Night-time New York is one of the brightest places on earth to see from the skies, and appropriately enough is also home to the delightfully eclectic Loboy, experimental visualist and soft/hard-ware tinkerer. Loboy’s beamed outputs come in 2 flavours : via the webtastic and full of surprises, downloads – lowcolabs.com, or via DVDs released on the Dope Lotus label ( linked from lowcolabs), such as the stroboscopic and relentlessly inventive ‘D1G1T4L Gr4ff Butt3r’. Loboy speaks now, straight outta Brooklyn, y’hear?

((Update, this was from a few years ago, part of a big migration of posts from the now defunct octapod.org/jeanpoole – another that slipped through without being properly dated, more ye olde in the archives ))

Am imagining a long list of toys – but what do you use to create your work with?
Depends. A VCR, 16 mm projector, slide projector, digital projector, tv tuners, loboby.gifphone patches, an analog mixer, a couple of cheap kid’s toys, an old Apple II, a G3 laptop, re-wired guitar tuners, a radio scanner. I do all my editing on a G5. Most of my video work is processed and re-processed, then overlayed and overlayed once again. I wrote a couple scripts that first pulls images off Google, then Photoshop crops and layers the images, then they are pushed out as a Quicktime file. I also use a technique which pulls html source to a text file, then it is brought into Illustrator, converted to vectors, and then put into a 3-D program and extrudes the vectored text. Last I would animate a sequence.

Given the ways machines, humans and av data can inter-relate – what collaborative processes did you enjoy / find fruitful with Drake?
I sampled down a lot of video, edited, mished and mashed, then passed the video off to him to lay out the audio. I gave him a really shitty digital copy of what I had been working on. It’d been compressed so many times for it to be able to be passed over a local network and brought into ProTools on a G3 running Mac OS 9. ProTools wasn’t that happy to play the video, but Drake managed to put down a matching audio set.

What interesting differences do you find between producing audiovisual material and playing it live?
With a production you can let it sit and grow on you, meditate on it, change it, all while sitting in your underwear. I don’t do much live stuff, I’m not much of an entertainer / performer, but the biggest aspect in a live mix would be audience dynamics, as well as real time visual manipulation.

Your thoughts on copyright, sampling and file-sharing?
I always use the library metaphor when I think about these issues. Library shelves are full of information, fileservers there have folders full of information. In the library I can take the information with me, all for free, same with the fileserver. If I want to copy the information in the library I use the photocopier, if I want to copy the information on the fileserver, I download it.

A book is full of words, a musical composition is composed of sounds. The way the words are arranged, as with the sounds, are what make it unique. When a sample is used it is almost always pulled from its original context and placed within another. If it is a creative/destructive act, sampling is great. Shakespeare would’ve shit himself if he saw how his work has been sampled endlessly from TV sitcoms to feature length films. In the digital universe everything is composed of 0s and 1s, it just depends how they are arranged.

The recording and movie industry need to go after big time bootleggers, instead of Amy AOL who sits online for an hour to download one Britney tune. The same industries got scared when cassette recording and VHS decks entered into the consumer market place. When the printing press was invented, this allowed people access to a broader spectrum of literature, which is analagous to file sharing software opening to music listeners a plethora of different kinds of music.

As an artist – what do u like/dislike about the DVD as a format?
Like: easy, portable, no more fast forward / rewind lines, slow-motion is great. Dislike: region coding, consumer grade DVDs only hold about 4.7 GB, easily scratched. I still listen to my tape collection.

How’s DopeLotus Records kicking along in Brooklyn?
DopeLotus trots along its path, Drake is fielding some bigger recording opportunities, Whole Wheat laid out a new album chock full of nuts. He’s been collecting church organs in his garage, I think he is going to open a funeral parlor soon. Drake and I have been shooting the shit about putting a video together for some of his new stuff. I’ve been slowly editing another mix DVD. Drake and Loboy will mutate into one form soon enough.

Last dream you can remember that involved unusual technology?
Never had one. Although, I did wake up once and there was a microwave in my bed.

Loboy & Drake as superheroes – what would u look like, and what super-powers?
Drake would be a midget pimp with the ability to talk to animals. Farmers would page his beeper looking to fertilize their live stock. Loboy would have the ability to change into different forms of condiments and infilitrate fast food joints to steal the secret sauce formula and sell it as weapon grade enriched uranium to aliens.

The Cartoon Guide To Physics
Cartoonist Larry Gonick has carved a career out of making complexities understandable. With a great range of engaging educational titles ( History of the World, Chemistry, Genetics etc ), under his belt, hopefully he’ll tackle economics soon enough. In the meantime, Physics is covered already, which Gregory Mackay’s Francis Bear was happy enough to run his paws through. ( Click for full comic, text was too small to read when the comic had to squeeze into this column).

