Had a craving for some good head-bending sci-fi lately, so was delighted to stumble across Nawlz, an exquisitely executed piece of illustrated writing from Tasmania’s Sutu, that uses clever and very appropriate layering, styling, sound and animation to navigate the story’s arc in a kind of visually messier, street arty update on the 90’s cyber aesthetic still being abused to this day. Go play.

And if still in need of a sci-fi fix after reaching that delicious last page, gotta recommend the Tom Cruise video doing the rounds, where he talks about his favourite religion invented by a sci-fi author, the one connected to beings from outer space.

Also by the Atak label, the nicely chopped intro to this, positions 4 different video artists and crews against each other in a battle of AV sampling skills. Quite varied styles on the disc and a bunch of interesting extras to wander through. Worth a look.

fame fame ( toronto )
The Fame Fame disc portion showcases clips from another label who exist for the ‘production and promotion of the aggressive, intense and volatile..’. So when Elvis & James Dean appear, it’s not long before they are whipped and sliced into an AV frenzy. Actutally works well, and followed by a more splattery stroboscopic piece by – cheerfully titled ‘i die u die’ by Jubal Brown. ‘In the eye’ by Tasman Richardson plays with surveillance cameras, mirror effects, layering of extreme close ups, tv glitches, all nicely composed then blending Robert De Niro in with rapid-fire micro-samples. Tasman follows this by remixing vintage guitar concert footage with white stripes drums, Ice cube, Public Enemy video samples..

eclectic method ( london )
Bill themselves as DVJs… “mixing music video and film snips like a DJ mixes records…”. Funny thing is – add together music videos by Blur, Prince, Snoop Dog, Beastie Boys, Aphex Twin, Metallica & Britney Spears etc etc all beat-matched and mashed together in a glossy high value production style, and you end up with a glossy, banal jukebox. Some cool moments, but they should be able to use their talents for far more interesting things than this.

madame chao ( new york )
“Everything is illegal’ – proclaims the intro by madame chao to a video described as ‘Violent slapstick’ best watched with a sword in one hand a drink in the other…’. The title sequence is quickly followed by a fast flickering density of hyper-speed collages, kaleidoscope warping, asian tv edits, and a text announcement that ‘copyright infringement is your patriotic duty’. Some genuinely inventive parts, bit relentless for myself though.

atak ( paris )
The label releasing the DVD leave a quarter of it for themselves, being a ‘hybrid mix of Vjs, movie makers and musicians’. Thusly, we get fed an initially sophisticated blend of medical experiments, horror movie special effects, motion graphics… with film sound bleeding through layered on a bed of industrial beats. Soon becomes a barrage, and a couple of high-speed carnage clips by Rko continue that pace.

Atak hails out of Paris, an audiovisual label with a quite a few releases under their gallic belt by now. ‘Meat’ features a series of clips by 3 artists on their roster, on a DVD boasting to be ‘DVJ ready’ – ready for looping and scratching by those with access to DVD turntables. The disc’s cover is a good clue to the content within, an eye-popping collage of photoshopped flesh in various states of life, augmented by various bolted on bits of electronic technology.

Cinemassaker start off with various close up screen textures, layers of surveillance cameras and jolts of colourised tv news, punctuated by beeps and glitches. It’s nicely done, with mostly restrained palettes, and quite hypnotically edited, up to and including the introduction of footage from John Carpenter’s legendary ‘They Live’ movie, where the main characters discover special sunglasses which enable them a capacity to decode all public advertisements ( put the glasses on and a billboard for a car now reads in stark black and white : ‘work, consume, die’ ). Overlaid barcodes and pixelated animations, along with burnt colours help their editing condense the film’s samples down to a bare repetitive essence, and they manage to lock into some kind of ambient audiovisual groove. Next track follows the same recipe, gradually introducing a film I didn’t know and paring it down over time, and the final track is a sequence of ever bloodying hi-speed martial arts chops.

Mutation continue the gore with a chicken killing scene that comes off as some weird voodoo circus scene the way they’ve colorised and framed it. Some wasted human dominates the next clip in eerie close up, and their final clip plays with highway panoramas and nicely overlaid motion graphics with sound on top of footage of overhead power lines sweeping by.

Lifesteak start off in a much more ambient vein, overlaid layers of light streaked plant close-ups, building up in slow intensity, the next clip musically editing and layering the squawks of birds flying from clifffaces. Factory machine close-ups are sequenced in the next clip, getting denser over time and it closes with butcher footage interlaced with motion graphics and some lab hand analysing a human brain.

Not for the squeamish then, but some worthwhile moments on the disc.

3000 words written quite a while ago for Julian Oliver’s ‘Packet Garden‘ exhibition @ Arnolfini(UK).

Appropriately, for an artist whose work has long been about exploring boundaries and intersections ( of media, artforms, of technologies ), Julian Oliver’s latest work is situated in that long celebrated interface between art and nature, between order and disorder, the garden. Across cultures, throughout time, the garden has been designed / created / explored / experienced as a place resonant with meaning, our relationship with the world probed through the use of symbolic themes and features. In Packet Garden, we are invited to map the world of our daily screens, to create our personal media landscapes. Creating order from our own disorder, we discover our own topologies, media patterns, our habits.

