skynoise

Like some mechanoid Arab Godzilla, Dubai emerges from the desert haze and Persian Gulf coastline, super-sizing itself as it goes. A mega-project studded spectacle that unavoidably boggles the mind. Audaciousness on such a scale, and yet alongside that arab saying “My father rode a camel. I drive a car. My son flies a jet-plane. His son will ride a camel,” it’s hard not to think of it as foundations for the world’s most elaborate ghost town.

Vat Ist Dubai?

Back in 1971 the modern emirate of Dubai was created with the formation of the United Arab Emirates, a federation of seven emirates on the Eastern side of the Arabian peninsula, at the entrance to the Persian Gulf. Surrounded by oil-rich nations and within short distance of most of Europe and Asia, Dubai has established itself as a key financial centre and trading route destination, featuring the world’s largest human made port. And they seem to like that kind of scale there.

Mega Mega Mega

Higher than 800m tall when finished, will be the world’s tallest structure : the Burj Dubai. Then there’s ‘The World’, a collection of 300 artificial islands – that means yes, each one is being constructed – that form the shape of the world’s continents. ( Apparently Australasia has already been sold to a developer from Kuwait.) The World (( “Take a tour of the world, and view our corporate video” ) is not to be confused with The World’s Largest Shopping Mall – due for completion in 2008, and not to be confused with the worlds largest shopping mall which already exists in Dubai. Nor should The World be confused with the Palm Islands, the three largest artificial islands in the world. There is already one giant indoor ski resort ( while it is 40-50 degrees C outside! ), and a second one is planned, complete with revolving mountain. Also revolving – each floor of a planned rotating skyscraper, a ‘tower in motion’ with heliport, swimming pools, outdoor gardens and floors that rotate independently from each other ( from stored solar energy) . There’s a Chess City planned, with 32 tower blocks of 64 floors, each in the form of a chess piece, The Restless Planet dinosaur theme park featuring more than 100 moving animatronic dinosaurs, a pyramid and a building called Atlantis that will cost $600m and include a “swim-with-the-dolphins encounter programme”, an actual underwater hotel and recently proposed – one of my favourites – ‘The Cloud’, still in concept design but has to be seen to be believed, a small village ( complete with lake and rotating bridges ) elevated 300 metres in the air above Dubai ( “a translucent floating island” ) and supported on slanting legs resembling rain. Check the artist sketches, I like the guy playing cricket at the base.

All those projects just end up sounding like science fiction in the end…. for a better sense of Dubai out of controlness, try this all you can eat photo explanation of why one fifth of the world’s cranes are currently at use in Dubai.

Arriving in Dubai

Turned out just before June, that the cheapest available Melbourne to Istanbul ticket ( for arriving by a certain date to play pixels with artificialeyes.tv ) was with Emirate Airlines – which also meant a stop off in Dubai, flying in over the desert to a sudden and abundant sprouting of buildings, hyper-green landscapes and football fields, resources from all over the world converging at this one particular location and seeming to swell after every blink of the eye.

Browsing through Open Skies ( the in-flight magazine for Emirate Airlines ), confirmed I was not remotely / ballpark / galaxies near their target market. Having passed on the calf-skin credit card holder ( only a few hundred euros ) and other delectable duty free items, scanning and skimming the magazine highlighted a few key phrases such as :

“open the door to a new member of the global elite,” “(real estate brand) xxxxx, the defined height of luxury,” “from the developers of some of the world’s most prestigious properties, we present…”, and while I quite liked “peerless opulence awaits the elite few”, it was hard to go past “a global landmark of grandeur & elegance, to give new meaning to opulence and exclusivity… at this premier luxury address….. owning a Rolls Royce is one of the premium entitlements of luxury living …. A fleet of luxury cars will will be part of your personal asset on a shared ownership basis.”

And then flipping open the newspaper revealed an ad for a sand-dune tour guide that used a fleet of Hummers… which maybe makes sense here of all places – its not like they’d run out of oil. Except as it turns out, they will run out of oil within 20 years in Dubai, and have already made plans to shift from this, revenues from petroleum and natural gas contributing to less that 3% of Dubai’s 2006 economy.

