Ever wondered how the Casio MT-54 keyboard saved the universe? The ever enigmatic Casionova has the dirt. Catch him and his band AutoChord {CasioTony and Ms Cassie O} and you’ll learn this and more, with their hilarious performed history of Casio keyboards.
Now playing at the Melbourne Fringe Festival, someday soon near you.

DH - digital horn – a sax with a speaker in the bell!

With so much old gear, a lot can go wrong. Worst gig disaster?
A gig isn’t a gig without a keyboard going down, worst has been accidently knocking a volume control and blowing up a really big PA. My DG guitar caught on fire once but alas it wasn’t on stage!
Worst gigs are usually because of vile promoters, I have had the plug pulled on me twelve times!

And so much can go just right. Gig magic 4 Casionova?
Would have to be playing straight after Miss Kitten and the Hacker at the Prince – so much pressure but the crowd was lovely and it is impossible to imagine how cool old home keyboards through an enormous PA can be! Though to be perfectly honest it was in Helsinki in 2001, but that was more after the gig…

What can u tell us about rumours that involving nails and tables at Industrial night clubs?
I used to do freak shows, you know sticking ones penis in a mousetrap, that kinda thing. In the past I have made people gross out and a lot of people laugh, now the challenge is to create things that are beautiful and to get people dancing. Meanwhile I’m happy for people to giggle at CasioNova’s obsessions.

And come on, what drives you crazy about Casios?
Flat batteries.

Why and how should someone buy your latest CD?
I require a fare to Helsinki to challenge a fellow to a duel for the hand of a fair maiden and then I will live happily ever after. Also so the listener can marvel at how a bunch of home keyboards in the hands of nincompoop can actually sound pretty damn ok. Buy off me for $10, go to the website:
www.spatula-international.com.

Fringe Gig-Plug goes here:
My show is cooler than you think it could be.
Bar Open, Brunswick St, Fitzroy 9:20 PM Oct 9,10,11

Extravagant feather displays are the lure of many a bird, while other winged-ones rely on the timbre of their voices, the qualities of their song. Western Australia’s most famous bird, the emu however, is a really, really fast runner. Much faster than Ol’ Roly Skender, but then his kicking audiovisual butt over in Perth is probably as good an evolutionary strategy as any. No need to run when you can make music and cinema out of Bob Hawke, bicycle bells, emus themselves, and the homo-eroticism latent within aussie rules. A quite cool audio+video-CD is available for the non-believers through www.rawbone.tv, and Roly heads East for Electrofringe in October.

How’s the Perth multimedia massive these days?
Perth definitely has a growing scene in terms of VJs and Audiovisuals but it’s still pretty small. Crew like the Semikazi Collective are some of the only people getting it out there at the moment with events such as the recent AV showcase as part of the Kiss my WAMi Festival.

And London & Paris? How’d you end up gigging there?
I went on a 7 week pilgrimage to try and find out where the action is I suppose. I was lucky to meet some nice people that ran clubs in Paris that were putting on AV/film nights and using the term ‘micro-cinema’ which really appealed to me. In the UK I stayed with the VJamm programmers in Brighton who really dug my stuff and introduced me to Matt Black (Coldcut/Ninja Tune) in London, plus there was a night called Vectors I played at which is run by a Canadian guy I met on the net. London has a very healthy AV scene but you still have to know where to look.

Breakin’ it down – what are the live audiovisual processes for the Rawbone Duo?
I play pre-rendered AV sequences off laptop and use VJamm to drop in samples and mess around with effects while Jo19 beatmixes with an 808, sh-101, live congas and percussion.

How do you work together composing and songwriting across sound and video?
I wrote most of the older stuff myself, but since I’ve been working with Jo19 we also have an act called The Rawbone Trio which is more collaborative. We also have a great double bass player called Pete Jeavons and it’s more of a downbeat vocal vibe. I’m still doing the video side of things myself but we’re always throwing different ideas at eachother. The Rawbone Trio is a live act and is my main focus at the moment. We’ve only done 2 shows but the audience response has been fantastic.

