skynoise

Blogs make for easy updating of material online for artists, but they’re also great for readers / listeners / viewers /commenters etc – as they provide an easy way to stay in touch with work developed sporadically over time. Latest visual blogs have added to my list of feeds lately includes ‘AVFolklore‘, a new project based blog by the Light Surgeons, a UK AV act who have been kicking ass for most of the 21st century now, but havent been so great at updating their website. The new blog documents their behind the scenes workflow and processes on an AV piece about the history of ‘Uncle Sam’, with some useful insights and a sample clip of their new performance. More vidi-yo? Suuure : http://espvisuals.blogspot.com, with plenny-o-pixel and soft/hardware / clip updates.

Another fine UK-AV homey by the name of Toby Harris ( aka *spark ), has been steadily blogging his progress with quartz composer, VDMX and his custom use of those in extravagant public ways. Well worth a look, and if something even more specific is needed, highly recommend http://runningfromcamera.blogspot.com, a photoblog featuring nothing but photos of a lone cameraman in a variety of locations, running as far away from his camera as his 2 second timer will allow. Mandy Ord is pretty infamous around Melbourne parts for her barbed and gorgeously drawn black and white comics. Which can be now seen more frequently at : http://mandyord.blogspot.com.

Stack of marshall amps in one corner, man with a movie camera in the other, both notorious for unique reasons, and both with interesting news of late. MBV, helmed by the sleep-deprivation-fond Kevin Shields, have finally announced that yes, there will be another album to follow-up their 1991 classic ‘Loveless’, and have even announced some UK tour dates. BYO earplugs. Vice.tv has the video scoop with a long Kevin interview, within which he reveals their favoured name before MBV : ‘Burning Peacocks’.

From wall of noise to blizzard-core, the tangent express takes us to Werner Herzog’s recently re-released diary from 1974, ‘Of Walking In Ice’, a diary written by the film-maker as he trekked through a fierce snow-storm to save a dear friend from her near fatal illness. On the film front, the documentary-maker also has a new feature out : ‘Rescue Dawn’ which is based on the true story of a pilot who survives a plane crash in the jungle, survives torture by his captors and eventually escapes the jungle for freedom. The actual pilot has already told this story in a Herzog film though, the mind boggling documentary ‘Little Dieter Has Learnt To Fly‘. Will be interesting to see how Rescue Dawn stacks up to this.

( Is there wireless? Exiled Surfer & Synesthete of artificialeyes.tv on the west coast prowl)

Will be processing my 6 month stay in Istanbul for a long, long time, but thankfully get to enjoy an extended goodbye with my hosts artificialeyes.tv as they’re joining me in Perth for the Byte Me festival ( Dec 1-9, Perth Town Hall ). We’ll both be doing outdoor audiovisual performances this Sat Dec 1 (meet outside Perth Town Hall at 8pm for wandering to secret outdoor projection location ), meaning 20 minutes each of video projection onto a building with accompanying soundscapes, along with AV sets by VJ Solu ( Finland / Barcelona ) and VJ Zoo ( Perth, and the festival organisers ). Then next Thu Dec 6, all of the above will be audiovisually jamming with DPWolf ( Melb ), Perth locals & Peter & Jaymis from Create Digital Motion at a Perth ‘Plug N Play’ event. Plenty more happening at the festival too, with a lot of interesting animation, film and digital media folk gathered ( each with their own intriguing website to explore.. ).

With climate change well and truly on the public agenda, energy use is being put under the spotlight in a wide variety of ways.

Go Australia~!

The BBC reported recently that when it comes to power stations, Australia’s emit more CO2 per capita than any other nation. Australian power stations emit 10 tonnes per person, China’s 1.8, the U.S. 8.2 and India 0.5.

Australia’s Sunshine coast however, made it to the news by becoming an official ‘Transition Town’ which means they have adopted measures to deal with the inevitable peaking of oil supplies, and the resultant transition needed to shift from fossil fuels.

Elsewhere in Australian, a town by the name of Cloncurry which boasts Australia’s hottest recorded temperature ( 53C in the shade ), will be the recipient of a large solar thermal power plant, which should mean the town is entirely powered by solar power by 2010. The project will use 8,000 mirrors to reflect sunlight onto graphite blocks, water gets pumped through the blocks to generate steam for electricity generation in turbines.

