skynoise

Another round-up of all things pixelish : software, hardware, VJ toys & interweb distributions.

Video Peoples
Everyone’s favourite acid-rave art casualities Paper Rad have been getting jiggy with motion – with a recent Trash Talking DVD release ( ravetastic qt trailer ) , and via www.wyldfile.org a whole range of animated music videos for artists like Beck. Dirty-flash-a-licious, and found via Jaclyn Campanaro’s Image Journal, who has made a very cute tutorial for making Stop-Motion Video Shorts with Your Digital Camera.

The Psychasthenia Society presents satiric storytelling blended with remixed vintage movie stills, live video, and electronic music. Includes an interesting video trailer.

Also on the performance tip – Furthernoise.org hosted a month of Sunday afternoon live audio visual internet performances throughout June 06 in the online file mixing platform visitorsstudio.org. Click to see the 5 performances.

Melb pixelist Kirsten Bradley, one half of Cicada.tv, now has a blog to document her current phase of “obsessive research on timelapse and organic animation.”

Sydney’s Spanky has started demux – a new audiovisual DVD label and blog.

Japanimation? Try the Optical Sisters, 24 Invaders, the crazed lo-fi pixels of eyehz – www.eyehz.com ( follow the links to their blog updates for especially fun retro-future pixel action ) – or Super Deluxe.

Web Video
The video blogging universe continues to expand – see for example, the followup film by the makers of Shaun of the Dead, detailing with much humour the entire production process – www.comingsoon.net. But the video blog expansion hasn’t been without it’s hiccups – rocketboom.com lost of it’s announcers recently, and journalist videoblogger Josh Wolf has been jailed defending a journalist’s right to protect his sources. He refused to testify before a U.S. grand jury and also refused to hand over unpublished video footage he shot during a clash between San Francisco police and anti-G8 protesters in July 2005. He is now in prison.

Second Life, the appropriately named online 3D world, has had it’s fair share of in-game video screenings and lectures, conferences etc – but as it’s population growth continues, the audiovisual experiments flourish – eg Portuguese artist um.mu creating a venue with 3 virtual screens to practice in a simulated space, his actual upcoming audiovisual shows. “When I compose, I stream live straight into SL, audio and video on 3 screens. It’s great having people being able to walk through your studio while you are practicing.”

Software
Lightreading has a useful overview of the top 50 online video storage sites, which includes the likes of jumpcut and their capacity to edit videos online. A nice one-stop glimpse of the alternatives to the crap resolution and uneditable clips offered by youtube.

Likely to impact on these video storage sites is the release of the ‘drag n share’ AllPeers – a free firefox extension which ‘combines the strength of Firefox and the efficiency of BitTorrent to transform your favorite browser into a media sharing powerhouse’.

Wikipedia continues to be the best friend of those seeking up to date technical information – egListofVJ_Software, and their digital video and VJ entries are very useful also.

For those moving on from stand-alone VJ software, processing and jitter continue to shine. Exhibition of software made with processing. Processing VJ application. Quite awesome rubber screen effect – built with processing – which works within the webpage – click around for extremely fluid image warping.

Jitter glitch patch, VJ sync jitter patch, more jitter patches, VIP mac/PC app which requires max & jitter, and Anti-Keyframe – a jitter based application, which places an emphasis on improvisation – in part by triggering random clips, in part by ‘moving the physical interaction away from the computer and the eyes away from the screen to start focusing on the present’. The interaction can be simplified to fit a standard game-pad.

FLxER : interactive free flash software to mix audio, video and multimedia sources during live performances, with a web-community of more than 4000 people sharing their productions.

FreeJ – free linux VJ tool – tutorial now online - to try Freej without installing it, just use the dynebolic live CD.

On the editing and post-production front : 10 final cut pro tips via dv guru
& an introduction to expressions in After Effects – or how to explore relationships between elements.

Hardware
Video circuit bending : awesome collection of DIY hardware hacks for video, new virtual vinyl product from numark & now online : Radical Software – a collection of video art technology magazines from the 70s.

related posts : july video snippets , may video snippets, live audiovisual round-up (april)

Viral? Really? Supposedly some 30 million people have seen the evolution of dance video – a 10 minute work through an astonishing range of recognisable dance moves across decades. That’s a lot of inboxes, blog posts and you-gotta-check-this-out-forwards, so, unsurprisingly, he has a sequel in the works. There’s a new mainstream emerging somewhere amidst all this internet rubble.

Cliptip’s a great little music video blog, Knife’s ‘marble house’ and the rapture’s ‘get myself into’ being recent stand-outs found there.

Super Vision - – explores with style the Minority Report future where we are tracked and bombarded by personalised advertising everywhere we go.

Top 50 funny Hasselhoff videos. 50 actual videos. Actually 50 videos.

Want to ‘repay all the goodness(?) Hasselhoff has given us’ over the years? Join the funny campaign to synchronise purchase of a Hasselhoff single and get him the top spot in the UK music charts. There’s probably better places to donate money, but it’d be fun to see the charts derailed by a trigger happy swarm.

Video Remixy? VJ Brewski’s video mash-ups.
Pixel Pirate II: Attack of the Astro Elvis Video Clone is an hour long narrative remix video constructed from samples pirated from over 300 film and music sources. It contains no original audio or video footage. The Year is 3001 and the ancient art of remix is being oppressed by the evil tyrant Moses and his Copyright Commandments… via – shortsville

OK Go, already notorious for their previous one-shot dance clip, have upped the ante with a new choregraphed dance clip that tweaks exercise treadmills in continously inventive ways. And it’s already spawned a lego version of the clip!