What do you like / dislike about your live flexibility with AV material?
I like creating stuff on the fly / I dislike people thinking I’m a DJ. It’s sometimes tough for electronic musicians to come to terms with the fact that no one gives a fuck if they’re performing live or just playing a CD or record, so to me electronic music ‘performance’ is really more like a ‘presentation’ in a lot of cases.

Electronic musicians gigging live you’ve enjoyed?
Definitely Coldcut because of the visual aspect, when I saw Biftek a couple of years ago they had a great live energy and the Kruder & Dorfmeister show this year was also a highlight.

What’s good & bad about video when people are dancing?
Depending on the positioning of screens it can be bad for your neck. Otherwise I just see lots of screens as an elaborate light show which is all good.

An ideal Rawbone performance venue would be?
An outdoor cinema on a beautiful night with the audience surrounded by huge screens on every side.

What have you planned for your Electrofringe performance?
I’ll be speaking on a panel and discussing the process, why I do what I do and how political it is (or isn’t). I’m not sure if I’ll be performing yet. ( see www.electrofringe.org for more details )

When future archaeologists try to restitch the development of the VJ, chances are an arkaos logo will feature prominently in their research. The Arkaos VJ software has been a forerunner for years, staking out new ground and becoming a tool of choice for live video artists. This gained ground has gradually turned into a swampy zone in recent years as a murky mix of VJ programs have emerged and the prospect of live video manipulation on computers has become ever more feasible. And so the biggest Arkaos upgrade in years is a bit of an event.

Nuts N Bolts
Under the bonnet – VJ 3.0 is still a souped up triggering machine. Whether arkaosweb.jpgactivated by key presses, mouse movement, midi keyboard or audio input, VJ 3.0 is essentially an app for triggering clips or images. It works by assigning clips and/or effects from your collection to keys on your computer keyboard or a mid keyboard. There’s an actual image of a keyboard on your screen for you to drag and drop these clips onto whichever keys you want, and the option of adding effects on the same key. Once you fill a keyboard, you can start on another, and keep going until you have 128 of them, then switch between keyboards as you wish when playing. This much hasn’t changed, it’s still the same solid program – now with 32-bit colours.

New Juice
Given that effects in most video editing programs mean rendering your clip to see what the effect looks like, film students are invariably impressed when they see that the effects within Arkaos VJ run real-time. Press a clip, apply an effect and it happens straight away to that clip, and the effect parameters can be adjusted by mouse or MIDI keyboard control. Version 3 has 7 new effects and about 50-60 overall – which vary in quality / tackiness, ranging from wacky, kooky, cheesy, zany through to smoother and very useful – eg various fades, blurs and pixellations. This isn’t where the significant improvements in the software lie though.

Live Camera Input
Got a firewire port + mini-dv cam? Or a webcam + usb port? Vj 3 can now take in feeds from either of these, or even both at once. I expected this to have a typically low frame rate, but it works great and suffers only a tiny time lag. Rather than live feeds, I like to play mixed down tapes through the camera that can be switched to, or layered over at any point with a keypress. You can also assign the camera to several different keys, with varied effects or masked and layering on each, and cut rapidly between each effected camera feed without the software pretty much missing a beat.

Chroma Keying & Layer Modes
Chroma keying creates transparent areas from pixels with the same colour ,and luma keying makes transparent all pixels of a specified brightness or luminosity. Which is great news if you want to then layer other colours or footage into those areas, and make like the Greatest American hero against a wobbly sky. And yes, both chroma and luma keying now come with VJ 3.0, which can allow for playful compositing or mash-ups. I prefer the new transfer modes – which layer video feeds on top of each other in a variety of ways that work like photoshop’s add or multiply, screen or burn. Not as much gritty edges, although the VJ keying is pretty good.

Udder Features
Like before we get a built-in recorder to create visual remixes which can be recorded to disk and re-used, remixed again – and this can be a cool way to make quick titles for short films, or even to try out various editing ideas. And now the arkaos engine is integratible with any MIDI sequencer (OMS, ReWire, …). Automatic beat-matching technology can synchronise effects or changing between clips. The ability of quicktime to use flash files, means that flash texts let you can display on-screen messages with customizable Flash animations and editable text for on the fly control. VJ 3.0 also brings a little more control over individual clips – by clicking on the key the clip is attached to, each clip can be assigned one of these ‘transfer modes’, and can have it’s speed, screen position and opacity adjusted – whereas in the past a time controlling effect had to be positioned there, and you can now put an effect instead.

