Underbelly @ Carriageworks
July 3 – 13, 245 Wilson st, Eveleigh, halfway between Macdonaldtown and Redfern stations.

While at first glance, it might seem as enticing as a community mosaic mural event or an amateur bongo night ( both great for participants but not necessarily audiences), this actually looks like a lot of fun – a public lab from 3-10 July, where a large range of artists converge to create art projects under the public gaze, with the aim of performing and presenting their work within the 2day Underbelly festival Jul 12 ( midday – 11pm ) and Jun 13 ( 2-10pm ). What makes it look interesting is the calibre and diversity of artists involved, and the range of projects they are aiming to complete. Clicking ‘artists’ at the site, reveals AV tagteams performing sets in a geodesic dome, artists trying to ‘make the narrative film process physical’, theatre groups with flying machines, an inflatable sideshow theatre, experimental tactile mixing interfaces, aerial acrobatics against video, bicycle powered projections, shadow-puppets, multimedia hiphop, a Mekanarky industrial sculpture retrospective, hanging gardens and floating sculptural speech balloons, kamikaze couture and muchos moros. People are encouraged to wander in to see the works in progress during the lead-up ( hence ‘public lab’ ), and then witness the end result on the 12th+13th.

Sydney Biennale Highlights?
To be honest, whether the site is to blame or not, couldn’t find much of interest within it. There is a free collection of films screening at the National Gallery every Wednesday, 2:00pm and 7:15pm, and every Sunday, 2:00pm ( Hans Richter, Alfred Hitchcock, Robert Breer, Len Lye, Dziga Vertov, Michael Snow etc etc c’mon down… ). Also notable – a free ferry shuttle to Cockatoo Island in Sydney harbour every hour, seven days a week, in aid of getting people to various art events there. Might try and coincide a free harbour ride with the Shaun Gladwell talk on Sunday. Elsewhere? A bunch of talks and performances, exhibitions as you’d expect, but not much that really jumped out. Again, maybe the website wasn’t really selling it, which seems odd given the scale of the biennale…

(* ie not this )

Tight little package of 4 events just about to launch in Melb – each event with its own twist on audiovisual interplay. The opener and closer are probably easiest to digest, live soundtracks being performed to films, though each with their own take on that. Opening night catches ‘Waiting to Turn into Puzzles‘, a hand processed Super8 film by Louise Curham being projected, while the five member Sydney ensemble Offspring perform music from hand water-coloured muscial scores that incorporate screen captures and imagery from the film. Closing night brings a classic 1928 Hans Richter animation to the screen, Vormittagspuk, accompanied by live score by Genevieve Lacey and Geoffrey Morris.

Skin Quartet on the 27th projects various skintones and textures by visual artist Louisa Bufardeci onto the screen, accompanied by David Young’s music, which, was created by CIA Factbook data on ‘ethnicity, skin colour and nationhood’, each note corresponding to an onscreen element visible on the skin. Where that places the project on the sliding scale from pretentious to profound, who knows?

d.v.d from Tokyo bring a drum-triggered visual show on the 28th, which apparently finds tight sequences of retro-game animations launched by the drumming, each of the animations in turn bringing their own sounds, and determining the progress of the drumming.

ACMI, Melbourne. Thu 26 – Sat 28 Jun – 8pm, Sun 29 June – 4pm
$20 Full $15 Conc. Festival pass : All 4 sessions $50 Full $40 Conc
Tickets, full program details : www.aphids.net ( check the cool animated promo – 33mb tho )

Persepolis, a gorgeous and uniquely styled black and white film about a girl growing up in Iran, is definitely an animation that’d be worth checking out on the big screen ( Jun 21, 8pm, state theatre). Alongside that, graphic designer and renowned film title creator Saul Bass has a little known directed feature, Phase IV,( Jun 22, 6.45, State Theatre) a dark humoured sci-fi piece which shows an ant colony taking over SouthWest USA ( prescient, considering the recent ‘invasion’ of electronics-eating ants in Texas : truly! ) ( See also Star Wars credits if done by Saul Bass..)

