End of year lists are generally a good reminder of three things – how bloody fast the year goes by, how much we manage to cram in, and no matter how sharp our radar, how much we manage to miss out on.

10 Stories Missing from the News in 2008
At Project Censored (via current.com) their top neglected story is the lack of media mention of the current top estimate of Iraqis killed in the Iraq war (1.2million ). Over at foreignpolicy.com/top10-2008, they name as major unreported stories – a significant increase in U.S. presence in Afghanistan during 2008, large increases in Colombian Coca production, and huge gas purchases in Africa by the Russians. For Time magazine, the Congolese civil war displacing 1 million citizens, and the outbreak of civil war in Sri Lanka are seen as needing more coverage. Time also listed their top ten green stories ( 1 = election of Obama and his focus on better energy use ), and Top 10 scientific discoveries ( 1 = The Hadron Collider – the massive particle accelerator which didn’t destroy the world, but didn’t really work either, as a helium leak caused the collider to shut down after less than two weeks. Spinning again June 2009 ). Time also noted a Chinese astronaut did a spacewalk in 2008, showing that the Chinese Space program, while still behind NASA’s achievements, is progressing at a much, much faster rate.

10 Worst (Mostly Aussie) Cock-Ups of 2008
Ben Eltham tallies up over at New Matilda, some of the year’s most notable political mistakes. No.1? Kevin Rudd’s ‘depressingly low 5 per cent target for carbon emissions reduction target’ which ‘pretty much throws in the towel when it comes to fighting climate change’. Also targetted? Lack of Australian water policy and Julia Gillard’s private schools funding bill which means that ‘billions more dollars now flow to the nation’s private schools than to public and state schools, and the Commonwealth gives more money to private schools than it does to universities’.

Top Google Searches of the Year
The annual list of Google as mirror, points out that Australian interest grew faster about about Sarah Palin than Underbelly, both of which were left in the dust by facebook and the iphone. Heath Ledger was the 5th fastest rising global search term. I wonder if all languages are counted, given China has more net-users than any other country now, and english is likely fading in proportion as a preferred language online.

Japanese Words and Archaeological Finds
Speaking of words. Pink Tentacle listed the most popular new Japanese words for 2008, and top of their tongues is ‘gerira gou’, which means ‘guerrilla rainstorm’, an expression in use for about 30 years, but really coming into it’s own with Japan’s increasingly unstable weather. Elsewhere, the Archaeological Institute of America noted that although 2008 will always be remembered for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, they will likely remember 2008 as the Year of the Earliest North American Coprolites (ancient human feces), or perhaps the Year of the Imperial Roman Marble Heads (two were unearthed in central Turkey). ( Full list )

Lifehacker Have Your Gadgetty Softwarish List Needs Covered
Inevitably. 20 top ten lists including obscure google search tricks, bit torrent tools + tricks, firefox 3 features, how to videos, youtube hacks, underhyped webpapps etc etc

New York Times : Best of Ideas in 2008
Spray on condoms, because one size fits all, air bags for the elderly, one-room school buses that transform long commutes into learning experiences, and eating kangaroos* to combat global warming were all celebrated as useful ideas. (*11 percent of Australia’s total greenhouse-gas emissions come from the methane produced by the rumen of cattle and sheep, whereas kangaroos don’t produce methane, because their stomachs have different microorganisms to ferment their food.) The NYTimes also point to a list of lists for best books of the year, which include the likes of : David Sedaris – You Are Engulfed in Flames, Beethoven was one-sixteenth black and Other Stories By Nadine Gordimer, graphic novels and other documents of human misadventure.

Free Music from Netlabels
http://phlow-magazine.com covers a huge range of netlabel top ten lists – and given the gigantic range of free and unknown material available, their end of year posts make a great place to start uncovering some new favourite artists. Also free, the latest EP from Melbourner Faux Pas, download from iamfauxpas.com, and a Suckaphish P. Jones mix from the road ( with bonus top ten rumblings.. ).

