“With every revolution, from wood to coal, from coal to oil and now from oil to the renewables, profits have increased. That’s just the way the world is. I would like to see business people rewarded for doing the right thing.”

Tim Flannery, scientist, author of ‘The Future Eaters’, quoted in the Financial Times.

The Changing Shape of News
Although the Tim Flannery quote above is directed at climate change and big business, pointing out the opportunities with renewable energy, it applies neatly to the shifting news environment too. There’s currently a lot of panic about the health of newspapers, as exemplified by the recent piece by media theorist Clay Shirky, whose argument can be summed up with two lines from it :
“Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism,” and
“Here’s how we’re going to preserve the old forms of organization in a world of cheap perfect copies!” ( the newspaper industry have seen the internet coming, but their plans were inevitably flawed as they chose not to face various technological and social realities ).

The opportunity is in how the need for journalism and news is harnessed, regardless of media format, and a good example of how blurred things are getting is ‘Newspaper Video : Will It Survive?‘, an article discussing the merits of newspapers producing video and visual material for their online sections. Elsewhere on the Endangered Charts?

What’s Happening With Those Bees?
The ones that are propping up our food chain, and were recently thought to be in danger of being wiped out in large numbers? The greatest development seems to be that there is now a name for what is happening to them, though the jury is still out on understanding why it is actually happening. Colony Collapse Disorder describes the mass die-off of beehives which has been happening lots in the last two years, particularly in North America ( 1/3 of commerical U.S. beehives suffered CCD in 2008), and there are a large range of possible culprits : pesticides, environmental changes, disease, predators, infestation, stress, and radiation from phone towers ( or any combination of the above). Modern life is rubbish apparently, as Don De Lillo covered a while back in his White Noise novel, a Professor of Hitler Studies living in a small town, observing his kids school having to temporarily close down because of allergies to one or a combination of a huge range of chemicals involved in the school building’s construction, and the town itself being menaced by an ‘Airborne Toxic Event’, a floating pollution cloud of unknown toxins and origin.

McSweeney’s Journal
And while on the literary thing, I’ve been meaning to plug these cats a while… Although their site stands up all by itself very well, thank you very much, ( see their regularly published reviews such as THE WRESTLER: A CINEMATIC ANALYSIS IN A 1989 VOLVO STATION WAGON 240 DL ), McSweeney’s Journal is a print beast which can arrive in your letterbox every few months, jamming together a motley crue of contemporary writers, the juxtaposition of each writer’s world likely to leave your head spinning fondly. They also dabble in DVD compilations of filmic esoterica ( see Wholphin, so named after a mythical dolphin-whale hybrid ). It should also be noted, that this whole enterprise was started by Dave Eggers, a decent author and screenwriter in his own right, who more recently has branched out into non-profit writing centres to help young people : see http://www.826valencia.org, which typically are set-up as super-hero accessory shops or as San Francisco’s “only independent pirate supply store” ( the latter being done to avoid some kind of zoning law problems ).

In Other News
- The Resolume folk have developed a new video codec for super-fast HD playback ( uses the GPU, only works on their software though).
- State Priorities? Victoria wanted Tiger Woods ( and got him for a golf tournament). NSW chased Brian Eno instead, to lead a new Sydney Festival ( yes, generative art on the Opera House exterior ).
- 137 Gb of BBC documentaries await you. ( Best be using a torrent application that let’s you select which files to download ) via VJ nosis.
- The Obamas are planting a vegetable garden at the White House. No word on their Hemp For Victory plantation yet though.

Recently carried home a Numark AVM02 Audio/Video Mixer strapped onto my bicycle rack with a $2 ocky strap. It survived.

Why?
There are video mixers, there are audio mixers. Combining them into one unit mostly makes sense if you want to mix both simultaneously. One smooth crossfade that leaves your other hand free for shaking a tambourine / zooming in on the sword swallowers contact microphone / scratching OJ Simpson video / making figure 8 patterns in the air with a wii controller / swirling the mike above your head / sipping your coconut juice or you know, clicking your mouse. And it’s just nice to have the option of that easy A+V sync.

Strengths
- In short, there’s not much else like it. 4 audio inputs, 4 video inputs ( of both S-video and composite), separate cross faders for audio and video, but a button click allows both to be controlled via the one cross fader for easy audiovisual mixing between 2 sources ( eg a DVD playing a clip with sound, and a laptop source, or any other combination of video and audio happening).
- Solid. Robust. It really is Schwarzeneggeresque. The cross-faders can be replaced anyway, but everything on the unit feels durable, weighty, responsive.
- 2 video outputs ( 2 S-video / 2 composite ) and 4 video preview outputs.
- Adjustible mixing slopes
- Chroma keying and Luma keying
- Comprehensive audio in/outs too : Seven stereo inputs and two microphone inputs with audio cueing section, 1/4″ and 1/8″ headphone outputs, master balanced, unbalanced, and control booth outputs.