System Requirements
299 Euros – or upgrade from 2.0 for 150 Euro.
Fully optimised for Windows XP & Mac OS X, G4 & Pentium II to Pentium IV processors.

Pros
The camera input works a treat and the transfer modes make layering so much less tacky, so more versatile. Hardly ever crashes, and tends to pump out a decent frame rate the whole time.

Cons
Some of the effects are really past their use-by date, and better live time-based control of loops is still on the wishlist.

Verdict
Arkaos VJ 3.0 is rock-solid on os9 and osx and seems to finally have hit it’s stride on PC also. It’s a really solid app that has just gotten a whole lot more versatile. Guesses are now that they’ve jumped to OSX, the next upgrades should come quicker and include even more responsive controls.
Download an arkaos VJ demo today at www.arkaos.net.

See Also : VJ Software round-up

The theory of relativity came to Albert Einstein when he was riding his bicycle, this much we know. Not sure if the cats behind SemiConductor just pedal pixels, but they’ve hit on a winner with their DVD compilation – ‘HiFi-Rise: Sonic Cities From Another Timeline’. Bundling their own short films together with the works of artists, musicians and film-makers, they’ve compiled a quite excellent collection of audiovisual glitchtronics. Below, they speaks, but first more>>

Bout the HiFi-Rise DVD
Browse along to www.semiconductorfilms.org and you can preview most of the clips online, such as the cheery kiddycore dementia of Dat Politics, a quite cool ‘recycled island’ Amon Tobin clip & the ever-up for a remixmash – People Like Us. SemiConductor’s own earthquake films are a highlight – a cut n pastried affair of earthquake stills, vectorised swinging office spaces, and bouncing buildings, all mash.dup in delightfully simple yet striking and unusual ways. Expect lots of scratchy glitches from blunt photoshop knives and pix by peeps with 8-bit goggles on. Comes with a quite lo-fi Dr.Crudescrawl type 3D panoramic interface of buildings, which is great for a while, but it’s maybe a bit too hard to find the clip you want in a hurry as well. You’ll like it anyway.

What were your creative paths into making short films?
It was quite a natural progression. We both come from a fine art background and had previously made large scale installations. We started translating a lot of this language via the computer and developed our own techniques and styles in the form of ‘Sound Films’. In each semiconductor film project we establish a concept that connects the sound and image. Usually with the sound leading the narrative but occasionally the image also.

What tools & processes do you enjoy?
Each idea takes a new process and form which employ different ways of working. We always challenge ourselves and the technology so that it stays fresh and playful. So basically we are always doing something new. We enjoy combining both analogue and digital to create a more hands on approach.

How did the Semiconductor DVD come about, and how has it been received?
Our Hi-Fi Rise DVD release was an attempt for our unique style of Art to be established in the same light as music releases. The experimental electronic music scene has a wide variety of forms and we hoped to tap into that. In some ways we did with many responses from around the world. But it was released in the early days of DVD and there was not an established market for experimental media. The audiences that have positively received it have usually been visual art people with an interest in music.

What were your favourite clips on it?
Its difficult to specify our favourite clips, as they all signify a different progression in our work. Of our guest artists I really enjoy Jeremy Butler and Ben Rivers video for Amon Tobin, its got a really nice pace to it and the sets they built were great, made out of household products such as potent blue cleaning fluids and plastic bits of junk.

What do u see as the technical strengths / creative potential of the DVD platform?
The immediate strengths are obvious, being the capacity. DVD is at an interesting stage where its not so novelty and being used to distribute really interesting experimental films, as an early technology its not out of reach of the DIY DVDer and this is when you get the most interesting releases. I like the idea that people are just into DVD for the medium and that people who wouldn’t normally get to see this sort of work may just come across it.

And the challenges of indie-DVD distribution?
There is no indie DVD distribution yet but there is some interest in the Art book shop circuit where novelty is supreme. But that is a far harder market to penetrate. We released our DVD more as an art object, showing a positive step for people letting go of their work and not being precious about it. We screen our work a lot and of course their was a risk that the distribution of it in this way may reduce interest from festivals etc., in fact it did the opposite!

