Underbelly @ Carriageworks
July 3 – 13, 245 Wilson st, Eveleigh, halfway between Macdonaldtown and Redfern stations.

While at first glance, it might seem as enticing as a community mosaic mural event or an amateur bongo night ( both great for participants but not necessarily audiences), this actually looks like a lot of fun – a public lab from 3-10 July, where a large range of artists converge to create art projects under the public gaze, with the aim of performing and presenting their work within the 2day Underbelly festival Jul 12 ( midday – 11pm ) and Jun 13 ( 2-10pm ). What makes it look interesting is the calibre and diversity of artists involved, and the range of projects they are aiming to complete. Clicking ‘artists’ at the site, reveals AV tagteams performing sets in a geodesic dome, artists trying to ‘make the narrative film process physical’, theatre groups with flying machines, an inflatable sideshow theatre, experimental tactile mixing interfaces, aerial acrobatics against video, bicycle powered projections, shadow-puppets, multimedia hiphop, a Mekanarky industrial sculpture retrospective, hanging gardens and floating sculptural speech balloons, kamikaze couture and muchos moros. People are encouraged to wander in to see the works in progress during the lead-up ( hence ‘public lab’ ), and then witness the end result on the 12th+13th.

Sydney Biennale Highlights?
To be honest, whether the site is to blame or not, couldn’t find much of interest within it. There is a free collection of films screening at the National Gallery every Wednesday, 2:00pm and 7:15pm, and every Sunday, 2:00pm ( Hans Richter, Alfred Hitchcock, Robert Breer, Len Lye, Dziga Vertov, Michael Snow etc etc c’mon down… ). Also notable – a free ferry shuttle to Cockatoo Island in Sydney harbour every hour, seven days a week, in aid of getting people to various art events there. Might try and coincide a free harbour ride with the Shaun Gladwell talk on Sunday. Elsewhere? A bunch of talks and performances, exhibitions as you’d expect, but not much that really jumped out. Again, maybe the website wasn’t really selling it, which seems odd given the scale of the biennale…

(* ie not this )

Tight little package of 4 events just about to launch in Melb – each event with its own twist on audiovisual interplay. The opener and closer are probably easiest to digest, live soundtracks being performed to films, though each with their own take on that. Opening night catches ‘Waiting to Turn into Puzzles‘, a hand processed Super8 film by Louise Curham being projected, while the five member Sydney ensemble Offspring perform music from hand water-coloured muscial scores that incorporate screen captures and imagery from the film. Closing night brings a classic 1928 Hans Richter animation to the screen, Vormittagspuk, accompanied by live score by Genevieve Lacey and Geoffrey Morris.

Skin Quartet on the 27th projects various skintones and textures by visual artist Louisa Bufardeci onto the screen, accompanied by David Young’s music, which, was created by CIA Factbook data on ‘ethnicity, skin colour and nationhood’, each note corresponding to an onscreen element visible on the skin. Where that places the project on the sliding scale from pretentious to profound, who knows?

d.v.d from Tokyo bring a drum-triggered visual show on the 28th, which apparently finds tight sequences of retro-game animations launched by the drumming, each of the animations in turn bringing their own sounds, and determining the progress of the drumming.

ACMI, Melbourne. Thu 26 – Sat 28 Jun – 8pm, Sun 29 June – 4pm
$20 Full $15 Conc. Festival pass : All 4 sessions $50 Full $40 Conc
Tickets, full program details : www.aphids.net ( check the cool animated promo – 33mb tho )

Persepolis, a gorgeous and uniquely styled black and white film about a girl growing up in Iran, is definitely an animation that’d be worth checking out on the big screen ( Jun 21, 8pm, state theatre). Alongside that, graphic designer and renowned film title creator Saul Bass has a little known directed feature, Phase IV,( Jun 22, 6.45, State Theatre) a dark humoured sci-fi piece which shows an ant colony taking over SouthWest USA ( prescient, considering the recent ‘invasion’ of electronics-eating ants in Texas : truly! ) ( See also Star Wars credits if done by Saul Bass..)

Already passed by? Man on Wire – a documentary structured like a heist movie, about French high-wire walker, Philippe Petit, walking between the twin trade towers of the World Trade Centre building ( remember that? ) in 1974 ( footage at the time shot by Australian director of the oz-doco-classic, Cane Toads, Mark Lewis ). Oh those groovy times. Strong strand of Iraq war docos, including notably,
‘Standard Operating Procedure’ by Errol Morris, who is probably the documentary makers documentary maker.

Still to come? The Last Continent, a film about the land of ice we still have at the moment ( Jun 19, 10am, State Theatre). And more. ( sydneyfilmfestival.org Jun 4-22 )

Like clockwork, the arrival of winter in Melbourne brings with it a range of depraved and delightful animations on the big screen, this year’s regional focus being on the tick-tock friendly Switzerland. Aside from buckets of Swisstacular, we also gets 6 or 7 compilations worth within the ‘International Panorama’ section, Australian animations, ‘Late night Bizarre’, a digital selection and a puppet animation section, and two particularly attractive compilations : Fears of the Dark and visual music.