Bleary Half-day Impressions?

Heat. Wealth. Heat. Airport wi-fi. Photo sharing site Flickr.com inaccessible, banned for not matching the cultural and/or politicial views of the UAE. More advertising aimed at people with much fatter wallets. Read about the huge underclass of mostly foreign workers enabling all of this to be built, some 250,000 mostly Indian and Pakistani men who lived in camps and would earn in 6 months, enough money to stay one night at the hotels they were building. Read that although Dubai is one of the more liberal Emirates, gay and lesbian visitors were urged to be cautious with their behaviour, as the punishment for homosexuality is kinda severe…. the death penalty!

And as Andy Nicholson from the Guardian observes (in a juicy article) :

“There is no hint of democracy in Dubai. There is a consultative council whose members are nominated by the ruling family. A group of five old Arab families control the entire emirate. Not the modern centre of the Arab world but, more than that, the Arab centre of the modern world.”

Further reading? Wikipedia for the bare bones, Mike Davis for the gravy >> Sinister Paradise : Does the Road to the Future End at Dubai?

Love, war and Brooklynite perversions. Plenty of bite in Dan Goldman’s comics, whether it’s his Iraq graphic novel with Anthony Lappe : ‘Shooting War’ (.com ), or “Kelly”, his ‘damaged romance Craigslist thriller serialized weekly on ACT-I-VATE ( a cool and prolific webcomics collective ). He was also cheerful enough to answer the comic fanboy questions below.

What made you realise you wanted to make Shooting War?

First and foremost, that reading it scared me. Aside from its snarky attitude, the plausibility of our near-future was as awful as it is likely. That and the script was full of things I wasn’t sure I could render as intended. As a rule of thumb, if something scares me… I charge right for it, my Taurean method of meeting conflicts head-on.

What roles and relationships did you have making Shooting War?

Initially, Anthony was to deliver the script in screenplay format and I’d adapt the script into comics. We’d meet early in the week, talk through things, and then I’d chicken-scratch the script into page layouts in my pocket moleskine. Pretty early on, we realized that ideas were coming into the script from these sessions, and the whole project got a lot more collaborative. Having never been in Iraq, I had a lot of questions that were important to me in making this place ring true, as a service to both sides of the conflict… but I’ve been writing/drawing comics for several years and my experience came into play structuring the story, pacing the rise and fall of the conflicts, developing Abu Adallah and weaving the threat of the Sword of Mohammed into what they ultimately become in the final novel. On the credits page, Anthony is the writer and I am the illustrator, but the baby definitely has his eyes and my nose.

What feedback surprised you about it?

How quickly it spread and how many people it resonated with; by the time the third episode hit the web, we’d gotten a glowing full-page review in the Village Voice and it was obvious that it was only the beginning. As happy as I am about all our press for the webcomic, I am twice as excited to see old fans blown away twice when they see the final OGN in their hands.

How do you feel about some of the criticisms from soldiers?

The constructive criticisms have been plugged back into the book version, fixing details that we simply weren’t privvy to during our online run. We were lucky to have a very vocal community spring up around our comic; SHOOTING WAR is by its nature controversial and polarizing, and I’m fine with that, as long as those offended understand the spirit the satire is intended, and how as horrible as the world is/will be, it’s the brighter future we’re all reaching for.

How does public sentiment about the war in Iraq seem to be changing in the states?

The public-opinion puppet show has deemed it OK to criticize the war in 2007, when doing the same in 2002 was a bit more dangerous. Is public opinion changing…? Depends on the media coverage; people have notoriously short attention spans here… and even more are simply tired of hearing about it and change the channel. That’s almost as disheartening as watching the government constantly extending that length of rope it’s supposed to be hanging itself with.

When’ll Shooting War be concluded in print, and will the conclusion eventually be published online also?

SHOOTING WAR will be concluded in print, but the entire print work will be re-cut and re-sequenced to have a more novelistic feel instead of being broken into episodes as it was online. As well, I’ve literally reworked every single panel in the graphic novel to nail the tone just right and best serve Jimmy’s journey. The print version will be previewed online but we’re not planning on concluding the book online for free; I don’t think Grand Central would be amenable to that.

