skynoise

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FIJUU
If you have the bandwidth, download the 50mb demo movie for Fijuu ( http://fijuu.com ) – if you like anything about glitchy, textural stutter-core musics, and wildly deconstructing 3D graphics – you’ll love what seems possible with this AV tool. Created by Julian Oliver and Pix, both Australian kids now on the European New Media circuit, Fijuu is built on top of the open source game engine ‘Nebula’ and runs on Linux. End plans for it include a non-linear beat pattern sequencer, granular synthesis tools and a graphical filterbank and release as a live CD Linux project, so players can simply boot up their PC with a PS2-style gamepad plugged in, and play without installing anything (regardless of operating system). This effectively turns the domestic PC into a console for game based audio performances.

Also see : Brisbane’s el Demento, their audiovisual Dr.Nintendo, Collapsicon and his game engine and hardware melting antics : www.collapsicon.net

Augmented Reality?
Adelaide’s A-Rage ( www.a-rage.com) are hoping to take gaming right out of the loungeroom into the great outdoors. They’ve built hardware which allows you to connect your portable consoles to, and view games on helmet-visors overlaid against the actual real-space background. They’ve built a couple of games to suit that, including a kind of 3D Space Invaders perfectly suited for your backyard. And if you’re curious about the ‘Augmented Reality’ phrase, don;t sweat too hard – Everytime a friend’s text message re-directs you to the right path in a city of lost children, you are augmenting your reality. We seem to live in a constant state of technologically enhanced wandering, but ‘AR’ has become a catchphrase to describe the efforts of many trying to provide various kinds of overlaid graphics, sounds and data such as GPS info – over our ‘natural’ environment.

Also see : www.pacmanhattan.com & www.blasttheory.co.uk

Video Blogs
For those already nauseated by the saturation of words online like ‘blog’, ‘blogger’ and ‘blogosphere’, adding the word ‘video’ in front is probably an even more unappealing prospect. Not only is every bedroom philosopher able to publish every scratch of their navel, but now we can see and hear them thinking aloud on the web too. Of course, the smooth ease of automated blog style publishing online is not only more democratic, giving a voice to more people, but it also inevitably provides different styles of content as the ease of us promotes more spontaneous expression.

Right about now, videoblogging is booming, a next logical step from text blogging and podcasting ( a form of automated audio publishing you can subscribe to ). These are a few of the key sites for finding out more – whether curious about the people, the technology or starting your own :

www.videoblogging.info – The mother lode, most link to and from here. For the cute factor, try their live world map of video blogs being posted.
www.vlogdir.com – good constantly growing directory of videobloggers.
www.antisnottv.net – Site of FireANT, an application dedicated to being the easiest way to find, download and watch video on the web. You can use FireANT to subscribe to your favourite videoblogs, and have them automatically download to your computer as they are published.
http://freevlog.org/ – A step-by-step guide to setting up a videoblog for free.
http://www.archive.org – free online video hosting.
http://creativecommons.org – Most videobloggers publish their videos with a CC license.

VJBlogs
And of course that same annoyed cynic who dreads the idea of videobloggers, is going to retreat into the woods even further when they learn about VJ Blogs. Nonetheless, given the way VJs are adept at constantly preparing new video material, it was kind of inevitable that some of them would float towards publishing regular news-related VJblog posts online. Falk from Berlin was in there first, and his remains one of the better ones. His text blog is also a good read for those interested in creative technology developments.
http://www.prototypen.com/blog/vjblog

You Are Beautiful
On the paper network front ( found via the wonderfully global woostercollective.com ), I recently acquired a blank white book from the You Are Beautiful kids from Chicago ( www.you-are-beautiful.com ). They’ve been making a name for themselves over the years with a steady outpouring of group projects facilitated by the web and copious amounts of – you know, like, actual postage of stickers and art materials back and forth. Story with this book is that it is one of 100 that were sent all over the globe, to be returned filled in by June 2005 for an exhibition in Chicago.
All pages to date in book 054 in Melbourne, have scanned and are clickable here: www.flickr.com/photos/jeanpoole/sets/266552/ – and many were ze Melbourne artists who dropped some ink on these pages – often at Thursday nights at ‘Plug N Play’ – a weekly AV night at the Kent Cafe, 201 Smith st, Fitzroy ( 8-11pm).