Visual Music Marathon
These are the culled highlights from a festival held in and curated by Jean Detheux (in Boston 2007) . Which is to say fans of Len Lye’s marvellously freestyling hand painted and scratch films, fans of abstract generative software visualisations and those who enjoy intensely integrated audio and video will be filling the seats at these sessions, so get in while u can ( tickets @ miaf.net )

Semiconductor – a UK duo to be filed under the category ( amongst others ) of visualists who write custom software to provide for their pixel needs, offer one of the standout selections, the end result of this particular coding process, being a stunning kind of hyper-animated handdrawn 3D origami beast, that gets mercilessly tweaked and prodded by industrial machines with faulty electrics. Elsewhere can be found muchos rotoscoped crazy drawing per frame madness, visualisation of throat singing.. spooky xylophones represented by organic decaying dancing squares, industrial drones given a suitably flickering and textured visualisation and Runa’s Spell – a gorgeous play with abstract organic shapes, mostly restrained colour palettes and blurry shapes that emerge from that long, darkened hallway of your David Lynch nightmares. Turns out to be a hallway leading to a New Zealand dairy farm, or where-ever it is that people make relaxy super dubbed out bass chai tent music these days. It gets prettier in other words. Both a strength and occasional weakness when it veers to more well known visual paths. Plenty more visual abstraction to follow, including Mugenkei ( also worth mentioning because the imagery is curator Jean Detheux’s response to Willfried Jentsch’s soundscape ).
Screening : Jun 20, 8pm, ACMI. Introduced by Jean Detheux.

Fears of The Dark
( fearsofthedark-themovie.com + celluloid-dreams.com )
Comic books tend to dismissed in the wider cultural sphere ( hence the popularity for comic artists to reframe them as ‘graphic novels’ ) , but an animation festival is one place they can crawl out from under the bed safely, ready to pollute the minds of the innocent. This feature length compilation draws together Blutch, Marie Caillou, Richard McGuire and a host of other gifted storytellers I hadn’t heard of, but will be keeping an eye out for now, and an artist destined for a compilation based on fear : Charles Burns.
The Burns piece is every bit as disturbing, engrossing and under the skin as fans of his Black Hole comics ( soon to be made into a feature!! ) would be hoping for within a Burns animation. Who knows what kind of erotic weird biology experiences inform or inspire the Burns imagination, but he sure keeps fanning the flames within the deep woods of outer suburban North America, a place where sexualised insects and aliens are prospering well, transmitting themselves through whatever human vessels they can find. It’s a credit to the compilation that the rest of it holds up so well to this piece. Full list @ miaf.net ( Screening : Jun 19, 8.45pm, Jun 21, 7.45pm, ACMI ) Recommendo.

Surely one of the weirder news stories of late, but the first world champion chess player to ever be defeated by a computer ( the ‘Deep Blue’ machine, 1997), Russia’s Gary Kasparov, recently found himself in range of bizarre headlines after being attacked by a remote control ‘helicopter penis’. The youngest ever World Chess Champion in 1985, and ranked world no.1 almost continuously from 1986 until his retirement in 2005, Gary has been using his chess profile lately to promote the ideas of The Other Russia, a coalition opposing the administration of Vladimir Putin. He must’ve been as surprised as anyone to find a recent speech interrupted by a “large phallus-shaped helicopter started buzzing around the room.” The ‘protest’ seems related to a Second Life prank a few years ago, when a CNET interview was interrupted by a series of flying, animated penises. The Tube’d have more, keyword search at your own risk.

Likely amused by it all, is comic artist Chester Brown, who has published a range of graphic novels over the years, often detailing his attempts to grapple with his sexuality, and in one particular short story from ‘The Little Man: Short Strips 1980-1995‘, he brags to another schoolmate about how he escaped from school one day by swinging his penis around really fast and using it as a helicopter blade to jump from a rooftop. Chester is also famous however for a character being chased by cannibalistic pygmies and having the tip of his penis replaced by the head of a miniature Ronald Reagan from another universe. That’d be all for today.

(And late shout-outs to C.H.U.N.K. 666 – ain’t a welded bicycle gang with choppers meaner than theirs .. )

With over 200 video uploading sites available, including plenty offering better resolution ( eg vimeo.com ), better interfaces ( eg veoh.com ), better payment for people whose clips have been viewed ( eg blip.tv ), the ability to stream live video from your phone to the web ( qik.tv ), and even a capacity to remix files via a browser when uploaded ( eg jumpcut.com ), there’s lots of reasons to avoid youtube. And yet.

Despite it’s crappy resolution, and significant other failings, youtube has become something of an extended audiovisual memorybank. Childhood television rarities, esoteric film snippets, weird slices of history, all viewable in our own time, not when (or what) the networks schedule. Sample clips bookmarked recently at youtube.com/user/jeanpoole :

• Darth Vader edited to be shown removing his helmet to play a harmonica for a disturbed Luke Skywalker, and elsewhere having his voice overdubbed by the brutal Daniel Day Lewis character in There Will Be Blood.. ( maps surprisingly effectively ).
• Saudi Arabian guys on a freeway, holding onto their doors and kind of ice-skating on the ground as the car speeds along…
• Astronaut Buzz Aldrin punching a conspiracy theorist reporter in the face who keeps inferring humans have never been on the moon..
• Turkish E.T.
• La Jetee ( Chris Marker’s legendary sixties short film which regularly finds itself on best film-ever lists )
• William Shatner at a scif-fi awards night singing about the the problems of being a rocketman, being high as a kite up there and all.. complete with deliciously cheesy 70’s styled re-composited versions of himself.
• Footage of the last Tasmanian tiger.. which died in Hobart zoo in the 1930s… the last sighted specimen, it’s tragedy compounded by dying from a human error – a zoo attendant forgetting to put it indoors overnight during one night in the Tassie winter. ( Reviving the tasmanian tiger from a museum DNA sample has been the subject of much scientific work, recently getting a boost when scientists managed to resurrect the gene responsible for the development of cartilage and bone by expressing it within a mouse embryo, but stating that the full reincarnation of a full tassie tiger was a long way off. )
• Still undecided on the merits of his recent epic, Inland Empire? Try this David Lynch double-bill instead :
  1 – David Lynch eating panties.
  2 – David Lynch deflating Tom Cruise’s Scientology bubble.