Ze economics of comics. What ways do you see forward, and is there any divide between online and print comic makers?

The techniques, form and medium are all different, and the skills sets needed to create them as well. That said, what binds print and web comics together is the language they use, which is exactly the same glorious visual tongue. Any divide between the two is implied, in my mind; a comic is a comic is a comic to me, and the physical medium the story’s told in is just the container for the dream.

What binds the ACT-I-VATE online community together, and what has inspired about that?

Pure and simple: a love of reading/making comics, learning from each other’s experiments, and pride in the work that we’re all creating side-by-side. We all love what we’re doing over there, free and wild, and the instant gratification of the feedback from our viewers only stokes the ego-flames and keeps us happy as we take our stories closer to the finish line week in after week out.

Favourite non-ACT-I-VATE webcomics?

*A.D. by Josh Neufeld : a nonfiction narrative structured around Josh’s experiences in post-Katrina New Orleans.

*NOWHERE GIRL by Justine Shaw is quite interesting as well; the art is cozy and clean.

*Anything by Derek Kirk Kim; his “Same Difference” made me cry at work and got me thinking about webcomics in a different way (and he’s so goddamned good it hurts). There are literally thousands more for you to check out; planet comics is fit to explode at the seams, it seems.

As a comic artist, do you harbour plans for storyboarding and making animated films?

Someday I’d love to make some films, it’s what I studied in university… but at the moment I’ve got complete creative control over my works, and that’s something nearly unique in the artistic landscape. Wouldn’t trade that for the world.

If the space between musical notes is just as important to consider as the notes themselves, how do video artists take this onboard? Cuts of black or blank video is one approach, masked shapes that leave portions of screens ‘blank’ are another, and use of transparent screens is another – when video plays it can be seen on this screen, when it isnt played, the space behind screen is still visible. Have been exploring this with Artificial Eye’s Video Mirror Units, images projected onto motorised mirrors that allow image to be sent anywhere in room ( or outdoors ). Hanging the thin ‘tulle’ fabric across a space in many places, leaves the space free and allows images to travel around and ‘collect’ nicely at various locations… seemingly hanging in space on the thin material. ( see flickr photos ).

In a similar vein, a recent celebrated fashion show used similar fabric to give a kind of holographic overlay on the catwalkers. Gorillaz did this to great effect at the MTV awards a few years ago, enabling a live performance by seemingly 3D cartoon characters in real-space. Musion from the Uk were behind that which apparently involves hi res LED screens set into the floor, which are then reflected in a very thin transparent material above it called ‘eyeliner foil’ which captures light very well.

See also : Peppers Ghost – “an illusionary technique used in theatre and in some magic tricks. Using a plate glass and special lighting techniques, it can make objects seem to appear or disappear, or make one object seem to “morph” into another.” ( good explanatory images too via wikipedia)

More Things You Can’t See
– Video underwater. ( Without decent instructions for building your own underwater cam corder holder. )
– Public Outdoor Advertising in Sao Paulo. Imagine – a whole city that bans visual advertising outdoors! Delicious photo collection of now-skeletal billboards.
– Official use of this empty building in the Melbourne CBD. The Unofficial Use though, is pixel-delicious. ‘Empty Show’ video featuring huge amount of visual work by melbourne street artists inside a great space.
– Fees to download the VJ Loops, or 30 page VJ / ‘Painting with Light’ manual uploaded by Perth’s dynamic pixel duo : http://VJzoo.com

Visual Software Bits

http://ustream.tv – Noticed people using this for the iphone launch… am sure there’s better uses for it to come – “a platform that provides live interactive video for everyone. Anyone with a camera and an Internet connection can use Ustream to broadcast to a global audience.”
– Nice photoshop color palette matching tip – use the tool to combine the palettes of stylish paintings with the palettes of photos taken, to give colours a boost.
– Final Cut studio 2 comes bundled with an application dedicated to colour correcting and enhancement, stylising for video. ( tutorial )