jeanpoole @ graffiti.net

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When they sang of good Norwegian Wood, it’s fair to presume Northern European eco-porn wasn’t what the Beatles had in mind. For Tommy (28) & Leona (22) however, raising awareness of Norway’s forests seemed best accomplished by putting their own naked Norwegian flesh online. Initially funded by a Norwegian Government grant to set up a ‘web-shop for raising environmental funds’, they soon changed tack and decided that redirecting just a fraction of the global porn dollar towards environmental groups, would surely benefit the environment.

“It is time to pay respect, and give something back,” explains Leona, who edits as well as stars on the site, “We believe it’s possible to use people’s need for sexuality as a way to raise money for nature and create interest for preserving our forests .” And so, inspired by ‘a twisted world’, ‘alternative religion’ and ‘crazy media manipulation’ – FFF was born. Paid up FFF members can browse though an abundance of explicit photos and videos of the duo ‘celebrating nature’ in the bedroom or the forest. These attractions are found nestled amongst diary entries, party pictures, deforestation statistics and cheesy eco-graphics that are worth the click alone – try Leona photoshopped topless beside Amazonian indians in a logged forest, or cartoon sperms with Indian head dresses for starters. Aside from the brain-jolting imagery, FFF also heavily encourages on-site participation with live chatting facilities, the chance to tune into their live action webcams and requests for amateur photographic donations from audience members – ‘Angry? Horny? You can be a model for fuck for forest. Amateurs and professionals alike – anybody is welcome to contact us. Pay respect to nature and give back from the gift of sexuality that has been given to you’. There’s even a ‘Porn Aid’ outreach program for those in the porn industry who’d like to recycle their work ‘for nature’.

While sex as a marketing tool isn’t new by any means, even for activists, the web is a great facilitator for campaigners who want to give more of themselves to further their cause. Animal Rights activists have long understood that an attractive naked body in say an anti-fur protest will guarantee interest, and while they might debate the use of it passionately, alternative mediamakers similarly anticipate higher sales for calendars of magazines with attractive alt_models adorning the front covers. Websiders of course, are much less timid about the co-celebration of sexuality and campaign issues. Sites to bookmark alongside FFF for the discerning and compassionate porn viewer include the ‘titillating tofu eaters’ at www.vegporn.com ( curious about the ethics of latex condoms? ), a ‘vegan-run non-nude fetish site for the female foot connoisseur’ at www.toes-in-action.com, or veganporn.com – which is in fact not a porn site, but attempting to ‘convert porn surfers to vegan’ and now up to #11 in the google rankings.

Fuck For Forest are clearly market-leaders in the eco-porn arena though, and after six months into the game, Tommy & Leona have gathered over 1,000 members, substantial daily traffic, and over US$60,000. Mixing politics and desire has proven more slippery than they expected however, as they discovered when trying to donate their fundraising efforts to the Norwegian Rainforest Foundation and the WWF, both refusing to accept their donations. Undoubtedly the need for larger environmental organisations to appeal to a large range of middle class citizens, clashed with the threat of association to porn. A disappointed but vigilant Leona explains:
“We really do not understand. Are moral values more important that natural values? We are shocked, and sad. But we will not give up that easily. The Norwegian nature organizations have been publically negative to our organization. They do not have to like it, just accept that some people will go further to try to save nature. And that money is important even if fucked for!”

