skynoise

Wordpress blogs the world over, have been hacked and attacked, bruised and used, by an insidious spam injecting virus that riddled blog posts with hidden spam links. It also nailed skynoise ( as Homer Simpson might say – not funny because it happened to me ), and eventually left the blog crippled to the point where no blog entry would post. Some 48 hours of code-wrestling later, and a new install, should be back to smooth sailing this week, though am expecting some hiccups / rogue waves. Fingers crossed…

April 24th hosts both the ‘8Bit’ documentary about video games (6pm @ ACMI - introduced by the director) and a remarkably interstate gathering afterwards of 8Bit performers @ Horse Bazaar.

8 Bit : A documentary history of Video Games + Art
As part of ACMI’s current ‘Game On’ exhibition, ‘8Bit the movie’ hits Melbourne shortly – a decent rummage through the history of the computer game and it’s intersection with the art world, with culture, with the creation of meaning in the world. Aye, this means lots of talking heads and archival footage, but passionate peoples abound, gleefully reminiscing about their early exposure to computer games, and subsequent integration of games into their various art practices, music-making, storytelling and media creation.

History is a construct, but at least this version is colourful, choosing to include early software hackers, and computer game crackers in the computer hall of fame, and then later people like Johan Kotlinkski – the creator of the LSDJ software which enabled live music making on the Nintendo Gameboy, Oliver Wittchow ( who made a similarly seminal piece of software, Nanoloop ), Alex Galloway who created an artwork out of the bugs in the Tony Hawk playstation release, Eddo Stern talking about trying to overcome the novelty factor in machinima ( cinema made using a game engine ), Mary Flanagan discussing the mastery of power, fantasy and control within a computer game, Cory Arcangel who loves to create game-based art ( eg mario brothers minus everything except the clouds ) and facilitate others making their own games, Team Tendo wearing bear suits while performing in Paris, This Spartan Life who conduct talkshow interviews within an online shooter and Ed Halter, author of ‘Sun Tzu to Xbox : War and Videogames’, who points out that games play people as much as people play games – the game player not so much being in control of a game, but only being part of the circuit that completes the algorithim. All up a pretty entertaining and provocative crowd – with a relentlessly upbeat soundtrack, dripping with that distinctive early computer chip sound.

Bonus : director Marcin Ramocki, answering questions after the film, and performance by Adelaide’s DJ Tr!P.

8Bit Afterparty with DJ TR!P, Dot.Ay, 10kfreemen + Maddest Kings Alive
Crazy little pre-Anzac day holiday convergence happening @ Horse Bazaar – a stellar line-up of 8-Bit-hitters : DJ TR!P from Adelaide ( SID Vicious album launch), Dot.Ay from Brisbane, 10kfreemen from Sydney ( http://10kfreemen.com) and Maddest Kings Alive from Perth ( now living in Melb ). Rounding out that crazy line-up is game related panoramic video across 6 screens by myself + Keith Deverell, and two other events on either side – OffBeat DJ residents Lephrenic & Sea from 8-10, and the Make It Up Club DJs continuing after the 8Bitness. “Bring it!”

“sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ! is a Realtime-Mind-Music-Video-Re-De-Construction-Machine – conceptual software which makes it possible to work with samples in a completely new way by making them available in a manner that does justice to their nature as concrete musical memories.”

“Gramophone records, magnetic tapes, vinyl records, digital samplers and computers have already liberated the samples long ago. But still – to infringe copyrights – one has to decide which sample one actually wants to steal. One has to arduously load audio files into sample editors or sequencers. One has to cut, copy, paste and arrange. All that takes precious creative energy and a lot of time. Enough of that! Copyright infringements have never been easier than with sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ!”

Sven Konig’s in town, yes, performance and talk @ Footscray Arts Centre, April 22. His shorter summary? “Remixing video by beatboxing”. Even shorter, one-click jaw dropper summary. And check out the nice Dirty Dancing Remix by Scrambled hackz over at myspaz.

That place in the Turkish desert full of melted rock buildings? That’d be Cappadocia. Was lucky enough to wander around it bug-eyed in 2007, during a stay with Istanbul’s Artificial Eyes. Crazy, enchanting, otherworldly place ( even aside from the “International UFO museum” set inside a cave building ), a desert full of hollowed out mountains – which makes it an amazing environment to explore on foot, or if your birthday happens to fall during a visit to the renowned hot air balloon mecca, from the skies above.