Weaknesses ( aka AVM 03 wishlist )
- The biggest omission is no master fade-down option for the video. Let alone the option to fade down both audio and video simultaneously.
- No midi ( or OSC ). Would’ve made the unit so much more versatile.
- No blend modes (add, multiply etc ), just stock-standard 1988 video-mixer style wipes and effects.
- The size. ( (LxWxH): 482.6 x 228 x 105mm, and we’re talking 5kgs ) It’s quite huge and deskspace hungry.
- Others will bemoan the lack of HD mixing or HDMI inputs. I’d prefer the above first.

In The Wild
Immediately, you’ll notice deskspace is an issue. Is big. Where do you put it? Behind those turnables and between that laptop? Maybe sideways next to that midi controller? Spot sorted, the large number of inputs is great. Buttons allow easy sorting of which video input goes to which channel, and each audio input can be associated with either the left or right hand side of the cross-fader ( eg it allows the cross fader to mix 3 audio channels across to one channel ). The keying works well, the wipes allow some degree of compositing ( but hey, it’s 2009, what about some zoom/scale/positioning options for each layer), and the option to engage or disengage the A+V sync to one cross fader is great. And generally, all controls feel good.

Verdict
If you’re wanting to mix audio and video, and don’t mind the size, it’s a great box to have. Does all it’s bare bone functions really well, and feels reliable, trustworthy. At around $1500 Aus, it’ll only appeal to certain users, but they’ll enjoy the added audiovisual flexibility it brings.

Pixel-hungry Serato turntablists have a new tool in their arsenal, Mix Emergency, available from inklen.com/mixemergency.

What It Is, What It Is
If my mum asked me, I’d say – DJs got tired of carrying milk crates full of records around, and started storing all their music on laptops. So instead of choosing records, now they can just pick a track on their laptop, and a special device let’s them pretend the record on the turntable has that track on it, letting them move their hands about and scratch it or jump to different places, and the device and the laptop take care of playing that music out of the speakers. Mix Emergency lets DJs use video files as well, so as well as music going to the speakers, video goes out to a projector, but the speed and timing of it is controlled by the DJ’s hands.

In other words, mix and scratch video and visualisations ( it’ll handle your quirky quartz composer patches) in real-time, if you’re already using Serato Scratch Live. Mix Emergency doesn’t handle any audio itself, but as it runs grand in conjunction with Scratch Live, that’s fine.

Under The Bonnet

- MixEmergency officially supports and recommends the following video container formats: avi, m4v, mov, mp4, mpeg, mpg and the following video codecs: H.264, Motion JPEG A, Motion JPEG B, MPEG-4.
- Supports external control by Scratch Live by Serato. Loading a video file in Scratch Live will cause the associated video to load in MixEmergency.

Verdict From An Actual DJ?
According to DJ Lewis Cancut ( myspace.com/lewiscancut // “Hip Hop / Korean Pop / Tropical”, or jump onto the Scattermish ( label ) blog / mp3 gravytrain ), Mix Emergency is “Sick”.

From my video library, Lewis made a special request for that ‘Little Superstar‘ clip doing the rounds a while back, of a tiny grinning Indian boy bodypopping like an electrified midget James Brown, freezing whenever his dad pressed stop on their portable ghetto blaster. Lewis then exported* the audio so it was a standalone track, lined this up in Scratch Live and sync-ed this to the video file in Mix Emergency, and began scratching back and forth, the hip-hop track coming out through the speakers and the video clip through video output onto a TV.

(( *UPDATE : Nick from Inkglen points out : I see that the DJ had to export the audio track from your video in order to play it with MixEmergency – you shouldn’t need to do this (unless the audio track is in a format that Scratch Live doesn’t support), as you can just drag and drop videos into Scratch Live and have MixEmergency automatically load them when you load them onto one of the Scratch Live decks. ))

Cue points are easily inserted in Scratch Live, so next Lewis was jumping back and forth to various key points on the clip ( the grin, the grin! ), and scratching along the way. Mix Emergency seemed to keep the video locked solidly to the audio and kept pumping out frame-steady pixels, no matter how motion blurry Mr. Cancut’s hands seemed to get. Double thumbs up. This is what we’ll be doing with it below :

Good Features

- Fast, responsive, relatively stable.

- Recording and exporting of performances in a non-CPU intensive way ( ie presumably records your actions, and then later takes longer to analyse these and export your video without dropping frames. )

- Quartz compositions (.qtz) can be used, with adjustible parameters easily assigned to midi controllers.

- Decent range of transitions between channels

- Simplest, smoothest midi implementation I’ve witnessed – Option-click the on-screen control you want controlled, then move or toggle the MIDI controller. Done!

- Visual Effects parameters controllable by midi, bass or velocity control ( from rubber wristed turntable wizards )

- Good forum support and video tutorials.