Already passed by? Man on Wire – a documentary structured like a heist movie, about French high-wire walker, Philippe Petit, walking between the twin trade towers of the World Trade Centre building ( remember that? ) in 1974 ( footage at the time shot by Australian director of the oz-doco-classic, Cane Toads, Mark Lewis ). Oh those groovy times. Strong strand of Iraq war docos, including notably,
‘Standard Operating Procedure’ by Errol Morris, who is probably the documentary makers documentary maker.

Still to come? The Last Continent, a film about the land of ice we still have at the moment ( Jun 19, 10am, State Theatre). And more. ( sydneyfilmfestival.org Jun 4-22 )

Like clockwork, the arrival of winter in Melbourne brings with it a range of depraved and delightful animations on the big screen, this year’s regional focus being on the tick-tock friendly Switzerland. Aside from buckets of Swisstacular, we also gets 6 or 7 compilations worth within the ‘International Panorama’ section, Australian animations, ‘Late night Bizarre’, a digital selection and a puppet animation section, and two particularly attractive compilations : Fears of the Dark and visual music.

Visual Music Marathon
These are the culled highlights from a festival held in and curated by Jean Detheux (in Boston 2007) . Which is to say fans of Len Lye’s marvellously freestyling hand painted and scratch films, fans of abstract generative software visualisations and those who enjoy intensely integrated audio and video will be filling the seats at these sessions, so get in while u can ( tickets @ miaf.net )

Semiconductor – a UK duo to be filed under the category ( amongst others ) of visualists who write custom software to provide for their pixel needs, offer one of the standout selections, the end result of this particular coding process, being a stunning kind of hyper-animated handdrawn 3D origami beast, that gets mercilessly tweaked and prodded by industrial machines with faulty electrics. Elsewhere can be found muchos rotoscoped crazy drawing per frame madness, visualisation of throat singing.. spooky xylophones represented by organic decaying dancing squares, industrial drones given a suitably flickering and textured visualisation and Runa’s Spell – a gorgeous play with abstract organic shapes, mostly restrained colour palettes and blurry shapes that emerge from that long, darkened hallway of your David Lynch nightmares. Turns out to be a hallway leading to a New Zealand dairy farm, or where-ever it is that people make relaxy super dubbed out bass chai tent music these days. It gets prettier in other words. Both a strength and occasional weakness when it veers to more well known visual paths. Plenty more visual abstraction to follow, including Mugenkei ( also worth mentioning because the imagery is curator Jean Detheux’s response to Willfried Jentsch’s soundscape ).
Screening : Jun 20, 8pm, ACMI. Introduced by Jean Detheux.

Fears of The Dark
( fearsofthedark-themovie.com + celluloid-dreams.com )
Comic books tend to dismissed in the wider cultural sphere ( hence the popularity for comic artists to reframe them as ‘graphic novels’ ) , but an animation festival is one place they can crawl out from under the bed safely, ready to pollute the minds of the innocent. This feature length compilation draws together Blutch, Marie Caillou, Richard McGuire and a host of other gifted storytellers I hadn’t heard of, but will be keeping an eye out for now, and an artist destined for a compilation based on fear : Charles Burns.
The Burns piece is every bit as disturbing, engrossing and under the skin as fans of his Black Hole comics ( soon to be made into a feature!! ) would be hoping for within a Burns animation. Who knows what kind of erotic weird biology experiences inform or inspire the Burns imagination, but he sure keeps fanning the flames within the deep woods of outer suburban North America, a place where sexualised insects and aliens are prospering well, transmitting themselves through whatever human vessels they can find. It’s a credit to the compilation that the rest of it holds up so well to this piece. Full list @ miaf.net ( Screening : Jun 19, 8.45pm, Jun 21, 7.45pm, ACMI ) Recommendo.

With over 200 video uploading sites available, including plenty offering better resolution ( eg vimeo.com ), better interfaces ( eg veoh.com ), better payment for people whose clips have been viewed ( eg blip.tv ), the ability to stream live video from your phone to the web ( qik.tv ), and even a capacity to remix files via a browser when uploaded ( eg jumpcut.com ), there’s lots of reasons to avoid youtube. And yet.