Structuring that disorder partially explains Packet Garden’s appeal, the allure of rendering a tangible world from the messy abundance of currently available media and communications technologies and protocols. Another way to make sense of the information ecology we wade through daily. Widespread adoption of the mediasphere as ecology metaphor in part informs Packet Garden’s sense of inevitablity, and one aspect of this metaphor is worth exploring in relation to the trajectory of Julian’s earlier works. In ecosystems the productive and most diverse areas are believed often to be found in boundary zones, where one ecosystem meets another ( eg where land meets the sea). Browsing Julian’s work prior to Packet Garden, it can be seen that his preferred terrain is that contained by overlapping boundaries, be they of art, software, games or performance.

Code = Poetry?
“By calling digital art “[new] media art,” public perception has focused the zeros and ones as formatted into particular visual, acoustic and tactile media, rather than structures of programming. Software art means a shift of the artist’s view from displays to the creation of systems and processes themselves; this is not covered by the concept of ‘media.’”
- Florian Cramer and Ulrike Gabriel (1)

Explore enough electronic arts email lists or online forums, wander through enough digital arts collective manifestoes, collect enough ‘new media’ calling cards – inevitably this means swimming in slogans that argue for software and programming to be considered an artform. For every digital artist who uses off the shelf software with limited palettes, to create wonderful works of media, there’s another artist who wishes to redefine the palette itself, who recognises the art in extending the range and limits of software, its nuances and interface design, the merits in creating overall systems capable of delivering uniquely customised possibilities. Julian Oliver falls into this latter category, a group of artists whose work is too often critiqued on the merits of the media it outputs, as noted by software art theorist Florian Cramer:
“The software which controls the audio and the visuals is frequently neglected, working as a black box behind the scenes. “Interactive” room installations, for example, get perceived as a interactions of a viewer, an exhibition space and an image projection, not as systems running on code.”(2)

Understanding that the analysis of a user’s network traffic is what makes Packet Garden compelling, is not to deny that it’s stylised rendering of that network traffic is visually beautiful. The project’s merits however are in it’s underlying principles, reinforced by the appropriately chosen visual metaphor for displaying our net travels. As a project which scrutinises our relationship with data, the distribution licensing of Packet Garden is worth looking at more closely. At an explanatory homepage, Julian takes care to point out that Packet Garden is not ‘freeware’, but is distributed as ‘free software’ under a legally binding license which allows users to modify and redistribute PG as long as the license terms are followed. As an artist who likes to get under the bonnet Julian’s work often builds on the shoulders of coders before him. His long connections with the free software movement make visible both the ways his “>projects are indebted to modular components provided for use by others, as well as the ways in which Julian provides access to his own developed code for others to use.

Audiovisual Remapping & Synchrony
“…if we simply mimic the existing conventions of older cultural forms such as the printed word and cinema, we will not take advantage of all the new capacities offered by a computer: its flexibility in displaying and manipulating data, interactive control by the user, and the ability to run simulations, etc.’
Lev Manovich, Cinema As a Cultural Interface (3)

As well as sharing large threads of connectivity to the free software movement, the panorama of Julian’s work is inescapibly intertwined with the computer game. As an artist with programming skills, Julian consistently exploits the rich availability of game construction software to create opportunities for artistic exploration, interactive installations and performance. Game engines otherwise used for creating virtual architecture where players seek to shoot each other, are modified, customised and repurposed to develop innovative ways of generating sonic and visual material.

Amongst Julian’s earliest repurposing of game software was a series of ‘Quake hacks’, including ‘q3aPaint’ – a series of paintings and an automatic painting system made with QuakeIII Arena, and q3apd ( made with Steven Pickles) – a free software project that turned QuakeIII into a music-making system. Julian’s sonic experiments continued with the free 3D software package Blender, exploring ‘positional audio mixing’ and using ‘collision events’ to trigger and control sound generating processes in music making software ( Pure Data, which in turn used the OSC protocol to send information between the software applications ). Another sonic interactive study was Tapper, which explored positional audio and 3D mixing for a hypothetical installation, six machines manipulated to change the bounce cycle of a puck that emits sound on collision with the ground.

Aside from exhibited installations, these experiments are also used in a performance environment by Julian ( under the moniker ‘delire’ ) to harness the real-time capabilities and responsiveness of game engines for generating music. In practical terms, this means an inner-city bar filled with electronic music fans, a make-shift table covered in computing debris, a tangle of cables, an occasional crash and reboot screen, and then the launch of customised software. Unlike other acts simulating audiovisual synchonicity, Julian’s projected imagery and amplified sounds exert a real crackling synergy, movement and events in an abstract 3D space immediately and clearly defining the sounds, their sequence, their composition.