More Francis?
Wrestling Sylvester Stallone, and before that, comic reviewing Mr.Instructional Comics himself, Scott McCloud.

And in other hemispheres, Francis has been gracing the pages of illustrious French graphic novel compilations..

Not Quite Art has returned to ABC TV with another cracker of a series. Once again, host Marcus Westbury dons the curatorial rubber gloves and unearths an eccentric and engaging medley of characters and practices. Should probably include a disclaimer for having lived in a sharehouse, edited a student magazine and organised festivals with Marcus, but don’t let any of my lingering dishwashing, editing or festival organising biases unnecessarily taint or glorify the show, check it out for yourself  : Tue @ 10pm ABC, or abc.net.au/tv/notquiteart.

You are in a small, noisy, Melbourne laneway bar. Current one-liner for describing the new series?
It’s about how technology is changing our cultural geography – what our culture is, where it comes from and who is making it. Alternately, it could just be described as an arts series featuring a lot of people who are antisocial, don’t smell great and don’t get out much.
 
What went smoother second time around?
I knew what to expect a little bit more. With the first series I felt a lot like a work experience guy hanging out with TV people, this time I felt a lot more like I knew what I was doing and what to expect. I think I’m a little more confident in front of the camera this time around – there was a bit of rabbit caught in the headlights about the first series!

Despite all the necessary pre-planning, which interviewees actually surprised you?
A few of the surprises were just in the chance to grab people I didn’t think we’d get a chance to interview. We interviewed Lawrence Lessig (founder of Creative Commons) in Singapore by basically going to his talk and begging after all the media people said they didn’t think it would happen.

Some of the surprises were on the negative side. Often when you sit down and talk to people without a camera they’re far more engaging than when you turn up with a crew and make them do the same thing three times and they worry about who might be listening to what they say.

The show is fantastic, the website less so. Are there any broader plans to flesh out the ABC website for it? ( eg links to the people interviewed )
No – it’s basically a question of process and resources and a series like this tends to fall between the cracks a little. I’m pretty handy with HTML and offered to do all that stuff myself to both ABC TV and ABC online but neither took me up on it. It’s a shame because if ever a series should have a decent online presence it’s this one.
 
And what does the ABC management have to say about the irony of a series that champions the internet, being unviewable online outside Australia?
A lot of the issues are due to nervous lawyers and copyright law. Officially, the ABC has a thirty day exclusive right to make the program available for download. After that I hope to make a version available for download under Creative Commons for International audiences. Although that is currently with the lawyers and my slightly apprehensive producer. Failing that, to anyone who is outside Australia and can’t get hold of a legitimate copy through legal channels, all I can say is PLEASE PIRATE THIS SERIES. I implore you to. Proliferate it far and wide!

(( jp- apparently episodes have been appearing on piratebay and mininova within 24 hours of screening ))

The second episode, Unpopular Culture touches on remixing and copyright law – were there any interesting production challenges here?
To be fair to the ABC, this is basically the reason why international downloads are being blocked. We spent an awful lot of time with the lawyers trying to find a legal way of showing Soda Jerk’s work. Their film “Pixel Pirate” is essentially a mashup of a lot of Hollywood movies and we used some fairly substantial excerpts from it. To do that we relied on some very specific exemptions in Australian copyright laws and the ABC was concerned that if the show was downloaded in other territories they would subject to legal proceedings in those territories.

(( skynoise soda jerk interview ))
Or any discussions about providing creative commons access to clips from the show?
Yes. Ultimately I hope to make a download edition of the whole series available via Creative Commons. We’ll see whether that happens! 

Marcus Westbury, aged 56, living in Ballarat, what would his DIY Museum contain?
I’m not that into museums. I reckon when I get to 56 and set up my regional cultural project it will probably be in Newcastle and full of live artists making stuff. But given that I am currently working on a scheme to do exactly that, maybe it won’t need to wait that long.
 
Any recent developments with the ‘Renewing Newcastle’ project?
Yes, our web site is up and we are calling for project proposals from artists and community groups that want to do projects in cheap empty shop and office spaces! See: www.renewnewcastle.org for all the information about it!

Not Quite Sport? Which sport did you find most difficult in your radio challenges with Olympic athletes?
Softball. You wouldn’t think it to look at it but those women hurl that ball underarm at you so fast it could kill you. Unlike cricket there’s no box around the strategic bits so the whole experience was pretty terrifying. (Audio of the horror )

What does Luke Skywalker have to tell us about Australian culture?
“I have a bad feeling about this.”

