Soon to be (multimedia) Dr.Wade Marynowsky, aka Spanky, aka AC/3P, aka The Old Sydney Town 8 Bit Gimp, aka Mr.Mutantric Australiana, has an exhibition coming up. With dancing robots. ‘The Hosts: A Masquerade Of Improvising Automatons’, extends Marynowsky’s development of custom-built robotics and interactive, performative media and opens Thu Aug 13 @ Performance Space / The Black Box, Bay 19, CarriageWorks, Redfern. Wade kindly took time out from arc-welding arduino units, coding his pirouette routines and cracking whips on the robot assembly lines, to feed our robot fetishes some more.

The local bingo organiser wants to know what your show is about. Your quickest bingo-friendly explanation?
Its a masquerade ball for robots, people are intruders (party crashers) into the space from another dimension. It consists of 5 larger than life autonomous mobile robots, which we have developed programs / behaviours for. The programs also allow the robots to avoid collision and naviagte the space, follow each other. The intention here is to develop robot choreography, the bots can spin trigger lights and sound (voice) and hopefully dance togther.

What would Freud say about your desire to build 5 life-sized robots wearing ball-room gowns?
Uncanny….How freudian , you must love your mum.

You work references ‘The Uncanny Valley*’, which suggests that “in designing humanoid robots one should not aim for total human likeness, but for an alternative to an uncanny appearance”. What drew you into this territory? Or should we say, where were you exactly, when a robot spooked your spine?
(*According to Japanese robotic scientist Professor Masahiro Mori, the Uncanny Valley effect refers to when “…familiarity increases with human likeness until a point is reached at which subtle differences in appearance and behaviour create an unnerving effect.” )

I am actually more interested in making the uncanny experience, I hope to give people the opportunity to be afraid or sightly unnerved like the experiences I had as a kid a various theme parks and wax museums.

Which robots have exhibited the most signs of life to you?
Hmm most are kinda quirky and you get over it real quick. I like David Hanson’s Phillip k Dick robot head that you can talk to.
(( “Somewhere on a shelf in a cavernous warehouse in Alabama rests the life-like noggin of Philip K. Dick, quietly dreaming of electric sheep. Or maybe the robotic head of the legendary sci-fi author got blown up. These are among the possible explanations for the bizarre disappearance of an artist’s homage to Dick.” ( more on Robot Dick’s head, over @ Wired )))

How’ve audiences responded to your previous robot installations? Did they react in any ways you didn’t expect?
One older lady put her scarf around the robot and had her photo taken with it. People have been convinced that I was inside the robot and that the robot was intelligent in some way.

[Guest post by the esteemed Lucy Benson ( VJ Nosis / Melb-Belfast-Berlin-Zurich etc ), for my Threeworld column, full version and more photos over @ Lucy's. ]

4 days. 378 performers from 26 different countries. Almost 300 performances, workshops, talks and demonstrations. An open exchange of knowledge, inspiration, technology and live audio-visual experiences, events running nonstop from mid afternoon ’til 5am each day. Quite an achievement for the organisers, who run LPM as a non-profit and have managed to grow the event steadily over the last 6 years, whilst maintaining a clear emphasis on making the artist connections the most important outcome of the event.

The heart of this year’s LPM was it’s central meeting room, a space large enough to act as a workplace and rendezvous for artists as well as the site of various installations, open-platform discussions and presentations. The atmosphere in this room was great – friends and strangers alike shared bench space, laptop chargers, offered technical advice and eagerly enquired about your work, your performance and whatever hardware/software you were playing with at the time.

Workshops and performances were spread across the rest of the complex and the main AV stage boasted a serious 9-projector setup, with screens wrapped around three of the four walls, a suitably impressive and immediate visual impact for the performers, and allowing multiple signals to be distributed across the room for ‘VJ clashes’ later in the night – apparently a bit of an LPM tradition that sees groups of artists all take the stage together in the wee hours of the morning.