Artists & Energy

And on the micro-scale, long time video artists Cicada, have been busily documenting their transition from city to country via their milkwood blog ( with regular videos ), and recently installed a solar panel which they figure should give them “15 years of light”. Plenty of linkalicious at the milkwood site, as they’re quite productive little kittens, and keen to share this type of knowledge.

With a bit more cash behind him, Damien Hirst has apparently ordered Britains second largest solar panel system at a cost of £1.5M for a 310w solar power system to power his warehouses. While commendable, the article quoting this also mentioned that this was enough to power 150 houses, and somewhere later that this solar system was equivalent to 2% of the country’s solar power. Given that the population of Britain is 60 million people, this suggests that British solar power has a long way to go. (2%= 150, 100% = 7500 )

Rethinking Automobiles

Shai Agassi has a novel idea – free cars! Based on the idea that ‘the cost of the average used car in Europe is now cheaper than the cost of gasoline to drive it for a year’, his company is investigating plans to provide electric cars that are very cheap or even free – and sold the way mobile phones are – the money being spent on a monthly contract rather than the device itself.

Which reminds of a conversation with a long time ago with Marcus Westbury ( who recently had that 3part TV show on the ABC, ‘Not Quite Art’ ), where he argued that the car registration fee ( then around $500 ) should be abolished – or rather that it should instead be shifted into fuel prices. The thinking being, that it should be as cheap or as easy as possible for the average person to acquire a car – but the burden of cost should be in the driving, so that energy use and pollution are minimised. Going another step, we really need to rethink the whole energy pragmatism of having one tonne vehicles to individually transport us around in. Do we really need, and can we really sustain a planet where we need to give vehicles enough fuel to carry around a tonne of metal on top of our body weight? Not so clever. And commented on nicely by UK artists Wilson and Radcliffe, who recently made a bicycle powered lamborghini – actually two bicycles within a thin, frame outline of a lamborghini. Also in the UK news, recent tax concessions which allow 50% off the price of a new bike, if you are riding it to work.

Take an energy vacation, or if stuck in the cubicle? Try google.com/search?q=facebook+carbon+app

Mmmmm playing Tesla Coils ( think giant lightning creating devices ) to make Super Mario soundtracks… ( check Tesla’s long list of exploits @ wikipedia )

Beaming in from Japan, International in flavour, a new DVD compilation of pixel-twisters from Lightrhythmvisuals(.com).

( Suryummy on left, actop on right )

What is a DVD by VJs?

Tricky to produce that’s for sure. Performing live a VJ tries to stay responsive to sound, the ambience of the setting, and the audience, and generally keeps it dynamic with constant refinements, manipulations, cutting and blending, effecting etc. In a live setting, a lower resolution of image is accepted and various errors and over adjustments are easily forgiven as part of the live performance. Once recorded to disc however, and played back in some home theatre system, the VJ is in competition with all of Hollywood and it’s production values, up against all the storytellers and their attention to narrative craft, compared with all the motion graphics artists and agencies, all the animators, cinematographers, and all the directors and their abilities to tie everything together. Still, up against all that, a compilation of real-time video wizards can still stand out with force of personality and quirkier experimental visual explorations.

Spinning The Disc

Promo compilation blurb said the DVD was “inspired by the book ‘Notations’ (compiled by John Cage)”, and aimed to “explore the new techniques in visualization of sound in the same way that Cage explored new forms of written music.” And so, on it spins and we are introduced to a variety of visual experiments over the course of 12 clips set to electronic music, followed by remixes of the same 12 clips – the artists included all shared their source files for other artists to visually reinterpret. Also cool – the DVD multi-angle function can be used to switch back and forth between the original and the remixed video. Overall the disc flows well, and while sometimes suffering flat spots, or descending into dated cybernetic visual cliches, has enough moments of visual surprise and polish to maintain interest. The remix section seemed to stand stronger, that extra layer of process lending them a more sophisticated feel.

Highlights

Global Giraffe by Suryummy : Nice cinematography, tasty compositing of complex moving 3d elements onto urban train lines. Some nice mask transitions too, nice elements, but combined lacking something to make the piece compelling.

Shabondama by Ben Sheppee : Smoothly realised 2D graphic overlays and transitions in train station. Well edited.

E of Bwe by Alien-Eye : Sumo wrestlers given the scratch video treatment.

