skynoise

What do Cyrillic Graffiti, Anti-Americanism in Europe and wikipedia edits have in common? Let’s find out.

Cyrillic Graffiti

Sofia, Bulgaria is 12 hours bus ride from Istanbul, a journey which facilitates extensions of 1 x Turkish VISA, a necessary process for foreigners every 3 months. The netcafe which delivered these words, is a dark Soviet styled bunker called “The Matrix”. There are 2 doors to walk through, a photo to be taken, and card to be printed and issued, before a final 3rd door can be entered through. Like most European countries, most young people speak enough English to help direct wandering bug-eyed folk. Unlike most European countries, the Bulgarian language uses not the Roman alphabet, but the cyrillic alphabet, which to eyes unused to it, comes off as some kind of machine-code graf wild-style combo. Wikipedia has more than enough Bulgarian language info to satisfy curious linguists, but precious little about cyrillic graffiti – which is surely the first thought in most minds upon seeing this square funked shaped alphabet. As it unfolds, the streets of Sofia have precious little cyrillic graf either, mostly Bronx alphabetics. There’s a little Bulgarian graf online, and more here ( Артисти – means ‘artists)but much more Russian around ( which also shares a cyrillic alphabet ). Especially love the otherworldly characters of http://ik.graffitizone.kiev.ua and http://englishrussia.com/?p=799. And for the touring curious,
http://myspace.com/waytorussia notes: “For DJs and bands—we can arrange a gig for you in Russia, especially Moscow, St. Petersburg, Novosibirsk and Volgograd.”

Anti-Americanism in Europe?

While the cyrillic graf scene ain’t ain’t exactly setting downtown Sofia ablaze, there’s no lack of visual ‘disapproval’ of one of the United States most unpopular Presidents. Spray paint and stencils stain almost every second wall with the likes of “Bush=War Criminal”, alongside various caricatures and generally demeaning portraits. Not so surprising maybe, given Bulgaria’s proximity to the Middle East where George Bush is hoping to spend an extra USD140-billion if he can get congress to approve his war budget for 2008, or East Europe’s proximity to Russia and the former Soviet empire. Some Americans are aware of this Anti-US sentiment though, as covered in the PBS documentary “The Anti-Americans” which covers attitudes from France, Britain and Poland. British singer Ian Brown ( former Stone Roses singer probably adds himself to that list with his recent single with Sinead O Connor, ‘illegal attacks’, which urges the return of US & UK soldiers currently in Iraq.

Wikipedia Edits

One of my favourite wikipedia edits is still the Penny Arcade comic “I have the Power’, which it shows an enemy of He-Man ham-fistedly transforming “He-man is the most powerful man in the universe.” to “He-Man is actually a tremendous jack-ass and not really that powerful”. And with wikipedia entries becoming so dominant in the top of search engine results, the desire to control perception of a nation, individual or company, event etc is becoming increasingly political. Wikiscanner, a site that exposes the digital fingerprints of those who make changes to wikipedia pages, has been in the news a lot recently. There’s plenty of corporations trying to improve their image, and both the CIA and Vatican have been nailed with changing articles. The Australian Government is no exception in this age of “info-war”, flying the flag with notable edits from the Defence department changing details in articles about the “9/11 truth movement”, and the Prime Minister’s office who added to an entry on martial arts: “Poo bum dicky wee wee”. Go Australia~!

This weeks shout-out goes to couchsurfing.com >> the best rad-person locator have found on the internet yet. And to my waycool Bulgarian hosts who brought me along yesterday to an amusing cardboard box ‘flash-mob’ style protest yesterday evening, aiming to draw attention to illegal building currrently happening in protected Bulgarian locations.

Was lucky enough to spend a week in Cappadocia ( from Persian: Katpatuka meaning “the land of beautiful horses” ) recently. Easily the weirdest physical location I have ever been, so many odd shapes and silhouettes, windows and doors where the eye doesn’t expect to see them, hand carved rooms to climb around in, that lead to more of the same, but different, and surprisingly for it’s desert climate, food growing in every spare bit of land – watermelons, grapes, corn, sunflowers, herbs etc etc. Apparently the soft rocks that make up the region are deposits from ancient volcano eruptions millions of years ago, which people carved out to form houses, churches, monasteries. There was around a million people living there at some point, but it’s now populated by sparse villages of a few thousand each, which leaves vastness to explore in between. Stayed at an enchanting village, Goreme, cafe with wifi, weird 3 storey melty rock buildings surrounding it in every direction, the option of walking back in time after breakfast – what’s not to love?

Other Cappadocia lovables?

They have an International UFO Museum.

