skynoise

Had a craving for some good head-bending sci-fi lately, so was delighted to stumble across Nawlz, an exquisitely executed piece of illustrated writing from Tasmania’s Sutu, that uses clever and very appropriate layering, styling, sound and animation to navigate the story’s arc in a kind of visually messier, street arty update on the 90’s cyber aesthetic still being abused to this day. Go play.

And if still in need of a sci-fi fix after reaching that delicious last page, gotta recommend the Tom Cruise video doing the rounds, where he talks about his favourite religion invented by a sci-fi author, the one connected to beings from outer space.

Also by the Atak label, the nicely chopped intro to this, positions 4 different video artists and crews against each other in a battle of AV sampling skills. Quite varied styles on the disc and a bunch of interesting extras to wander through. Worth a look.

fame fame ( toronto )

The Fame Fame disc portion showcases clips from another label who exist for the ‘production and promotion of the aggressive, intense and volatile..’. So when Elvis & James Dean appear, it’s not long before they are whipped and sliced into an AV frenzy. Actutally works well, and followed by a more splattery stroboscopic piece by – cheerfully titled ‘i die u die’ by Jubal Brown. ‘In the eye’ by Tasman Richardson plays with surveillance cameras, mirror effects, layering of extreme close ups, tv glitches, all nicely composed then blending Robert De Niro in with rapid-fire micro-samples. Tasman follows this by remixing vintage guitar concert footage with white stripes drums, Ice cube, Public Enemy video samples..

eclectic method ( london )

Bill themselves as DVJs… “mixing music video and film snips like a DJ mixes records…”. Funny thing is – add together music videos by Blur, Prince, Snoop Dog, Beastie Boys, Aphex Twin, Metallica & Britney Spears etc etc all beat-matched and mashed together in a glossy high value production style, and you end up with a glossy, banal jukebox. Some cool moments, but they should be able to use their talents for far more interesting things than this.

madame chao ( new york )

“Everything is illegal’ – proclaims the intro by madame chao to a video described as ‘Violent slapstick’ best watched with a sword in one hand a drink in the other…’. The title sequence is quickly followed by a fast flickering density of hyper-speed collages, kaleidoscope warping, asian tv edits, and a text announcement that ‘copyright infringement is your patriotic duty’. Some genuinely inventive parts, bit relentless for myself though.

atak ( paris )
The label releasing the DVD leave a quarter of it for themselves, being a ‘hybrid mix of Vjs, movie makers and musicians’. Thusly, we get fed an initially sophisticated blend of medical experiments, horror movie special effects, motion graphics… with film sound bleeding through layered on a bed of industrial beats. Soon becomes a barrage, and a couple of high-speed carnage clips by Rko continue that pace.

Atak hails out of Paris, an audiovisual label with a quite a few releases under their gallic belt by now. ‘Meat’ features a series of clips by 3 artists on their roster, on a DVD boasting to be ‘DVJ ready’ – ready for looping and scratching by those with access to DVD turntables. The disc’s cover is a good clue to the content within, an eye-popping collage of photoshopped flesh in various states of life, augmented by various bolted on bits of electronic technology.

Cinemassaker start off with various close up screen textures, layers of surveillance cameras and jolts of colourised tv news, punctuated by beeps and glitches. It’s nicely done, with mostly restrained palettes, and quite hypnotically edited, up to and including the introduction of footage from John Carpenter’s legendary ‘They Live’ movie, where the main characters discover special sunglasses which enable them a capacity to decode all public advertisements ( put the glasses on and a billboard for a car now reads in stark black and white : ‘work, consume, die’ ). Overlaid barcodes and pixelated animations, along with burnt colours help their editing condense the film’s samples down to a bare repetitive essence, and they manage to lock into some kind of ambient audiovisual groove. Next track follows the same recipe, gradually introducing a film I didn’t know and paring it down over time, and the final track is a sequence of ever bloodying hi-speed martial arts chops.

Mutation continue the gore with a chicken killing scene that comes off as some weird voodoo circus scene the way they’ve colorised and framed it. Some wasted human dominates the next clip in eerie close up, and their final clip plays with highway panoramas and nicely overlaid motion graphics with sound on top of footage of overhead power lines sweeping by.

Lifesteak start off in a much more ambient vein, overlaid layers of light streaked plant close-ups, building up in slow intensity, the next clip musically editing and layering the squawks of birds flying from clifffaces. Factory machine close-ups are sequenced in the next clip, getting denser over time and it closes with butcher footage interlaced with motion graphics and some lab hand analysing a human brain.

Not for the squeamish then, but some worthwhile moments on the disc.

Managed to acquire a few discs of bent-pixel booty recently… First up is the tasty piece available for order/download as ‘Umfeld’..

