Aligning the movement of stars with the state of human affairs on the ground may not be everyone’s cup of tea ( including mine ), but the Sep23 – Oct 23 calendar phase that marks folk as Libran around the world, is as good a marker of time as any for a tech round-up.
Up And Coming:
Australia’s annual tech-creative implosion happens from Thu 27 Sep – Mon Oct 1, all capitals and satellite towns suffering brain-drain as peeps converge in Newcastle for the Electrofringe.net / thisisnotart.org etc. Highlights include Canada’s white-noise-delicious aka the orchestral sweeper of tones known as 1 x Tim Hecker, a deserved champion of late night playlists the world over. Tim also plays ethereal sounds with a more bangin’ techno orientation under the Jetone moniker, but the show should be fantastic to check out live no matter what way it swings. The typically eclectic collection of DIY workshops, panels, performances, screenings etc is again a monster, gathering the cream of electronic artists from across the continent, and far too much to summarise in print, especially when it’s all clickable at the freshly updated : Electrofringe.net.
Happening :
At the time of writing, Italy is hosting the Live Performer’s Meeting, where 250+ live video performers gather in one place for a Roman orgy of pixels Sep 20-23. Mentioned it before, but worth reiterating that to encourage exploration of the huge list of VJ artist websites included. My hosts in Istanbul, Artificial Eyes, have been busy installing their moving mirror projectors since arriving, (they’ll be appearing on stage 4 times all up ; ), this fresh on the tail of having successfully managing to control their 3L app with an iphone using virtual network computing. (see video)
Still Cooking Til Mid Oct:
Melbourne’s Digital Fringe, the electronic sideshow alley accompanying the Melbourne Fringe Festival, happens again from 26 Sep – 14 Oct ( see http://digitalfringe.com.au for more info and a smorgasbord of festival related webstreams ).
A Disaster Movie Named Capitalism
Naomi Klein author of the well received ‘No Logo’ book, has recently released ‘The Shock Doctrine’, a book exploring what she calls ‘disaster capitalism’ – the use of public disorientation following massive collective shocks ( wars, terrorists attacks, natural disasters ) to achieve control by imposing ‘economic shock therapy’. Director of the ‘Children of Men’ Alfonos Cuaron was so impressed by the book he decided to make a short
film about it, which is currently happy ping-ponging it’s way around the internet to to some kind of viral marketing nirvana.
And South American Style Shock Therapy?
Mr.Synesthete noticed an Alejandro Jodorowsky film on my hard-drive and mentioned he’d attended a lecture by the infamous /notorious / South American film director ( now aged 77 ). Unsurprisingly, the lecture was lucid, provocative and hilarious. As is this Fortean Times interview:
“Shooting Santa Sangre we found a site where they were demolishing a house and creating a huge dust cloud. It was terrible, dirty, dirty! But I thought, ‘Go inside the cloud.’ And we went inside the cloud, we crossed the cloud, and there was the church. It was exactly what I needed, it was a church built specially for prostitutes. They all sat nearby and charged three dollars for their sevices. One dollar for the woman, one dollar for the pimp, and one dollar for the priest! Incredible, no?!! One dollar for the priest for every fuck!
Religious Drums?
Also pushing buttons for people around the world at the moment is Ramadan, one month of the year where Muslims fast during daylight and other practices. In muslim-dense cities such as Istanbul, this also means a nightly parade of raucous drummers and chanters at 3 or 4am, waking people for their pre-light prayers and meal-time.
Swiss Army Knife-Hand-Chop-Quick-Timey
Audio and video codecs can be a pain to maintain, but a combination of the VLC player and Perian ( a free, open source QuickTime component that adds native support for many popular video formats ) takes some of the headache away. And you wants some FLAC (a lossless audio codec ) with that?
“oh, the juice is in the heritage: the s3kr!t is that FLAC is a Xiphophorus codec, hence:
http://www.xiph.org/quicktime/ ” – Dan McKinlay, possumpalace.org
FON-erific
Beameing this in via ‘Fon‘, ‘the largest WiFi community in the world’. What it is, what it is – a community friendly modem router that allows sharing your wifi connection, and once registered as sharing, allows access to other wifi spots around the globe as you travel. Cool idea, but impressively enough, it actually seems to work. How much must 3letter URLs be worth now? This one is taken anyway.