And a hair museum.

They have lots of hot air balloons.

They have a long, extended,crazy history.

And pop culture likes it >>
Guess which civilisation is being referenced in the name chosen by Wu Tang Clan’s “Cappadonna”?. ( Go the Wu Tang Clan! Check out Cappadonna’s voiceovers in the the Wu Tang Clan overdubbed Kung Fu feature film, Iron Fist Pillage for more Wu Tangent ).

“In The Simpsons episode “Brother from Another Series,” the character Sideshow Bob grudgingly acknowledges the Cappadocians as the only “civilization in history [that] considered hydrodynamics a calling.” This referred to the Cappadocians being famous for underground cities, although not specifically dams.(via wikip)

And yes, they have underground cities.

See BLDGBLOG for a rad post about the extent of Cappadocia’s hand-carved underground cities. Only managed above ground weirdness this time, but met an interesting German man Bernd Junghans, who has been exploring the region for six years and documenting all of the ancient churches and monasteries he finds there, with a photographer friend. One recent discovery was made because he wanted to go to the toilet behind a bush, noticed a hole low down in a wall, went inside and found himself facing a monastery! He said the publically accessible underground cities go down 8 levels, but that he knew where to get access to a 20 level underground city, but it involved crawling through a lot small holes. Crazy collection of photos – of spaces – discovered by these two. Locals say there are hundreds more, even thousands, of these ancient buildings and that many people keep private that a hole in the back of their house leads to such a cave, because they don’t want government interference.

Naturally, all of the above made an excellent filmic backdrop for people in monkey masks and squid costumes, as well as providing some of the weirdest projection surfaces that could be hoped for. Especially when the two projectors in use are strapped to the side of a car which has a generator in the boot, the car is travelling along a hill-peak dirt road in between weird rocks, one laptopper in the back triggering video, laptopper in the front controlling the two VMS Video Mirror Units also mounted on the side of the car ( enabling the projections to be moved around with software, swinging to hit whatever targets seem ‘interesting’. )

(above – the view when you have projectors instead of headlights. Could you drive down a dirt path @ 30-40km/h like that? I got in trouble for the white dot footage… Kept hearing this manic voice from front of car, the driver’s seat : ‘what are u doing?! this is crazy’, which I was eventually to understand meant the fast moving white dots projected on the road were very disorienting. Good time to mention there was also a girl on the bonnet, filming.)

Artificial Eyes post on the adventure, and as usual, well photo documented along the way, including the plastering up of Todd Synesthete’s unfortunate wrist-break. Photos for day one, two and three and four – which ended with projections on a cliff face with hand carved rooms in it.. see day+night photos below…

UPDATE : Recently uploaded a 5 minute clip I made after the trip, ‘Cappadocia skies‘, set to music by Swedish wunderkid, Extraboy.

(click above for full comic-style review )

As the creative media palette expands online, the storytelling and multimedia principles explored in Scott McCloud’s ‘Understanding Comics’, + ‘Reinventing Comics’ become more relevant everyday. ( Aye, aye’s they’s rad books that cannot be recommended enough to any kind of visual creatives ). ‘Making Comics’ is Scott’s latest, which he promoted on a yearlong U.S. tour, trialling mobile ‘home-schooling’ with his teenage daughter on the way. Given the way Scott uses the comic form itself, to deconstruct and explains the subtleties and potential of comics, art, technology etc, it seemed appropriate to review his book in comic-style. Melbourne’s fine comic auteur, Gregory Mackay stepped up to the drawing board for it ( or was it graphics tablet? ), with Francis Bear in tow. ( + Give him a poke to get some more of his enchanting dystopian inked suburbia up online too! )

The whole private public motion blur is generally less of a concern with video sharing sites ( files uploaded are generally preferred to be publically available ), than with social networks. Ownership, profit and control however take an important front seat. As sites increasingly profit by aggregating content from their audience, inevitably audiences are wanting some of that profit. Leaders in the field youtube have announced plans to eventually share advertising revenue with creators of clips, starting initially with the more popularly viewed creators. Several other sites already have revenue share programs in use and earning cash for creators – blip.tv and metacafe being two, Scott Kirstner ( author of The Future of Web Video, and Cinematech blogger ) has a comprehensive list of the video giants that do actually reward contributors.

UK Indymedia asks bluntly :

With video.indymedia currently dead and googlevideo, youtube etc dominating the upload your own online video sector, what is the realistic future of truly independent video online?

