skynoise

If you can buy a 1metre high set of deer antlers on Ebay for less than a case of beer ( as my friend did recently), what else could available?

Needles, Haystacks.
Sure. Categories to browse are useful for computer parts or more lately, for friends who seem to acquire their second hand clothes via Ebay. And Musicthing provides a good filter for endless musical oddities available on Ebay eg actual kraftwerk synthesizers, etc. For finding genuinely weird items, that database is too big for anything but the search button. Which means choosing the right keywords. And lets limit search to items from within Australia.

Antlers? Just to see what else my friend missed. For a deer-less island, impressively no less than 5 sets of antlers could be found.

Taxidermy? Offered actual wall-mounted deer antlers with full heads starting from around $750 ( many on offer ), but also an american skunk “excellent condition” (bidding was at $207), a rattlesnake head ($45 ), a giant tarantula ( $100 ), a predictable assortment of sharks teeth, kangaroo pouches and crocodile heads, and most temptingly – a taxidermied rabbit holding a hunting shotgun and wearing camouflaged unifrom ( $90 ). Taxidermy is an artform, y’hear?

Voodoo? 166 results, but mostly brand oriented stuff, no juicy spells or 21C witchcraft..

Bizarre? 42 items – leather pants, frank zappa CDs, monster bracelets.

Spiritual? 101 items – books, ‘healing cds’ crystal balls. yawns

Terrorist? 11 items including a hessian “Terrorist” body bag ($18 ) , a ‘suspected terrorist’ T-Shirt ($25) and a How to survive a terrorist attack manual ( $25).

Robot ? 353 items, with an ‘Automatic Conveyor Robot Donut Maker’ starting at $5,950.00.

Rare? 12630 supposedly rare items on offer, mostly CDs.

Nuclear? 30 items : A useful ‘Map of Uranium Coal Nuclear Fuels in India & Burma’ ($75), and a British Army NBC (Nuclear Biological Chemical) Suit ($130).

Skeleton? 281 – including a Life Size Human Anatomical Skeleton Female Model 170cm – ($133 )

Ticket? Not so strange, just curious to see how many available – 1439, the bargain ‘buy now’ price of $4250 for a “Date With Destiny” and motivational speaker Anthony Robbins, being particularly alluring.

Ebola? 1 in Australia, 17 worldwide, including 1x very special “EBOLA VIRUS SCIENCE MEDICAL Custom Italian Photo Charm” yours for $17.50 at time of bidding.

Enema? Perhaps appropriately, all 7 items were Blink 182 albums.

Medical? 261, Drugs? 95, Hypnotism? 26, Brain? 137 etc etc.

Perpetual, Peer to Peer Garage Sales?

What to make of all this availability? Skeletons in closets, crap in basements, all the world’s backyard sheds all in the one shippable database? On the one hand, it means avoiding waste and clever re-use of items rather than increasing demand for more new products, but there’s something disturbing about the number of planes in the sky at any one point, that are probably be filled with Ebay gear zipping from country to country. There’s merit in maximising what can be provided locally.

Related : The Slow Food movement, which aims to work towards “local production and consumption which will exploit “best practices” of science and professions worldwide but ultimately prove cheaper due to less reliance on transport and energy and chemical and technology intensive methods.”

Where to now for Ebay?
They’ve made a few purchases of their own in recent years:

skype.com – the dominant VOIP net phone software. Presumably to faciltate even easier sales, as well as broaden how they line their pockets. Plenty of better alternatives available tho.
paypal.com – popular online payment system. Now challenged by Google’s Checkout payment system.

Related: on the payment front, ‘micropayments’ are an interesting idea that many creators find attractive – users click easily to donate tiny payments which means that artwork that has enough merit to generate an audience, can also generate an income without advertising. One such micropayment system recently closed – bitpass.com
Arguments for? www.scottmccloud.com/comics/icst/icst-6/icst-6-full.html

Arguments against? www.nothings.org/writing/upay.html

VJ Benton C. Bainbridge has been doing a solid amount of experimental live video work for 20+ years (see his site for huge array of clips, projects, + quirky vintage video hardware), and was recently in Melbourne to VJ for the Beastie Boys at the Good Vibrations festival. Benton was kind enough to put me on the guest list and invited me sidestage to take footage with one of his video cameras. Which meant for great close-up views of both the Beasties and a Snoop Dog performance.