Ten Visual Links for a Desert Island
There’s plenty more, but if it had to be only 10, could survive with just these in my RSS reader : http://ffffound.com ( images curated by the masses ), createdigitalmotion.com ( curious brained scene scanning and speculation ), vjforums.com & http://delicious.com/tag/vj (got the VJ hive mind near covered) , mograph.net ( covers most motion graphic queries ), vidvox.net, http://vdmx.memo.tv, http://machinesdontcare.wordpress.com and http://abstrakt.vade.info ( software development and glitch FX in the house ), and say http://dekku.blogspot.com thrown in as a short film radar. ( See also antville on best music videos of 2008 )

Top Ten Things I Didn’t Miss Out On
Kid Koala ( Golden Plains, Mar 9th – Stupendous, delightful, outdoor set from the flexy wristed panda), Man On Wire ( documentary about French tightroper who snuck in and walked between the two world trade towers. Epic. ), DJ Krush ( Prince of Wales Hotel, St.Kilda – Upped the ante yet again, re-destroying and recreating so much music in one night). Best* fiction book by audio-cut-up artist? Earth Inc by Michael Bollen aka Cassette Boy (*Haven’t read it yet, review still to come, but confident it is still the best book by an audio cut-up artists this year ), Tim Sweeney’s jagged disco sludge @ La Di Da, Holy Fuck ( gorgeously chaotic @ the Meredith festival ), a whole bunch of music releases : TV On The Radio : Dear Science, the Santogold Diplo mixtape, QUA Q&A, Gang Gang Dance, Kelpe, DJ Rupture Mudd Up / Uproot, Daedalus – Love To Make Music To ( though his more condensed mixes on dublab.com are even better ) and the weirdest little splinter-genre of music I’ve come across in a while.

May your glass be half-full over the summer / winter.

Looks like it’s audiovisual kick-ass-o-clock over at resolume.com. They’ve totally revamped version 3 of their VJ software, included comprehensive audio controls, and made it available for both mac and PC.

Basic Interface Concepts
Okay. VJ software. Living mixing of clips. We get that. Lots of apps for VJing now, but how does this one work? At a quick glance, there’s a bank of clips to choose from on the top half of the screen, and a range of parameters to change them underneath. Looking closer reveals that the grid of clips is arranged in rows, and each row is a separate layer of video. Only one video from each row can play in that layer at a time. The bottom layer is rendered first, and each layer above is layered above that with a selected blending mode. Layers can be assigned to A or B, allowing cross-fading between each. Each set of rows of selected clips, can be saved as a ‘deck’ and reloaded at any time.

Underneath the rows of clips, the software’s three pronged approach unfolds :
- properties / effects for Clips – fine-tune settings for each individual clip, so it always triggers the way you want.
- properties / effects for Layers – so all clips loaded in a particular Layer can be processed the same.
- properties / effects for Composition – settings to control the final composited output of all clips and layers.

It’s a well considered approach, and becomes intuitive fairly quickly. What especially jumps out is the audio parameters integrated in each of the above areas, alongside the video parameters. Adjust some blur on layer one. Add a little distortion to the squawking bird on layer two. Adjust the brightness. Pan the audio to the left a bit. This has been especially designed for people who wish to play with audio and video simultaneously. One cool facet of this is the way that any audio and video parameters can be linked to the same on-screen controller, enabling a mouse or midi device to control both audio and video at once, and enabling highly synchronised and customised audiovisual effects.

Also in the interface: a couple of preview monitors ( one for the final output, and while it plays, any other clip can be previewed below this by clicking the clip’s title), and a file browser on the right hand side for loading clips, loading compositions, choosing sources (camera, feedback, gradients, solid colour) and for loading visual ( FreeFrameGL ) and audio (VST) effects.

What Works Well?

- Framerate. With all the rendering being done on the graphics card rather than the CPU, clips are quick to change, even when many layers are involved. Resolume Avenue is fast.
- Audio playback controls, effects and easy combining with visual parameters to make audiovisual effects. With well integrated volume, panning, VST effects, as well as beat based looping and matching, the audiovisual possibilities are huge.
- The interface. Easy to understand, and scales to suit any size screen.
- Easy mapping of keys, midi or OSC to control any of the program’s parameters.
- The solo button and mute buttons on each layer, these allow different layers of an overall audiovisual piece to be easily cut in and out ( eg stripping a multilayered piece back to just a visual drum loop, then re-engaging all content again).
- Recording! Easy, efficient recording of mixed clips, and reintegration of them back into a layer. Clips seemed to record at 15 fps, and play back fine, meaning Resolume Avenue can be used for a quick turn around production tool as well.

Still to be Refined?
- Subtle interface enhancements needed here and there. ( Eg Sometimes the tiny arrows to set parameter ranges are tricky to re-click and adjust )
- Occasional sound glitches ( sound drops out, or distorts / glitches badly – improved in the latest version, and resolume recommend using separate video and audio files, then dragging them together inside their software, to avoid such glitches – which makes sense when making new sets of beats perhaps, but not when you already have large collections of cinematic snippets ).
- Some video files don’t load ( eg some older clips encoded with sorenson 3, that work fine in quicktime or vdmx ).
- More options and flexibility needed in places, which’ll probably be added over time. ( eg adjusting the cross-fade time? Having an option so that each clip triggered auto-scales to fit in it’s layer?)
- The Auto-Beat detection, while great for tightly sync-ed clips, makes simple playback of other clips tricky, with a juggle of pitch shifting and adjusting the number of beats to try and make the clip play at it’s natural speed, pitch and duration ( even when the clips’ individual settings are set to avoid beat snapping ).