VidVox Noise

Amongst the relentless pixel-chatter at the vidvox.net forums, can be found links to the VDMX 5 beta, which is smokin along nicely, the VDMX museum and a guide to integrating Quartz Composer patches into VDMX. Quartz Composer comes bundled with all Tiger OS X operating systems, but has to be installed from the developers pack to allow making your own visual toys. However, even within installation, the quartz files produced will run on any OSX Tiger system within quicktime, or application using quicktime. Harnessing this, the vidvox QC wiki has over 30 example FX and patches free for use. QC patches can be used as clips, FX or a Font Synth in VDMX 5 ( meaning text triggered in VDMX will be sent through the QC patch, then back to VDMX for outputting ). Sample QC effect ? Implementation of the classic ‘Stargate’ slit-scan effect. ( Now with vertical and horizontal modes, Flip, Freeze, manual Scan, Rate and Angle controls. )

Freshly popped from their cubicle culture escape hatch, Hunter Weeks and Josh Caldwell found themselves making a ‘road movie’ about their trajectory. On Segways. www.10mph.com for more details (and feature film download). Over to Hunter :

Why’d you pick a 100 day trip across the country on a two wheeled gyroscope as a way to get out of your “soul-sucking cubicle jobs” ?

Maybe something about those cubicle jobs made us think it’d be a good idea to travel 4,000 miles on a scooter designed only for short distances at a time? In all seriousness, a college buddy who knew we were pondering a change in life came up with the idea and we thought it was pretty ludicrous at first. But after a week or two, it started to make sense to us. It was a perfect opportunity to really force our lives into a whole different direction and we figured it would make an interesting film.

How’d the 2 wheeled beasts hold up to such a flogging?

Beasts are exactly what they are. After we started planning this, I had a panic attack when I imagined going up and down the huge mountain passes in the Rocky Mountains. But it handled them fine. The wheels lasted the entire trip and it handled hopping many curbs and traveling miles and miles of wash-boarded dirt roads. The only time we ran into a problem was in Pennsylvania when so much rain caused a short circuit in the handle bars.

And yourselves? What’d you gain from the experience?

We could write a book. This film resides around a philosophy. We went from a lifestyle that seemed to really emphasize the importance of material things – having money and subsisting off of lattes and swanky urban cuisine. It was all about work and a drive to make more money and do more meaningless day-to-day work. So many people in our society are stuck in the muck. By forcing ourselves to really let go of this and doing our own ‘thing’ (making films), we created a whole new path and perspective on life. So many people seem to relate to this, but my guess is that most will stay stuck in the muck. We’re not and I can’t tell you how rewarding that is. You gotta go figure it out for yourself. I think this film will inspire a few people to live life differently.

And at the end of 100 days, did you begin to stop feeling like a dork when riding a Segway?

Haha. I think I’ll always feel like a dork riding a Segway. But people dig dorks.

Which of you is the more skilled rider?

Josh for sure. He spent the entire time riding on a Segway. He learned how to do wheelies and other goofy stunts.

Oddest reaction to the Segways along the way?

A drunk guy saw Josh riding on the side of the road and was trying to hitch a ride with him. He was looking at the batteries and thought it was a heating device. He insisted he could fix the heater and begged for a ride.

Independent film producers tend to be unburdened with giant marketing budgets, and inevitably tend to mirror inventive production with inventive distribution ideas – what are yours?

We’ve got some cool things going. We’ve got a download of the film, so anyone down under can check this thing out right NOW. And we’ve started an affiliate program where we give 33% of the sale to the seller. Rather than give this to some big ol’ distributor, we figured we’d let anyone take a cut. After people see the film, they are inspired, and often want to help get it out there, so why not share a little of the profits. Like I said earlier, we ain’t as concerned with the money, though it does help a little. Finally, we aligned ourselves with some cool companies in the States and they are all helping get the word out about this. I think most of these are pretty unique approaches in the film industry and they seem to be working for us.

And what’s the next film in your pipeline?

Next up is a documentary about Fantasy Football, an online game 20 million people play during the American Football season. But after that, we’re talking about doing a Western and I just read a bunch about Ned Kelly. I don’t think he’s gotten his fair share of good cinematic expression yet. Coooo-weee.