Andrew of Australian video sharing site, engagemedia.org responds :

Well, there are many possible directions, and the newly released free, open source Plumi package aims to offer some more. Until now, the only other effective free and open source online video publishing platform available online has been the Broadcast Machine, made by (US-based) Participatory Culture Foundation. Like Engagemedia, PCF are participants in the Transmission network of online social justice video projects. For a year now Transmission participants have been working together to develop the tools and social networks to link projects together, stop reinventing wheels, expand our options and easily enable users to upload and download the video we want, when we want…. without having to give our work to the new corporate landlords of the online media sector.

Like that game? Gauging the merits of online social networks can be just as fun.

Space Vs Face

Migrations are afoot, users flocking on masse from the gawkiness of Myspace to the more elegantly structured social capacities of Facebook. There’s much to love and hate about them both though. The wikipedia entry for News Corp reveals what an enormous media empire Rupert Murdoch has been building, most recently adding the Wall Street Journal to the collection, alongside the US Fox network and newcomer MySpace. Everytime you send or receive a mail via Myspace rather than say an email account, Rupert’s cash register tinkles just a little bit. That mohawked zebra and anarchist film collective from Texas that just logged in to send you an important bulletin about their activities ( which they could’ve done on their own webpage ) has just made one of the world’s largest media empires a little richer. Myspace’s terrible design, interface bottlenecks and buggy code have been beaten to death already, so let’s leave it. But where are people going?

Facebook – a leap from one private pond into a better designed but even more private pond ( only members may view and participate, and Google doesn’t index any user-created pages on Facebook ). It feels more legitimately what an online social network should feel like. Some reasonable ways to filter the noise and tune into the activities, conversations, interactions and media creation of your friends. And it works really well, it’s killer feature being the ease at which a user can oversee activity in their network of friends, and join in when inspired to. Not so cool is that this information – created by you, by me, by users, shared conversations and media, is effectively owned by Facebook, walled off to the outside world. For some, that’s a comforting level of privacy, for others it is something that will have to be improved on with the next social network that everyone will jump to.

(The Facebook is stupid. Don’t do it kids : http://www.ihatefacebook.com ).
( All your widgets are belong to Facebook )
( Facebook is the new AOL )
( Slap in the Facebook : It’s time for Social Networks to open up )

As Krish sees it : “We need a decentralized social networks based on open standards. After all, what we have in Facebook or Myspace, are our friends. They are fruits of our time. We should be able to take them anywhere we go at any time we want. We needed a Microsoft to understand the importance of open source and open standards. Probably, Myspace and Facebook (to some extent), will provide us the “Microsoft” of the social networking world.”

OpenID.net is one such “open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity”, that aims to identify people on the internet the same way websites do with a URL, allowing people to use their OpenID to sign into many places, and eventually I suppose to transfer their social networks with their identity as they go.

And yes, lots of add-on applications are being built for Facebook, as a result of their offering their code and a programmers kit to the public, however annoyingly a lot of these also require installation from both the giver and receiver to be used. Fine, if someone on Facebook wants to bite their vampire-ninja-werewolf-superhero-zombie fangs into my neck, buy me a virtual beer, give me a shoulder massage or interact in some other weird way, go ahead and let them do it. Just don’t require me to have to click and litter the side of my screen with yet another icon. Just let them bite me.

Aside from skynoise posts and the weekly technoscape column at threedworld, have found myself with a few other places to send words while in Istanbul. Currently working on a piece for a new Australian publication, Greenpages magazine, who asked for :
“an optimistic view on what peak oil might mean for the future of Australian society at least – big shifts bring opportunities to do things differently..”

Engage Media maintain a website for video about ‘social justice and environmental issues in
Australia, Southeast Asia and the Pacific’, and they’ve also asked for some weekly words to be sent their way. Engage Media are looking to ‘harness the growth of digital distribution tools to bypass the control of big media conglomerates’. To that extent they’ve already released Plumi – ‘a Plone-based video-sharing CMS. Plumi enables you to create a sophisticated video-sharing and community site out-of-the-box’, which features video uploading in any format, automatic server-side Flash video transcoding, embedded playback and much more. Will be diving into that shortly.

Have also been enjoying ‘reblogging’ over at the Artificial Eyes Reblog, ‘a mix of video and contemporary arts of interest to vjs, and visual artists curated by Todd Thille and Michael Parenti, with guest rebloggers’. The Reblog software allows quick and easy reposting of favourite posts from your selected feeds, and is free to install on the server of your choice. So have been harvesting various visual inspiration feeds there, with more recently some posts reflecting local politics : ‘satanic’ raves in Iran, water rationing in Istanbul, and death threats to Turkish writers. Alongside this Artificial Eyes maintain their own news blog.