If the Fuck For Forest campaign flounders, it won’t be for lack of ‘imaginative’ public relations strategies. Many came across FFF after they had sex on stage at a Norwegian festival, something they’d arranged with a band called ‘The Cumshots’ as an effort to ‘get attention to the destroying of nature and our attempt to prevent this’. Leona claimed that worked and notes they have been contacted by an American documentary maker who wanted to make something on them going to Brazil and giving the money to an ‘Indian tribe who tries to rebuild a destroyed forest’. At the time of writing they’d just made the Australian print media for a recent court appearance related to that stage performance. The article titled ‘Stage sex man shocks again’, described how Tommy Hol Ellingsen stripped during an appearance in court after he and Leona refused to pay a fine of 10,000 crowns ($A2079) each for copulating on stage. Despite such obstacles, the kids plough on.
“This has been hard. But we have been really busy with keeping the web site alive, and the money is just growing. What we really want is to get help with buying up forest and make protected areas. Creating a fuckforforest-foundation doing it on our own.”

Jean Poole

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>Where does your music database come from, and your charts analysis?
Primarily it comes from retailers we work with since we’re now going to be launching our Human Music Interface, our own special version of music recommendation technology. It also comes from radio stations we work with, and from companies who specialize in having digital databases of music.

>How is HSS set-up to deal with the ongoing and inevitable shift from to giant, widespread popularity, to more specialised niche tastes?
We can profile the taste of any audience. With HSS in most cases we’re profiling the tastes of a mass mainstream audience but we can profile the tastes of listeners of a single radio station or even a single individual. We even have a tool called a Music Taste Test that can do exactly that, profile a single user’s music taste.

>How much Australian hip-hop do you have in your collection, and how well do you think you are placed to predict which Australian hip-hop songs will prove to be ‘hits’ ?
The only Australian music we have in our databases would be those songs that have had some international success at this point, or at least been released in the US or UK. As soon as we have a couple of label clients in Australia we’ll go ahead and take the plunge into that market. It will be really exciting because Australia has historically produced such great artists and music.

>2 tracks that’ve surprised you by getting low HSS scores?
Lyrics and artist image are two big determining factors we don’t touch. That’s still up to the A&R and marketing guys. So some songs that have been very lyrically driven such as Eminem’s Cleaning Out My Closet became a big hit without scoring well on our system. Nevertheless, we know how to factor for that sort of thing and by working with the labels we can help them make good decisions.

>2 tracks that’ve surprised you by getting high HSS scores?
Our technology isn’t even really that good at telling you if a song “sounds” like a hit. What it IS good at is telling you if a song that people already thinks “sounds” like a hit will perform in the market.

>Given your prediction technology is based on analysing the songs of the past, how can it be expected to cope with new musical genres that may spawn hits?
Since 90% of hits over the past 50 years have conformed to the same large but limited number of mathematical patterns and in that time many new genres have emerged (pop, grunge, disco etc) it can be said that if a new genre of music were to be invented tomorrow, most likely HSS would be able to determine which singles from that new genre would chart and which ones would fail.

>Do you find many differences between what HSS defines as a hit and what you actually prefer to listen to at home?
Hit songs are my specialty and that of Polyphonic so I spend a lot of time with them. However, yes, from time to time you have to think about something other than work and there is a LOT of quality music out there that will never be hit singles. I have a huge collection of jazz getting a lot of rotation at home.

>HSS studio optimisation? How do you liase with artists to ‘improve’ the score of their potential ‘hits’?
Most songs destined to become singles come out of the studio already sounding great. However more often than not the scores are just a little bit off and that can prevent the song from performing in the market. We can suggest very minor tweaks in the mix and production values and usually correct the problem. We don’t get involved in the composition and arrangement. We leave creativity to the artists and are ONLY concerned with giving that song the little extra polish that will propel it up the charts.

>What do you think about the recent Australian invention which predicts which type of beer you will like best, by taking a mouth swab at the pub entrance?
Interesting. I can see uses for that, especially if I already don’t know what kind of beer I’m going to drink in a pub. If they get it right I’d be happy. If they get it wrong I’d be upset that I didn’t order something I know I’ll like. I’m not likely to get tired of my favorite beer as quickly as I am a hit song. So, my need for trying new beers is lesser than my need to find good new music on a regular basis.

jeanpoole

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– as phone queries from richer countries are increasingly being re-routed via the cheaper Indian phone operators. While no pizza companies in Australia actually do this yet (that I’m aware of ), several larger companies in Australia already send their phone queries offshore and undoubtedly the budget conscious takeaway biz isn’t far behind.