Vidi-Yo!
Mr.Monkeypresso (Hungary) used a triple-head to span his work across the whole nine screens, his performance, Serpendity, a half hour show played entirely from a custom-built Quartz Composer patch. Much of the imagery was certainly very QC-graphics heavy (think cubes, spheres, line work) however Monkeypresso deployed these elements with a rare level of finesse and sophistication, using them very carefully in combination with narrative film footage and harnessing QC’s audio-responsiveness to synchronise the whole piece unshakably to it’s soundtrack. Never entirely abstract nor entirely pictorial, Serpendity pulled you into it’s dark, dense interior like some kind of semi-suppressed nightmare. A stunning show and for pure visceral impact remained unsurpassed the whole weekend.

Another favourite performance, was the incredibly fun last-minute collaboration between Oigovisiones (Spain) and German video artist, e (from e-Gruppe Berlin ). Bumped along by a stellar music set from Rafa Gonzalez and Nin Petit (Spain), the combination of Oigovisiones’ bright cartoon animations and e’s super crisp, subversive vector backdrops was refreshingly original and watching all four crew members bouncing around behind the stage, extremely entertaining. Oigovisiones’ dance moves and exuberant Spanish exclamations could have carried the show alone (I wish someone had handed this man a mic..) but the killer visuals, sublime jumpy techno-bop, and enthusiasm of the performers made it hands-down the most contagiously enjoyable set of the event. Oigovisiones said after the show; “I want people to know i am enjoying myself – that I am happy to be up there” and I really don’t think anyone could’ve been left in any doubt.

Other highlights?
The beautifully simple video installation by Marco Calderón (Mexico ) which saw a ping-pong game variously write and erase sections of text from ‘The Aleph’ by J.L Borges. A theatrical piece from Italy, in which a rather bored looking femme fatale had her face and body explored with a micro-camera by a Mexican wrestling-mask clad man. Servando Barreiro (Germany ) and his techno-tambourine, a homemade ‘post-music’ controller, complete with accelerometer, built into a 20-pack plastic CD case. Attending an excellent Quartz Composer workshop run by Belfast artist Shakinda and having QC guru Vade (New York ) turn up for two inspiring guest lectures. The U.K’s Toby *spark, during an AVIT talk pushing home our potential to create a shared and meaningful community. And hearing the artists behind RomaEuropa Fake Factory ( a subversion of an Italian arts competition that did not allow remixed or open-source content to be submitted ) explain that their version of the competition had been so successful it had actually influenced the original site to change it’s entry requirements (they also had a WC installation at LPM allowing you to literally flush copyright down the toilet).

Across the entire weekend, I was struck by the complete lack of competitiveness amongst the artists. Despite the quality of the work, the performances at LPM are extremely transient, which in a sense equalizes the event for everyone. Opportunities, gigs and events were passed on happily and regardless of your medium, aesthetic or background, there was nothing but support and interest from the other artists. The whole event feels like one big overblown family get together; a sprawling party of new friends and shared experiences. And it’s not just at the venue – back in the hostels and hotels provided for the artists, the exchanges continue. It’s quite something to wake up in a youth hostel and find a bunch of AV artists stretched across the kitchen, twiddling knobs, jamming to music and discussing software over coffee and juice.

Sure there were bad points – the tight schedule invariably led to pushed-back timeslots, doubled-up performances and general confusion about who was on where. But given the nature of the event, you tended to just have another drink, start another conversation and soon all was forgiven. For my part, my half hour set on the last night turned into a five person mashup with my travel partner, Shakinda (Ireland ) and some new friends made at the event. But to be honest, I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

[ See also, Lucy's review of the 2009 Mapping Festival ]

Monkey Marc’s renewable energy powered beats go back a long way ( Combat Wombat, LabRats, remote Australian desert tours and workshops, festivals the nation wide ), and the upcoming release of his long awaited solo and solar album debut, provided a good excuse to visit his portable shipping container studio in Melbourne (@ the Collingwood children’s farm).

In The Beginning
To trace some of Monkey Marc’s pre-solar-studio history, we need to go back to the Lab Rats Solar Sound System (Monkey Marc + MC Izzy ), which was formed to bring music to the Jabiluka uranium mine protests in 1998, transported there by a diesel van converted to run from vegetable oil ( “We actually get more miles per gallon on veggie oil than we do on diesel. Also all the oil we get is old oil so it’s all recycled and free. We’ve done just over 20,000 km’s around Australia for basically nothing, and it puts out much less pollution than a normal diesel” ).