Sometime ( and several DV tapes ) later, was asked to contribute a videoclip to a compilation DVD of Australian artists, to appear in the Synchresis Edition of ANAT’s Filter magazine, being curated by Mitchell Whitelaw ( Canberra based academic, writer and artist with fine blog to boot ). Decided to edit something out of the Cappadocia footage and set about looking for a possible soundtrack. Came across an old track by Extraboy, the more ambient music making alias of Sweden’s Anders Carlsson ( who lived in Melbourne for a while, and graced several Plug N Play events with his live c64 drum sequencer and live vocoded vocals – under his Goto80 alias). Thought the track suited the hot air balloon footage beautifully and thankfully Anders was happy to let the track be used. Turned out also that Anders was playing in ‘nearby’ Israel soon, with the 8BitIsrael.com crew, so we tried for a while to figure out a way he could come via Istanbul, and I could join him as VJ in Israel, an exciting prospect ultimately foiled in a netcafe as the airticket prices doubled over the course of an increasingly frustrating 2 hour netchat trying to find tickets and times to suit. No stopping the Anders juggernaut though, plenty of touring and releases since then, and he included the videoclip below in his mammoth publish-one-song-online-everyday-for-2008 project.

In other words, various ways to use the Four Joystick Buttons of The Apocalypse.

Kings of Power 4 Billion %

Pixel auteur Paul Robertson ( Melbourne animators, represent! ) is clogging the internets again, – ie fans of supercute low-res hyperviolence have been busy downloading his latest gargantuan animation effort, this one a 12 minute epic of biblical proportions that combines alien invasions, most major religions, Hulk Hogan, Capt Picard, endless pop cultural cameos, and the usual cast of fighting masses.
Download details can be found over at http://probertson.livejournal.com, along with 200+ comments along the lines of :

“Are you using secret japanese technologies when making all the this bright flickering? The ones which make innocent children fall into satanic epilepsy attacks?”

Inadvertently, the video is also an advertisement for the bit torrent protocol: the large video is listed as being mirrored on several sites, but many of these are slow or hammered by the heavy demand. Bit torrent, however is a protocol and an application which gets around the limitations of small sites by sharing the bandwidth of the downloaders between them. So as some people download, some of their ‘spare’ upload space is also used to help someone else get part of the file. Which can lead to decentralisation… and eliminating the need for centralised all-powerful distributors – a good thing for a healthy ecology of media.

Annnnnnnie-ways, if you’re familiar with his 2006 effort, ‘Pirate Baby’s Cabana Battle Street Fight‘, then the above makes some kind of noodley sense. If not, distil the retro-game fighting aesthetic to an essence, then use this to super-saturate the plot, all of the characters, and all of the on-screen motion. And take the more surreal sequences of the Akira movie as a starting point, but as they may have looked if designed for a late 1980s or early 1990s arcade game machine. Except this clip is an even more herculean effort than the last one, as relentlessly stroboscopic and action-packed as befits an ‘end of the world’ epic. And then there’s the soundtrack.

Quatronica

Half French synthesiser spaceships, and half viking riffed glam metal guitar shredding – the soundtrack to ‘Kings of Power 4 Billion %’ definitely provides a lot of the animation’s energy and momentum, it’s sense of epicness. The dual synth and shredder sonics in this case were choreographed by Cornel Wilczek, another Melbourner who has been releasing music on Surgery Records and now Mush, under the alias ‘Qua‘. Equally at home playing acoustic instruments and laptop chopping with the nerdcorest of them, Cornel has 2 releases coming out this year and has developed a live ‘Qua’ show that playfully combines his instrument playing and splinter-funk with the live drums of James Cecil (ex-Architecture in Helsinki + check Paul’s AIH pixel clip too..).

As it turns out, am VJing for Qua on May 3rd @ Richmond’s Corner Hotel ( also playing : High Pass Filter, One Watt Sun ( Oz/Ger), which will also be interesting for 2 more reasons : Lemur & OSC. Aye, Cornel has one of those Lemur touchscreen controllers ( as recently popularised by Daft Punk in their video pyramid at the Grammys ) which allows multi-touch control, and highly configurable interfaces ( customise your controller to suit every gig if you want ). The Lemur also has a built in ethernet interface which allows it to connect to a whole network and it uses OSC ( Open Sound Control ), which has many advantages over midi when it comes to sending information between machines, including lower latency, higher data capacity and easy configurability. And so – it’ll be fun to see the Lemur in action, but also to have it sending OSC data and manipulating some vidi-yo in time with those splinter beats. “Good times”

Future Oil Wars made Fun

Even more apocalypso bang for your buck – via selectparks.net – check out Frontlines: Fuel of War, a high profile game out shortly which finds China & Russia joining forces against the U.S. + Europe and battling it out in an era of dwindling oil supplies. Not sure which side Mad Max picks there, but there’s something eerie about these kind of games modelled around contemporary news projections. Insert coin.