Random thoughts on the show :

Benton had to work really hard, lotsa set-up, lotsa scheduled clips and camera changes to suit different songs, was very, very busy the entire set. Black & White fish-eye travels through New York never seemed more appropriate. The L.E.D. screens used were super-bright ( Benton: “It’s the only time I’ve had to ask to have a screen brightness turned down.”). Snoop Dog’s entrance, slinking across the stage, had me hunching over with laughter – he seemed like such a cartoon character in the flesh (reinforced by the size of his diamond crusted microphone and the clouds of smoke trailing behind him ). Beasties put on a good party set, swapping between beat-driven brat-hop, and wah-wah percussion fuelled distorto pop. Fun, but felt a bit dated too. Something is lost, something is gained with events of this scale. Photos from side-stage.

Pirate Bay is a long running Swedish hosted file-sharing server that seems to be run by kids whose parents were skate-brats and copyright lawyers. They’ve publically and amusingly scoffed at legal letters sent to them by U.S. based entertainment companies, and continued to host torrent files for all types of media. Not remotely shy when it comes to entering public debates about copyright and file-sharing, they’ve recently gained news attention for another reason – their desire to purchase a nation, preferably a small island, where they want to host their files under their own national laws. First choice was Sealand, the famous oil-rig as nation off the coast of the UK, and is still under negotiation apparently though expected to be too expensive. See www.micronations.net for a full list of alternatives on offer. ( Includes a page to Start-Your-Own-Nation!! ) Related : Craziness off the coast of Dubai, where a map of the world is being built as a series of islands ( amongst other mega-construction projects ).

Part 1 : Exxon announced on 2nd Feb 2007, the largest corporate profit ever, a near $40-billion (U.S.) windfall in 2006.

Part 2 : Major International scientific reports have recently strongly linked fossil fuels with climate change.

Part 3 : Crude oil is still polluting Alaskan waters almost 18 years after the tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground.

Part 4 : Oil Rigs are very popular to photograph. There are hordes of people who love nothing better than to click and whir at those mini floating cities in the ocean. Especially when they is burning up.

It’s not like you need a side-bonus for finding a story about a guy who recently jumped out of a plane, had a parachute fail, then twisted his back-up parachute, plummeted to the ground, all the while being filmed, then hit a large bush of some sort, keeled over on the ground and – survived! My jaw had room to open another notch, when reading about it on metafilter brought up a companion link – The Freefall Research Page, which is dedicated to recording the stories of people who have survived a fall of thousands of feet without a working parachute. ( They’ve even got a companion book which details 200 or so such stories in loving detail…. ) Note – The Free Fall Research page is “primarily focused on falls from aircraft, but we have covered a couple of skyscraper falls”. If you know of any such falls that were higher than 10 stories, they encourage you to “please let us know”.

Randomly : YES, The Man Who Fell To Earth is a movie featuring David Bowie, and NO, he would not have survived a parachute fall in the 1970s, at least judging by the looks of ‘Cracked Actor’ – a fascinating documentary about David Bowie imploding and reconstructing before the camera in his Ziggy Stardust phase. As it turns out, his teeth have improved since then. This is known because googling the above doco-name also reveals the charming 5 minute video ‘a detailed analysis of david bowie’s teeth over time’ ( ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-changes).

And YES, bonus points if you also remembered that ‘The Man Who Fell to Earth And Landed It’ was once a title for a skateboard magazine about he who lands often, Tony Hawk.

Collage of “the real reasons behind Global Warming” found a fark.com thread.

Prone to procrastination? Call it research instead. Drop a comment to add to this list of worthwhile pixel haunts.