Computer games, as noted by Lev Manovich(4), are an area of computer culture that has been dynamic in its use and extension of cinematic language. One example of this is the incorporation of virtual camera controls and privileging the user with dynamic points of view and the capacity to enjoy several perspectives at once or switch between these at will. Julian has long held a ‘fascination with multiple viewports’, for both the ‘visual compositional possibilities and for the divided object/subjecthood’, and explores these to great effect within ‘Trapped Rocket’(2006), which built a ‘prison’ out of six virtual cameras, containing an aggressive rocket trying to get out. Together all six cameras form an inward facing cube, jailing the rocket as it toils trying new trajectories indefinitely. 2ndPS continues the fascination with perspective, attempting to move beyond the computer games traditional first and 3rd person shooters by building a ’second person shooter’. In 2ndPS, ‘you control yourself through the eyes of the bot, but you do not control the bot; your eyes have effectively been switched. naturally this makes action difficult when you aren’t within the bot’s field of view. so, both you and the bot (or other player) will need to work together, to combat each other.’

Experiments which explore Julian’s explorations in sound and vision can be found at Selectparks.net, ‘an online archive of divergent and artistic game-development practices’ founded by Julian in 1998 and now established as a key destination for game-art related news and research. The site includes a dedicated ’sonichima’ category (sounds produced with computer games) and experiments which combine audio and vision – such as Max Miptex (2001 with Chad Chatterton), an experimental ‘glitch’ machinima film, and the very well received game based audio/visual performance engine ‘Fijuu2′ (2006 with Steven Pickles).

Playing In The Garden
Designed to enable musicmaking using cheap Playstation 2 style gamepads, Fijuu2 is music improvisation software with a difference – it simultaneously generates abstract 3D graphics, and these visual representations can be manipulated on screen, an innovation that allows the exploration, anticipation and generation of music through visual means. Fijuu was performed at the Sonar festival in 2004, received an Honourable Mention at Transmediale 2005, then CyberSonica06 commissioned the development of Fijuu2, and the continuation of its attempts to transcend the limits of electronic music performance interfaces.

Fijuu2 foregrounds the poetics of navigation, allowing 3D space and shapes to be played with in an instrument like manner. The tight real-time responsiveness of game engine software brings a real immediacy to the process, and the setting offers unique ways to respond to the unfolding music and visual display, uncovering accidental pleasures along the way, the user able to harness the system’s inherent quirks and glitches for musical benefit. By getting under the bonnet, new performance possibilities are created, and the scope of computer game as interface has been expanded.

Aside from abstract and performative explorations, computer games are regularly utilised by many artists seeking to create immersive worlds pregnant with provocative meanings, ripe for profound discovery and expression. Selectparks.net regularly profiles (5) such game-art, including an array of politically inspired games tackling issues from the war on terrorism (September 12th ) to the fast food industry ( McDonalds the videogame ), the history of Latin America ( Tropical America ) and apocalyptic religious cults ( Waco Resurrection – C-level ). If any doubt remains about computer games as a legitimate, powerful form of cultural expression, able to uniquely engage contemporary audiences, even the briefest of interaction with the above games should settle that.

Escape from Woomera was built by Julian Oliver with Katherine Neil & Kate Wild in 2002-3 as a response to the inhumane treatment of refugees in Australia. Set in remote desert, the harsh conditions of the Woomera detention centre are far from the public spotlight, something the makers of Escape from Woomera sought to remedy. Using extensive photographs of the compound and a modified version of the Half-Life game engine, the detention centre conditions were transformed into a 3D game – the user taking on the persona of a detainee in subhuman conditions, having escape as the ultimate goal. The refugees at Woomera have had to endure imprisonment for years at a time without knowing their ultimate fate, and raising awareness of this situation and their appalling conditions was a goal of the makers. This was achieved on a number of levels – through the engagement of gameplayers around the issue, through International publicity generated, and through even further publicity received when the Minister for Immigration Phillip Ruddock publicly condemned the game ( which had received some Government arts funding ). In a similar fashion, the Guantanamo Bay cell of Australian prisoner David Hicks ( who has been waiting many years for a trial as an alleged terrorist) has been recently recreated as a 360 panorama for users to navigate, similarly providing a fresh and intimate perspective on a political issue.

Aside from raising awareness of issues, computer games with an overtly political message have also helped contribute to an improving perception of the computer game platform. By leveraging sophisticated immersive and interactive to provoke players into considering particular issues, these games introduce gamers and non-gamers alike into further accepting on some level the merits of the computer game as an artform in its own right. This new batch of believers also includes media theorists, McKenzie Wark in his most recent book ‘Gamer Theory‘, stating that ‘computer games constitute the dominant cultural form of our time’.

Packet Gardening
Stepping back in history, playful information representation has long been alive in the garden. his book ‘Gardens of the Gods: Myth, Magic and Meaning‘, Christopher McIntosh cheerfully delineates the ways in which the garden has been used across many cultures to convey meaning – landscapes designed and manicured to reflect various belief systems and mythologies. And a rich history it is, from which today’s landscape architects, town planners, ecologists and horticulturalists draw on heavily when designing or seeking to conserve parks, gardens or landscapes.