Still to be Added?
Flash playback, audio FFT analysis and DMX support ( will be available as free future updates). And presumably some kind of sequencing that takes advantage of the global BPM.

Requirements?
PC – ATI Radeon 9600 or better. NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 or better. 1GB ram.
OS X – 1.25Ghz or faster Power PC G4 or G5, Intel C oreDuo, or Intel Xeon processor. Quartz Extreme graphics card. 1Gb ram.

Price ?
300 Euros for 1 computer, 500 Euros for 2 computers, 650 Euros for 3 computers. 50% educational discount available for students, teachers and educational institutions.

Verdict:
Resolume Avenue balances quick access performance needs with depth of control, and marks a huge leap forward from earlier versions of Resolume. The audio features really set it apart, make it fun, and give it promise. Still feels a little fiddly in places, but that’s potentially something that’ll disappear after further use, and getting a good workflow process going with it. Double thumbs up!

(Late End of Year Bonus )
Free Particle System effect for download and operation within Resolume.

Drop a line if you’ve had any experiences developing audiovisual material with it, love to hear how people are finding it.

What does the Australian Government’s proposed ISP filtering ‘Clean Feed’ actually mean?

What it is, What it is.
The Federal Government is planning to force all Australian servers to filter internet traffic and block any material the Government deems ‘inappropriate’. Just to make it clear – this would be a compulsory filter maintained at every ISP in the country, whereby a secret list of sites chosen by the Government would be blocked. A trial of this technology will start on Dec 24, which aims to prove that “ISP-level filtering is a viable way to stop ‘unwanted content’ from reaching users”. Why? Is this a smart solution? Would it even work? Let’s have a look.

What does it Hope to Solve?
Saving the children, one would presume. And to prevent any illegal sites from being viewed in Australia – by adults or children.

Why will it fail?
An ISP level filter will not, by itself, save the children. As pointed out by Electronic Frontiers Australia, a national non-profit organisation concerned with on-line freedoms and rights, the threats to children online are many – identity theft, chats with strangers, cyber bullying, and none of which come with any easy technological solution. The filter could potentially even cause more harm to children, if it gives any parents an illusion of safety for their children online, and allows them to neglect the proper advice, supervision and education they should be giving their children.

The proposed filtering will also fail to prevent illegal sites from being viewed by whoever really wants to see them. Plenty of users today already get their internet using a process called ‘tunnelling’ or through the set-up of virtual private networks, which allow them to securely and privately use the internet whichever way they want.

Aside from access to illegal sites, the proposed filtering will also fail to cover any peer to peer based sharing of files.

What new problems will it cause?
Yes, it’s a simple analogy, but by imagining if Australia Post had to open and check every letter before delivering it, it is easy to grasp that the process of filtering adds a significant burden to each ISP. This burden will be passed onto net users with increased costs and decreased speed. Some estimates claim it will slow down Australia’s internet access by 10-30%. This after Australia’s broadband speeds and availabilities already lag well behind other countries.

“The only countries that really do have a widespread technological filtering or censorship regime are China, Iran and Saudi Arabia,” said Colin Jacobs from Electronic Frontiers Australia, “In countries like that, where free speech is a real issue, slowing down the internet is a secondary concern to blocking access to undesirable material”.

The filter will inevitably contain false positives, unfairly blocking legitimate sites to all Australians. A rate of 10,000 false blockings per million webpages is apparently typical. Maintaining a list of sites, given the rates of web growth, and reinstating falsely blocked sites will be an enormous job for any government organisation.

Aside from these false positives, remains the larger question of who should decide what is viewable. The proposal suggests the Australian Communications and Media Authority should decide, that they should be allowed to add whatever sites they want, to an unpublished, secret list of sites that would then be blocked to all of Australia. Will they include sites about sexual health and drug use? Discussion sites about euthanasia or anorexia? Breastfeeding sites? What about sites with creative interpretations of copyright? Provocative fiction? Provocative journalism? Where is the line drawn?

What can You do About it?
With widespread dissatisfaction and annoyance being shown from ISP owners, communications experts and the general public towards the proposed filter, campaigns against it’s introduction have been growing strong. See below for ways to get involved.

