skynoise

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.

Italy hosts 190+ artists at the ‘Live Performers Meeting‘, in Rome from Sep 20-23.

Am doing a live AV set with Synesthete( 1 x Mr.Todd Thille from Artificial Eyes ) midnight, sat 22nd. Will feature filmed fragments from recent Cappadocia adventures, Australian car-wrecks, animated squids, Japanese TV shows, sampled Turkish instruments and Artificial Eye’s new software 3L ( Thrill – about to become the new benchmark for real-time 3D software ), all hopefully bundled into something vaguely compelling.

Other LPM bits worth checking out, by my hosts in Istanbul:

Artificialeyes.tv present Thrill [Turkey – Istanbul]

Workshop: A Thrill a Minute

Sat 22th17:30

Get the inside picture on this complex near-release openGL based OS X software.

Artificialeyes.tv present VMS

artificialeyes.tv present VMS [Turkey – Istanbul]

Workshop: VMS - Video Mirror Units

Sat 22th17:00

( VMS - motorised mirrors controlled by DMX, and ultimately by the 3L software that allow the projected image to move around the space… )

Drop a line if you’d like to meet up : )

Ramadan has started in Istanbul, a significant month for Muslims, where amongst various practices, they fast during daylight hours ( have been told to avoid taxi drivers near the end of the day during this month ). It was for Ramadan that the traditional Oktoberfest beer festival was held earlier than usual – in Israeli-occupied West Bank, in the Palestinian Christian village of Taybeh, where a microbrewery recently shifted dates out of respect for muslims . Now you know, thanks BBC.

At 4am a few nights ago, was introduced to another Ramadan practice – via what seemed like raucously drunk drummers pounding out harsh, brutal beats on oil barrels. Found out a few days later, this is a nightly ‘service’ during Ramadan, to wake Muslims before dawn for eating and performing their fajr prayer. And at the end of the month, the drummers will be coming around for payment for this ‘service’.

Which made the above drawing make a bit more sense. Piece is by Art Diktator, an Istanbul artist who plays in
Neoplast, a Turkish goth band. Apparently they do a nice ‘Black Wedding’ cover of Billy Idol’s ‘White wedding’. Text reads : “Ramadan is Cuming. Cosmos is Bleeding. You Bastards. Let me play for Ramadan Armageddon.”

Saw the drawing amongst a range of Art Diktator fusions of sex, violence, death and anti-tourism at The Triangle Project an Istanbul Biennale related project that brought 30 or so Danish artists from Copenhaegen to exhibit, perform and collaborate with Turkish artists. Adding to the cultural mix, most of the events were held in “The Hall‘, a cultural centre that has been converted from an Armenian church ( have only discovered since arriving in Istanbul, the intense historical problems between Turkey and Armenia. ) Shout outs to Mikkel Mayer (introverted folktronica wth great sounds), Kidkishore & VJ Cancer ( aka the albertslundterrorkorps – ‘Danish bhangra gabba mash-up ghettotech’ anyone?) and Band Ane, a 21 year old female singer/laptopper/dancer/prodigy who swings from to glittery idm pop, to ravish jungle by the end of her set.

True story : I gave a skateboarding lecture @ Istanbul’s Bilgi University, to an Architecture class two days ago. Was attending an ‘Art Experience’ workshop ( part of the Istanbul Biennale), and one of the participants introduced herself as an Architecture student. Mentioned I’d studied architecture for a year before, and asked what she was working on. A skatepark! Expressed keen interest to see any drawings she had, but didn’t expect her reply – “well if you skate, it would be very helpful if you could talk to our class… in half an hour”. Which turned out to be 30 students and two lecturers, eager to hear my perspective ( an actual skater! ), about their project. And so, with my internal laugh track set to 11, I talked about what makes a successful skatepark – the location and social space being as important as the materials and geometry, clicked through a variety of online skate videos, and answered a range of questions that made skaters sound like they were from another planet. Watched one of the presentations by a group before I had to leave, which was a conceptually interesting modular and reconfigurable, but unskateable skatepark – exclusively featuring 8foot pipes ( a diameter too small to allow any real skating ). Made my contributions to their skatepark’s evolution, and departed grinning.