At the same time, the Lab Rats van was also fully equipped as a mobile studio running off solar panels on the van’s roof. Which made it perfect for post-Jabiluka desert nomadics – the Lab Rats “travelling the country working in many remote Aboriginal communities across Australia with indigenous kids creating socially conscious hip hop, conducting cultural preservation workshops and oral history recordings”.

Add DJ Wasabi and MC Elf Tranzporter to the mix, and Combat Wombat was born, a super-charged political hiphop group who eventually released a very well received album on Elefant Traks Records ( Unsound System – which was written and recorded using renewable energy ). ( Download music, videos and more )

Powering Up
Cut to the Collingwood Children’s farm, and nestled in a corner is Monkey Marc’s fitted out shipping container, with nearby horse trailer from which 6 solar panels provide the energy to keep everything running. Inside the container, his dub weighs a tonne, one end entirely filled with shelves of vinyl, the other end dominated by a large mixing desk ( RTW / Telefunken Broadcast mixer / Mackie 1604 ), and a second hand basketball floor (!!) has been cut up and attached to the floor, walls and ceiling to improve the acoustic properties and make the studio a bit more liveable.

Monkeymarc need 4 panels to complete his ideal set-up, and any would-be solar panel donors are encouraged to contact him. In the meantime, his 6 solar panels provide 5.5 full days of continuous energy in summer, before the 12 x 2 volt ( 1100 Amp Hour ) Deep Cycle Batteries need 1.5 days to recover before repeating. In winter the panels give 4 days of power running before needing 3 days off to recharge capacity. There’s also a 400 Watt Airstream Wind Generator on the roof for topping up the batteries too, and an 1800 Watt sine wave inverter allows all the energy to flow compatibly into the studio equipment.

Electricity Eaters
Aye, the power, it flows to a wide range of gear : an Akai MPC 3000 ( signed by Public Enemy no less! ), EMU SP 1200, EMU SP 12, Studio Electronics ATC 1, AKAI S3200 XL, Rhodes 73 Electric Piano, Roland TR 808, Casio F2-1, Publison Infernal Machine, Roland Space Echo 201, Radar 24 recorder, a laptop running Ableton and that Telefunken Broadcast mixer / Mackie 1604.

And So:
Currently gigging in Europe ( Glade Festival in UK, Paris end of July, see www.myspace.com/monkeymarcbeats for venue details ), Monkey Marc launches his solo and solar album ’soon’ with a series of gigs around Australia in the months to come. Beyond that, the studio can be easily transported for ‘around $200′ to remote parts of Australia on a project by project basis, so who knows what the next renewable powered chapter will bring?

Many pieces of the live video puzzle seem to be snapping into place lately. A few of my favourite things:

Real-Time Vidi-Yo Puppetry!
http://animata.kibu.hu

Bored with mere live triggering of video clips or visual effects? Using the real-time animation software Animata ( free, open-source ), it’s now possible to control the limbs of virtual puppets in real-time, either with simple computer keyboard or midi controls, or a variety of physical sensors, cameras, audio levels etc. Designed for stage use, the software allows simple creation of scenes ( characters and backgrounds ), that can be controlled easily in real-time. Say the Hungarian creators:
“Creating and moving characters is as simple as loading an image and attaching a skeleton to it. ( On the basis of the still images, which serve as the skeleton of the puppets, we produce a network of triangles, some parts of which we link with a bony structure. The bones’ movement is based on a physical model, which allows the characters to be easily moved. )”

Once various characters and scenes are set-up, the various limbs and joints can be animated in real-time by external applications, such as hardware midi controllers or software like Max MSP or Quartz Composer ( A quartz patch has been made, which allows Animata to be controlled directly from within popular mac VJ software, VDMX ). In other words, instead of rendering out a variety of animated loops for triggering over time, animations can be made fresh on the spot. This offers all sorts of live performance and installation possibilities, limited only by the imagination and preparation time.

