skynoise

“Is it a game, or is it real?” asked Matthew Broderick in War Games, an 1980’s take on Stanley Kubrick’s Dr.Strangelove, and an amusingly Hollywood reflection about automated defence systems and the dangers posed. We’ve had two Gulf Wars since then, and a range of films exploring them.

‘War Is Heavy Metal’ is a short film made by Australian war-time artist George Gittoes, where he asks American soldiers in Iraq about the music they listen to, to help them function in the war zone. Although overtly about music from hardcore hiphop to heavy metal, seeing the soldiers flip through CD jackets and sing along to their favourite songs really helps bring alive the contemporary nature of the conflict – this is really happening now. Following up on that great short, ( which featured within Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11) George has made ‘Soundtrack to War’ where he returns to the States with a black soldier who claimed parts of Miami were more of a warzone than where he was based in Iraq.( Soundtrack to War review )

Jarhead & Three Kings are two Hollywood takes on Iraq, the latter exposing more of the politics, conflict and complexity involved, and is accompanied by the ‘Soldier’s Pay’ documentary film by the same director, David Russell, about the occurrence of soldiers in Iraq raiding houses and stealing money or goods they found inside.

Sidenote of interest? On the smallscreen, Al Jazeera, which claims to be the only politically independent television station in the Middle East, now has an estimated 50 million viewers worldwide – comparable to the BBC.

Those who recognise the power of comics beyond superheroes, who enjoy their capacity to emotionally overwhelm and powerfully persuade, have probably already read Maus by Art Spiegelman. A landmark graphic novel, it portrays an astonishing and utterly moving true story of one family’s struggle to survive through world war 2 and the Auschwitz prison camp. For me it transcends history better than any story I’ve come across in any media, in bringing home the intensity of events that happened during the lifetime of many people alive today.

Barefoot Gen is another gripping attempt to help us remember another aspect of world war 2 – the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, ,in this case a manga novel written by Keiji Nakazawa, loosely based on his own experiences as a survivor of the atomic horrors. ( Two animated films were based on the manga : Barefoot Gen & Barefoot Gen 2 )

Probably the most deserving of the comic-journalist title, Joe Sacco has made extensive comics about his experiences in war zones, outlining in very human detail his interactions with locals, against a contextual backdrop filled with historical background. Try fantagraphics.com for his books : Palestine, The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo, War’s End: Profiles from Bosnia 1995-6 & more.

Whether you want to call it participatory journalism, citizen journalism or just the noise of the many, the ease of online publishing tools for quick, spontaneous expression means there are a whole world of alternative war perspectives online. Wikipedia has become known as an incredibly valuable resource, not just for encyclopaedic definitions, but for it’s coverage of current events – such as the Israel-Lebanon conflict. Partner project Wikinews now also comes with RSS feeds – meaning you can subscribe to the latest world, regional or topical news.

Elsewhere, impressively leveraging the capacity of Google Earth’s 3D topography & satellite photos, a site has put together a collection of placemakrs which show exact locations of military actions based on news reports – with a whole bunch of added embedded information. Quite intense to browse.

Kevin Sites is a veteran war correspondent now signed up with Yahoo – who aims to travel to every armed conflict in the world, in one year. Using a HD camcorder, satellite phone, powerbook, & satellite modem he sends in articles and edited video from warzones, aided by a production team in the States. Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon are all on his list, but also a whole string of lesser known conflicts such as those in Chechnya, Congo, Haiti, Kasmir, Nepal, Sir Lanka, Sudan and a whole host of others.

Mazen Kerbak’s response to the craziness of inheriting a war, was not just to blog about it, but to perform and record improvisational music to the sound of bombs falling nearby. That, comics and paintings await.

Salam Pax’s blog coverage of war in Iraq is also worth a mention, and ABC’s Andrew Denton has a good interview with him about his experiences.

War, it’d seem, we cannot live with or without. An unfathomable aspect of humanity, a scale of drama unavoidably alluring to a long list of mediamakers, who these days tend to be stacked with gamers, comic makers and bloggers:

Peacemaker
A video game still under development, which simulates the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, being promoted as a tool that can be used to promote a peaceful resoultion among Israelis, Palestinians and young adults worldwide. Found via selectparks.net.

Virtual Palestine
With similar intentions, this site tried to provide a virtual community for Palestinians living in exile around the world. Although not currently active, there’s still plenty to explore here in site built by VJ Headcleaner and a group of young Palestinians in Sydney( English & Arabic versions available ), including a “Stonethrower” animation in an attempt to redefine what has become a negative media image of Palestinians into a positive icon.