Despite it’s crappy resolution, and significant other failings, youtube has become something of an extended audiovisual memorybank. Childhood television rarities, esoteric film snippets, weird slices of history, all viewable in our own time, not when (or what) the networks schedule. Sample clips bookmarked recently at youtube.com/user/jeanpoole :

• Darth Vader edited to be shown removing his helmet to play a harmonica for a disturbed Luke Skywalker, and elsewhere having his voice overdubbed by the brutal Daniel Day Lewis character in There Will Be Blood.. ( maps surprisingly effectively ).
• Saudi Arabian guys on a freeway, holding onto their doors and kind of ice-skating on the ground as the car speeds along…
• Astronaut Buzz Aldrin punching a conspiracy theorist reporter in the face who keeps inferring humans have never been on the moon..
• Turkish E.T.
• La Jetee ( Chris Marker’s legendary sixties short film which regularly finds itself on best film-ever lists )
• William Shatner at a scif-fi awards night singing about the the problems of being a rocketman, being high as a kite up there and all.. complete with deliciously cheesy 70’s styled re-composited versions of himself.
• Footage of the last Tasmanian tiger.. which died in Hobart zoo in the 1930s… the last sighted specimen, it’s tragedy compounded by dying from a human error – a zoo attendant forgetting to put it indoors overnight during one night in the Tassie winter. ( Reviving the tasmanian tiger from a museum DNA sample has been the subject of much scientific work, recently getting a boost when scientists managed to resurrect the gene responsible for the development of cartilage and bone by expressing it within a mouse embryo, but stating that the full reincarnation of a full tassie tiger was a long way off. )
• Still undecided on the merits of his recent epic, Inland Empire? Try this David Lynch double-bill instead :
  1 – David Lynch eating panties.
  2 – David Lynch deflating Tom Cruise’s Scientology bubble.

Collage animator Run Wrake ( yes, he of the Rabbit fame, but there’s much more to him ) was chosen to promote a collection of vintage stock-art by CSA Images recently, and Control Master is the resulting animation, every bit as personable and quirky as could be hoped for. The vintage stock-art is reworked with plenty of imaginative visual twists, with a creeping tension helped along by Daniel Morgan’s great soundtrack ( mistakenly I’d picked the music as Run Wrake’s also, which is enough to say that it’s broodingly similar to many of his other short films ).

On a negative note, the clip is flash only, so it can only be watched online, not saved and rewatched – an annoyance and a big mistake according to Motiongrapher, who argue that :

“While Flash may be the most ubiquitous media player on the web, QuickTime is still the industry standard format for distribution. Some reasons for this:
Easily downloadable, Easily scrubbable, Huge array of supported codecs – and if your site is targeted at designers, producers, agencies and other video-savvy clients – QuickTime is currently the expected choice for distribution.”

The descent into Melbourne’s winter also means there’s a whole bunch of festivals on their way, kicking off right about now.

( May 15-31 http://2008.nextwave.org.au ).

By virtue of preferring to spread it’s grant money in smaller doses to a wider array of artists, this bi-annual festival for emerging artists tends to be a sprawling beast of quirks and charms, a never ending array of performances, exhibitions and installations in shopfront windows, hidden alleyways, underground tunnels, catwalks, nightclubs and occasionally, within art galleries. There’s a festival club this year at the Mercant Hotel near the Victoria Markets, where people can wander to each night, but other than that, it’s pin the dot on the map of inner-city Melbourne and browse the calendar on their ( well designed ) to see a long list of events jostling for attention. Some favourites below :

Yelling At Stars, a transmission into space

On the closing night, a performance at the Myer Music bowl will be recorded, filmed and streamed directly to Deep Space Communications Network in Florida, where it will be converted into radiowaves and become Australia’s first interstellar broadcast, travelling light-years into outer space. As the artist behind it, Willow S. Weiland notes, maybe the reason we haven’t received any transmissions back from outer space yet is something to do with the messages we’ve been sending out :

“It’s time for some honesty. The fastest way to make contact with others is to expose something about ourselves, our own frailty and vulnerability. We’re a beautiful yet destructive stressed-out plague of people destroying our habitat who feel in so many ways personally, culturally and geographically alone.”