Elsewhere on Planet Quartz
http://openemu.sourceforge.net

Also running wild, Open Emu is an open source project that brings game emulation to OS X ( Sega Master System, Game Gear, SG – 1000, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Sega Genesis, Sega CD, Sega 32x, NES/Famicom, SNES, Super Famicom, Game Boy Advance etc ). Which is all fine, but it’s recent porting to Quartz Composer means that old ROM computer games from the above consoles, can be used within quartz compatible video software and controlled live. Says Team EMU:

Use audio or MIDI input to drive game characters and input
Use the same input signals to control multiple ROMs at once from the same joystick/gamepad
Add 3D effects or image processing to the game image for interactive 8bit visuals
VJ with your favorite games, in realtime, with effect responding to game input

*Bonus Nerd Utopia Level : Open Emu QC includes a separate plugin just for the Nestopia engine, which supports extended features, such as ROM glitching, cheat codes and game rewinding. You can now software ‘bend’ a virtual NES, in realtime, with your favorite Quartz Composer-compatible VJ applications.

So that’s Space Covered. What About Time?
Abundant live manipulation of video is indeed already here. An embarrassment of pixel riches. On the other hand, while there are some sequencing solutions and workarounds ( eg using midi and Ableton’s time controls to trigger video clips ), many video artists are still waiting for better time-based control and sequencing of video clips. The release of Max for Live later in 2009, will undoubtedly explode live audiovisual possibilities and sophistication, when it brings together Ableton’s sophisticated and musically precise time controls, with the custom visual effects possible within Jitter, the visual component of Max. In the meantime, another sequencer contender has emerged, a step sequencer for Resolume, built as a Max patch, and using the OSC protocol to control the clip launches in Resolume. More.

Controlling It All?
http://www.osculator.net/wp/
“OSCulator is software that links your controllers to your music and video software. For example, with OSCulator, your Nintendo Wiimote or iPhone can talk to major MIDI sequencers or your favorite console emulator or even the Kyma sound design workstation.
OSCulator supports the OSC protocol which makes it able to be used with a wide variety of software and devices like SuperCollider, Processing, Max/MSP or the Lemur multitouch controller.”

And Outputting to the Projector?
Maybe you’ll be needing one of these : an as yet to be bulk manufactured, but awaiting your order, hardware dvi mixer. Which means being able to mix digital signals in high resolution between 2 laptops. The UK’s Toby *spark and D-Fuse are behind this effort, with further updates ( and requests for orders ) to come.

renew newcastle

After a decade of transforming inner-city Newcastle into an artist’s playground for one week a year, Marcus Westbury has finally persuaded Newcastle’s local Government and business interests that there’s merit in doing this all year round. Leveraging his profile developed with ABC TV’s Not Quite Art, Marcus has created a body to liase between owners of empty buildings in Newcastle, and artists and mediamakers in need of space. Given Newcastle’s resemblance to Baghdad over the years, unsurprisingly the projects aims of injecting activity into the inner-city have been hugely popular. (( Organic food co-ops in old churches anyone?

There’s been a recent surge in activity with Renew Newcastle, what’ve been some highlights?
The big highlight for me is that a large part of Newcastle is coming back to life again and is full of interesting things happening. What was becoming a bit of a dead zone is now a hub of independent and original arts, photography, jewellery, design, publishing, fashion, crafts, filmmaking, and much more. I’m a bit reluctant to single anyone in particular out but there’s a shop called Makespace that’s worth a look to see what you can achieve on a hard rubbish fitout.

How many vacant shop spaces have you got being re-used by artists now?
We are up to 17 or 18 spaces that have been taken over by about 26 or 27 projects. We have more being added all the time. It’s a pretty amazing number given that we only really started on this a few months ago and it’s a very big turnaround from what was there before.

Of the recent shop projects, can you explain some more about the ’sustainable “upcycled” art and design objects’ ?
They’re selling furniture, accessories, art and objects that are all made from recycled materials. They take junk and turn it into desirable objects.

You’ve compared Newcastle and Glasgow on the ABC TV series Not Quite Art. With more time behind their strategies, how has Glasgow’s attempt to reinvigorate local culture unfolded?
Everyone think’s I’m an expert on Glasgow because I filmed there but I’m not really expert. What Glasgow has successfully done is chart a course from an industrial city to a place that has become well known for interesting art, and music and it has done that by letting artists take the lead and treating the city’s empty space as a resource for them. I’d like to think the same thing could happen in Newcastle with a bit of time.

How have local businesses in Newcastle responded to the transformation of nearby vacant shops, and the bohemian populations that can come with them?
The reaction has mostly been excellent. People are pleased to see activity. They’re glad to see interest and to see people back in town again. I think it goes well beyond bohemians, there’s a great deal of interest from the whole of the community.