September 12th
Made by Gonzalo Frasca and a team of independent games developers, Newsgaming plans to publish several games each year in response to world events. September 12th effectively reminds how killing civilians ( collateral damage ) inevitably ends up creating more ‘terrorists’. They’ve also released “Madrid”, a newsgame about the 3/11 terrorist attacks in Spain

Kumawar.com
A library of 74 missions that can be played in single and multiplayer, built as playable re-creations of real war events. Play Mission 75: The Death of al-Zarqawi, or Mission 7 – Iran Hostage Rescue Mission, or visit South Korea as it is invaded by Northern Spies in 1996 – Mission 21 – Korea: The Enemy Within?

Dead In Iraq
Online gaming performance/protest, where an artist is logging into the America’s Army online game to input all of the names of each of the over 2000 American service persons who have been killed in the Iraq conflict, utilizing the game’s instant texting feature. America’s Army is the free, downloadable first person shooter game that serves as a primary recruiting mechanism for the United States Army.

Spitting from the heftier corner, Groening’d surely have no trouble with scrawny Jonze in a wrestling ring. When it comes to the screen though, both have recent hands in promoting Al Gore: Spike ( directing in Melbourne soon) with a video-portrait of the ex US Vice President published in Wholpin, a quarterly DVD compiled by McSweeney’s Journal, Matt with an animated promo for Al Gore’s film about climate change, An Inconvenient Truth*, featuring Futurama’s beer swilling robot, Bender:
`_

*Screening at MIFF, July 30, Aug 5

1. youtube.com may be a copyright car-crash waiting to happen, but the eyeballs are feasting for now. Imagine TV executives everywhere providing the soundtrack to this sample upload: The Big Lebowski – F_cking Short Version – fun.NY

2. Human Space Invaders – recreated by stop-motion animation of people sitting in auditorium seats. How can TV compete against people with internet connections and enough time on their hands to do this?

3. Who’d have thought cunnilingus in North Korea would be such a potent political wheelbarrow? Funniest political art piece I’ve clicked / watched in a long time.

4.http://participatoryculture.org – your very own internet TV platform, with four free components:
Democracy player – application for watching internet TV. Intuitive interface. Free and open source.
Video Bomb – Website for sharing videos, creating personal video channels, and filtering up the best videos online.
Broadcast Machine – Software for publishing channels (RSS feeds) of video from your website. Installs easily, supports BitTorrent, creates a browsable gallery.
Channel Guide – an open listing of internet TV channels—video podcasts, vlogs, and much more.

Business columns may swell with lusty talk of future online delivery models, from the few to the many, but this neglects one of the greatest things about the internet – it’s remarkable capacities for allowing people to creatively collaborate with each other.

A Swarm Of Angels
Calling itself ‘Remix Cinema’, the Swarmers are hoping to leverage the networks to fund, make, and distribute a £1 million film. Participants are sought to be involved on all levels – to be ‘part of a giant media experiment’ and be part of ‘active entertainment’. Or it can just be downloaded when finished, shared freely and even remixed with it’s creative commons licence, utilised to make your own media. They’ve got a podcast going to keep the project news updated, the last episode presenting a ‘moodcast’ – tracks chosen to evoke visual cues and the general atmosphere of the first part of the script. Recent additions to the team include a new director of photography, Grant Gee ( feature-length music documentary on Radiohead, Meeting People is Easy ) and The Kleptones as soundtrack producers and consultants ( remix albums : ‘A Night At The Hip-Hopera’, and ‘Yoshimi Battles The Hip Hop Robots’ ).
“In our productions, we enjoy the thrill of taking disparate musical worlds and creatively colliding them, so the prospect of being part of such a large collision is electrifying. We…look forward to kicking out the virtual and actual jams within The Swarm.” – The Kleptones

Nothing So Strange
The makers of this documentary-style drama about the assassination of Bill Gates, are releasing their film on an “open source” basis, under a license that allows all of the “source” footage of the movie to be used without restriction, in personal or commercial projects, but keeps the actual film as created by the filmmaker under copyright. “You have free access to all the parts of the movie,” said Flemming. “But you can’t just copy our version of it—you have to make your own original work with the various parts.”

Outfoxed
Also under a remixable Creative Commons licence, is this documentary about the political biases of the Fox TV network in the states made by Brave New Films – who further claim to be ‘in the early stages of creating a network of volunteer field producers’. Free to download : 48 minutes of interviews here in a slew of high resolution formats.