As a DVD distributor – how do u feel about the global DVD regions?
For indie DVD the whole region thing is irrelevant as it just isn’t introduced to the disk but the whole issue of NTSC / PAL should have been bridged with this format.

What work are you exhibiting at Experimenta’s House of Tomorrow ? (melb X-hibition comin up, see experimenta.org )
We’re showing a fictional landscape that is broken up by sound in its many Internet guises called Domestic E.M.I. (Electro Magnetic Interference). Although the work is offline for the exhibition the online version on our website. www.semiconductorfilms.org will link you to many discoveries found in sound archives around the net. We have created an integrated aural landscape of archives based around a Virtual home.

What do u think of machinima?
( shooting film in vr – eg www.machinima.com )
We saw a presentation of machinima stuff recently and there is definitely a lot of potential there! We have plans for doing some experiments in this area, seeing what can be done with it!

Current projects? Future plans?
For now and the near future we will be developing new online work and performing our live sound and image set around the world.

Where are u when wandering online? Same place as when on the fone, which scientists finally located last week just west of Katoomba, atop a towering hunk of rock. As well as attracting the world’s collective conversational headspaces, the rock was also remarkable for the density of jet black ravens circling it, and the smoky violin billowing up+over. Girl below had mountainbiked to glimpse these shifting shapes, another pilgrimager in search of mutation. Clicked her way to http://meta.am once, home of wonderfully tweaked web experiments. And the molecules that make ‘meta’, typed these replies:

What tools and software do u use 4 your gfx/vid/sound/web/other?
Max / msp / nato / director + various other commercial, share, and freeware apps. whatever is appropriate & available is used. the work determines the software used – not vice-versa.

If software is a flow, what’s the most fluid at the moment?
Human thought. ( can also be the most rigid. )

What attracts u to the generative approach of art-making?
The sense of discovery. i don’t like dictating all the parameters of a project in advance.
having a specific final form in mind. so tedious. i have never ever worked that way. would much rather wander, explore, discover. be surprised. grow and evolve in directions unforseen by myself. would rather grow a building than assemble it brick by brick.

How are you trying to transcend limits of the computer screen?
No fear! i love the digital realm & the internet. the possibilities – the plasticity the nullification of time & physical distance. but ultimately – hardware / software / operating systems / programming languages all of these things are unimportant! i can’t stress that enough.

One should not be intimidated by these things. one should not allow them to govern ones behavior or creativity. they are transient. impermanent. on their way to obsolescence – always. creative drive & vision, transcending your own limitations, that is what is important.

How much do u consider outputting for different mediums / resolutions while making art?
Concerned – but not overly. i try to support as many different platforms / browsers as i can. However, this is art – not commerce. i don’t have to cater to everyones needs & desires & will not compromise my work to do so.

Ever had any software related dreams?
No. i know others who have, however.

What do u see yourself doing in 5 years time?
Growing buildings.

3 Inventions the world needs today?
Organic technology (computers / architecture / vehicles / manufacturing) co-existing with nature instead of replacing it. fully sustainable environmentally friendly sources of energy. anti-violence gun.

Some urls u’d recommend for exploring different creative tools and processes?
the tools are not going to do it for you. there is no magic bullet. all of the software i use can just as easily be used to produce the mundane, or misused – to produce something interesting.

url’s – you’ll just end up looking at all the same links everyone else is influenced by all the same things everyone else is making all the same art as everyone else is. a circular process which is responsible for creating and destroying ‘scenes’ at record speed these days. instead -i would recommend that one looks at and tries a great variety of things with an open mind.

Different forms of art & music from all different cultures & time periods. books, sculpture, architecture, cinema… don’t be overly influenced by any one thing. keep quiet and observe everything around you. ask questions. spend some time alone. think – but don’t think too much. follow your instincts. explore. ( if u do crave web-exploring, check meta’s – jp )

If you’ve long understood the threats from outer space posed to the four elements of hip-hop, then you’re probably well cosy with Q-Bert’s epic intergalactic scratch odyssey Wave Twisters, dreamt from the start as a feature film and finally animated sometime after his album hit the streets.