House Proud – seven artists get to reinvent 7 homes. Aye, 7 sets of brave home dwellers have agreed to let artists develop site specific installations in their homes. They leave the house, the artists set to work, remixing their interior lives, and a few days later the homes are open for a short exhibition launch, the general public free to wander through these freshly intimate spaces.

Esky? A ‘moving architectural intervention’ – or a large inflatable venue doubling as a pop-up performance space and bar, appearing at various locations around Melbourne during the course of the festival. Need to know where it is? SMS the word ‘esky’ to 0428 477128 for location of the venue each night.

The Telepathy project – artists in 2 adjoining windows try to communicate with via telepathy, recording their messages every 15 minutes on time-coded post-it notes. Later to be published as a book.

The Movement Movement – Funny project where the general public is encouraged to run alongside artists inside museums in something that sounds like a cross between an obstacle course, comedy routine and aerobics class. Apparently they had 250+ people running a 5km course through a Canadian museum. Witness the fitness!

Paradise City – dance performance with BMX, skater, acrobat breakdancer and a fallen diva.

More? Survivalism in tents, handprinted wallpaper on Melbourne’s laneways, art performances in ‘Men’s Galleries’, Workshops – develop your own personal dancing style… learn about how to inject interactivity into new media installations… ( by Jon Pak of lightmatrixinterface.com ). Forums – on virtual communities, artist interventions in public spaces, recycling pop culture imagery, theatre in non-traditional spaces. Abundances more – website is very well organised and makes exploring and finding events very smooth and easy, well worth the browse.

And sure, the Festival has only just started, but has already run into controversy, the Melbourne City Council ruling that a Swedish artist’s works that feature male nudes must have the genitalia covered up. The work in question featured a stoned, naked Mickey Mouse character ‘dreaming of becoming as famous as Damien Hirst’ , and was looking to critique the whole art supermarket from an artist’s perspective… but naked male genitalia are best on stone statues it seems. ( see http://platformartistsgroup.blogspot.com, and the artists site : ceciliafogelberg.com )

Also Coming Up :

Melbourne International Animation Festival 2008 June 16-22
Melbourne International Film Festival 2008 – July 25 – August 10

That place in the Turkish desert full of melted rock buildings? That’d be Cappadocia. Was lucky enough to wander around it bug-eyed in 2007, during a stay with Istanbul’s Artificial Eyes. Crazy, enchanting, otherworldly place ( even aside from the “International UFO museum” set inside a cave building ), a desert full of hollowed out mountains – which makes it an amazing environment to explore on foot, or if your birthday happens to fall during a visit to the renowned hot air balloon mecca, from the skies above.

Sometime ( and several DV tapes ) later, was asked to contribute a videoclip to a compilation DVD of Australian artists, to appear in the Synchresis Edition of ANAT’s Filter magazine, being curated by Mitchell Whitelaw ( Canberra based academic, writer and artist with fine blog to boot ). Decided to edit something out of the Cappadocia footage and set about looking for a possible soundtrack. Came across an old track by Extraboy, the more ambient music making alias of Sweden’s Anders Carlsson ( who lived in Melbourne for a while, and graced several Plug N Play events with his live c64 drum sequencer and live vocoded vocals – under his Goto80 alias). Thought the track suited the hot air balloon footage beautifully and thankfully Anders was happy to let the track be used. Turned out also that Anders was playing in ‘nearby’ Israel soon, with the 8BitIsrael.com crew, so we tried for a while to figure out a way he could come via Istanbul, and I could join him as VJ in Israel, an exciting prospect ultimately foiled in a netcafe as the airticket prices doubled over the course of an increasingly frustrating 2 hour netchat trying to find tickets and times to suit. No stopping the Anders juggernaut though, plenty of touring and releases since then, and he included the videoclip below in his mammoth publish-one-song-online-everyday-for-2008 project.

In other words, various ways to use the Four Joystick Buttons of The Apocalypse.