McIntosh identifies three basic ingredients which give a common structure to the language of gardening – the form of the garden as a whole, the objects that are created or placed in the garden or existing landscape features to which specific meanings are attached and the plants in the garden and the meanings they are given. From this platform, the symbolic language of gardens is explored widely, from the renaissance gardens in Europe, that sought to search for, or recreate Eden (horticulture as reflecting the mingling of new scientific theories with older ideas and beliefs), to the Chinese & Japanese gardens that sought to balance the forces of nature ( with the influences of feng shui and taoism, balancing of yin and yang), to the Christian motifs in European gardens (renaissance magical and memory systems as a possible basis for the iconography and design of certain gardens), to the dense mythological symbolism of baroque and rococo gardens ( theatres of transformation ), the symbolism and allegory of gardens of the 18th century (reflecting ideas of 18th century enlightenment) and the foretaste of paradise suggested by Islamic gardens ( recurring features such as four water channels representing the rivers of Eden). Which brings us to our current tangle of light and wires.

A wild and woolly network of computer networks, the internet’s world-wide operations are made possible by the use of a common set of communications protocols. Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocols ( TCP/IP) enable globally understood interaction between machines, and each machine must have an Internet Protocol number or address for it to communicate with others. An IP address is a unique number consisting of 4 parts separated by dots, e.g. 163.117.235.3 ( which is also the type of address ultimately found when looking at a web address such as http://www.google.com ). In addition to these protocols, another layer of protocols enable software applications to send messages between these addresses.

Packet Garden generates a unique, explorable 3 dimensional world based on your internet use, and operates by monitoring the above protocols and noting which servers you have visited, quantities of traffic, geographic locations and which protocols were used. As Julian points out:
“Uploads make hills and downloads valleys, their location determined by numbers taken from internet address itself. The size of each hill or valley is based on how much data is sent or received. Plants are also grown for each protocol detected by the software; if you visit a website, an ‘HTTP plant’ is grown.”

Visualisation of such traffic is inherently interesting to the user, illustrating patterns and habits and often drawing attention to surprises – heavier than expected usage in some area, or by some application. Daily files or worlds can be stored and compared later to observe changing habits over time. In revealing the users internet usage in this unique way, an understanding of the underlying structure of the internet is necessarily nurtured – for example, wondering why some ‘plant’ is so prominent, might lead to discovering that some supposedly bandwidth benign application is using much more traffic than it should.

Space is the Place
“the space of flows… links up distant locales around shared functions and meanings on the basis of electronic circuits and fast transportation corridors, while isolating and subduing the logic of experience embodied in the space of places.”
- Manuell Castells (Informationalism and the Network Society)(7)

Eminent sociologists ( Hi, Manuel ) are great for mapping the contours of a networked society across its various dimensions ( social, economic, political ), and with fine-toothed detail ( quantitative analysis of changes in labour market demographics across decades??? anyone? *). In his comprehensive three-volume series, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Manuel Castells carefully outlines the impact of advanced communications and information technologies, and the ways in which they have facilitated globalisation and transformed identity and society. He argues that ‘information technologies foster a networking logic, because it allows one to deal with complexity and unpredictability, which in itself is increased by these technologies’ (8) and introduces the ’space of flows’ as a key way of understanding the importance of networks. The second volume, The Power of Identity is dedicated to the core tension behind Packet Garden, the juxtaposition between our lives in the space of places, and our jostling for position in the ethereal geography-less networks, the space of flows.

It is often the cultural creatives who can best illustrate these tensions and nuances of our times, providing unique vantage points from which to gauge information technology’s continued transformations of our personal and collective identities across the globe. As Edward Tufte (9) might argue, well visualised information can make a strong contribution to helping distill the complexities of our aged. Lateral attempts to convey our times abound online : Richard Hodge’s rollercoaster version of the graph of US home prices adjusted for inflation (10), Carlo Zanni’s Ebay landscape which generates mountains from ebay stock market charts (11), and many mappings of global blog activity eg the Twingly screensaver which visualises global blog activity in real-time (12). See also Discover Magazines ‘Charting the network of jocks, gadget hounds, political junkies, and porn aficionados’ (13 ).

Beyond simply good graphic design and well chosen visual metaphors however, strong conceptual software design can engage the reader / viewer’s participation on deeper levels. An excellent recent example of using contemporary visual interfaces to promote understanding of complex issues, would be the inclusion within Google Maps, of densely overlayed information relating to the genocidal atrocities happening in Darfur, Sudan(14). Within an information software manifesto of sorts, ‘Information Software and the Graphical Interface’(15), Bret Victor puts forward that information software ultimately serves the human urge to learn:
“A person uses information software to construct and manipulate a model that is internal to the mind—a mental representation of information. Good information software encourages the user to ask and answer questions, make comparisons, and draw conclusions.”

5. References / links
(1) Florian Cramer and Ulrike Gabriel, ‘Software Art’, August 15, 2001.

(2) Florian Cramer:
“The software which controls the audio and the visuals is frequently neglected, working as a black box behind the scenes. “Interactive” room installations, for example, get perceived as a interactions of a viewer, an exhibition space and an image projection, not as systems running on code.”

(3) Lev Manovich, Cinema As a Cultural Interface

(4)Lev Manovich, Cinema As a Cultural Interface
Computer games, as noted by Lev Manovich, are an area of computer culture that has been dynamic in its use and extension of cinematic language. One example of this is the incorporation of virtual camera controls.

