Elsewhere. Meanwhile. Would you believe that German film director Werner Herzog has invited you to study with him? BYO bullet-proof vests.

“The Rogue Film School will be in the form of weekend seminars held by Werner Herzog in person at varying locations and at infrequent intervals. The Rogue Film School will not teach anything technical related to film-making. For this purpose, please enroll at your local film school.

The Rogue Film School is about a way of life. It is about a climate, the excitement that makes film possible. It will be about poetry, films, music, images, literature. Excerpts of films will be discussed, which could include your submitted films; the attention will revolve around essential questions:

How does music function in film? How do you narrate a story? (This will certainly depart from the brainless teachings of three-act-screenplays). How do you sensitize an audience? How is space created and understood by an audience? How do you produce and edit a film? How do you create illumination and an ecstasy of truth?

Related, but more practical subjects, will be the art of lockpicking. Traveling on foot. The exhilaration of being shot at unsuccessfully. The athletic side of filmmaking. The creation of your own shooting permits. The neutralization of bureaucracy. Guerrilla tactics. Self reliance.

Censorship will be enforced. There will be no talk of shamans, of yoga classes, nutritional values, herbal teas, discovering your Boundaries, and Inner Growth.

Follow your vision. Form secretive Rogue Cells everywhere. At the same time, be not afraid of solitude.”

( Previous round-ups of Werner World, for the unfamiliar )

Remember 12 Monkeys with Brad Pitt? That movie was based on La Jetee, a thirty minute film made in 1962 by Chris Marker, a grainy black and white film set in post-apocalyptic Paris. That La Jetee has been a perpetual entry in best film lists ever since is all the more remarkable given it only contains a few seconds of actual motion, the rest comprising of grainy black and white photos of underground Paris, some background music, occasional sound effects, and Marker’s evocative, tightly scripted narration. Aside from the film’s inspiring execution though, it resonates today for other many other reasons:

- The implications for DIY film-making ( ideas are more important than budgets – spend more time developing and refining ideas)
- It reminds, that in the end, technology is the easy part.
- The right text can wonderfully frame and transform images. ( And what does this mean for websites, let alone films? )
- If a film like La Jetee is possible with a hand-held still camera in 1962, what is possible with today’s technology? ( Or – what would a young Chris Marker be making with our abundance of portable recording devices, which are often net-connected, location aware, and without the processing costs of film? )

And sure, it resonates because I bought La Jetee the book recently, after spotting it on a shelf – a film as book – savour the story and cinematography at whatever pace, or in whatever sequence you prefer. ( Available via MIT Press )

“This book version of La Jetée is, to my mind, astonishingly beautiful. It brings a total freshness to the work and a new way to use photos to deal with dramatic events. Not a film’s book, but a book in its own right—the real ciné-roman announced in the film’s credits.”

—Chris Marker

Read about it @ wikipedia
Watch the film in lo-res ( le horreur! ) on youtube
Watch the film of the book of the film

Fusing together contemporary interface design with a love of early dub pioneers such as Lee Scratch and King Tubby, James Nichols has cleverly cobbled together an interactive tactile mixing table which has been wowing crowds at events around Sydney.

Describe your ‘dubtable‘ to a bus full of ice hockey players.
It’s like an adult version of one of those Fisher-Price musical toys that you give to young children. You know the ones with big coloured buttons that make fun sounds? It’s a large musical toy. You place blocks on a table and music happens. You move those blocks around and mix and match them and crazy sounds happen.
 
And to a tech-music nerd, what software and hardware do you use to put it together?
It uses a high precision camera that’s inside the table looking up at the surface, the notorious reacTIVision software to do the recognition of objects that are placed on top of the table (the “fiducials”), and an audio component written in the PureData environment that does the synthesis of sounds, reacting to the objects as recognised by reacTIVision.
 
How did the idea come about? What seeded it?
The inspiration half came from the reactable, which a friend showed me a few years ago and that Bjork toured with recently, and half from Lee Scratch Perry/King Tubby. Those original dub pioneers were essentially making new music through such simple manipulations of sound – by turning up the bass on a track, making hectic echos etc etc… I figured the simple interface presented by the reactable system would apply so well to making dub, and would give this technology a chance to do something a little more organic sounding. The original reactable is mainly aimed at making glitch techno.
 