Are there still empty spaces available? What kinds of projects / people are suitable?
Yes, we are always lookign for new projects. Anyone who is making anything that’s creative or original should have a look at our website and check out the guidelines. We’d be interested in anyone with a good idea for an empty space.

How can interested people otherwise get involved?
See the website at www.renewnewcastle.org or join the “Renew Newcastle” facebook group for more information.

The project is obviously going great. Where does it go from here, and are there looming deadlines / expiry dates / milestones on it’s horizons?
Right now we are consilidating some of our organisational stuff and expanding to some more difficult sites than the ones that we have started with. We will do another call for proposals over the next couple of months but people are welcome to enquire at any time.

Bored with manbabies.com and thereifixedit.com? Got you covered:

Documentary Bloggers
Adam Curtis (The Power of Nightmares, The Century of the Self etc) recently got his blog on over @ the BBC, featuring :
“a selection of opinionated observations and arguments. I’ll be including stories I like, ideas I find fascinating, work in progress and a selection of material from the BBC archives.” For fans of his provocative and entertaining film-making style, this is good news indeed. Already featured, ‘It felt like a kiss’, an experimental film he made for the BBC last year with the aim of trying to find “a more involving and emotional way of doing political journalism on TV”.

Blogging on the other side of the Atlantic, Errol Morris ( director of The Fog of War, Standard Operating Procedure, and many more) has been applying his interrogating powers onto photography, art forgeries and documentary re-enactments. Warning : while pursuing his trains of thought, his lines of investigation, you might find a need to go and have a lie down, several times before even getting halfway – the man has the research jaws of a vigorous bulldog. Expect your understandings to flip several times during the course of an investigation.

Comic Remixes
Written and directed by comic author Marjane Satrapi, with Vincent Paronnaud, Persepolis is an animated film showing Marjane’s coming of age while the Iranian revolution unfolded in 1979. It’s a powerful film, showing Marjane’s childhood obsessions ( Bruce Lee, Michael Jackson, punk rock ) juxtaposed with the politics surrounding the Islamic fundamentalist rulers of Iran. Using the very same comic book panels, a pair of comic artists have re-sequenced and re-worded Marjane’s comic to reflect the contemporary situation in Iran, and the lead up to current dissent about the recent election results.

Says Marjane :

Dear Friends
To all who believe in freedom and democracy
Please sign this petition to the United Nations to stop the violence,
arrests and torture in Iran.
( http://www.petitiononline.com/12June/petition.html )
The situation is really really bad.

Please forward it to whoever you know
Best and lots of love
Marjane Satrapi

Tongue Tips
As far as the continued outsourcing of our mental tasks to an internet application goes, this one’s pretty cute – using a combination of dictionaries and word matching algorithims, Tip of My Tongue tries to help with a word that is just out of reach. Clues you can enter include the starting and ending letters, the word’s meaning, the minimum and maximum length and what it sounds like. Good luck with that.

The Pirate Bay Sold Off
The world’s largest torrent site ( hosting over half of the world’s torrent files ), recently the subject of a landmark court case in Sweden, just announced they were being acquired by the Global Gaming Factory for nearly $8 million US. Which by itself might sound ominous for the site’s future, but they have also decided to decentralise the storage of the site’s torrent files, hoping that BitTorrent users will be less reliant on the uptime of The Pirate Bay’s servers alone, the burden now to be spread among several independently operated services.

MSA Remote for the iPhone
Good news as video producer Memo finally gets his iphone app approved :
“MSA Remote is a remote control application for iPhone & iPod Touch that sends OSC messages over the wifi network. This allows you to control any OSC supporting applications such as Max/MSP/Jitter, PureData, Reaktor, VDMX, vvvv, Resolume, Quartz Composer etc. By mapping the OSC to midi on desktop (e.g. using OSCulator) allows further control of any application which supports midi such as Ableton Live, Cubase, Logic Pro, 3DSMax etc. In addition, developers can easily integrate OSC into their applications knowing it can be controlled remotely. The application can be distributed to visitors, guests, members of the public etc. to interact with an installation or performance, or used by dedicated performers.”