Gary Coleman is the Governor of California. The fifth largest economy in the world is now under the tiny thumb of a sitcom actor whose most famous words are ‘Whatchoo talkin bout Willis?’. While we do not live in that no doubt beautiful parallel world, Gary can at least console himself by knowing that today’s television stars also suffer considerable pain. Jackass & Big Brother, please explain.

Boofheads ‘R’ Us
From the cultural juggernation that brought the world Beavis & Butthead, Bill & Ted, Rock N Roll Wrestling and daytime talkback TV, inevitably the kid at the back of the science lab with his underpants on fire was going to get his own TV show. Jackass was the vehicle, but if we retrace a few steps – we find a skateboard magazine named ‘Big Brother’. Renowned for it’s irreverent approach, gratuitous sex and drugs references and unashamed targetting of horny 14 year old boys, the Big Brother editorial team soon added video to their repertoire, and a while later – mixed up with the now very well known skatevideo director Spike Jonze – the endless skits peppering the in-between skating bits had finally found a new home all of their own: Jackass. Recent jumpers onto the Jackass depravity bandwagon, are Stomp films who also licence a very, very interesting collection of rare art and music related films for DVD distribution in Australia. New Stomp_ables?

Steve-O: The Early Years
Subtitled ‘How dangerous and irresponsible behaviour can lead to fame and Steveoweb.jpgfortune’, unpredictably this is an absolutely essential disc for those who already own the ‘Steve-O’, ‘Steve-O The Tour’ & ‘Steve-O Out on Bail’ DVDs, and no doubt already have the Steve-O tour cut-off t-shirt, the Steve-O temporary tattoo kit, the Steve-O DIY piercing needles, the Steve-O XL Enema kit and the Steve-O trepanning kit ( insert drill to bit of forehead just above nose ). Meet Steve-O’s dad. See Steve-O in clown college. See Steve-O jump into water lots. See Steve-O before he got Jackass-ed. And the pilot he made for it. See amateur homemade VHS pause button skate footage – lovingly crafted by a 14 year old Steve-O. Even better – see Steve-O reclining in a plush hotel bed ( or his current abode ? ) kicking back, and fondly recalling his troubled youth – think of it as a magnifying glass on his infected bellybutton piercing. What a long time ago that was~! And if you love the disc, what fun to be had at the Steve-O website, complete with bulletin board for thousands of fans.

411VM Skateboarding : The BAM Issue
Rebellious subcultures still need a good branding, and 411VM have been delivering skater eyeballs to advertisers for 60 whole video magazine issues now – this latest a BAM special, which means aside from urban grinds of many kinds, you get a lot of BAM in between the skate product ads. It’s all relative here, but Bam seems to exude a little more charisma than Steve-O, while plundering the same depths of bodily damage exploration. And the boy can skate. Plenty of giant flips and transfers, concrete park carving and smooth grind-candy for the weariest of skate-porn eyes. A tutorial section offers to teach how to boardslide down a handrail – which perhaps, is kind of like watching a slow motion martial arts video tutorial on how to do the splits in the air and double whammy the attackers from both sides. We also get skate park tours, obligatory low-angle skatercam street scenes of polished benches, steps and rails, and an inside view of a day in the life of Jason Dill – which generally involves some skateboarding, hanging with his homies and lots of fast food. A double disc DVD for the whole skater family.

Fond of getting their electrical freak on, The International Dorkbot ‘movement’ is an interconnected hard & software hacking community of sorts, spread from Barcelona to Mumbai, Rotterdam to Melbourne and San Francisco. Members of Dorkbot Ghent, the Belgian node of the Dork community are visiting the upcoming www.electrofringe.org festival ( sep 27-0ct 4 in newcastle ) and took time out to zap these replies:

What strange things can ‘grown-ups do with lego’?
How about : break their fingers … ? Seriously, they can build quite complex howiedork.jpg
robots that can track colors, follow patterns, produce sound and crawl onto walls. The Lego Robotics series is actually pretty sophisticated, since the engines underneath can be controlled through various software modules. Just to give you an example, Lieven – aka “the Quiet One”, my second half at the Electrofringe gig – has built a little machine that wanders across a large canvas reading the color values of the paint that had been smacked onto it by 3-year olds – and turning all that info into sound… it’s boyz & toyz really.

What about electricity?
It can really sting, duh.

Good skaters fall well. How do good experimental electricians recover?
They don’t. they just wear rubber boots.

