Open, until Oct 11, the current ACMI Len Lye exhibition is one of the best reasons to wander to Melbourne.

Let There Be Light
And there was light. Back in nineteen thirty-five. Which was when New Zealander Len Lye (1901 – 1980) produced the first ‘direct film’ screened to a general audience, a glowing example of a new genre of camera-less film making that saw artists directly painting onto film stock, making scratches, etchings, punching holes in it, burning it, gluing and taping objects onto it etc. His film, ‘A Colour Box’ was a wildly vibrant work, featuring bold and playful colourful shapes tightly synchronised with a Cuban jazz soundtrack, and went on to inspire other luminaries to explore the field such as Stan Brakhage and Norman McLaren (who aside from an illstrious animation career, also wrote “How to make animated movies without a camera”). From here Len Lye only pushed his handmade explorations of rhythm and motion even further, and the decades that followed are the focus of the current free exhibition at ACMI, a smorgasbord of vivid film prints, paintings, sketches and most impressively, a good collection of his gorgeous kinetic sculptures.

Kinetic Sculptures
“Kinetic experience lies deep in our bones, It is a more constant experience than any other.  Our hearts beat, blood runs, rib cages expand and contract, eardrums resonate, lungs vibrate, every attitude we enact we enact kinetically.”

Inspired by the idea of ‘composing motion’, Len Lye’s attempts to do so extended beyond film to a large range of mesmerising motorised steel sculptures, which ranged from small scale to landscape based, such as the 45-metre high seaside Wind Wand, and the The Water Whirler, which although designed by Lye was never realised in his lifetime, finally installed on Wellington’s waterfront in 2006. Len saw film and kinetic sculpture as aspects of the same “art of motion”, which he also wrote about in essays. Wandering into the sculptural component of the ACMI exhibition, we are treated to a variety of gentle whirs and pulses, as a combination of motors, clever positioning, gravity and the surprising elasticicity of large metal shapes helps shift the sculptures into slow hypnotic dances, the dim lighting allowing the metallic sheen to trace gorgeous patterns as the shapes ebb and flow. The sculptures alone are worth visiting, but those on top of a chance to sit and watch his vividly executed films and explore artefacts from his artistic process, makes this an exhibition worth checking out multiple times.

Lecture on Movement and Time in Film
Sun Sep 13 ( 2PM ) sees a special one-off related event, Gary Simmons delivering a lecture on the remarkable elasticity of cinema time: speeding up, slowing down and playing with our sensory experience of the world. Taking as his departure point Gilles Deleuze’s theories of cinema, Gary Simmons examines the capacity for screen-based media to modify space and time. This kaleidoscopic movement and possibility for multiple temporalities will be explored in a cross-section of films and artworks by the likes of Len Lye, Maya Deren, Ivan Sen, Michel Gondry, the Wachowski Brothers, Stanley Kubrick, the Dardenne Brothers and Richard Kelly. ( Free Tickets available on the day from the ACMI Box Office. )

Len Lye Resources
The Govett-Bewster Art Gallery ( NZ) which houses much of Len Lye’s work, Wikipedia, Youtube, Particles in Space ( Lo-res version of a particularly stupendous scratch film that seems to employ 3D camera movement around a series of tiny scratches dancing in time to tribal percussion. Handmade, yo! )

You Suck At Photoshop
Fragments, snippets and viral videos abound online, but occasionally these are coalescing into larger forms. There’s immense opportunity for creating online video niches, and a few stand out in recent times. You Suck At Photoshop is now up to it’s second season, having tallied some 40 or so episodes now, based around the simpler premise of an embittered cubicle worker recording some screencast tutorials in his spare time. The familarity of the interface somehow reinforces the humour, part of the appeal, seeing the ingenious ways he manages to use otherwise innocent features of the software to highlight problems with his ex-partner.

Auto-Tune The News
The Gregory Brothers from NY have now pumped out 7 episodes of their musical news satire and show no signs of stopping. Formula seems to go something like : find some topical news segments, break it down into possible riffs, work a song structure around those, composite characters to appear onscreen beside the news hosts, offer alternate opinions / back-up vocals / harmonies, then shake it all up. Again what seems cool is reminder that ideas are more important than money, and today establishing a globally popular video channel is possible from anyone’s bedroom.