Global Giraffe (remix) by actop : Fantastic recompositing into sequenced slices, enhancing the original clips colours and masks well.

lake (remix) by Alien Eye : Weird and wonderful visual distortions of the 3D objects, nice light overlays.

Gravith (remix) by VJ Anyone : Super, strong introduction… and transition into splintery slowly panning graphics, that unfortunately devolves later into cyber-fare, but maybe the clip only seemed to get much worse because he seems to have added or emphasised some embarrassing text overlays – let me paraphrase, and imagine this text on top of 3d wireframes of a glitching human – “because of global warming, if we don’t find help from extra terrestrials, soon our only hope is to download the human psyche onto micro machines… ” Uhuh.

Brologic (remix) by Jasper Vader : Some nicely added mask elements, but still missing something.

Hoofprints in the sand (remix) by Ben Sheppee : Recomposited and re-layered to create some nice light and dark interplay.

Full details of all tracks, artists and musicians (and ordering details ) etc included at Lightrhythmvisuals.com

Your mission should it choose to accept you, and it did, is to turn yourself inside out. There may or may not be a relationship between this mission, and your recent phone call to an airline requesting that they delay an unchangeable flight for a week ( which they did ), given that you were vomiting blood ( which wasn’t entirely true*).

You are at a deluxe 5 star hotel, in a large conference room, hustling yourself across a maze of tables ever more urgently. Finally, you reach the hall, take a sharp left and head for the bathroom, picking up the pace. The first stomach lunge hits and you hold it in, rushing past the tuxedo’d gents exiting the bathroom. Many lunges follow.

You are back in the conference hall, no-one the wiser. Time passes, and given how much you had emptied before, you presume it is all over. Not quite. You are quicker to spot the build-up this time however, and make a hasty effort to reach your destination in time, which you unfortunately don’t quite manage. Beside what looks the most expensive shoes you have ever seen ( sequins or diamond studded?), more of today’s lunch splashes vigorously against the floor. The three or four women you are hunched over between, squeal and scatter, but you are already rinsing your face in the bathroom. A man with a Swedish accent helpfully points out the exact location of the motion sensor for the tap, which makes the rinsing much more effective. Thankfully, this is the last time you will visit this bathroom.

Next up, the conference room maze is avoided with a quick dart into the hotel kitchen behind the stage. Dodging dozens of waiters carrying trays of what looks like exquisite chocolate mousse, a quick analysis of the environment reveals a black plastic bin as the preferred location for repeatedly heaving further contents of your stomach into. The sheer volume hurled by now, is dizzying.

It is as though you have more than one stomach, you are channelling the stomachs of entire families. You have grown extra stomachs, some kind of rapid-fire evolution/devolution. You are possibly a cow. Anything seems more plausible than that much food fitting inside your body. Still hunched over, watery-eyed, you notice David Lynch is sitting in the corner of the kitchen. Meditating. 10 inches from the ground. Simultaneously, the sounds of hurrying waiters get softer and David’s breathing rises up in volume, eventually becoming the only thing you can hear. Subconsciously perhaps, your rapid stomach flutters grow less violent and slow to the pace of the soft, deep breaths.

You are floating in space. Or rather, your stomach is. You are your stomach. It twists and turns, clenches and releases, ebbs and flows. It is dark, but a darkness teased by flickering sparkles of light. Relentlessly your stomach toils on, turning over everything to find and expel that one last molecule of disagreeable foreign matter. Out of the darkness you make out a spiral staircase, and drift in a daze downwards. The staircase seems to sway from side to side, faster the further down you go. Doors open and a blast of cold air greets you. You are shuffled into the back of a black hearse-like vehicle. Told to lie down. Hold onto these flowers. It’s for the best. We’ll open the lid when we get there.

You cannot find your pistol. You do however, seem to have been successfully transferred to another hotel. The bathroom floor is different here, as is the sink, the bedroom floor, and the stairway. Foetal curled in bed, your vision catches briefly a neon-like light. You close your eyes, then open again. You can’t quite figure out whether the neon-like writing is happening when your eyes are open or closed. You lie there flickering. Eventually it dawns that it is the act of opening and closing your eyes that triggers the lights, as thought the writing utilises the motion and energy of opening your eyes to display the messages. You close and open at a slower rate, and eventually are able to make out two words: ‘Mission completed’

*at all.