(5) September 12th – http://www.newsgaming.com. McDonalds the videogame – http://www.mcvideogame.com. Tropical America – http://www.tropicalamerica.com. Waco Resurrection – http://waco.c-level.cc.

(6) Christopher McIntosh, ‘Gardens of the Gods: Myth, Magic and Meaning’ ( I.B. Tauris 2005 ).

(7) (Informationalism and the Network Society. In: The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age. New York, Random House pp. 155-178, Himanen, Pekka 2001. )

(8) ‘information technologies foster a networking logic, because it allows one to deal with complexity and unpredictability, which in itself is increased by these technologies’ (1996: 60-65)

(9) Edward Tufte is a leading advocate of intelligent information visualisation and author of many books on the topic.

(10) Richard Hodge’s rollercoaster graph of US home prices adjusted for inflation: http://www.speculativebubble.com/videos/real-estate-roller-coaster.php

(11) Carlo Zanni’s Ebay landscape which generates mountains from ebay stock market charts http://www.vvork.com/?p=3720 Artist home page: http://www.zanni.org.

(12) Twingly screensaver which visualises global blog activity in real-time: http://twingly.se/ScreenSaver.aspx

(13) Discover Magazines ‘Charting the network of jocks, gadget hounds, political junkies, and porn aficionados’ ( http://discovermagazine.com/2007/may/map-welcome-to-the-blogosphere

(14) “Educating today’s generation about the atrocities of the past and present can be enhanced by technologies such as Google Earth. When it comes to responding to genocide, the world’s record is terrible. We hope this important initiative with Google will make it that much harder for the world to ignore those who need us the most.” — Sara J. Bloomfield, Director, USHMM. http://www.ushmm.org/googleearth/

(15) Bret Victor, ‘Information Software and the Graphical Interface’ http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/

Beaming in from Japan, International in flavour, a new DVD compilation of pixel-twisters from Lightrhythmvisuals(.com).

( Suryummy on left, actop on right )

What is a DVD by VJs?
Tricky to produce that’s for sure. Performing live a VJ tries to stay responsive to sound, the ambience of the setting, and the audience, and generally keeps it dynamic with constant refinements, manipulations, cutting and blending, effecting etc. In a live setting, a lower resolution of image is accepted and various errors and over adjustments are easily forgiven as part of the live performance. Once recorded to disc however, and played back in some home theatre system, the VJ is in competition with all of Hollywood and it’s production values, up against all the storytellers and their attention to narrative craft, compared with all the motion graphics artists and agencies, all the animators, cinematographers, and all the directors and their abilities to tie everything together. Still, up against all that, a compilation of real-time video wizards can still stand out with force of personality and quirkier experimental visual explorations.

Spinning The Disc
Promo compilation blurb said the DVD was “inspired by the book ‘Notations’ (compiled by John Cage)”, and aimed to “explore the new techniques in visualization of sound in the same way that Cage explored new forms of written music.” And so, on it spins and we are introduced to a variety of visual experiments over the course of 12 clips set to electronic music, followed by remixes of the same 12 clips – the artists included all shared their source files for other artists to visually reinterpret. Also cool – the DVD multi-angle function can be used to switch back and forth between the original and the remixed video. Overall the disc flows well, and while sometimes suffering flat spots, or descending into dated cybernetic visual cliches, has enough moments of visual surprise and polish to maintain interest. The remix section seemed to stand stronger, that extra layer of process lending them a more sophisticated feel.

Highlights
Global Giraffe by Suryummy : Nice cinematography, tasty compositing of complex moving 3d elements onto urban train lines. Some nice mask transitions too, nice elements, but combined lacking something to make the piece compelling.
Shabondama by Ben Sheppee : Smoothly realised 2D graphic overlays and transitions in train station. Well edited.
E of Bwe by Alien-Eye : Sumo wrestlers given the scratch video treatment.
Global Giraffe (remix) by actop : Fantastic recompositing into sequenced slices, enhancing the original clips colours and masks well.
lake (remix) by Alien Eye : Weird and wonderful visual distortions of the 3D objects, nice light overlays.
Gravith (remix) by VJ Anyone : Super, strong introduction… and transition into splintery slowly panning graphics, that unfortunately devolves later into cyber-fare, but maybe the clip only seemed to get much worse because he seems to have added or emphasised some embarrassing text overlays – let me paraphrase, and imagine this text on top of 3d wireframes of a glitching human – “because of global warming, if we don’t find help from extra terrestrials, soon our only hope is to download the human psyche onto micro machines… ” Uhuh.
Brologic (remix) by Jasper Vader : Some nicely added mask elements, but still missing something.
Hoofprints in the sand (remix) by Ben Sheppee : Recomposited and re-layered to create some nice light and dark interplay.

Full details of all tracks, artists and musicians (and ordering details ) etc included at Lightrhythmvisuals.com

Aye, my Istanbul hosts are getting close to releasing their quite rad and ground-breaking real-time 3D software, 3L (aka Thrill). It’s caffeine-o-clock as bugs are ironed out, features are refined and interfaces re-jigged. An OS -X beastie, it harnesses the 3D power within recent graphics cards to provide a modular, real-time 3D environment. Inside this, multiple objects can be positioned and moved around, as can the camera position, or the whole scene itself. Video textures can be composited as backgrounds or on objects, effects can be applied to textures or the final output. And it’s all happening in real-time, super-fast frame rates and with plenty of depth to explore.