Me, I’d love to ask Q-Bert about how that whole concept developed and how the plot and musicmaking bounced off each other, what future instalments might be planned, and why American hip-hop is so far behind Aussie hip-hop – I mean they haven’t even recognised skateboarding as the 5th element over there yet. The Wave Twisters movie promoters implied I could interview the animators (who did a great job, as you can sneak at www.wavetwisters-themovie.com) and hence the visual-heavy questions below.

Turns out of course that Q-Bert himself replied ( aye carumbah! ) so all I can suggest is tune into www.djqbert.com if you wanna find out when the scratch master is gonna add phat ollies, grinds and flips to his repertoire.

What sort of processes did u go through to conceive the overall look of the film?
the animators (syd garon and eric henry) met with the artist (dug cunningham) and just messed with his work over one of the songs called “sneak attack,”then from there they said they had something and began to make the whole film in that theme.

Were you happy with the software used?
Of course! I can’t live without pro tools as it’s the music industry’s standard. The animators also say that Adobe’s After Effects was all they needed.

What (imaginary) software would u like to make a sequel with?
The same stuff for me. I don’t know what the animators think though, but I believe they would still use it. Maybe that hardcore expensive cgi stuff for another film!

What would u do differently if making Wave twisters again?
Well, as a musician, definitely a progression in the emotional quality of the music to where different feelings for different scenes can be achieved.

How well do u think the animations and effects have dated?
It still looks great to me. as for what it is, it’s totally supposed to look like that in it’s classic sort of way.

Do any of the Wave Twisters team play with real-time visualization of music?
Not sure, but those guys can do anything.

What further animations have you been involved with?
Nothing but the sequel, and a video game called “frequency” for playstation if that counts.

When does the Wavetwisters computer game come out?
That’s what we’re looking to find out actually

The top 3 albums you|d love to make into films?
mix master mike’s “anti theft device,” d-styles’ “phantazmagorea” and of course my next album whatever that will be called!

PS. I did send a buncha other Qs straight back when I realized who was answering, and if they ever fly back, will tag them here later…. ( 2008 notes – haven’t arrived yet… )

Sitting in a room outlooking the Costa Rica jungle, amongst bugs bigger than his hand, friendly toucans, other crazy bugs and birds, lizards, and ‘weird lifeforms’, Dave the founder of one the most popular live video websites in the whole world, sent back these replies about www.audiovisualizers.com.

How’d the Audiovisualizers site come about, & your own involvement with live video?
In university I explored interactive 3D video/installation, had a gallery showing, then soon found myself at raves doing live A/V mixing. In 1999 the site evolved as a sort of online photo album about my life and interests in video performance art and related fields.

What sort of shifts have you noticed within video since developing the site?
What really interests me is human interface technology for directly controlling the video stream. I think the real shift on the live performance angle, will result in a synchrony of audio, video, laser, and true performance art, navigated by a single person.

What are today’s interesting developments in vidi-yo soft/hard-ware?
The future of VJ software will combine realtime 3D models with texture mapped live and digital video, with integrated video mixing, realtime FX & layering, as well as sound responsive FFT based visuals.

What hardware do you play with?
I was always into electronics from a young age, and took things apart, modified them, built many kooky circuits to bend and twist video every which way. Disregard what people say you can’t do with a technology. Void your warranty, pull something apart and try and decipher how it works, route outputs back into inputs creating electronic fractal loops, and inject and pull off signals anywhere that suits your fancy.

You’ve recently added links for building your own LCD projector – how hard is it?
I made a prototype several years ago, essentially a slide projector with a small colour LCD in place of the slide. It was approximately as bright as a slide projector, although more pixelated than I’d hoped for. I’ve been meaning to put something more professional together, but there’s ample info on the site to allow anyone to put together a decent video projector for under $US300.

Tell us about your VJ Loop exchange?
I figured that it made sense for VJ’s from around the world to share and trade content, being that a VJ from Sydney, Amsterdam and Miami don’t likely infringe in each others market areas. So the CDR Exchange came about, and in the past year I’ve mailed out over 3.5 Terabytes of content on CDR & DVDR, mostly for free. Email me at freecdrs@audiovisualizers.com with your mailing address, and I’ll happily send some off to you.