Rotterdam is both the home of musician Jochem Paap aka Speedy J, and the visual source for much of the industrial textures used on this luscious high end DVD. High-end both because it’s an audiovisual production in HD with 5.1 surround sound audio, and because of the sophisticated graphic treatment it is given by the visual half of the producers – Scott Pagano ( who also co-curated the excellent Reline DVD series of clip compilations – reviewed previously). Nicely, the DVD is also available as a free downloadable dvd disk image at umfeld.tv ( though it’s quite a hefty download). The DVD comes with many extras though, including a documentary with Jochem explaining how the step from mono to stereo was much smaller than the step from stereo to 5.1, and how the project was based upon that from the ground up, while Scott explains some of the visual processes he employed to create ‘an abstract graphic piece that is an hour long’.

Admittedly I’m without a 5.1 system to listen to it ( Jochem insists the project should be listened to in the sweet spot of a 5.1 sound system ), but the sound quality is quite impressive even on a stereo system – a gnarled, moody, quickly shapeshifting soundtrack of quite some grunt and density. Matching the sound’s intensity, the visual overload plays the industrial look of Rotterdam well, meshing the geometries of rusted buildings with flickering close-ups, textures that morph from into another, sharp angular layering and machine-speed masking out of imagery. The aim for the DVD was to draw on the dynamic arc of a feature film, but one hour is a long time for such a dense abstract visual style to maintain interest, so it’s to their credit that for the most part, Umfeld remains an engaging experience.

Plenty of folk tend to get speculative around this time of year, but there’s provocation to be found amongst the predictions.

State of the World

At the the turn of each year, sci-fi author, blogger, creator of the viridian design manifesto and all round sharp-fella, Bruce Sterling runs a spritely conversation at The Well, between himself and anyone interested. Moderated by media theorist Jon Lebowsky, the conversation generally ends up trying to puncture various conspiracy and apocalyptic theories, and make some vague sense out of the recent whirlwind of media and technology events. Well worth a read through, the sample quotes below give some of the flavour :

Jon Lebkowsky’s cheery introduction :
Everything’s peachy, with a few exceptions… the economy of the USA is crumbling, of course, and the U.S. government’s bleeding dollars (as well as real American blood) in Iraq. Climate change is accelerating, polar ice caps are melting, whole species are disappearing. Developing nations want their chance to be the next USA, and they’re not especially interested in hearing that it’s not possible for everyone to leverage the same increasingly limited resources. What happens when we pay everybody in the world a living wage, and give ‘em all a chance to own an SUV and a house in the suburbs? How many worlds would it take to float that boat? How pissed are they going to be when they realize “lifestyles of the rich and famous don’t scale,” in fact the lifestyle of the typical middle-class American is not sustainable.

Bruce Sterling: Serious-minded people everywhere do know they have to deal with the resource crisis and the climate crisis. Because the world-machine’s backfiring and puffing smoke. ( eg see – http://climateprogress.org/2007/12/12/an-ice-free-arctic-by-2013/ )

I love the fringes of society, but, as great designer Henry Dreyfuss used to say, the best way to get three good ideas is to brainstorm a hundred weird ideas and kill off 97 of them. And we need to get used to that process, and not, say, shut down Silicon Valley because there are too many start-ups there wasting Microsoft’s valuable resources.

Jamais Cascio, in response : We really do need to learn to generate lots of prototypes, throw ‘em at the wall, search them, sort them, rank them, critique them, and blow the best ones into global-scale proportions at high speed. That’s what our contemporary civilization is really good at, and it is simply beyond the imagination of the 1960s.

Likewise, Elsewhere

The EDGE.org’s John Brockman asks a new question each year, and gets an interconnected crew of tech/sci/internet elites deliver short and nano-sharp replies. This year’s question: What have you changed your mind about? make Science is based on evidence. What happens when the data change? How have scientific findings or arguments changed your mind? Climate change and energy resources are again in the forefront of many heads, but there’s also insightful opinions about memory, the internet, language, distributed identity, wikipedia, the mind-body problem, online privacy, complexity, the ethics of animal research, software as performance art and muchos more.

Myths De-Bunked

Turns out that we don’t need to drink 8 glasses of water a day ( we get water in food in other drinks too ), our hair and fingernails don’t keep growing after we die ( the rest of us shrinks ), we use more than 10% of our brain ( the 90% supposedly never-used has never been found ) , and shaved hair doesn’t grow back darker or coarser ( when first shaed, the hair has a blunt edge, thereby seeming thicker, it is also bleached by the sun over time ). And more, at the Guardian.

And Other News Worthy of A New Year

The New York Times reports on signs of 21 st century civilisation:
“For the first time since record keeping began in 1960, the number of deaths of young children around the world has fallen below 10 million a year, according to figures from the United Nations Children’s Fund being released today.This public health triumph has arisen, Unicef officials said, partly from campaigns against measles, malaria and bottle-feeding, and partly from improvements in the economies of most of the world outside Africa.”