Web Illustrators

http://drawn.ca – The mother lode of drawn imagery, introducing 10 new sites / illustrators per day, which usually reveals something extraordinary no matter your visual tastes. The archives therefore oozing with all kindsa visual surprises.

www.comicslifestyle.com – international but very aus-friendly comics hub/blog/portal/community/propoganda disseminator/experiment/fun.

www.belfry.com/comics/index.php – Try not to find 3 web comics worth reading daily from this huge directory.

www.woostercollective.com – More ‘street art’ actually, but relentless, global and at its best an enchanting collection of inventive, delightful art in the streets.

http://blogs.iloha.net/francis – The comic adventures of Francis Bear, via Coburg, Melbourne.

http://forepaw.org – Melbourne based monthly drawing collective. ( PDFs to see onsite )

http://pulphope.blogspot.com – Regular images and their dissection / contemplation from Paul Pope to you.

www.warrenellis.com – Aside from dystopian future observations, Warren keeps a regular splash of photos and illustrations, ranging from the sublime and evocative to the absurd and perverse.

http://diburtimentos.blogspot.com – Just love these weird-assed drawings.

http://tokyoblog.livejournal.com – Great comic journal kept by a visitor to Tokyo who took ‘requests’ via his site for adventures he would try and complete in Japan, then draw a short comic about.

Photoshop Chops

Usually down the daft end of the spectrum, but some great imagery is spawned from the web’s collection of photoshop contests :

photochopz.com, fark.com, worth1000.com, somethingawful.com, photoshopcontest.com, pixeladdiction.com, http://mechapixel.com and http://aliencelebrities.com/contests.html should be enough research for now.

B3tards from www.b3ta.com are regularly creating all sorta animated oddities, usually spammed out in their own e-newsletter which has gained quite a notoriety. One such B3tard is mutated monty / cyriak who has made the best skateboarding godzilla animation you are likely to see this year. Still on the photo tip, try flickr.com’s “interestingness” photos or subscribing to various ‘tags’ to get an ongoing feed of photos of your desire.

Video / Animation

Likewise there’s a gazillion various video sharing sites available now to throw keywords into and wander around. And a gazillion torrent sites with categories upon categories of downloads to explore ( eg talking hot dogs in LSD case study. Video blogs are a nice filter to keep on top of all this though:

http://videos.antville.org – Still the best collection of regularly updated music video links.

http://typolis.net/shortsville – Companion site for short films.

http://www.splitscreen.us – ‘Dedicated to the art of the split screen and multi-layered visuals’.

http://tvinjapan.com/blog – On TV. In Japan. Which inevitably means many brain hertz.(interview here)

http://ticklebooth.com – Well selected, contextualised short films, music videos.

The World Is An Amazing Place

http://monkeysforhelping.blogspot.com – Fun.ny stuff. Look for Turkish Star Wars, Turkish Spiderman, Turkish Superman, and the animated Planet of the Apes no more. Lotsa links, but as the author might write themselves, also comes with “Boss writing. Ice cold.”

www.we-make-money-not-art.com – More oddball electronic art projects, ideas and unexplainables than any one brain should be capable of taking in.

http://googlesightseeing.com – Skin of the planet, stretched to fit your browser. (Beware of low-flying google-mapping-aeroplanes. )

www.kirchersociety.org/blog – Provocative vintage oddities. Only place I’ve ever come across a dog powered tricycle.

www.notcot.org – Bit on the object/gadget fetish side, but enough weirdness to balance out the diet.

www.ektopia.co.uk/ektopia – As above, but with more of a graf flavour.

www.wurzeltod.ch – Adorable collections of the whimsical, esoteric and enchanting. Double plus good.

More prospects for 2007 via worldchanging.com, a site founded on the idea that ‘real solutions already exist for building the future we want. It’s just a matter of grabbing hold and getting moving’.

Now with a few years of promoting sustainable solutions online, the Worldchanging.com crew recently compiled some of their best into a mammoth print compendium of innovative, pragmatic and up-beat projects being put into practice the world over. It’s a near giddy read with an avalanche of enthusiasts the world over, bringing a welcome respite to daily news onslaughts of climate change and eco-disasters.

From ideas to reduce energy use in your house and easy to assemble low-cost housing from cheap recycled materials to zero energy homes, from rooftop gardens & ‘elevated wetlands’ to buddhist monks with solar panels, from compostable computer parts to bioplastics, from handmade saunas to greening skyscrapers, from collaborative designing and carbon sniffing robots to land-mine detecting flowers, this is a book that beams : There is much we can do, there is much being done, and there are many people doing it, small steps at a time.

Noting that this year we need awareness translated into action on many levels – personal, corporate, governmental – worldchanging asked their writers “What do u see happening in 2007?”
Below some highlights, much much more on their site, as well as details for ordering the World Changing book.