Kings of Power 4 Billion %

Pixel auteur Paul Robertson ( Melbourne animators, represent! ) is clogging the internets again, – ie fans of supercute low-res hyperviolence have been busy downloading his latest gargantuan animation effort, this one a 12 minute epic of biblical proportions that combines alien invasions, most major religions, Hulk Hogan, Capt Picard, endless pop cultural cameos, and the usual cast of fighting masses.
Download details can be found over at http://probertson.livejournal.com, along with 200+ comments along the lines of :

“Are you using secret japanese technologies when making all the this bright flickering? The ones which make innocent children fall into satanic epilepsy attacks?”

Inadvertently, the video is also an advertisement for the bit torrent protocol: the large video is listed as being mirrored on several sites, but many of these are slow or hammered by the heavy demand. Bit torrent, however is a protocol and an application which gets around the limitations of small sites by sharing the bandwidth of the downloaders between them. So as some people download, some of their ‘spare’ upload space is also used to help someone else get part of the file. Which can lead to decentralisation… and eliminating the need for centralised all-powerful distributors – a good thing for a healthy ecology of media.

Annnnnnnie-ways, if you’re familiar with his 2006 effort, ‘Pirate Baby’s Cabana Battle Street Fight‘, then the above makes some kind of noodley sense. If not, distil the retro-game fighting aesthetic to an essence, then use this to super-saturate the plot, all of the characters, and all of the on-screen motion. And take the more surreal sequences of the Akira movie as a starting point, but as they may have looked if designed for a late 1980s or early 1990s arcade game machine. Except this clip is an even more herculean effort than the last one, as relentlessly stroboscopic and action-packed as befits an ‘end of the world’ epic. And then there’s the soundtrack.

Quatronica

Half French synthesiser spaceships, and half viking riffed glam metal guitar shredding – the soundtrack to ‘Kings of Power 4 Billion %’ definitely provides a lot of the animation’s energy and momentum, it’s sense of epicness. The dual synth and shredder sonics in this case were choreographed by Cornel Wilczek, another Melbourner who has been releasing music on Surgery Records and now Mush, under the alias ‘Qua‘. Equally at home playing acoustic instruments and laptop chopping with the nerdcorest of them, Cornel has 2 releases coming out this year and has developed a live ‘Qua’ show that playfully combines his instrument playing and splinter-funk with the live drums of James Cecil (ex-Architecture in Helsinki + check Paul’s AIH pixel clip too..).

As it turns out, am VJing for Qua on May 3rd @ Richmond’s Corner Hotel ( also playing : High Pass Filter, One Watt Sun ( Oz/Ger), which will also be interesting for 2 more reasons : Lemur & OSC. Aye, Cornel has one of those Lemur touchscreen controllers ( as recently popularised by Daft Punk in their video pyramid at the Grammys ) which allows multi-touch control, and highly configurable interfaces ( customise your controller to suit every gig if you want ). The Lemur also has a built in ethernet interface which allows it to connect to a whole network and it uses OSC ( Open Sound Control ), which has many advantages over midi when it comes to sending information between machines, including lower latency, higher data capacity and easy configurability. And so – it’ll be fun to see the Lemur in action, but also to have it sending OSC data and manipulating some vidi-yo in time with those splinter beats. “Good times”

Future Oil Wars made Fun

Even more apocalypso bang for your buck – via selectparks.net – check out Frontlines: Fuel of War, a high profile game out shortly which finds China & Russia joining forces against the U.S. + Europe and battling it out in an era of dwindling oil supplies. Not sure which side Mad Max picks there, but there’s something eerie about these kind of games modelled around contemporary news projections. Insert coin.

You are total strangers, have never even seen each other before, and yet as you ride towards the man further up the road, at the very last moment, you both know the right thing to do at this point, the only thing to do, is to stretch out your palms, and as your bike whizzes past, let a satisfying skin-slap be heard by the late night congregators on the footpath nearby. You keep riding, don’t even turn around, that was then, this is now, and now you are on a different part of the road, and you are grinning.