The ‘lecture’ also got me digging up this old interview with a UK Architecture Professor who had written a book about Skateboarding and Architecture. ( Prior to skynoise.net, published a few hundred posts at octapod.org/jeanpoole – a server which was abandoned at some point, and I’ve long been meaning to extract the archives of stories / interviews / posts etc using the waybackmachine More to come… ).

Skateboarding Vs Architecture

(First published Aug 2003 )

As Arnold ( both the terminator & the Different Strokes character ) are no doubt testifying in the Californian elections, there is a better world possible. One of win-win situations rather than ‘us and them’ or ‘axis of evil’. Across the Atlantic and doing his bit to unite jarring camps, is Iain Borden, Professor of architecture at the University College of London. Iain has authored a remarkable book that should help smooth architect-skater peacetalks: ‘Skateboarding, Space & The City : Architecture and the Body’.

The book has appeal for both (sub)cultural theorists and those who like to ollie, bordensk8web.jpgand unfolds an engaging history of public versus private space and skateboarding as a subculture and filter of urban experience. And you’ve gotta love photo captions like : “Exploiting the rhythms of modernist urban space and architecture. Phil Chapman, ollie between planters.. “. R-e-s—p-e-c-t ~! How often do we get a skating professor round here?

How do you describe your research/book at parties?

People use cities in ways different to how architects and planners intended them to be used, and as a skater I wanted to say something about the history of that activity.

Sk8ing & theory make unusual bedfellows – how were the seeds sown for your book?

In the late 80s I was a PhD student at UCLA, and asked to write an essay on something about LA that I knew about, but no one else in the class knew. I was also taking studying Henri Lefebvre, so writing about skateboarding and spatial theory grew from that moment. I’ve generally been interested in the history of architecture from the point of view of the user � i.e. Those who experience and utilised space and buildings, rather than those who design and make it.

If writing about music, is like dancing about architecture, then what does that make you?

Er, confused in mind and body.

How has skateboarding shaped your appreciation of architecture?

Skateboarding lets you experience buildings not as a set of objects, designed by architects, but as a set of spatial experiences. By this I mean that moving around on a skateboard makes you consider buildings and landscapes as a set of opportunities to skate � you are constantly sizing up banks, ledges, curves, curbs and so on for their ability to be skated upon. So there is this initial process of interrogation � looking at architecture differently, working out whether it can be skated or not. And then there is the actual engagement with the architecture, using the skateboard and your body in relation to the physicality of the building � and here one appreciates architecture differently again, this time as a direct sensual engagement, less to do with the mind and more to do the living body that we all possess.

How does sk8boarding critique architecture & capitalism?

Skateboarding is a critique of the Protestant work ethic, the idea that we should always be working to produce something: a product or a service to sell. Skateboarders (non-pros), at least while skateboarding, don’t generally do this, and so skateboarding suggests we can produce different things: expend energy not as work, but as the production of emotions, actions, effort and play. Skateboarding is also a partial critique of commodity consumption, i.e. when not working we should be consuming things. Again, skateboarders use urban space and buildings without buying anything, treating the city as a free wealth for all to enjoy.

Can u describe ‘rhythmanalysis’ simply, and how skating fits into this?

Rhythmanalysis is the term used by Henri Lefebvre to describe space associated with actions of the body � the space produced by walking, or by moving, or by breathing, or by the cycles of reproduction and regeneration. Space as lived over time, by people with physical bodies. For skateboarding this might mean such things as the speedy space of moving over the pavement, or the rhythmic space of a skater on a half-pipe, or the weekly or seasonal patterns by which skaters return to particular spaces over the course of days, weeks or even years.

How has your research affected the way you skate?

If anything, I guess it has made me want to enjoy my skating as a bodily experience and as a kind of play and fun � for me, that means enjoying simple things like carves and grinds rather than worrying about new tricks, and feeling the concrete move underneath me. I tend to be more of an old school skater than a streetskater . . .

3 things architects could learn from skaters?

Take risks. Learn from others. But do it your own way.

What interesting responses have u had from architects or theorists?

Lots of surprise that this was even a subject worth thinking about it . . . but then a lot of interest in the way other people can use and enjoy architecture in ways the architects never even dreamt of.