Dave Roberts : 2007 is the year of execution. Three factors are coming together:

1. Public interest in energy and climate issues is at an historic high.

2. The U.S. Congress has just gone through the biggest shake-up in over 20 years.

3. The global business community has anticipated our energy-constrained future and is responding aggressively.

David Bornstein : To change the world, people have to overcome their inhibitions about repeating themselves. The easiest way to generate excitement is to continually look for new ideas. The hardest thing to do is to stick with things that work, and to keep doing them better and better, and to keep saying what needs to be said, over and over again. I would like to reiterate two old ideas, that have proven themselves to be extremely effective at alleviating poverty and bringing positive change in many of the poorest parts of the globe: extending micro-credit for self employment and eliminating school fees, especially for girls.

Emily Gertz : more being done on climate change from a governmental level – it was proposed just this week to list the polar bear, native to the Arctic north, as threatened on the endangered species list. Although the full listing process will take about a year, the result will be the first-ever species acknowledged as endangered by global climate disruption.

Serge de Gheldere : Mobility, food, and building sectors cause 70 to 80% of the total environmental impacts in society. Working solutions for these problems do exist, yet somehow have failed to enter the mainstream. So, maybe 2007 should be about carefully choosing our battles, choosing the best places to intervene.

Katie Kurtz : “I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum,” – Claes Oldenburg. We need more artwork that uses minimal resources, includes a component of environmental reclamation or restoration, and encourages people to think differently about how they live in the world. Considering the rapidly encroaching effects of global warming, it’s becoming harder and harder to not view art – both its production and consumption – as a luxury. What happens when an artist approaches their material – whether it’s a jar of paint or their own body – as a precious commodity, to be used sparingly? What if the work harnessed sunlight in order to power itself? What if art gave back rather than took from? How might art’s wealth be shared sustainably?

Phillip Torrone : We’ve seen an explosive growth in blogs, RSS, wikis and video sharing, the next challenge is making it “useful” for learning and manufacturing in developing countries. Projects like the OLPC (one laptop per child) are just one of many physical hardware solutions to information distribution, not the solution, just one of them. I also think we’ll see open source hardware and open hardware projects provide a lot of opportunities to build physical things and share back the skills and iterations.

Jason Kottke : Wealth.. comes from the ground, human effort, the flesh of animals, the sun, and the atom. The global economy is driven by nature, and yet it’s not usually found on the accountant’s balance sheet. Perhaps it should be – a True Cost number or rating, like the nutritional information on a cereal box or the Energy Star rating on a refrigerator. When True Cost is factored in, conflict diamonds become a morally expensive choice to make when they’re fueling turmoil in the world. Likewise clothing made in sweatshops. Organic tomatoes flown in from Chile may be less expensive at the register, but how much carbon dioxide was released into the atmosphere flying/driving them to your table? What’s the energy cost of living in the suburbs compared to living downtown? Do the people who made the clock hanging on my wall get paid a fair wage and receive healthcare? Just how bad for the environment is the laptop on which I’m typing?

Sydney artists Soda Jerk continue their glorious remix trajectory, with their latest feature length epic ( and collaboration with Sam Smith): PixelPirateII : Attack of the Astro Elvis Video Clone.

Much booty to be found over at Soda Jerk HQ – short clips, project documentation, audio remixes and thoughtful witty texts related to the art of remixing. And of course a trailer for their gargantuan collage effort – Pixel Pirate II, and details for ordering the DVD - savour the extended saga, bonus disc sample breakdowns, a piracy archive, gorgeous provocative booklet and a cool poster which lists on the flipside the over three hundred(!!) film and music sources used.

What’s PPII like? Rad. Stupendous. Exhausting. Deftly weaving narrative strands of time travel, copyright battles and video cloning, films relentlessly combined and twisted, Elvis strutting into frames of films that don’t expect him, and all the narrated dialogue itself sourced and spliced from other media. Action? The extended Hulk vs Luke Skywalker vs Daniel-San vs Die Hard Bruce vs Lara Croft vs Rambo vs The A-Team vs Donnie Jarhead fight sequence is “preeet-ty, preeet-ty good”. Over to Soda Jerk:

>Copyright and Intellectual Property rights – what lead you down this not-so-sexy garden path?

