation software interests you ?
I mainly use After Effects, Photoshop and Illustrator. I find the control over physical time and space within After Effects quite amazing. It’s a powerful tool that can help you beat TV at its own game.

Flash is lower down the list – I am not a 2D animator but it does have its uses for me (in conjunction with a million fonts). You can’t beat zero render time.

3D CG is still a black cave/hole that sucks your life in for me. Its better suited to team production than the forms of animation I follow at present. However, having used 3d Max in the past I know something about CG and would like to adapt those skills to Maya in the future if a project involving it comes up.

Your ideal animation set-up?
A large studio space with drive in access, high ceilings, blackout curtains, pro lighting systems, a high end digital still camera, G4 laptop, fast PC, green screen, fast internet connection, fully equipped workshop with all tools. Lots of the friendly kindly animators and friends that live in Melbourne and a great kitchen and lounge area to do nothing but eat and talk about animation in.

What intrigues about your next animation project?
It’s a puppet animation in which I will be using video assist for the first time (for a whole film) so I am expecting to learn so much more about stop motion animation as opposed to working ‘blind’. That and the use of dynamic animatics knocked up in After effects may speed things up about one microsecond.

What advice would you give to somebody starting animation today?
Be aware that concepts and ideas are like gold in the often jaded ‘industry’ – don’t give them away freely – my concept for a ultra short series for one Melbourne CG company is now past its 50th episode, without any credit.

The techniques used in animation production are many and varied and at times its easy to compare yourself unfavourably to ‘experts’ but content that makes people watch and react is what its all about. Follow what you love and the money will come.

S-Crash is being screened as part of the Melbourne International Animation Festival (‘95 films from 24 countries, June 24?29 @ ACMI ) – and later at the Sydney equivalent. Other MIAF hi-lights include a Betty Boop retro, animated homages to painters, and a focus on Paul Driessen & Czech Republic animators.

Steadily growing a reputation in the softsynth (software based synthesiser) world is Absynth by Native Instruments, now available for mac and PC. Famous for his other-worldy compositions and claiming to be from outer space, Sun Ra was the greatest jazz cosmonaut from 60’s & 70’s afro-psychedelia. Today, it’s ok to love them both.

The Basics
Absynth has a crazy array of sound-sculpting possibilities, offering easy intuitive control to synthesise sounds, or tweak and customise the extensive presets to get a synth sound you can’t help grinning at.

Sun Ra performed with The Arkestra, and his music was typified by counter melodies, off-key horn barrages, polyrhythms, titanic organ and synthesizer solos, dissonant note clusters, and a giant cosmic tongue in his cheek.

Features
Absynth can be used as a stand alone app, or as a VST plug-in, allowing it to be used inside an app such as Cubase. Absynth has a huge range of presets, delivering you diverse and very customisable textured or rhythmic sounds to use with a synthesiser. Some of these presets are even named after the artists they’re inspired by, such atom heart, mouse on mars, or autechre, but of course the software’s greater merits is in it’s capacity to radically tweak these presets or to create your own.

Sun Ra fused a very strange melding of jazz, Egyptology, primitive electronics, numerology, color theory, intergalactic fascination, and anagrammatic obsession. He recorded around 200 albums and distributed them at gigs and a few choice record stores. They were usually packaged in white sleeves with wild homemade cover art.

Abysnth’s graphical waveform and spectrum editors allow for fantastic real-time and varied control of sound, as well as oscillators, filters, ring modulators, Fm synthesis, an envelope function generator for tempo-based rhythms and nearly every parameter can be modulated by MIDI controllers, aftertouch, velocuty and note number.

Sun Ra and his Arkestra staged incredible live concerts with a strong visual presence that was equal part ancient Egypt and NASA. He staged at least three 100 piece concerts, including a memorable one at the pyramids in Egypt. Said Sun Ra “There’s five billion people on this planet, all out of tune. I’ve got to raise their consciousness.”

System Requirements
Absynth: Mac – PowerPC 300 / 64 MB RAM as stand-alone application / 128 MB RAM if used with other programs / MacOS 8.6 or higher. Has just been released for PC but couldn’t find system requirements online for PC. Native-Instruments like email tho.

Sun Ra, 1956: “In tomorrow’s world, men will not need artificial instruments such as jets and space ships. In the world of tomorrow, the new man will ‘think’ the place he wants to go, then his mind will take him there.”

In Summary
Absynth: Awesome presets/ very intuitive controls, esp the graphic editors / great performance / great quality of sound and real-time manipulation.

Sun Ra: Leaving a great vinyl legacy, Sun Ra died in 1993. When he was admitted to hospital, he listed his address as “Saturn.”

Absynth: www.native-instruments.com
Sun Ra: www.holeworld.com/stellar.html
Absinthe (Includes. recipe): www.erowid.org/chemicals/absinthe/absinthe.shtml