Now The Movie
Latest news from this ambitious UK venture is that music from Cold Cut’s recent Sound Mirrors album is being used in the film sound track. While they ‘can’t know exactly how this will work’, they do aspire for ‘an exploration of what open, collaborative cinema could be!’ and offer profit-sharing for users whose contributed clips end up in the finished feature film.

The Echo Chamber Project
Another open source, investigative documentary – this one about how ‘the television news media became an uncritical echo chamber to the Executive Branch leading up to the war in Iraq’. Nicely though, they’ve also developed collaborative techniques for producing this film, in an effort to try and generate some solutions for incorporating a broader range of voices and perspectives into the mainstream media.

1000 Journals
An ongoing, collaborative experiment attempting to follow 1000 journals throughout their travels, which is apparently enough ink and various substances smeared on paper that it deserves it’s own documentary.

Carp Caviar Vlog Remix
Video Bloggers are long used to filling pipes with their own pixels, but the efforts and momentum behind this quirky remix project make it well worth a look.

Vast worlds changed hands in twentieth century playgrounds, whenever a well compiled music cassette was passed on. The entirety of the enormous Melbourne International Film Festival ( 26 Jul – 13 Aug ) will inevitably be swapped at future playgrounds in the blink of an eye, a casual zap and transfer. Was a pretty good year they’ll say.

Festivals Within Festivals
All @ MIFF 06 : – Brain Monkey Sushi : Slices of Japanese weird cinema (Funky Forest looks like fun) – Music on film : Decent selection including Beyond Beats and Rhymes : A Hip-Hop head Weighs In On Manhood in Hip-Hop Culture, LoudQuietLoud: A film about the Pixies, and Godard’s Sympathy For the Devil. There’s also a live music cinema performance by David Shea – ‘Chronopolis’ – which is dedicated to composer Luc Ferrari. – How to Fix the World : is a selection of innovative international video art pieces. – Short Danish selections, oh and sessions dedicated to Australian, French, Nordic & Experimental shorts and animations including Philip K. Dick’s latest translation to the big screen.

A Scanner Darkly

“In my writing I .. question the universe; I wonder out loud if it is real, and I wonder out loud if all of us are real.” – P.K.Dick

Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder, Robert Downey Jr. and Woody Harrelson all in the same film is always going to be a woozy affair, but it’s probably good casting for Richard Linklater’s interpretation of this classic sci-fi story, a heady exploration of paranoia within a drug saturated subculture. All filmed and then reanimated like his Waking Life film, also made with animator Bob Sabiston ( http://flatblackfilms.com ) who developed the software for processing the filmed footage. Trailer explaining his process is viewable here. Flatblack films also hosts a free podcast demonstrating examples of their animation and rotoscoping ( the process of painting frame by frame ). Whether the animation process and actors chosen succeed in delivering, undeniably, anticipation is high. Could be so deliciously good, could be so dreadfully bad.
See also http://www.ascannerdarklyartists.com/

Globalised
Amongst the broader palette of documentaries offered, those framed under the ‘Globalised’ moniker deserve merit for being selected as films with the fangs we need for the world today. An Inconvenient Truth tracks Al Gore’s mission to show the craziness of climate change, We Feed The World highlights the immense inequalities of global food production, Oil Crash tackles our near fatal dependency on oil, Black Gold looks at the impact and actuality of coffee production, and Our Daily Bread promises a word-less audiovisual meditation on the industrial food chain. Elsewhere in the programme the melting Arctic is drawn to attention in The White Planet, Iraq in Fragments looks at the region with fresh eyes and a whirlwind of others detail the lives of TV junkies, Cocaine Cowboys and monks in the alps.

Ze International Panorama
Is even harder to get a grip on, featuring a huge array of features fetched from the far-flung globe. Jan Svankmajer’s LUNACY promises to combine Edgar Allan Poe and the Marquis de Sade, Werner Herzog’s Wild Blue Yonder plays sci-fi games with antarctic scuba diving footage, and the Brothers Quay seem to have a gorgeous live/animated film on their hands: The Piano Tuner Of Earthquakes. But that’s just what I’d put on a mixtape, there’s so many to wade through.