When DJ Kool Herc invented the break he wasn’t thinking about intellectual property issues, he was just thinking about what was going to sound good. As artists, a similar kind of rationale lead us into video remixing— we wanted to liberate the actors that we liked (Bill Murray), punish the actors we didn’t (Tom Hanks), and resurrect the celebrity dead (Elvis Presley). “Ah, yes, this shit is illegal” was a realisation that followed.

>Almost every major media organization is touched by the vast array of works in your mammoth Pixel Pirate II edit – have you been threatened by any of them?

So far no nasty legal letters have arrived in the mail, but we do take the legal dimension of our art practice seriously (shout out to Shane our intellectual property lawyer).

>Why did you choose to state in your PP2 booklet, “none of the samples in Pixel Pirate II have been cleared” ?

It wasn’t really intended as a f-you finger to the copyright cops, or a way of waving a red flag at the intellectual property lawyers of MGM and Co, just acknowledging that Pixel Pirate II wouldn’t have been possible under current copyright law. With fragments from over 300 different film and music sources, the cost of licensing each sample would’ve been phenomenal. With licensing there is also the question of consent – it’s unlikely that the Powers That Be are going to be into our requests to mash Elvis and Jesus or to decapitate the head of Charlton Heston-as-Moses. These licensing firms might not agree, but we believe there can be value in these sorts of remix actions – people have a right to play with shared culture and mess with the linearity of history. We see Pixel Pirate II as a protest along these lines: if as a culture we want this sort of project to exist then we must alter the law accordingly.

>It’s an epic production, what roles did SodaJerk and Sam Smith have in making it happen?

As SodaJerk, the two of us have been practicing as remix artists since 2000 and we had been bigtime fans of Sam Smith’s video installation art for about as long. Although he works with original footage, he shares with us an interest in the sci-fi dimension of contemporary screen technologies. So in 2002 we asked him to collaborate with us on Pixel Pirate II and four years later we were still at it…

>Given the immensity of masking your work required, can you give 2 tips for masking / ‘composing fragments of different sources’ into a single shot?

Masking is a bastard, if you’ve done it then you know it to be true. It begins with a simple thought like ‘hey wouldn’t it be great if I cut out footage of the Karate Kid and made him kung-fu kick the Incredible Hulk?’ and always ends in tears. Somehow we tend to overlook the fact that every second of video footage we want to ‘cut out’ has 25 frames that need to be individually masked.

1/ Fingers are really hard to mask. Avoid this problem by masking character’s who are amputees and have no hands.

2/ Loops are your friend. Why mask 8 seconds of footage when you can mask 2 seconds and loop it 4 times? Just think of the old school Scooby Doo and He-Man cartoons, they had the shit looped out of them and still looked rad.

>What inspired your hiphop blending of the 2001 Kubrick apes in your ‘Dawn of Remix’?

‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ is a sci-fi saga that follows the evolution of man from ape to outer space. With Pixel Pirate II we were attempting to chart the evolution of the video remix so it made sense to use 2001 in our project. For us, the true innovators of the remix hail from Hip-hop culture so we conflated these two ideas in ‘Dawn Of Remix’ by re-cutting Kubrick’s apes to make it appear as though they were DJs, drummers, break dancers and MCs. ( see video )

>Conceptual challenges of collage to be overcome in the future / what do you think are some next steps in the evolution of collage and remix video?

Most video remix cultures draw on fast-cut visual forms like movie trailers and music videos. We think the next step in the evolution of video remix is longer narrative films, and in many ways PPII is a bet in this direction. For us, digital editing makes the shift to narrative video works possible because it allows people to recut the space-time continuum of film in a greater variety of ways.

>Do you ever explore live reworkings of your audiovisual remixes?

At the moment that’s not our gig, but we are interested in the possibilities of live remixing.

>Current / future plans?

We’ve just completed a new video remix ‘Picnic at Wolf Creek’. It’s a 10 minute saga where the girls from Hanging Rock get slaughtered by the psycho from ‘Wolf Creek’ despite an enthusiastic rescue attempt by Mad Max and Skippy. It’s a remix made entirely from Australian sources. We’re also attempting to pimp Pixel Pirate II for screenings here and overseas.