Unique to the program is a cleverly coded and killer capacity to record your real-time experiments at full DV resolution – eg 720 x576 pixels for DV-PAL. Play, manipulate, refine, record. Like most contemporary VJ software it also comes with a full range of adjustible sliders, each controllable by mouse input, audio analysis or a large range of oscillators and maths functions. It’s the well thought through detail with a lot of these though, that makes the software quite powerful. And sequencer modules. And a module for controlling those VMS ( video mirror systems that allow the projected image to move around the room ). And lots, lots more, ( wonderful capacities to interpolate between various complex sets of parameters, wet and dry FX levels for R,G and B etc etc etc ), but that’ll come in a later review – this is just a note to say there’s something on the way. 3D graphics fiends who give good constructive feedback are highly encouraged to bug AE into putting them on their 3L Beta-testing list, muchos recommendo.

If the space between musical notes is just as important to consider as the notes themselves, how do video artists take this onboard? Cuts of black or blank video is one approach, masked shapes that leave portions of screens ‘blank’ are another, and use of transparent screens is another – when video plays it can be seen on this screen, when it isnt played, the space behind screen is still visible. Have been exploring this with Artificial Eye’s Video Mirror Units, images projected onto motorised mirrors that allow image to be sent anywhere in room ( or outdoors ). Hanging the thin ‘tulle’ fabric across a space in many places, leaves the space free and allows images to travel around and ‘collect’ nicely at various locations… seemingly hanging in space on the thin material. ( see flickr photos ).

In a similar vein, a recent celebrated fashion show used similar fabric to give a kind of holographic overlay on the catwalkers. Gorillaz did this to great effect at the MTV awards a few years ago, enabling a live performance by seemingly 3D cartoon characters in real-space. Musion from the Uk were behind that which apparently involves hi res LED screens set into the floor, which are then reflected in a very thin transparent material above it called ‘eyeliner foil’ which captures light very well.

See also : Peppers Ghost – “an illusionary technique used in theatre and in some magic tricks. Using a plate glass and special lighting techniques, it can make objects seem to appear or disappear, or make one object seem to “morph” into another.” ( good explanatory images too via wikipedia)

More Things You Can’t See
- Video underwater. ( Without decent instructions for building your own underwater cam corder holder. )
- Public Outdoor Advertising in Sao Paulo. Imagine – a whole city that bans visual advertising outdoors! Delicious photo collection of now-skeletal billboards.
- Official use of this empty building in the Melbourne CBD. The Unofficial Use though, is pixel-delicious. ‘Empty Show’ video featuring huge amount of visual work by melbourne street artists inside a great space.
- Fees to download the VJ Loops, or 30 page VJ / ‘Painting with Light’ manual uploaded by Perth’s dynamic pixel duo : http://VJzoo.com

Visual Software Bits
http://ustream.tv – Noticed people using this for the iphone launch… am sure there’s better uses for it to come – “a platform that provides live interactive video for everyone. Anyone with a camera and an Internet connection can use Ustream to broadcast to a global audience.”
- Nice photoshop color palette matching tip – use the tool to combine the palettes of stylish paintings with the palettes of photos taken, to give colours a boost.
- Final Cut studio 2 comes bundled with an application dedicated to colour correcting and enhancement, stylising for video. ( tutorial )

VidVox Noise
Amongst the relentless pixel-chatter at the vidvox.net forums, can be found links to the VDMX 5 beta, which is smokin along nicely, the VDMX museum and a guide to integrating Quartz Composer patches into VDMX. Quartz Composer comes bundled with all Tiger OS X operating systems, but has to be installed from the developers pack to allow making your own visual toys. However, even within installation, the quartz files produced will run on any OSX Tiger system within quicktime, or application using quicktime. Harnessing this, the vidvox QC wiki has over 30 example FX and patches free for use. QC patches can be used as clips, FX or a Font Synth in VDMX 5 ( meaning text triggered in VDMX will be sent through the QC patch, then back to VDMX for outputting ). Sample QC effect ? Implementation of the classic ‘Stargate’ slit-scan effect. ( Now with vertical and horizontal modes, Flip, Freeze, manual Scan, Rate and Angle controls. )

Melbourne’s ACMI hosts a 20 year Pixar retrospective from June 28 – October 14 2007, which’ll feature paintings, sculptures, digital installations and a zoetrope that creates the illusion of motion using nearly 180 modelled characters. Naturally there’s a whole raft of screenings and opening weekend includes public talks with 4 Pixar artists, including Dan Mason who took time out to answer these questions…

What attracted you to the special effects animation of Ray Harryhausen?
I just loved to see the unbelievable. It amazed me to see The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad or Jason and The Argonauts on Saturday afternoon television. At first I wasn’t trying to figure out how they were made. That came later. I just loved the interactions between the animation and the “real” world.