Some storyboarded narrative film could try, but would have a hard time conveying what the rest of your bicycle ride actually felt like. Not what it looked like, but how it felt, the shift of internal gears, the slight electric buzz that comes with being in the right place at the right time. Nope, your best cinematic hope for conveying those feelings, would be to forgo the usual plot devices, transcend the usual visual techniques, and harness visual surprise as a way of describing your own experience.

Which leads us, down an unnecessarily windy garden path to the back shed of cinematic tinkerer and visual explorer, Joel Schlemowitz. If in doubt of just how busy Joel has been, how dirtily his fingers have been covered in film chemicals over the years, check his dot com, for a huge list of short experimental films, ‘cinepoems’ that explore the everyday in efforts to reach beyond them.

microcinema.com, bless their independent distributor socks, have been amassing a gigantic collection of experimental DVDs for distribution and recently added a triple-disc set of Joel’s work to their swelling catalog. “Joel Schlemowitz : short experimental films” gives what it suggests, 45 of them even, showcasing the scope and terrain of Joel’s work over the years. Definitely some room for improvement with the DVD authoring though – differences between the booklet and what appears on each disc, no easy menu that allows continuous play of all films, only a clumsy bottleneck of an interface to access each film and as it turned out on my copy – disc 3 containing all the same films as disc one, despite what was printed on it. But that’s not the point… that’s computer accountant land. We need the smell of a pine forest, a chimney with smoke rising out of it, homemade window sills, tool benches, vintage equipment, a film explorer’s den.

Disco One : Short Experimental Films 1 Through 20

Some favourites?

Abrasions – a bound and blindfolded man stands before the camera, and the film of this event is slowly scratched to oblivion.

Bacchanale – Characters wearing masks, that moment before a party goes to another level. Warbling, perspective warping camera.

Bagatekke Biolique – A animated beating heart, various anatomical imagery filmed, and the film itself hand painted to create motion through a body, complete with sound effects.

Bagatlle in Neon – Playful long exposure explorations of city lights, then hand painted over with a soft limited palette. (Technicolour vibes! )

Doris’ Garden – A baby’s voice wandering, a song. Buddhist garden statues and images baby superimposed over explorations into a near junglish backyard.

Extemporized – Wild camera movement wandering in a city of snow, sound effects added to suit mime artists who are performing in various parts of the city.

Eye Music – Silent film zooming in on an old turntable, using hand-painted splashes to convey the sonic scratch of the jumping needle.

Disc 2 – Short Experimental Films 21 through 40

Invitation to a Voyage – fast overlaid shapes elegant silhouettes extravagant fonts… solarised image of a naked man… zoom in…

slowly avalanching sound… curious little piece.. exactly what should be found somewhere on an experimental video compilation.

Little Nothings – poem by Wanda Phipps.. nicely overlaid footage, on top of the poet reading her work… reaching for cinepoetry…

Morris Engel Time Sculpture – gorgeous close-ups of weird timepieces… visual aesthetics associated with that weird human trait of measuring time.
the closer we zoom in, the louder the sounds get, until finally we zoom out, sound softens, and the piece’s time has run out.

Pillowbook – Black and white scene. the book is opened – we get red tinted flickery imagery suggesting entangled limbs, skin sliding over skin, panning vertically fast, images overlaid densely enough so that what feels lurid and pornographic, is also able to wash over the eyes like some gentle breeze.

Poem for the Past – Film strips twisted, decayed, overlaid

Purple Candle Poem – colour painted film, scratches, overlaid on footage of candles… lot more compelling than that suggests… flair for composition, motion… colour control… limited palette…

Reverie – more candles, statues in candlelight, old classical nude drawings given a perspective warping… offset by exotic string and percussion instruments in an echo chamber.. a hand, a desk, spectacles..

Silo – time lapse… of people at some filmic event, old projection systems, complete with burnt holes in film, accompanied by various laptop noodlers, guitarists… hey look – its an audiovisual happening… lying in the grass, the vividness of the colours in the outdoor projections are flanked deliciously by the silhouetted tree branches…

übel – fast flickering overlays of machinery turned abstract – metal scraping sounds in background hypnotic in their choreography over time… a pendulum of light playing on machinery to form shapeshifting shadows… shapes blended in.