Collaborative Projects : Where Are They Now?
“The kind of motion picture I am interested in will be like creating the modern LP record. It will be mixed into ways of thinking rather than cut linearly” – Francis Ford Coppola, quoted at nowthemovie.com.

There have been a few notable attempts over the years to try and harness the network to create large collaborative works of video and cinema. Cold Cut spearheaded a UK attempt to facilitate a global network of film-makers contributing footage to an audiovisual collage feature film. The eventual feature film and ninjatune DVD release hasn’t eventuated though, apparently because of some promised UK funding not coming through. Also from the UK, A Swarm of Angels tried to transcend this problem by crowdsourcing the funding component as well as the creative aspects. As it currently stands, their site states they are ‘making a transformation’, and asks for patience during the site hiatus. “With members now in the four figures we are reconfiguring our web presence to simplify involvement and clarify all the project developments.”
The Age of Stupid documentary has already been completed with funds crowdsourced from many individuals and groups, but perhaps funding a large collaborative project is the easier part after all. Other group cinema projects on the boil include : Open Source Cinema hosts several collaborative documentaries, and Star Wars Uncut breaks the movie up into 473 x 15 second clips for *anyone* to remake. So far 143 have been finished. Should make for a hilariously disjointed viewing when finished.

Resolume 3.1 Now with Flash playback
A recent upgrade to Resolume adds Flash playback, which will appeal greatly to motion graphic creators and animators everywhere. Their Flash playback includes full alpha channel support so transparaceny looks great, and is Actionscript 3 compatible which allows live control over your animations with custom slides, buttons and text input from within Resolume. And they’ve conveniently added a new Flash chapter to the Resolume manual on how to get this going. There’s a bunch of other updates too including a video beat looper, a keystone plug-in for mapping onto objects, a dedicated AV slider, and a master output audio delay to compensate for the difference in time between video hitting the screen and audio hitting the speakers ( audio is generally quicker ). More at resolume.com. Elsewhere? A step sequencer for Resolume.

Six legged video projection anyone? You’re going to need a miniature projector and cables, you’re going to need a Mexican video artist by the name of Fernando Llanos, and most of all, you’re going to need, a chihuahua. Fresh from their recent Mapping festival performance, Fernando explains some more.

You are sitting at an airport with a chihuahua, laptop and video projector. A Californian with long blond hair wants to know what the ‘Videohuahua’ sticker on your laptop means. What do you tell him?
It’s a project I made as an artist, it started with me becoming a superhero, VIDEOMAN, and projecting video on the streets, like videograffiti, and now my Chihuahua projects some video too. I’m like Batman, a weird man with no super powers but some technology and lots of guts, and Chamaco is like Robin. 

Still curious, he wants to know :  ”What kinds of places you project with these ingredients?”
Different places, I have been projecting in 5 cities in 4 years. I call them “urban accupunture”, they cause certains reactions, that in certain ways help heal the city or the people that saw them. For example, the first video projection I ever made was called: POETIC TERRORISM, and was the projection of airplanes having accidents on the Airport of Porto Alegre in Brasil.

Impressed that you brought your chihuahua to Switzerland, the Californian is inevitably wanting to know how difficult it is to bring a four legged creature around the world, during times of such cross-border disease phobias. 
It’s easier than you thought! You just pay, have the papers ready, and that’s it. Nobody told me anything in Switzerland when I arrived. When I arrived to Zurich I made a passport to Chamaco, now he is European.

“And what kinds of things do you project? Do you use sound as well? How does the dog feel about all of this? Is it ever integrated into the show somehow?”
The first time we did the VIDEOHUAHUA, Chamaco got really scared, so while I was putting the equipment, he pissed. People in Europe are more sensitive to this, when they saw him shaking and scared, they started telling me things like DOG ABUSE, etc. But I didn’t care, he’s my dog and he has to work, it’s like in a circus, there’s a price the animal has to pay, in order to eat foagra in France and jamón in Barcelona.

The first videohuahua projection was called: CHIHUAHUA’S ATTACK!! And was some video of some Chihuahuas barking really mad at the camera, with sound as lound as we could play: Chamaco got that in his back so he was really afraid!

“And what other kind of art do you do?”
Drawing, Guitar in a band, all kinds of videos, I’m writing a book, published first on my blog and I also like to cook.