Do you know any architects who design with skaters in mind?

Not really � most architects don�t really get to design major buildings until they are at least in their 40s � and often into their 50s or older. So given that there are now a load of 40-something architects who used to skate in the 1970s, I reckon we are probably due some serious skate-friendly buildings over the next decade or so.

Favourite skateboard trick names?

Invert, layback, frontside – I like the ones that refer to the position of the skater�s body.

Can u recall any good skate-dreams?

Hmm, skateboarding tends to appear in my dreams as a representation of anxiety � where I have forgotten how to ride a pool, or some such frustration. Not sure if this good or bad, but at least I do dream about it. . . .

What would you prefer to ollie – the skull of einstein, a cloned sheep or a gaff-taped Tony Blair?

Definitely a gaff-taped TB � time to make the bugger realise that we don�t all want to be Christian, well-behaved model citizens all of the time.

‘Skateboarding, Space & The City : Architecture and the Body’ by Iain Borden is out now through Berg.

25 years after the Commodore 64 was unleashed, Sweden’s King Milker of it’s retrosonic glory is Goto80 ( aka Anders Carlsson ) who manages to coax 8-Bit reggae, bossanova, breakcore, metal and even country tunes out of that 64K.

Superdöner? 5-man rock band, based on Commodore 64 and Gameboy and an unhealthy obsession of bad taste.

Extraboy? Pseudonym I use to create slower electronica stuff – usually somewhere between electronic ambient and dub.

HT? Me and Greg doing vocal micro synth pop in Swedish.

Labelable? Net label that invents new music styles. I’ve made most of the songs there under various silly names.

What’s so good about making music with the C64?

The C64 offers the ultradigital standard 8-bit sounds that everyboy recognizes from old videogames, but also has unique features – analogue filters, ring modulation and actual bugs in the chip = dirty digital lo-fi sound. I don’t hear anything else that sounds like a C64. It leaves a lot of room for experimenting since there’s hundreds of programs to use, all letting you program the chip directly and totally control what’s happening. The chip’s a beast that cannot be fully tamed, which’s what I really like in the end.

What else do you like to perform with at the moment?

On my live shows I arrange songs live, play melodies on synthesizers and do vocals. Usually I add effects as well, but keep it quite clean. I’d like to think that my live shows is not a typical introverted laptop show.

How’s the micromusic bandwagon travelling these days?

The micromusic.net website works as a community for mainly European people inspired by home technology, but it’s still growing with new headquarters popping up around the world. The micromusic or chipmusic scene has evolved a lot in recent years to include more vocals and other instruments and has been heard in mainstream music like Nelly Furtado and Beck. Other people than old videogame-nerds are using the technology, which means that you get banjo-gameboyers like Bud Melvin, jazz masters like YMCK, punkrockers like Maniac Mansion or furious drummers like Duracell.

Even Sex Pistols manager / swindler – Malcolm McLaren jumped on board for a while.. did he stick around?

Although a lot of things he said simply wasn’t right, I guess Malcolm McLaren did a lot for this music as he talked about it in the media worldwide. Describing it as 8-bit punk, he wanted to portray us as poor hackers manipulating obsolete corporate technology with ideals to fuck more modern ways of doing it. It sounds cool, but it’s not true. He threw some parties and released some records, but as far as I know he’s now doing something else. It was possibly the first time in this scene that there was reason to actually discuss “selling out or not” which made it interesting. Money and fame has never really been a big issue, though it might be in the future. Anyway, as far as collecting such a diverse range of people into one package to present as something cool, maybe he did a good job. But he’s just a fucking sell out

You often work with a dedicated VJ, Entter or Josssystem, in what ways do you collaborate / interact – in both production and live performance?

Me and Entter (Raul bb and Raquel Meyers) collaborate in producing videos and some music together. As they are Spanish, we do some things separately and some things when we meet up or have a residency like for our cowboy video “Microcolorado”, shot in the south of France earlier this year. They also made my websites, and karaoke-part on my upcoming album “Made On Internet” (Pingipung, release in October). For live shows, we sing together and they keyboard-VJ in innovative and frenetic ways, much like my music. Jossystem from Sweden programmed a specific Goto80 VJ-tool to for easy improvisation with random parts of the memory to create some of the most beautiful data trash known to man. They also made some videos for me, and remixed my music under various names.