Disc 3 – Collaborations and Experimental Documentaries – sounded interesting in theory, but in practice, turned out to contain the same data as disc one, which is a shame, because one of the shorts, Teslamania, like all good films exploring the aesthetics of tesla coils and violent bursts of electricity probably deserve a good viewing. (( UPDATE :: Joel writes in to say “This was a problem on a small number of “rush” pre-release copies and the problem was corrected before the the DVD collection went into distribution. ” ))

Close the door, leave the shed, the cine-laboratory concoctions still bubbling away, smell the air, blink anew at the world and wander away. And if you want to hi-5 Joel..

Another round-up of visual treats. Some with fangs.

Recent Work From Soda Jerk

Following on from their epic, feature length, I mean really, epic, compositing job in Pixel Pirates II, Soda Jerk have made a couple of shorts that again transcend most mash-ups with their pro-level recompositing of characters into various scenes. ‘Picnic at Wolf Creek’ ( as you may guess ) combines a whole swagger of iconic Australian cinema ( guest stars : Mad Max, Steve Irwin, Russell Crowe, Ned Kelly, Lindy Chamberlain, the drag queens from Priscilla Queen of the Desert, Skippy the Bush kangaroo and a few high school girls at Hanging Rock. Some greatly combined scenes here. More details and pics at the Soda Jerk HQ.

‘Astro Black: A History of Hip-Hop [episode 1]’ kicks off a hopefully long running series about the intergalactic origins of hip-hop turntablism. I haven’t seen this one yet, but there was something about the way the blurb was batting it’s eyelids at me:

“Set in the Bronx in the mid seventies, this video remix kicks off with the alien abduction of the three pioneers of the hip-hop “old skool”: DJ Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Baambattaa. Once on board the Mothership with Sun Ra and George Clinton, the three DJs are transported to Planet Rock where they are skilled in a secret alien technic – the scratch.”

Tokyo Streets

via microcinema.com

If the names Shibuya, Omote-Sando, Harajuku, Yoyogi, Shinjuku and Meguro light up neon-bells inside your head like some winning sequence in a Daft Punk poker machine, then it’s feasible this disc from fashionshow.ch will provide some amusement, and or satisfaction, in your life. The premise holds potential – a snapshot of life on the streets in one of the largest, densest and most colourful cities in the world, and given Tokyo’s range of crazy cosplay characters and weird-fashionites already well documented in the likes of the Fruits books / magazines, given the fact that well – it’s Tok-(e)-YO! – one of the world’s best examples of the future wedged firmly into the present, then surely, it’d be possible to edit together an exhilarating snapshot of super-sugoi critters wandering about in their natural terrain? Editing however, would suggest the makers had a range of decent footage to start off with, and some overarching threads / ideas or just flair for weaving this together. Unfortunately the DVD comes off as really flat – poorly shot ( not a sin in itself, but it doesn’t help the disc ), and badly edited – extended sequences of drab audiences looking on meekly at amusingly half-assed street-performers, a few random camera wanders past colourful characters, some live bands on the street, dreary pan and tilts over up-market building facades, etc etc. There are a few nice sections, but it would’ve been vastly improved by being edited down to 5 or 10 minutes. Get your hands on the classy ‘Tokyo Noise’ feature length doco instead.

Ryuke

Also from Tokyo, and the latest release from VJ label Light Rhythm Visuals, Ryuke provides a collection of works by native Tokyo pixelists VJ Reel and K-Mixx, a whirlwind of ‘experimental 3D animation and explorations of virtual space’ – a description which admittedly makes me feel queasy straight away – possibly limiting the disc to being another collection of motion graphics for some information technology current affairs program, with a little science fiction thrown in for good measure. As it turns out – only some of the disc is like that, the rest is densely packed with visual ideas and it’s nice to see Light Rhythm Visuals continue their tradition of including visual remixes on each disc, as well as keeping the discs region free and including quicktime clips ready for use within VJ software. The disc also loops without returning to the menu screen, savvily positioning the disc as a possibility for various venue owners or acknowledging that it can run continuously in the background occasionally provoking interest rather than needing to be watched all in one sitting. The stand out piece on the disc for me was the angle 2 remix by Kevlar of VJ Reel’s “illmatic chopper” – it playfully extended VJ Reel’s obsessive look at horizontal movements, adding plenty of innovative variations over time, used masks and black space fantastically, shifted to a tasteful 3D section ( ie – it wasn’t doing some generic object deconstruction / reconstruction, or moving camera around some mechanical 3D object ) and managed to be both beautiful and visually surprising. It helped I guess that VJ Reel’s original piece was quite strong, especially the nice overlayed silhouettes against the fast panning and chopped up horizontal movements.