The guy at the airport fumbles for his drivers licence, and smiles sheepishly at you. He wants to point out he’s from California, that he knows California and Mexico were once part of the same nation, before California shifted away to join the U.S. in 1846, and you, are not sure why he is telling you this. You receive a text message, and use this as an excuse to turn away briefly, before reading an invitation from a friend in Mexico City to participate in an upcoming show. You are excited by this, the event has a great range of Mexican artists, and a typically creative approach to how it will be happening. What is this event, and who else would be involved?
Actually today I got an email, with an invitation, and I got very excited, it’s a review of the 20 years of FONCA, like the official art support institution in Mexico, they are inviting me to participate, everybody is there!

“Ahh. So who are some interesting digital Mexican artists / art collectives?”
Arcangel Constantini,
Ivan Abreu,
Fran Ilich,
Alfredo Salomon
Hector Falcon
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer
Rogelio Sosa

And if you speak spanish, check my radio programme.

And which airport are you at, anyway, and where are you going?
I was travelling too much, Switzerland, France, Spain, Buenos Aires, Chile, Tijuana, San Luis, etc…. but now happy at home!!

This post is brought to you by the letters ‘I’ and ‘Q’. Or at least, the spotlight is cast onto public intelligence, albeit by two very different films.

The Age Of Stupid
Premiering in Sydney ( complete with Green Carpet for celebrities ) on Aug 19, The Age of Stupid is a feature film pitched as a ‘drama-documentary-animation’ hybrid, and stars Pete Postlethwaite as an old man living in the devastated world of 2055, watching archive footage from 2008 and asking: why didn’t we stop climate change when we had the chance? Director Frannie Armstrong previously covered the McLibel case, where UK activists faced off McDonalds in court, so the perspective is likely predictable, but the film is also interesting because of the ways it was made.

Crowdsourcing gets mentioned a lot lately, as a way to harness the power of groups online, but this film managed to entirely source it’s near half million pound budget through a wide range of individual and group donors, ensuring complete editorial control, and giving each of those investors own a per centage of the film’s profits. Production of the film also took into account it’s carbon footprint ( as estimated 94 tonnes of CO2 ), and endeaviured at every stage of making the film to reduce it where possible. This included showing the world premiere in London inside a solar-powered cinema tent, having guests arrive on bicycles. ( It also helps having the involvement of people such as Radiohead, Depeche Mode, Dragnerve and The Band of Holy Joy, creators of the Gorillaz animations, and the oscar nominated Pete Postlewhaite in the lead role. )

And while the 2055 future dwellers may doubt our public intelligence, it’d appear the film appeals to our brighter, proactive capacities. Guests will arrive at the Sydney launch by ‘bicycle, solar car, rickshaw, feet, horse or electric car’, there will be pedal-powered popcorn, and the launch will harness satellite technology to link together more than 40 cinemas around Australia for the lead-up to the film, and questions and answers with the director and star after the film. Frannie herself admits that having 3 of their team fly around the world is in contradiction to the film’s message : “We think the potential benefits outweigh the frighteningly high emissions (13 tonnes each – about 13 years of emissions for someone living sustainably), but we may well be proved wrong.”
Part of their rationale includes a planned Aussie parliament screening, and overall an attempt to “catapult climate change – and the all-important Copenhagen climate summit – slapbang into the Aussie and Kiwi consciousnesses.”

Tickets for the Aug 19 premiere on sale now. And of course they’re on : http://twitter.com/ageofstupid )

Idiocracy
Also set in the future, but in an Adam Sandler-esque kinda way, is this cult film which suggests that the next half millenia sees society dumbing down through a process of natural selection : “stupid people easily out-breed the intelligent…. the children of the educated élites are drowned in a sea of sexually promiscuous, illiterate, alcoholic, degenerate peers.” A dopey cryogenic frozen pair of ppeople from today suddenly find themselves as the smartest people on the planet, and set about trying to reverse the trends. Today the U.S. President is Barack Obama. In 2500 it is a former wrestler and porn star named Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho.

The Idiots
Of course, neither of the above are to be confused with the Danish Dogme film by Lars Von Trier. Anyone who has seen the Idiots, won’t make that mistake – it features a bunch of ‘anti-bourgeois’ adults who pretend to be disabled as a means of provoking others. That, the unsimulated sex and the directorial shadow of Von Triers is usually enough to remind people this ain’t Hollwood.