Electronic Frontiers Australia – www.efa.org.au and http://nocleanfeed.com
twitter users: Use the #nocleanfeed tag to voice your opinion and follow @efa_oz for updates on the No Clean Feed campaign.
Get Up : www.getup.org.au/campaign/SaveTheNet/442

Television, the drug of the nation
Breeding ignorance and feeding radiation*.

- Michael Franti, Disposable Heroes of Hipocrisy, way back in 1991.

*Except when you’re watching television via the internet. Then it’s edumacational.

Dosing Up in December
Sure, you’re busy hang-gliding in South America, writing a book about your ancestors, trekking across snowy mountains, learning new veterinary surgical techniques, scuba diving near the equator, recording your album, making your screenplay, movie, animation, contemporary dance piece etc. It’s ok. TV still loves you, whether in short syrupy bursts (should we watch *another* episode of that sitcom we downloaded?) or in the longer-form seduction of a well made documentary series. And the best bit is, it’s not an either / or situation, you don’t have to choose. Some possible additions for your download stocking:

Entourage
Yes, yes, how many hours of my life are forever gone, stolen by this candy-coated, smooth talking glimpse inside the Hollywood celebrity circuit. It’s a simple recipe : in exchange for your soul, you are delivered inside A-list parties, VIP room, luxury yachts, the playboy mansion, all the while accompanied by your new best friends. They start shooting a 6th season early next year, which’ll mean another batch of juicy cameo roles, following on from the likes of Scarlett Johansson, Snoop Dogg and Larry David.

Curb Your Enthusiasm
Aye, another sitcom about the mega-wealthy looking for ways to pass time. It should be doubly annoying given it features Larry David as a neurotic semi-retiree, and yet his peculiar brand of self-deprecation eventually charms, the comic timing honed from his years creating Seinfeld, where of course you got to see in series 3 Tom Hanks playing an immigrant “discovering” America while stuck in an airport terminal. Tom Hanks, who is useful mainly in a Kevin Bacon six degrees of separation kind of way, as producer of the film ‘The Wild Things‘, to link us to Spike Jonze, who is directing that film due to be released in 2009 along with a novel based on Where the Wild Things Are, as penned by Dave Eggers, the guy who has not only written “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius”( both the title and description of his book ), but founded McSweeney’s Journal. Which incidentally, also releases a delightfully curated selection of short films every few months as the Wholphin DVD series. Guess which eye-opening 3-part BBC doco they included in full with issues 2, 3 and 4?

The Power of Nightmares
Adam Curtis would have you believe that the rise of both the neo-conservative right wing of the United States and Islamic terrorism, stem from the same source: the use of fear as a method for those in dominant positions to maintain their power. After three episodes, it’s a compelling argument, traced across the last few decades with actual interviews and statements from the key figures over that time. In order to bind society together from an immoral, atomised fate, both camps argue in various ways, fear of an overarching enemy is needed.

Try watching contemporary news again after watching the section on the creation of U.S.S.R. as an enemy, where even the C.I.A. themselves downplayed the Soviet threat, and dismissed as rubbish the idea that the U.S.S.R. was centrally organising all terrorist activity worldwide, including in Northern Ireland and remote Africa. And yet in the face of all evidence, the myth was seen as good for the country, so the policy was pursued in the face of the facts.

Also worth a look, his doco-series : ‘The Century Of The Self’ and ‘The Trap – What Happened to our Dream of Freedom?’. All waiting for viewing at google video or downloading from your favourite torrent site.

Aye, will be doing a ‘live cinema performance’ at the Meredith Music Festival’s outdoor cinema, Dec 12-14, 2008. It’ll have an intergalactic theme of sorts, which I thought the photo above suited nicely. ( It was taken from a carpark rooftop in the spice markets of Eminonu during my stay in Istanbul last year). Below, the blurb sent to the festival :

“Load up on supplies, lie back on the grass, and let cinema become your spaceship windscreen for an intergalactic journey to distant stars ( and back – we don’t want you to miss the next act ). Underappreciated Flying Objects along the way, may include, bootlegged Super Heros (badly green screened by filmmakers in Mexico, the Philippines, Italy, and Turkey ( of course! )), Will Oldham high on a trampoline, a Mike Munro paper mache mask ( as used in Jon Safran’s banned Australian TV pilots ), a 21st century German cannibal, Lucky People Centre, musical prostitutes, animated turntables, fighting gorillas, and a Soviet Union cosmonaut who returns to earth to discover the U.S.S.R. has been dismantled. In-flight zentertainment for the 90 minute journey will include video karaoke, animated interludes and a condensed history of musical cinema. BYO anti-gravity boots.”

Will be testing out some of the samples and edits this Friday @ The Johnston St warehouse party in Fitzroy. Should be fun.