Last few weekends have been spent rooftop VJing in Istanbul ( hello Ghetto bar ), and then wandering the brain-melty landscapes and liquid rock buildings and landscapes of Cappadocia. That’s not to suggest the quest for Turkish Batwoman has stopped by any means. In fact there have been several important leads.

1. Via comments from Mike Best, a treasure chest of Mexican Batwoman links & youtubery. Sez Mike, this poster ( above right ) is adapted from a painted centrefold from playboy/penthouse (sorry can’t find a link but I saw it reprinted in the 80s). ( Thanks Mike~! : ) And Mexican Batwoman = Maura Monti – is as great a super-heroine name as ever I’ve read.

2. Turns out that Turkey’s golden era director of such films as Turkish Rambo, Turkish Star Wars & The Immortal ( featuring Turkish Bruce Lee! ) Çetin Inanç*, has his very own myspace. Or dedicated fanpage, run by a chararcter with whom I hope to trade many films, even if Turkish Batwoman is unfortunately not one of them. The page notes that Inanç made an incredible 138 movies between 1967 – 1986, including the notable ‘Psychedelic action cult movies with our great star CUNEYT ARKIN 1981 - 1984’. Links on the site lead to a funny Turkish Superman review, another dedicated Turkish cult cinema page, a Turkish movie poster site with a bundle of irrestible jpegs, other cultmovie sites, and the owners Sinematik blog ( in Turkish ).

3. Have been flashing a digital camera image of the above left Batwoman poster to the bootleg DVD people in little alleys sprawled around Taksim + Beşiktaş. Without success so far, but only a matter of time.

( *thanks to the freshly broken wristed Synesthete for pointing out how to switch on Turkish alphabet characters within os x )

Akin to deep-sea fishing, throwing the word ‘torrent’ (alongside just about anything) into a search engine, reveals all kinds of creatures that look strange in the daylight.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead

An essential teaching in the Buddhist cultures of the Himalayas, the explorations within this book have captivated people of many cultures, and so, torrents abound. Audio books are available for those who prefer their meditative reading via headphones, and the gravel voiced crooner Leonard Cohen narrates a television documentary about the book and it’s meaning. Exactly the sort of reason am watching more TV programs these days – quality programs on some station somewhere, are uploaded, and choice is no longer restricted to what the local network has designated must be watched at this specific time. Sixties maverick Timothy Leary predictably gets a torrent nod too, given his acid-fuelled explorations and inevitable attraction to the book. Mere side-clicks away, quite a few Leary related archival oddities too. What the Net-As-Library can provide is proving less surprising every day. A library whose keys would be thrown away for 5 years if Elton John had his way.

David Lynch’s Money Shot

Inland Empire is the latest and long anticipated (172 minute) descent into cinematic hypnosis / psychosis from the much revered director. Love or hate him, there’s such undeniably exquisite craft to his work, each release is an event in itself, all the more reason to experience the work at some red-velvet curtained cinema-den. Lynch himself takes the presentation of his artworks seriously, and refuses to ‘taint’ his DVDs with voiceovers for this reason. The artwork should exist by itself to be viewed in the right conditions, and sure, separate DVD commentary videos can be used, but not a voice on top of the actual artwork. Which’d likely leave the famous for transcendentally meditating director a little peeved to know that torrents of Inland Empire are easily found online, and probably being watched on some iDevice somewhere. Marketing for the film championed that Lynch enjoyed the freedom of shooting this digitally, undoubtedly the producers must understand also that the lack of distribution for the film will send fans downloading. There’s no reason why a completed film by a world-famous director that was screened nearly a year ago in New York, should not have been screened in Australia or Istanbul by now. The shift to digital projections and ease of distribution this will enable should help with that.

More Gravel Please

If anyone can outgravel Leonard, William S. Burroughs’d be a good man to give it a shot. Here’s the sort of man notorious for enough reasons that it’s easier to refer curious folk to a search engine about him, than list his exploits or point to a single URL. That he comes with a voice fitting his endeavours makes it all the more honeypot clickable that torrents exist for ‘A documentary about the history of witchcraft, told in a variety of styles, from illustrated slideshow to dramatised events of alleged real-life events, right up to the early twentieth century…. narrated by William S.Burroughs, recorded in the mid-1960s.’ Comes with self-described hypnotic jazz score, and requisite bizarre imagery from ye olde times.

Getting Your Torrent Freak On

Torrent Freak.com is becoming one of the better known repositories for torrent related news, and while much of it may only be of interest to torrent software fanfolk, there’s plenty here to digest, and regular probes into the central issues surrounding file sharing and peer to peer distribution online. How can artists and content producers get paid for their work? How can traditional distributors work with rather against peer to peer based systems?