Z-Z-Z-Zidane~! Legendary French soccer player, and after his headbutt, the top search term for the technorati blog search engine, filling 8 of the top 20 youtube videos, and inspiring the piece of code to the left ( via waxy). According to a newspaper with Italian translator glued to the replays, Italy’s Materazzi called Zidane “the son of a terrorist whore”, before adding, “So just f—- off”. From the youtube videos uploaded ( some before the game had even finished~! ), we can read Materazzi’s lips, we also see the ‘nipple cripple’ given by Materazzi, watch a music video of Materazzi’s greatest fouls, and re-live ze headbutt. ( ze headbutt animated? )

Another way of looking at all this though, is as another milestone in the emergence of a user-contributed global video network. Though many query whether or not video has a napster problem with copyright, it does seem as though there is now that little bit more expectation that video coverage of the freshest news will be easily found online. Youtube may have snared the limelight for now, but whether they or several competitors succeed seems irrelevant in the face of easy uploading, easy categorising, cross-referencing and peer to peer distribution. Bring it on.

Another bag of ripe, hand-picked grapefruits from the double-click universe.

Clips
Goal / world cup / soccer / pele etc are useful search terms at youtube.com to ease a smooth World Cup withdrawal transition. Youtube continues to sprawl out of control, but sites like vimeo.com offer better resolution, and in the case of jumpcut.com – even online editing of clips and photos! Firefox extension ‘Video Downloader’ let’s you download and keep videos from youtube.com, google and 60 other video hosting sites. The just launched flock.com browser is well worth a look too, for a taste of easy media-sharing and a glimpse of future online browsing.

The hugely popular digg.com, where gazillions of users rank and determine ‘news’, has added a video section. Watch that space. Chromafresh from Japan has some lovely videoclips to check out, although some are limited to stills because of bandwidth troubles.

Devil Ducky provided a very popular lyrebird video narrated by David Attenborough, a small clip voted as his best TV moment by the public on his 80th birthday. Watch the feathered sampler and be gobsmacked, as the South Australian lyrebird mimicks other birds, camera-clicks and even a chainsaw.

Video Software
VVVV is a toolkit for real time video synthesis, it’s capacities displayed splendidly by the gorgeous three dimensional experimental work of David Dessen. ( via generator x )

NY VJ + coder Vade maintains a fairly technical blog detailing his exploits with the likes of max/msp and jitter. Plenty of beautiful stills to look at, and most recently he made available a patch which exploits the capacity to find security webcams around the world using google, and then utilise these in a video application.

Useful OS X VJ software comparison Robotfunk Flowmotion 2.8, Garagecube Modul8 2.02 and Vidvox GridPro 1.02 @ Analog Recycling, using a Powerbook 17” with 2GB RAM, and clip playback from a dual channel FW800 raid. ( Livid 2.0 would’ve been another good comparison ) At the same review site, they’ve recently ( & generously) offered a batch of 80 loops for VJs to download, as well as a variety of tutorials.

www.mxwendler.net looks promising for OSX VJ software, and are looking for beta-testers.

On a much smaller screen, London VJ Pikilipita has released free VJ software that works on a game boy advance~! Presumably for jamming along with musicians using nanoloop or LSDJ.

On the video production side, heavy duty FX and composition tool, Shake has had a price reduction from US$2800 US$500, while it gets integrated into the rest of Apple’s video production suite.

Web Video Software
There’ve been a few video blog plugins of note lately ( for the free and excellent wordpress blogging software ) which facilitate easier publishing of video on blogs, and some which enable video commenting – a worthwhile attempt to drag the pixel-makers up to the same levels of interactivity as their text cousins.

See : http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugins/Video And http://itp.nyu.edu/research/?page_id=34 & www.joshpaul.com/blog/?p=132 for commenting explorations.

Video Hardware
Great overview of Video-capable turntables at Pixelsumo, though they missed Virtual DJ – – which is a key tool of choice at the moment for Collapsicon(.net) who is building up a live scratch video electro set.

S-Video signals can suffer / decay greatly when s-video cables are stretched across a long way across larger venues to join a computer and projector. Via a nice new live-video blog – createdigitalmotion.com, comes hint of a solution : 2 x Baluns : devices that enable S-video to be plugged in on one side, and plain ethernet cable on the other. Plug balun into computer and projector, roll length of ethernet cable to suit, and bingo – no picture distruption. ( $30ish each from Jaycar.com.au )

Buzz around the Red camera is immense within video and indie-film-making circles – presumably not only because of their domain name ( red.com ), but that the camera poised for production in early 2007 boasts a supposed 11.4M pixel resolution at up to 60 frames per second, a 35mm cine sized sensor with depth of field like film cameras and a projected cost of $17,500US which is a fraction of current cameras with much lower resolutions. Track the hype at DV guru.