What have been some different ways you’ve used it live, and what seems to be an optimum number of collaborators using it?
I’ve both used it as a performance tool, kind of like some live producer, and as a pure interactive experience where I’m not touching and just barking at people, telling them to experiment and have some fun.
 
Do you tend to encourage any audience involvement?
Yes, see above. I originally intended it as a tool for people who’ve never done music production to have a go, without having to learn the ins and outs of a large mixing desk or recording system.
 

What kind of interesting audience reactions has it had?
Some interesting ones. You really get a sense of different levels of curiousity that people have. Some people will get immersed in the table, comprehend all the possibilities, and start experimenting crazily. Others wiggle some blocks, see a few things change, get bored and move on. It’s about 50-50 I think. Maybe some people just don’t like the music…
 
What’ve been some surprising aspects to using it?
The whole philosophy of interface design has suddenly come to haunt me. It has made me incredibly jealous of Apple and google. How do you make something that is perfectly intuitive? See, some people just don’t get the dubtable, they can’t understand it quickly enough to be able to experimenting right away, others do. I’m constantly asking myself the question – how do I make this readily usable for *anyone*?

The dubtable has been an unexpected pleasure. The best bit has been the chance to turn things around and make the audience the performers. As a musician, I’m always asking for people to be an audience. Some times it’s tiring to always be an audience member. It has been such a great experience to see it turned around and let people perform and collaborate at a show.

Have you been using it to control both sound and video? 
I haven’t done any video controlling yet. It’s quite possible, but this project is only about 8 months old, and I don’t have much time! Somewhere in the future I guess. I’d love to get it integrated with the Figureight surround video dome and make a really immersive experience. One day. If I ever get the money together.
 
What sorts of ideas has the dubtable given you for future development?
There’s some projects on the way. Check www.dubtable.net for more info! 

Swimming in images then, or if you prefer, lieing back in an inflated tractor tire and drifting downstream with the sky set to slideshow.

Your New Swimsuit
Whether it’s a technology divide, lack of awareness or interest, half of my friends remain oblivious to the charms of having their own personally customised internet delivered to their doorstep. Or to the their RSS reader more specifically. Which bewilders the other half, who wonder how anyone manages the deluge of information without the filtering and auto-update and delivery options of RSS.
At least as people become used to the likes of constantly updating Facebook status updates of friends, or twitter feeds, it gets easier to explain RSS in those terms : RSS allows you to subscribe to the parts of the internet you like, and then instead of going to say Facebook, you can just open up your RSS page online ( eg google reader ), or better, open a dedicated RSS application ( eg netnewswire ) and see articles / images / postings from whichever of your favourite sites have updated recently. ( How to use RSS? The BBC guide to rss, or ‘rss in plain english‘ if you prefer video explanations. )

Aside from world news from your preferred sources, blog postings from your favourite authors, mp3 postings from your favourite musicians, notifications from forums you are on, ebay auctions etc etc – you can also use RSS to subscribe to a steady stream of imagery, which can be a perfect mid-work break to dive into. Most of the photo and image storage sites such as flickr have RSS feeds that allow you to subscribe to everything by a person, by a group, or even by a certain tag or keyword ( inventing unique keywords thus enables lots of people living remotely to easily contribute to the same pool of imagery and easily stay up to date with anything added to that group ). Add a subscription to your RSS reader, and then when you next browse your RSS collection, you’ll see any new image additions and can let them flow past, stopping only for what really grabs, just as you might with a barrage of Facebook status updates.

Infinite Paged Coffee Table Magazines
There are also a wide and wonderfully eccentric collection of dedicated image blogs, lovingly ( or dementedly ) curated by photographers, illustrators, artists and others with the twitchy thing behind their eyelids when the lights go off. These are a few recent additions I’ve been enjoying diving into lately.

Ephemera Assembly man
It was the collection of Tibetan anatomical paintings that hooked me on this, a series of vividly coloured alterna-clown skeletons complete with cosmic medicine colour coding. Mostly vintage imagery collected here, but it’s a fine pair of sharp-eyes to borrow if it’s yesteryear you’re after.

Skull Swap
Aight – this ladies a comedian – and not just in the -look at how many netspeak hooks i can pack into 140 characters kinda way – but an actual stand up on stage full of nerves and swagger and try to make people laugh by saying things into a microphone kinda way. By the comments under each photo, and the mutant clan of jpegs themselves, I’d imagine she’s probably pretty good at that microphone thing too.