- Camera input on it’s way, beta for now : inklen.com/download/8/video.DVInputStream.zip

What’s Missing?

- Overall controls of the master output – eg fade to black / white, adjust contrast, colour etc – to help the scratch DJ optimise the output for whatever projector / screen / environment they’re using. Being able to add master effects ( not just on either channel ) would be good too.

- Ability to scale/ position an image / video.

- Ability to assign keyboard shortcuts.

What You Need :

- Recommended tech specs : Mac only, and MacBook Pro or better, Video card (128 MB dedicated RAM), GB RAM, DVI or S-Video output

Mac OS X 10.4.10, Quicktime 7.3 ( + Scratch Live 1.8.22 for external control )

( MixEmergency will run on both PowerPC and Intel CPUs. However, low powered CPUs, such as those used in the PowerBook G4, are not officially supported for video mixing and scratching. Low-quality (320 by 240) videos and simple Quartz Compositions are recommended for such systems. Download and install the demo to test on your system. )

Also needed : $179 USD ( Possibly the equivalent of a small Australian home by time of publishing )

Verdict :

A great addition to the live visual performance software market, look forward to its future iterations.

Word Up! I mean, words in the sky, words in your eye. I mean, sometimes out of print books loaned 5 years do come back. Here’s looking at you, Cobralingus by Jeff Noon.

A Toolkit For Language Bending

“Cobralingus comes completely from my love of electronic music, attempting to give language a little of the freedom that music enjoys. How can language refer to itself? Can it be bent, mutated, made liquid? Sometimes this will bring on certain poetic effects. I wouldn’t myself label it as poetry, because I think that should refer to a more heightened sense of language. I like to fire up words, energise them, drug them, destroy them, bring them back to live in some other form. Cobralingus is the end result of this process.”

Jeff Noon, author of Cobralingus, interviewed by Vladislava Gordic.

Almost like a blueprint for his well received novels in the nineties ( Vurt, Pollen, Automated Alice, Nymphomation) and beyond ( Needle in the Groove, Falling Out Of Cars ), Cobralingus is an instructional book revealing Noon’s attraction to experimental music and processes, offering a series of experiments for remixing text. The introduction brings us ‘the cobralingus engine’, for manipulating language into new shapes and meaning, and which interprets text as a signal, which can have various filters and re-routing applied to it. Noon outlines his filters ( eg decay, randomise, search and replace, sample, release virus etc ), then jumps into a series of chapters, each starting with a paragraph sample of text taken from a classic, and proceeds to transform this gradually with his filters, until it’s final iteration at the end of the chapter.

The results are varied, sprawling about in unusual page layouts, but for the most part have gained something compelling. It’s the process overall which is most intriguing though, itself part of a wider manifesto Noon has argued for elsewhere ( in this Guardian article ).

“We have to accept that English writing has been far too slow in its adoption of avant-garde techniques, in comparison with popular music, art and films. The narrative fabric of the latest cult movie is woven through with jump cuts, freeze-frames, montage, slow motion shots, tracking shots, hand-held camera techniques, and the like. House, hip-hop and garage recordings contain elements of remixing, scratching and sampling. What are the prose equivalents of the tracking shot, the hyperlink, the remix, the freeze-frame?”

Which is not to say that the Surrealists, Dadaists and the likes of James Joyce, William Burroughs / Brian Gysin haven’t already explored text mutation and cut-up techniques in the past, but perhaps suggesting that we don’t have very advanced tools or frameworks for doing so in writing as compared to other artforms. There are a few believers out there though, visible in a quick scan of the dub text universe :

cutnmix.com – a mac+pc application which ‘helps creative writers generate new ideas through the use of different methods of text randomization and manipulation. Cut’n'Mix expands the pallete of tools available to writers with functions not available in standard word processors’. ( eg randomisation, word blends, random rhythm and rhyme functions, ‘word shredding’ and ‘word gluing’.

The Text Mixing Desk – offers a range of filters to apply to a text ( eg transgenderiser, rasta rack, cut-up engine, expletive deleted ).

http://zelea.com/project/textbender/ – Textbender is a system of collaborative writing based on recombinant text. It implements a social Web medium with potential applications ranging from open art to open democracy. The underlying mechanism is evolutionary genetics.

languageisavirus.com – a few experimental writing widgets available.

Liptikl is a ‘cut up’ word arranger; a lyric generator.
writerhymes.com – “option-click on a word to find a rhyme for it”

Noonworlds : jeffnoon.com, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Noon, http://tinyurl.com/dhtwkd : a flash version of cobralingus- which only seems to animate the text into it’s new formations – vastly less interesting than allowing the remix of inputted text.

- and there are plenty of sites for remixing text or a website into a particular dialect, be it smurf, rastafarian, hAcK3r speak etc eg http://speaklolcat.com, with special mention for the wiki project that aims to translate the entire Bible into Kitty Pidgin English ( lolcatbible.com ).