As evidence of how sophisticated file-sharing has become a recent post describes software now available for mac and PC which will notify users of vacancies as they become available within private tracker
systems. Trackers essentially showcase lists of torrents as they become available, and outside of the hugely popular sites like piratebay and mininova etc, an ecology of smaller topic and niche focussed trackers provide incredibly specific archives of material for their respective communities of members. Many of these choose to remain private membership based, which is where the above applications come in. Sometime ago the record music industry only had one peer to peer based application to deal with : napster, and they must be wishing they worked with it then, rather than having to deal with the arsenal of diversified and decentralised sharing tools that sprung up from Napsters demise.

Albert Einstein – grinning bicycle lover, scientist and fond of reminding people that ‘imagination is more important than knowledge’. Were his animated head floating in a jar on a shelf somewhere today, no doubt it’d be smiling at the lateral ways the bicycle is being harnessed.

Two Wheeled Energy

Bicycle on a stand = an easy pedal powered generator, and an idea often seen powering fruit juice blenders at outdoor festivals. At the 2007 Coachella festival in the states a group called Global Inheritance took the idea a step further, providing 24 bicycle generators to power some stage equipment, and also making the bicycles available for recharging mobile phone batteries. Instructions are available for building your own with a bike trainer stand, bike, car alternator 78” belt and other parts, or there’s an “email us to buy one” option as well.

In other random Coachella news, Scarlett Johansson joined the reformed ‘Jesus and Mary Chain’ on stage for backup vocals on “Just Like Honey,” a combination that does odd things to my brain. Supposedly shes got a covers album of Tom Waits songs up her sleeve too, but back to bikes…

Bicycles, Projectors, Amplifiers

DIY high performance bicycle lighting system? No problemo. ( via metafilter ) Those after a bit more light might enjoy The Magnificent Revolutionary Cycling Cinema, UK touring bicycle-powered cinema who transport their cinema to festivals and events by bike, and then power it by bike while there. Plenty of inspiration on their site, including details of a recent gig which featured The Jelly Royale, ‘a five piece which in sound check were pulling around 250W from four amps at their loudest… all three bikes are fired up and there’s a queue of people ready to jump on the bikes if needed. As it turns out, the band probably averaged around 170W continuous, so there wasn’t much need for ‘change-overs’ on the bikes.’ They were supported by Pedalo Folk who sings and plays guitar through a pedal powered amplifier – while he rides on stage at the same time~! ( “Apparently it’s a bit like patting your head and rubbing your belly at the same time” )

Just Weird Bikes

Couchbike : the true story of Brent and Eivind’s travels through Maritime Canada on a human powered couch in the summer of 2002. Worth it for the pictures alone, but the story is funny too.

Sideways Bike
: A bicycle that is ridden sideways and is balanced by using human Front to Back balance, rather than side to side balance, and also uses Front and Rear steering. Mind boggling pictures, can’t imagine what this would feel like to ride. The Author asks to think of the difference between skiing and snowboarding : where the latter’s use of front-back balance allows more refined and expressive movement.

Sharing Bikes

Bicycles are the ideal way to get around large, flat, congested cities. Even more convenient is being able to pick up and drop off a very cheap rentable bicycle from lots of locations all over the city. It’s an idea that has been adopted in many European cities before, and is being scaled up in Paris, where they are currently installing over 10,000 bikes at 750 stations. The Paris program is being funded by an advertising company in exchange for 1,600 billboards around the city and is computerised and credit card driven. Swipe a card, release a bike, and buy in for a day, week or year. Across the Atlantic they’re giving it a go in New York as well, where a credit card or cell phone can unlock the bike for riding, until finished with and another swipe at a bike rack returns it to the available network. Via comments @ the ever entertaining BLDGBLOG, someone from Washington wished them well in NY, mentioning their city had tried the same but half of them had ended up in the river within a year.

Bicycles & Windmills

Malawi in Southern Africa is home to 19 year old William Kamkwamba, who has used the bicycle to enhance the efficiency of a windmill. Admirably though, this was a windmill William had made by himself – with locally found parts, a book on electricity and despite having no formal qualifications and having to leave school at 14 because of poverty. His first windmill was used to create light in his house for his family, but this second windmill, enhanced by the bicycle, is able to generate electricity for his village, providing a capacity to recharge car batteries and mobile phone batteries. His success story has been
widely circulated, which introduced him to the internet and email for the first time at a conference in 2007. Initially impressed with the speed of search engines for getting information about ‘windmills’ and ‘solar energy’, he now has a month old blog clocking plenty of hits. Donations welcome!