Bodyworld
Well, mostly, this blog is subscribed to in case *anything* at all is published by the creator of the Bodyworld, a 12 chapter comic online in full, and dripping in equal parts with the apocalypse, psychedelic inter personal relationships and quite crazy layered imagery. His tangents, experiments and off-cuts that appear in the blog are well worth the price of admission.

Abandoned Places
What is it about urban decay? Maybe growing up in Newcastle has something to do with my fascination for it, and you’ve likely seen photo collections of the once thriving Detroit going around, but if in need of more, this site seems to have an army of contributors the world over, whose mission seems to be to document every broken window, every moss covered spiral staircase and every graffiti covered haunted theatre space they can find.

Awkward Families
Painfully funny. No matter how weird your upbringing, there’s something to outdo it here.

And Ye Olde Regulars
ffffound.com – an image bookmarking site, whose members keep it eyepopping.
Drawn.ca – the illustrators blog, that illustrators want their work published on.
http://riotclitshave.livejournal.com – Enchanting, bewildering, ever-fresh.
http://www.woostercollective.com – Street-art the world over.
http://www.ektopia.co.uk/ektopia – Well filtered graf + street art.
http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com – what other eyes have seen long ago.
http://www.vvork.com – like all of the above, except these self-identify as ‘art’.

Variety in the diet is nice though, drop a line if you have any recommendations…

“At the turn of the century cute and cuddly robots carried none of the symptoms of technological paranoia, and bright-eyed boys and girls looked with ecstatically dilated pupils into a bright future. Only a few years later, the same characters had been tortured, twisted and mutilated. Suddenly blunt combinations of cuteness and abuse, naivety and sex, harmlessness and violence were everywhere. A little later death entered the scene and character’s eyes were crossed out. More recently there has been a spiritual shift, ghosts have started appearing and souls are being exhaled.”

Lars Denicke and Peter Thaler, editors of ‘Prepare for Pictopia‘ offering some insights from Pictoplasma’s mammoth archive of character design.

Pictoplasma?
A Berlin based group dedicated to exploring contemporary character design, which has included an ongoing archival of characters since 1999, a series of curated exhibitions, an annual animation festival and conference, and a series of DVDs and books, of which ‘Prepare for Pictopia’ is the latest (shout out to book designers Janna Davidjants + Alex Fuchs of wiyumi.com ), a chunky colour picture-dense tome of 326 almost A4 size pages.

Page Flipn
Wheeeeee! The thing is gorgeous, full of delights. Crackpot collage ( hello Franceradium ), whimsical illustration ( Andrew James Jones, come on down.. ), giant helium filled characters floating above a sea of people on a Miami beach ( Word up, FriendsWithYou), Mongolian death worms on the streets of New York ( and yes, they are in Motomichi Nakamura’s trademark minimal palette of black, red and white ), Mark Ryden’s seductive paintings, the three dimensional double headed tigers of woodworker AJ Fosik, and so on and so on.

Australians Crashing The Party
Melbourne artist Dylan Martorell : featuring both his intricate layerings and colour saturated sculpture-costumes.
Ben Frost : his multi-layered pop-art is well known, but the relative stark simplicity of his ‘Self-Regenerating Bambi’ is refreshing (a series of miniature Bambi deers are piling up under Bambi’s rear end, one in mid transit.)
Rinzen : extending their vector based schwing to sculptures and murals etc
Sam Gibbons : vivid mandalas of decomposing cartoon characters.

Who Else?
Nagi Noda ‘pushing pet culture deeper into artificiality’ ( remember her poodle fitness video? )
Boris Hoppek’s bimbo / gollywog character – exploring themes of immigration, racism, violence and sexuality..
Hideaki Kawashima ethereal ’stylised feminine beauties with wafting hair’
Olaf Bruening’s photographs of masked and recontextualised characters in strange places..
The psychedelic crystal ink work of Charles Glaubitz.

But Wait, There’s More
“Insert your finger or tube into the finger prosthetic.”
Essays. You get a bunch of them in the book, including a typically visceral, anti-corporate anti-figurine essay / stream of consciousness covered in paint / body fluids rant from Paul McCarthy. Lev Manovich desktop-chimes in with a piece about ‘Remix after Software’, and a bunch more tackling the uncanny between animation and animism, the human machine and masks and the body. Recommendo~!