But what does it all Mean Batman?
Aside from mobile phone virii ( already here, and there’s more coming), the continued wiring of the global village is also very useful for drawing attention to some of the disparities between people born in different parts of it. If something feels strange about having a poorly paid offshore call operator answer one of your leisurely queries – it’s probably to do with the way this transaction highlights how the abundant western lifestyle is made possible by taking advantage of the resources and labour of poorer countries. This is something already implicit in the outsourced production of consumer goods such as computers, televisions or even mobile phones, but the human factor of having the voice on the other of the line can bring this home more effectively.

( See : www.fairtraderesource.org – http://fairtrade.asn.au – or – www.newint.com/catalog/nonofair.htm )

Mid-Column Pop Quiz
Q1. Are you the type of person who* :
a) Acknowledges and engages the person behind the cash register serving you the food?
b) Still hasn’t outsourced memory to a phone and can remember numbers?
c) Often have to replace your wiped bankcard because of your unusual body magnetics?
d) Asks telephone operators or telemarketers interesting and unusual questions?
e) Had friends in high school who rang random numbers, telling people not to answer the phone – as a repairman would be on the line for the next 15 minutes – then ring them back repeatedly until they finally answered, then scream down the line at them?
A1. (*note, for A1 there are no wrong answers )

Q2. What is Skypecasting?
A2. Combine podcasting ( blog style audio publishing online that can subscribed to and automatically downloaded to both your computer and then mp3 player) with recorded phone call interviews made with skype (free voice over internet software) and you have all needed for a complete bedroom radio production suite. Google away, people are already jumping on this.

Mobile Phone Theatre
Nothing to do with iTunes mobile 1.0 ( due in June ), German artist trio Rimini Protokoll have developed an excellent theatre piece “Call Calcuta” (www.call-cutta.in) which explores what would happen if India’s army of call centre operators got personal on the phone. In part 1 of their project they made a theatre piece which involved the arriving audience in a Kolkata ( Calcutta, India ) theatre, being given mobile phones and directed to leave the building. The city becomes the stage, and an interesting interplay between call operators ( who have also been trained with a theatrical script ) and audience members unfolds. Part 2 of their project extends it to Berlin – with a Berlin audience being given directions around their own city, and told unusual histories of various hidden landmarks as well as histories of anti-colonial Indian history – by the call operators in India!

Terrorist Training School
Am now officially a graduate of the above, having been on the city-as-stage / theatre / performance-art-on-a-bus tour of capital Australian cities beind currently undertaken by Perth’s PVI collective. ( www.ttsaustralia.com ). Aye aye, a 22 seater bus and a pretty funny alternative sight seeing ‘terror’ tour – using live performance, on-board media, video and wireless audio, the bus navigates through public sites, with on-board tour guides probing the darker underbelly of public anxiety. Well worth a look – Be alert, but not alarmed ( your next fridge magnet is coming soon ).

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As well as their audiovisual pioneering with Cold Cut, NinjaTune label founders Matt Black and Jon Moore have long prioritised audiovisually infused works at the Ninja HQ - witness their AV fitness : Neotropic’s film & soundtrack ‘La Prochaine Fois’, The Cinematic Orchestra’s soundtracking of ‘The Man With a Movie Camera’, Funky Porcini’s AV noodlings, the ninja ZEN-TV DVD and their ongoing piratetv.net AV streams. Given these cinematic leanings, and the downtempo flavour of the mid nineties, inevitably a boy from Brazil who combined a flair for such dark movie-scape beats, lush instrumentation and splintery-jazz – was always gonna be attractive.