Also worth a mention – the Ben Sheppee remix of K-mixx’s “Beautiful destruction”, taking the stock 3D disintegration to new places by nicely overlaying glitched masks and stripping back the palette to a less garish black, white and pink – simultaneously enhancing the effectiveness of various silhouettes blacking out portions of the screen. VJ Anyone’s remix of VJ Reel’s ‘gravith’ also has merit, with a wealth of fine edits and sophisticated compositing techniques on show – even exquisite in places, but the overall piece suffering by lapses into information age visual cliches and the addition of some unfortunate text that reeks of a transhuman bent that surely even sci-fi readers find hard to swallow today ( Advocating uploading of the human psyche to machines as a solution to global warming? C’mon … ). It’s an accomplished piece despite these shortcomings, but could’ve been that much stronger.

Gathering links for a visitor makes you realise it’s quite the city for eyeballs, old Melbourne town.

Australian Centre of Moving Image
: Usually has a few exhibitions / screenings, the free Christian Marclay exhibit currently exhibiting is available until February 3 and has several cool AV collages worth checking out. The nearby Federation Square public screen often hosts interesting public screenings too.

City Lights Project

Across the road from ACMI, is Hosier lane, ever drenched in graffiti and stencils, and host to a monthly laneway exhibit hung high and illuminated in light boxes. Also located in another CBD lane, Centre Place.

Stream Collective : live A-V performances, adventurous sound, screenings and installations.

Stencil Graffiti Capital Hearts Melbourne. More stencilly stuff.

Pecha Kucha Melbourne : Series of rapid-fire design and graphics presentations by wide range of melbourne visualists.. with big audiences, big design social event..( next event mar 19 ).

Forepaw : Shopfront in Northcote transformed into gallery, venue, comic + illustration jam nights and much more.
Just missed ‘Trails’ http://forepaw.org/trails.php group drawing jam night ( Tue Jan 29). ( “Bring pens. And beer”).

Sticky Institute : Zine store and seller of much lo-fi and rad print stuff.

Is Not Magazine : Maybe you’ve seen that giant one sheet magazine that gets printed in colour XXXL and pasted up on walls around the city? This is it.

Comic’s Lifestyle : Lots of the Melbourne comic making massive live here.

Breakdown Press : Local independent publishers of provocative visual material.

Engage Media : Local makers of software for self-publishing video online

Dorkbot Melbourne : Local tweakers of electricity and odd projects.

Footscray AudioVisual Social Club : Regular show and tell events @ Footscray Community Arts Centre.

Tape Projects : a collective of young and emerging artists who champion provocative, temporal, audio-visual works and site-specific performances by our peers in and around Melbourne. ( Also release a quarterly DVD ).

Horse Bazaar : Club with a really, really long video screen that wraps around a corner, and regularly features visual artists.

Loop : Another club with many dedicated video walls and regular visual arts bits & vj projections.

Plug N Play Melbourne : Pixellists and live visual experimenters every 2nd thursday of every month… 201 Smith st, Kent st Cafe, Fitzroy, 8-11pm + free.

Art Galleries? Melbourne has those too. ( 150+ here for starters )

Film Festivals / Open Air Cinemas / Cult film Societies? Try….

Popcorn Taxi, Melbourne Cinematheque, Silver Screen Sundays, The Astor Theatre, Melbourne Underground Film Festival, Italian Film Festival, The Other Film Festival, Melbourne International Film Festival, <