Self-confessed short attention spanner, Londonite Duncan Beiny AKA DJ Yoda is gathering momentum with take on hip hop spliced with pop culture and bad taste. Fond of mixing Neighbours dialogue with Wu Tang beats, he has taken to upping his cut and paste antics with the addition of DVD scratchnology in his live show. With a couple of CDs & DVDs now under his belt, he makes his way to oz in February 07.

What are you still proud of with your debut album?
I think I under-estimated how easy it would be to make an artist album – I’m pretty used to working on mixtapes, and I thought it would be that simple. So I guess I’m proud that I got it finished finally, and that it’s at a stage that I’m happy with! Also, that I got the chance to make two tracks with Biz Markie, who’s always been my favourite MC.

When at a party, what’s your one-liner for explaining ‘DJ Yoda Goes to the movies’?
Ha ha – I just tell people that it’s all my favourite parts of all my favourite movies, mixed into all my favourite tunes! It’s like having the remote control for the TV and stereo at a party.

How has your development of an audiovisual show shaped your music creation process?
Actually I don’t think the DVD mixing that I’ve been doing has affected the way I make music – if anything it’s the other way round.

What gear do you use for a live show?

Pioneer DVJs, Pioneer DJM mixers, turntables and Serato.

And in the studio?
Anything that’s available. I have access to a very cool studio with about 200 keyboards and every drum machine you can imagine, so whatever takes my fancy! And kazoos.

What are your general steps now, when approaching a new audiovisual show?
Well my newest tour is the live show for my album, so I’ve got together visuals for each of the tracks on the CD, and will be mixing it all up together, and creating live bootlegs of my own tracks. So I’ve filmed a lot of the rappers on the album performing their track, and I can mix them into different backgrounds and stuff. It’s very cool.

What sort of differences exist for the way samples are treated by copyright holders of audio and video?
Clearing video is pretty much impossible! I looked into doing a legal mix DVD, and it basically can’t be done yet! There needs to be some serious re-examination of the way copyright laws work for video and audio I think.

Did you have to get samples cleared to produce your Kill Bill DVD set?
( Have you ever had any sample clearance troubles with anything? )
Can I just say “no comment”?!

What happened at the turntable & orchestra event ?
It was a really incredible experience – just because it was so different from anything else I’ve ever done. I had a music score on a stand to follow, and I had to watch the conductor, and the rest of the orchestra, so it was crazy. The crowd was half Yoda fans and half classical music aficionados, so that was weird. But it was queues round the block, and standing ovations, so what more could we have asked for! The concerto is going to be recorded and released next year, and I’m sure we’ll take that on tour too.

What’s good and bad about DVD mixing technology?
Good: it adds an extra element to the DJ/club experience, and allows me as a DJ to have that extra element of creativity .
Bad: more equipment means more electricity – bad for the environment.

Audiovisual inspirations? Who has pushed it?
It’s weird – I have so many inspirations when it comes to music, but with the AV stuff I don’t really feel like I’m looking up to anyone. There’s no-one that I’m aware of that’s out there doing what I do, so I think I’m an old-school innovator at this!

Where does yoda want to take the force next?
I’m going to start working on some more music production for other artists, and then on a new “Cut and Paste” CD…

Can we expect the full audiovisual show when you come to Australia?
You can – I’ll have the full dates up on www.djyoda.co.uk in the next few weeks, but I’ll be all over Oz in February! See you there!

Appropriately enough for someone who renders the spectacle of Washington in such gloriously mutant pixels, Kenneth Hung’s first exhibition in Australia will be at the White House gallery as part of ‘Straight Out of Brisbane’. Kenneth seems amped too about participating in a range of workshops and talks at that festival too ( Aug 15-20) and was happy to do some Pacific Ocean Ping Pong:

60×1? What is behind the name of that URL?
Back then I have already got my TINKIN.com, and it serves as my main portal. I got bored to have a very routine looking site and one day, I decided to have another web domain that is crazy enough that I don’t need any search engine to promote it- I was thinking of testing the viral marketing aspect of the web and see how

From Aug 15-20 Straight Out Of Brisbane offers up it’s wintery festival goodness to the sunshine deprived. Aside from a mammoth gigs, art and new-media program, special guests glitch-pop queen Kevin Blechdom & net-artist Kenneth Hung, AV scratching by Collapsicon(.net), robot wars and much more – it also features a ‘festival of ideas’ – a series of forums crisply curated by Qld JJJ reporter Fiona Hogg.

What inspired the ‘Ideas’ component of SOOB 2006, and the theme of urban futures?
A committed stance against the three ‘w’s of forums; waffle, whinge & wank… so to give the program a purpose & direction was a start. As a 20-something born’n’bred Brisbanite, my living memory of the city is nothing but concrete, construction & cranes; on the other hand I have an elderly father who points out where the barley-fields were as we drive through zone2 suburbia. It’s not the norm to grow up going on holiday for two-weeks and returning to see so many changes in a city…. so there was this strong theme of BRI$CRANE.

We are increasingly urban creatures, more than half the world living in cities this century. If Brisbane is the 2nd fastest growing city in the world, what king of impacts is this having for local life?
Brisbane has until now been a big country town; a CBD and then