What is ‘44422435 to nowhere’?

An audiovisual, glitchy C64-video that me and Entter made this summer in Spain, based on altering the data of games and music. We used a C64 with a special cartrdige to gain access to the memory. With a complete listing of the memory, we would put random numbers and letters into the memory to manipulate graphics, sound and functionality. We could also pause the games and alter the graphics on the screen, and see what would happen we would run it again. We recorded it to VHS and edited it, and voila! I also made some live remixing of my songs with the music program that I’m using, spiced up with some RAM-hacking as well.

( Highly recommend checking out Entter’s 8-Bit Video demoreel… most entertaining! – jp )

Seems you’ve been gigging busily, what’ve been some recent highlights?

Just had a 2 week European tour and before that a Swedish tour with Entter and Meneo from Spain. Maybe it’s the first time a chipmusic act got thrown off stage (3 times!), when Meneo and Entter got naked on stage in Stockholm. The Blip Festival in New York – with more than 40 chipmusic artists from around the globe – was great, playing in an old bank 10 meters from Wall Street. Also, me and Entter played at the alternative stage at the Metro Dance Club in Southern Spain, this huge techno club where I felt really out of place. We actually managed to get the people dancing to the sounds of Commodore 64! People came expecting the usual 4/4 bassdrum kicks, but we hypnotized them with lo-tech beats and super pixel visuals! Great experience.

You’ve released so much music both for sale and free download, what’re your thoughts on music distribution?

When I release music commercially, I try to include special things that you can find if you put the CD into your computer. On “Commodore Grooves” I had 1 extra hour of music in various obscure music formats but also texts, videos, pictures, etc. On my new album “Made On Internet” you can put it into the computer to run a special karaoke program to sing along with some of my songs.

As I don’t buy much music myself, I don’t demand that other people pay for my music. But if you’re an artist who can almost make a living out of it, and needs to get more money to do the music properly, it’s a shame if they have to stop just because people don’t support them financially. Doing it yourself – without labels, distributors, etc – is hard work and I for one don’t really like it as it has a lot to do with words and contacts rather than only music. I’m really happy to have Pingipung to release my next album, as they are both good people and a good label.

Timbaland calls you, wanting to collaborate – what questions do you ask him?
Timbaland took a complete song made by two friends of mine, and used it in a Nelly Furtado song without credits. I’m not one to complain about sampling and stealing, but this was maybe a bit too much since the whole song was sampled with only some basic additions (apart from the vocals). If Timbaland approached me with a very good idea, I’d first make sure to have some agreement before getting to work as I’ve had days of work disregarded because of big record companies “finally not liking it”. I’d basically make sure to get a lot of money if the musical ideas weren’t very much appealing to me, and then use that money to save the world.

( see Timbaland in other ‘sampling news’ over @ Wayne&Wax )

3 sites / mp3 blogs you’d recommend for finding good chip music?
www.rebelpetset.com
http://robot-dreams.com/nahc/
www.8bitpeoples.com

What will you be making music with in 2015?

Microphones and mountains.

( UPDATE : Noticed recently that some of the net censorship bypass methods below still left a wordpress site blocked. Was still viewable by entering the site address at https://proxify.com – or – https://stupidcensorship.com – both found via this PDF at citizenslab, which outlines a range of web-based and much more advanced net censorship avoidance techniques and software)

As Governments around the world are looked down upon for trying vainly to limit what citizens may access on the internet, it’s worth remembering that under the ‘war on terror banner’, Australia’s Government is playing the same game.

What We Know So Far

“The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”
– John Gilmore

“The Internet interprets the US Congress as system damage and routes around it.”
– Jeanne DeVoto

“You can’t take something off the Internet – it’s like taking pee out of a pool.”
– NewsRadio

China has blocked Wikipedia. United Arab Emirates has blocked Flickr. Turkey has blocked YouTube and now wordpress.com.