You began shooting stop-motion animated films with a Super 8 camera. If you were starting again today what DIY animation techniques and technologies do you think you’d be excited by?
Computers and digital video have changed everything. We can all be filmmakers now. I would’ve loved to have been able to shoot something, edit it, add sound and show it immediately. I probably would have made many more films.

How’ve your roles and ideas changed in the time between Cars, The Incredibles & Ratatouille?
The challenges are always changing. In The Incredibles we all had to learn how to animate humans to look really good. I learned a great deal on that film because we had to loosen up the faces and get the weight right. Cars had a different challenge where we had to keep true to the material of an auto but still bring out the character. We used the wheels and tires along different suspensions to loosen things up. Each character drove in a different way. Then it was back to the organic movements of rodents and humans in Ratatouille. Each film and each character creates a new challenge.

What do you think of the ‘uncanny valley’ (where animated characters that look too close to real can seem odd), and in what ways would you like to see Pixar deviate along the spectrum from ‘abstract to realistic?
Yes, the closer to realistic the creepier it gets. I like to see human characters as more of a caricature. We can have a lot of fun with great stylized character designs. The medium of animation allows us to explore and have fun with caricatures, and we always strive to be believable, but never realistic.

What’s lost in the transition to computerised animation, and what strategies do Pixar employ to try and remedy this?
An Animator at Pixar designs every frame the same way a 2-d or stop motion animator would do. The computer wants all movement to be equal and linear. We spend a lot of time working against what the computer wants to give us.

What workflow differences are there between a feature film and an animated feature film?
A live action feature is usually shot by getting coverage of a scene with different camera angles and multiple takes. It is then put together in editorial where the director picks which camera angle and which take he would like to use. In animation all of the camera angles are worked out before it is animated. The choices come in the storyboard phase and then refined in Layout but once it is animated there is not too much one can change. There is a lot of planning up front in animation.

Can you foresee a Pixar animated film hybrid, where Pixar techniques and workflow are applied to combine shot footage, FX and animation?
If you mean live action with FX and animation …Sure we could use all of those elements to tell a story someday. I think Peter Jackson did a great job combining all the elements for the Lord of the Rings.

What does Steve Job’s experience with Apple software architecture bring to the animation table for Pixar?
Apple and Pixar are two different companies that happen to have had Steve as CEO. He has been a great leader at Pixar.

What kinds of innovative behind the scenes technologies exist exclusively at Pixar?
New technologies are being developed constantly at Pixar. If I told you more I would have to kill you….(joking)

As motion capture technologies improve do you see further possibilities for real-time, or live animation in various contexts?
We don’t use any motion capture at Pixar. But I’m sure in the industry there will be lots of opportunities where mo-cap will be used. I liked the way Peter Jackson used it in the Lord of the Rings Trilogy.

Based on the repetitive nature of animation, you must have many dreams in which you were animating. Have any dreams stayed with you as potential future animations?
I’ve had dreams where see the shot I am working on. It seems that I find solutions to problems and come up with new ideas while I sleep.

Contemporary directors that push your animation buttons?
I love the films of Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli. The animation and the nature they explore are so appealing. They also have great female characters. I love Nick Park and everyone at Aardman. Their sense of storytelling and comedic timing is so much fun. Mike Johnson did a great job with Corpse Bride – stunning. I am looking forward to seeing Henry Selick’s new film. And of course all of the directors at Pixar – I have been very lucky to have worked with brilliant directors here.

Mythic religions and deepest science use quite different language to say the same thing : the world we leave our little footsteps in, is a shimmer of light and vibration. Zooming in and out on that vibration, Semiconductor present a compilation DVD of their animations to date: “Worlds in Flux”.

Getting To Here And Now
Semi-Conductor = Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt and their PR blurb claims ‘obsessive interests in landscape, architecture, geology, geography, chaos / systems theory and artificial intelligence’. In practical terms (over the last 5-6 years) this has encompassed:
- exploring a large array of digital and analogue animation techniques and processes, combining where possible.
- many residencies, installations, exhibitions and live cinema performances
- ‘Hi-Fi Rise’ – an art DVD compilation in 2001 with an innovative interface, and featuring the work of many artists including People Like Us and Amon Tobin.
- 3 music videos, 4 live cinema pieces and 6 short films.

Spinning The Disc
‘Brilliant Noise’ is perhaps the highlight of the “Worlds in Flux’ DVD, featuring gorgeous black and white time lapsed animations made from close up photographs of the sun’s flicker and dance. That these photographs were sourced from a solar observatory and left unmanipulated was quite a surprise to read, a conscious decision to let the sun’s crackling glory stand on its own. 11 possible soundtracks can be chosen to accompany this dazzling monochromatic display, from artists including Cristian Vogel, Max Richter and Antenna Farm, each adding it’s own sense of atmosphere.

200 nano-webbers is another delicious animation, this one created as a visualisation for Japanese act ‘Double Adaptor’ using custom-made scripting to generate a lovely hybrid of seemingly drawn squiggles and complex structural behaviours and movements. The tangle of elements oscillate with the music and shift towards density interconnection as the song washes along. Very re-watch worthy.