Given the former Premier of NSW, Bob Carr, argued on the ABC’s Q+A, that you don’t understand how U.S. elections work, would you care to offer your forecast for the U.S. Presidential election?
Barack Obama will be elected President with somewhere between 300 and 350 Electoral College votes. I’ll even more confidently predict that Bob Carr will conveniently forget that he was on TV a little while back predicting the collapse of Barack Obama’s campaign and accusing me of ignorance for disagreeing with him!

*I actually enjoy the show very, very much.

Another monthly round-up of all things pixel.

First Up, Making Pixels
Was reading a funny thread on a motion graphics bulletin board the other day, “So what are you going to do if we get into a depression and our mograph biz goes down the tubes?”, which advocated waiting tables, agriculture, back to mom & dads, and new potential for work with ‘powerpoint presentations for bank acquisition share holders conferences’, ‘more corporate clientele (pharmaceuticals and military)’, casinos, pr0n, etc.

‘Spaceship Earth’ was a phrase coined by inventor Buckminister Fuller back in the twentieth century to encourage thinking about the ways we consumed energy and resources. Coughing, spluttery Golfcart Earth rings truer at the moment, but in that same hands-on Bucky spirit, there are still plenty of folk out there cobbling together the next generation of audiovisual gear, and as it turns out there’s been some fun stuff coalescing. Let’s see what survives the economic tailspin. And keep that Swedish VJ Union card in your pocket.

Software?
Resolume Avenue is now available for beta testing, and looks to have the best integration of audio and video for any real-time software so far. FreeFrameGL visual FX can be easily combined with any VST audio effects to create audio visual FX. It’s mac and PC compatible, graphics card enhanced, built on the back of a decade of VJ software development, and quite exciting for audiovisualists. Full test of it to come.

Elsewhere, Quartz Composer creations continue to breed and mutate:
http://abstrakt.vade.info, http://vdmx.memo.tv, http://machinesdontcare.wordpress.com.

Photoshop alternatives online are starting to flourish:
Sumo paint – impressive interface in a browser..
photoshop.com/express + http://tinyurl.com/57mk7r

Hardware?
Oh yeah. That computer in a pocket thing is taking off, who’d have guessed? Aside from applications like OSCemote + TouchOSC, which allow an iphone to use OSC ( the modern networked cousin of MIDI ) for wireless touchscreen controlling of data ( think VJs on rollerskates, DJs on trampolines etc etc ), we’re now seeing ( or hearing ) some more interesting applications being released. If having an ambient Brian Eno generator in your pocket works for you. Or you like the idea of a ‘reactive music’ application (RjDj) that uses software based on ‘pure data’ and a microphone to generate and control music based on the actual soundscape surrounding you. Maybe file those under earballs actually.

Watching Pixels?
Japanese video artist Nagi Noda died recently, most famous for being an all round champ, and well, a poodle aerobics video. Worth having a browse of her work if unfamiliar.

French VJ style, fantastically framing the video.

Worthy blog addition : infosthetics.com by Andrew Vande Moere, who gave a great presentation at Electrofringe recently. His blog explores ‘the symbiotic relationship between creative design and the field of information visualization’, ie is regularly peppered with visually provocative posts showcasing examples from all over the globe.

You Tube videos of the now :
Todd Diamond – shining a car sales glitz over the economy.
Schmoyoho – Presidential debates given the auto-tuned vocal treatment.

Meanwhile..
Flickr have a new vomiting panda.

What with the United States economy imploding, their upcoming election, and various court cases and controversies to palm off, it was surprising to see Sarah Palin had time to visit the fringes of Melbourne on the weekend, to pal around with her buddies. Still, if you’re going to be a separatist, may as well go the whole way..

This should be fun… come along to horse bazaar in melbourne, or tune in via the web – and let’s hear an electronic drumroll for :
Peter Kirn ( 9am New York set – Create Digital Music + Motion )

Vijay + Sone
Vijay Thillaimuthu : Wild tangles of hair and distortion
SONE: Corey Sands, Keith Deverell ( beats + pixels )

Thugquota ( Live vocal hypnotics )

( from Bum Creek / Pikelet )
with video by Jean Poole, LED lights by DPWolf

Jaymis ( jaymis.com / CDM / Brisbane Plug N Play + Segue )

Share Outpost AV collective ( Sprawling tech improv )

VJ Zoo ( Perth Plug N Play )

Tokyo ( LightRhythmVisuals in the web-house )

Mobile Projection Unit ( roaming streets of Melbourne, projecting our event signal onto walls, and a video camera feed of that back to our event.. )

Broadcasting to the web with built-in chat client at Melbourne time 8pm-1am, Oct 9th :
http://www.mogulus.com/netlag
( Click through mogulus link, and ‘video on demand’ to see example footage from test gig on sep 25th )
Send twitter messages to netlag, which will scroll across the bottom of our webfeed :
( http://www.twitter.com/netlag or send messages to @netlag )