What We Also Know : Open DNS

Web addresses such as http://www.worldchanging.com are actually translated at your ISP into a series of numbers such as [66.102.7.104]. This happens with a ‘Domain Name Server’ at your ISP. Sometimes your ISP will request you enter specific DNS addresses in your browser preferences, sometimes the process is more automated. We can also replace these DNS addresses with the following public addresses, which will effectively stop how an ISP might try and limit access to certain domain names. Tip comes via…

Instead of relying on the DNS server of our local ISP, we can change the DNS server name to point to a more reliable and free service called OpenDNS. There’s no software to download or install, just a small modification in your internet connection settings. The DNS server can be changed from the TCP/IP Properties section. [Control Panel -> Network Connections -> Local Network Connection -> TCP IP Properties]
You will see a setting called “Use the following DNS Server Addresses” – Type the following values for the preferred and alternate DNS Servers respectively.

208.67.222.222

208.67.220.220

Turkish Web Delights

Skynoise.net is hosted at the dreamhost servers, and made using wordpress blog software installed there, which allows easy understanding of people who make links to your site. Wordpress also hosts blogs at wordpress.com, providing built in blog software and storage for millions of bloggers. And so, recently realising there was a link to skynoise coming from http://agrotime.wordpress.com, clicked away and found the following message :

“Access to this site has been suspended in accordance with decision no: 2007/195 of T.C. Fatih 2.Civil Court of First Instance.”
Which I later learnt was a Turkish court ruling that agreed with a Turkish creationist about some blogs being offensive, and thereby deciding to shut down the entire wordpress.com domain with Turkey. I am now viewing Agrotime in Istanbul, Turkey, using the above Open DNS domain name servers, but a lot of people will not know how to do this, and find millions of wordpress blogs blocked to their view ( including presumably many Turkish blogs). This followed on from a Turkish court banning youtube because of a teenage battle between Turks & Greeks escalating to where some offensive material was posted on youtube. Noted at Boing Boing, you can also access any wordpress.com weblog using ssl; that is httpS://*.wordpress.com . “This is why wordpress.com is so popular here” ( an Iranian author).

In 2006 more than 60 prominent writers and journalists have been put on trial in Turkey, accused of violating article 301 of the criminal code, which makes it a crime to denigrate Turkish national identity. This law has seen best-selling authors jailed for having fictional characters who denigrate the Turkish national identity. I met a girl recently who had been briefly jailed during High School, for expressing something her teacher found ‘dangerous’ then reported her to the authorities. Sounds crazy? Lets go to Australia.

Sedition in Australia

( see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australianseditionlaw )

Sedition? ‘Conduct or speech inciting to rebellion or a breach of public order; agitation against the authority of a state.’

And yet in a genuine democracy – in a market of ideas, such criticisms should be heard surely? In 2005 changes were included in an Anti-terrorism Bill announced by Prime Minister Howard prior to a “counter-terrorism summit”. Incidently, the last sedition related prosecution was in 1960, when Department of Native Affairs officer Brian Cooper was prosecuted for urging “the natives” of Papua New Guinea to demand independence from Australia. He was convicted, and committed suicide four years later, after losing his appeal. Peaceful independence from Australia occurred on September 16, 1975, who had ‘administered’ PNG since World War 1 in 1915.

Cardigan Comics bring out a regular comics anthology, TANGO, and their seventh edition combines the themes of LOVE and SEDITION. Say they :

“The ‘War on Terror’ has provided the government with a pretext for enacting emergency legislation against its own citizens, increasing surveillance, and muzzling its critics. It’s easy to be blamed for sedition today. It’s as easy as being unAustralian. A true democracy, surely, recognises the ground on which it stands – that people will disagree, argue, challenge. That indeed we need to be seditious…”

I like their suggestions for would-be comic submitters :

Imagine the Dixie Chicks locked up in Guantanamo Bay.

William Blake, greatest poet of his age, is tried for sedition for throwing a soldier out of his garden. He and his wife Catherine celebrate the case’s dismissal by toasting the French Revolution and having sex in the aforesaid garden.

Related : Aust Govt attempts to censor netporn by spending millions on netfilters, which will also block sex education and health materials, and not stop anyone from finding what they want online anyway. There are better ways of spending money.