What’s your favourite live vidi-yo software then (mac /PC) ?
On the PC, my favorite is the original Channel 3 software. On the mac, I mostly burn cdrs/dvdrs, use Final Cut Pro, and run my VJ Loop Server, and can ensure cross platform compatibility. I sell about a dozen or so apps each month ( hard to get and otherwise cool visual performance software), and the profits help subsidize the site.

Some urls with your video work on them?
I have a 300 meg quicktime version of an interactive video at: http://www.audiovisualizers.com/library/dvj_1.htm The file name is psyberflight.mov in the root folder.

Future interests?
I’m really intrigued by esoteric electronic consciousness alteration technology, & hope to integrate it into my performances in the near future. Think of the bass bins on stage…they are TRANSDUCERS. In this case taking an electrical signal and translating it into an acoustic one. Imagine a synthesizer that generates complex waveforms that effect the audio and video but also drive a transducer array, pumping out electromagnetic fields. This may give us the ability to DJ another person’s head if you will. I’ve experimented with forefront technologies for some time now, and although synchronized binaural sound and 3D visuals & lasers are quite amazing, I believe the future of entertainment and consciousness alteration lends itself to the use of bioelectromagnetic neural interfacing technology.

Guilt about my waterproof laptop and daily spa zapping up the coal power, means this solar primer will be the first of an every now and then series of articles about renewable energy. What is the state of a particular technologies development? What can be done with it? How might you integrate it into your life? Where’s it at, sunshine?

Why bother with renewable nrg?
Despite a high general awareness that energy waste is bad, it’s surprising how many people don’t quite make the link between their fingers and say a light switch and the coal power plant it is ultimately connected to, it’s related pollution, the greenhouse effect and global warming.

With an expected population of 9-11 billion people by 2050, and a much, much higher energy consumption in the west, energy is a key issue for carving out a decent future for ourselves this century. More than a few species will be hoping we manage to make a quick transition from fossil fuels to less polluting renewable energy sources such as solar, wind, wave power, or hydroelectrics. Research and development of these technologies, better funding and governments or institutions willing to show some foresight are sorely needed, but we can have roles too in helping develop renewable energy by supporting what is available.

What is solar power?
The energy radiated by the big burning ball energy takes about 93 million miles to get to us, but offers an estimated10,000 times the current global energy demand. Four-fifths of the sun’s energy falls on the sea. The remaining fifth, which falls on land, is still about 2,000 times greater than the total world energy demand. This can be captured using a variety of solar technologies. Passive solar techniques provide heat by conscious design of buildings.

Solar thermal techniques using solar energy to heat water. And the ‘Photovoltaic effect’ generates electricity from sunlight, thanks to silicon – the second most abundant element on earth – and its light sensitivity to light and generation of substantial voltage when treated with certain impurities.

Integrating Solar Energy
You have options. Maybe you’ll get a solar powered battery charger to charge batteries for your walkman ( try dick smith or tandy ). Perhaps you’ll try a solar cooker for your food occasionally. Aware of hot water’s proportion in our energy bill, maybe you’ll convince the landlord to install solar hot water? And if you had the time, no doubt you’d build your own solar powered car with these simple directions.
What everybody wants to do of course is run set up your house to run off solar.

DIY Electricity
Aside from repetitively rubbing your shoes on carpet, like many rural citizens do already, it is feasible to generate your electricity from the sun with a basic renewable energy system.
You’re going to need some solar panels, you’re going to need some batteries to store the electricity, you’re going to need some regulators to protect your batteries, and you’re going to need some inverters to turn the battery power into mains power to run your normal appliances on. Here’s a system I prepared earlier:
( www.ata.org.au – well, actually the Alternative Technology Assoication in Melbourne did most of it )

Still Not Sure?
Try the Australian Home Greenhouse Scorecard, a software package allows you to estimate a household’s annual greenhouse gas emissions and savings resulting from everyday activities including transport, hot water, heating appliances, recycling and composting. compare a household’s greenhouse gas emissions with those of other households, including an environmentally friendly ‘green home’. Explore ways of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by changing behaviour or using different appliances and forms of transport. Mac & PC available. (Toll free number 1800 338 873 and fax number 1800 674 899)