What do you think about a globalised electricity grid?
Hmm. Politics. But what about a sense of ‘place’ then? Moreover, I kinda like all these little adapters and peripherals that come with the problem. Watch us wrestle with plugs & currents come Saturday

What are you doing at electrofringe?
We’ll be ‘feeding the pet’- a litte text/sound toy built, using director, flash, cps and bidule, where I write live lyrics and The Quiet One knobs the sounds. What I write translates into a little dancing skeletal structure that responds to the sounds being produced, in turn being modified by the sort of language I use. It’s something we built from scratch and is still very small and vulnerable. We’re giving electrofringe the first live try-out. After all, ‘this is not art’ is it ? Apart from that experimental gig we’ll take part in a roundtable on ‘new networks’, talking about www.dorkbot.org AND we will host a masterclass on vision & sound, based on tinkering I’ve been doing over the past few months using a microscope, macromedia director and cps.

Upcoming projects that excite you?
Uh, Australian elections ?

Meet A Dorkbot
Potential Dorkbot magnets are well advised to head to Electrofringe in Newcastle this week ( Sep 27- Oct 4), where International Vjs, DIY musical robotics experts, dee-jayz, workshops, masterclasses, zinefairs, installations, screenings and under the bonnet ginger beer fulled tweakage with people from every state in Australia – will happen over a motion-blur weekend. Sunday nite should be a piss-funny round-up exclamation mark for it all, with the ‘Plover Idle’ talent quest on offer by the Dual Plover record label.

Last time sailing on seas of cheese to a Primus gig, you might’ve noticed a hot air balloon above the band with video projected onto it. Projections by Primus visualist ‘The Ape’, using a crazy real-time video app called ‘Union’, developed by Jay Smith & Peter Nyboer of Livid Instruments. Jay Smith’d be recognisable to some as the creator of the ‘Viditar’ – a midi based video control unit built into the body of an electric guitar, complete with LCD screen, clip and FX controls, and made for jumping around stage with. As expected then, Union packs in plenty of real-time punch.

Under the Union Bonnet
Complex controls, real-time triggering, advanced automation, sophisticated LIVIDweb.jpg
effects and reasonable frame_rates – how do they manage it? Being built on a bed of jitter objects helps, the video building blocks of the max/msp software shaping environment. Jitter objects are fast, optimised for real-time video modules – which bring power to the Union app, but also should mean Union can evolve rapidly alongside Jitter’s development.

Functions & Features
Union is unique in allowing both quick access to triggering of multiple clips, as well as advanced automation and sophisticated time based controls. Different clips can be quickly played on various midi or computer keys, whilst simultaneously complicated video processing can evolve and unfold or be adjusted as needed. These are a few of the ways it can happen:

Clip Controls
First-up Union has a well integrated way of accessing movie folders, which allows easy change between banks of clips, and scanning of thumbnails for quick triggering on keys. Clips can then be routed through to one of two sides of a mixer for combining – with a range of blending modes for mixing in different ways. Each clip either side of the mixer can be finely tuned in relation to it’s speed, direction of playing, position along timeline with easy setting of in and out points for quick loop making on the fly. Scrubbing / scratching and all of these functions can be controlled by keyboard and mouse or by midi – meaning you can control with external knobs and sliders on a midi box.

Effects
The Union FX bank is impressive and responsive, especially say – Meta-image – resizing the overall image into many smaller images which make up the whole and streak-blur which extends images fluidly. It also has a range of resizers, vertical slicers, video-on-3D object controls and considerable colour and image controls. Each effect has various parameters, any of which may be assigned to key or midi controllers, or synch-ed with oscillators which provide a few different ways of smoothly and incrementally adjusting values by themselves.

Automated controls
As well as the oscillators, there is an another auto-function which allows tempo-based ( BPM ) ‘events’ to happen, such as jumping to a random frame within a clip, changing clip or speed of clip. Works well, but is a little clumsy to get to within it’s tabbed interface. Also buried within the tabbed interface are some masking controls, tempo measures, text titling, chroma keying, camera and audio controls & the capacity to synch it up with certain modified turntables – delivering actual terror wrist ’scratch vidi-yo-yo-yo’.

Live Camera Input & Audio Analysis
Aye, point a camera at something, or play a tape through it – and Union can treat that as a mixing source against a bank of clips from your hard drive. This also includes a range of useful camera input refinements. The audio analysis can be tuned to detect certain frequencies and then provide ‘event triggers’ whenever these are heard – so a bass drum might be used to change clip position or speed, or to another clip. In future releases it is expected this will include triggering of FX as well.

Requirements:
Mac G4 400Mhz OS X 256 MB of RAM – though real-time video with UNION would surely be kinda taxing on such a machine. PC version available “in the future”. US$249

Verdict?
Union’s unique combination of quick sample based triggering and complex automated processes makes it a very powerful and flexible real-time video processor. Has plenty of depth though, so it’d take time to get to know it’s ways, and customise it to really make it a useful live video tool. Some of it’s functions are a bit hard to easily access, although apparently this is eased much when using a midi device. Similarly the interface has a few bottlenecks, which are being ironed out during fairly regular upgrades. If looking to mash video, then definitely worth a test drive, get your demo keys here : .
www.lividinstruments.com

See Also : VJ Software round-up