Five progressively darker, heavier and increasingly processed album-beasties later, and now with a shapeshifting game soundtrack under his belt – both Amon and the Ninjas must be well pleased at the way things have rolled (outselling the likes of Bjork and Massive Attack in the US last year, probably doesn’t hurt either). From his initial offering as Cujo with ‘Adventures in Foam’, the beats have flowed thick and fast, traversing bossa-nova and batucada to jungle and electro, always imbued with what has become a trademark mood of menace. That capacity to conjure richly evocative moods with his music, no doubt helped tune Ubisoft into the merits of having Amon soundtrack their spy-thriller – but even they probably underestimated the extent to which soundtracks have formed a backbone of Amon’s sampling and musical inspiration.

“Working on a game soundtrack was very challenging, very different – as you have to adapt with what happens in the gameplay,” offered a relaxed and softly spoken Amon. As the gameplay in this case mainly involves tense camoflauged night vision wanderings, stealth manoeuvres around darkened corridors, and hand to hand combat with various military personnel – it obviously called for a different approach to game soundtracks than the retro blips on Amon’s favoured games – Galaga, Aztec Challenge and Ghost N Goblins. And while admiring the phasers on ‘Defender’ and the lateral use of music within Grand Theft Auto, it was clear to Amon that the challenge for this was to produce tracks which were malleable enough to work with the game’s unfolding sequences and in-built sounds, whilst still providing an adrenalinized accompaniment to the onscreen tension. Which meant revisiting the masterworks of favourite film composers to study how their arrangements helped keep that tension tingling.

“It’s my first love really. Most of my records are soundtracks, as are the records I buy, the old vinyl I collect,” explains Amon,”and I guess I was really aiming for the ‘70s horror classic thing, a really vintage sound, you know… Dario Argento, Bernard Hermann, John Barry, Lalo Schifrin. It’s got a kind of a classy sound to it that I wanted to transpose into this.” Lalo Schifrin himself was approached initially by Ubisoft, and then the possibility of working together with him was hinted at, a prospect relished by Amon, but unfortunately this didn’t eventuate. Nonetheless Amon continued to carve ‘an occasionally slightly camp homage to the great soundtrack composers’, whilst attempting to create the genuine article himself – creating tracks almost entirely from acoustic instruments, then thoroughly processing each sound before slotting them into his arrangements. It was only from web-scouring rather than our brief phone call, that I discovered the extent to which this homage went – his recruitment of a live band to create those samples included a Mexican bass player and composer of the crazy surrealist 1971 flick ‘El Topo’, a pair of Italian brothers on Hammond and Mellotron, and a Japanese flutist.

“I paid a lot more attention to production than usual with this because I was aware of all of these other sounds that were going to be added on later as part of gameplay, and I had to have all these tracks which could unravel differently depending on what the player does,” says a voice from Montreal, obviously living in some dark underground cavern, judging by the background rumble and the occasional jolt of old electrical cables sparking over swampy waters. “At first it seemed a distraction from how I usually work with paying attention to arrangement and melodies, but I got more and more into separating the frequencies, and the mix in general and ended up learning a lot from it. The CD is the full arrangement of those tracks, but depending on what happens in the game the tunes unravel with different layers and transitions.”

While the end-result works well by itself, it’s true merit shines when heard as part of the game and the onscreen action. Splinter Cell movie soundtracks are laughed away, and for now Amon is back hurtling along with his own material again, with another ‘proper’ album possible before the end of the year. The Splinter Cell game soundtrack is also due out in a full 5.1 surround DVD mix, the surround mix-down process enjoyed by Amon very much, given the wider spread to separate sounds ( rather than with stereo). And he’s excited about milking the fruits of that experience during upcoming DJ sets booked in Los Angeles, Brooklyn, Paris & London with full 5.1 surround sound. After his last bass-milking, full spectrum and Final Scratch bootleg attack on Australian shores, let’s hope he wanders south again soon.

Amon Tobin’s soundtrack for Ubisoft’s Splinter Cell Chaos Theory is out now, and in 5.1 surround sound too – believe dat~!
Jean Poole

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