Hooking up with the British Geological Survey nabbed a range of seismic data for Semi-conductor, which they exploited to great effect within ‘All the time in the world’. Converting the data into sound, they used this to jolt portions of a coastline into life, animating segments within a scene and slowly shifting from one location to another, drawing attention to the crust of the earth along the way. Particularly captivating were the fluttering sparks of light that hovered above one section of coastline, illuminating nooks and crannies as they travelled in and out of coastal rock formations.

As well as with my favourite pieces above, the clips on the rest of the disc string together nicely as a range of experiments, each showing a different side of Semi-Conductors fascination with the micro and the macro, the buzzing life within structures that we take for granted most of the time. Notable mentions go to ‘The Sound of Microclimates’ which nicely superimposes animations on top of urban surrounds, ‘Inaudible Cities’ which reaches a stroboscopic, shuddering climax, Green grass of tunnel’ for mum, and ‘Earthquake films’, an earlier piece which reanimates a series of earthquake photos with a variety of masks, 3D experiments and collage play.

On another note, Fatcat records who are releasing this DVD, have of course made it region-free. What makes any larger label believe someone should have to buy another copy of a disc to watch it in another country is beyond me.

Everyone’s favourite French audiovisual super-duo, ‘Gangpol Und Mit‘ are back with a fresh new picture vinyl LP : “The Hopelessly Sad Story of the Hideous End of the World”, and a DVD on the way!

Sylvain & Guillaume, who sculpt the delicate cartoon cacophony of sounds and video, are currently busy gigging live around Europe to promote their LP ( a narrative musical project about the end of the world ). Along the way they’ve started a collaborative ‘electro-crooner original music & visuals project that features Polish and French artists using entirely material captured from the city of Budapest. Imagining some kind of melancholic Serge Gainsbourg with a pair of loop pedals programming his own cartoon tv channel gets close to the G.&M vibe (check their stunning videos and free music) . In between shooting super 8 and recording at haunted karaoke bars, they* found time to email the below >>

*Sez Sylvain :
“I made the answers so if you may mention Sylvain is talking, maybe it’s better, so that Guillaume is not involved in my stupidity ”

What happens at a typical G.U.M gig?
We mostly wear glasses and special suits, jump everywhere, make headbanging and duck-like vocal scratches, play wiht puppets, smal keyboards or circuit-bent toys, trigger samples and use our laptops in order to produce for YOU a sonic and visual entertainment.

Episode 3 of a Gangpol Und Mit TV Show would feature what?
Death of Gangpol & Mit in lot of sadistic ways, full of sexually explicit content.

How do you share or split up your musical roles for performing and composing?
Gangpol always makes every music and Guillaumit every visual. We daily share of course lots of ideas, wishes or views when composing. Pragmatically, one of us starts from an idea, either a 30seconds melody or a short storyboard, then we share a lot until we are satisfied.

Tell us about your upcoming DVD…
We just released a new picture vinyl LP on wwilko label, which offered us this beautiful opportunity thanks to their amazing job. It is a narrative musical about the end of the world. Then we will come the DVD, maybe with close topic, including some video clips and cartoon material, but it will probably be postponed until autumn days. Meanwhile we had an inquiry from japanese label Out one disc for a cd released, and are currently working on it.

How does video relate to your musical processes?
We realize everday how music and visuals are run in our project by exactly the same concepts: composition, rhythm, samples,… We sometimes have tight a relationships between sonic and visual, sometimes it is more allusive, distant,… Both ways have their strength and limits.

Who does live audio & video well?
In most cases, VJ’s don’t have an exclusive relationship with a musician, because they’re supposed to be able to play for any kind of event. Maybe that’s why we enjoy so many graphical or VJ’s works, old weird TV programs, cartoons or anime, and many brilliant musicians, but didn’t really find a specific audio and video live we may quote here.

Some musicians are very good for graphic design, like Dat Politics, but we never saw them live with the video. Le Dernier Cri makes very wild shows, but it is more live music on a screening of their amazing animation work. Doravideo seems to be a funny drum & video project, we hope to see him live… And hope to find more in 2007.

Electronic equipment. Audiovisual busking. How is it possible ?
We just make rehearsals like a regular band. Guillaumit is doing live montage with video sampler, and I play multitracks versions of the audio,playing keyboards, vocals with effects, triggering samples…

What do u like in electronic music gear? soft/hard/wetware?
Gangpol & Mit wasn’t really intended to be an “electronic” project, but it is on these days because nobody unfortunately built an acoustic laptop yet… I tried to work once with a full mouses orchestra. I asked them to play my scores, but they never really were able to play the beats as strong as I wished them to do it…

Medicated rollerskating dentists. How appropriate is your music for them?
I really don’t know. Maybe it’s better for medicated rollerskating ducks.

What cliches of recent times would you like to put a bullet through?
Cliché n°1: There’s no difference between underground and mainstream music.
Cliché n°2: Gangpol & Mit play 8bit music.

3 websites more people should be finding music from:
http://thebrain.lautre.net – our favorite french radio show, hours of top-quality streaming
http://www.tiliqua-records.com – no fucking free mp3s, no fucking download, here is a place to BUY music in the old way.
Their reissue series is amazing work if you do care this kind of things: perfect mastering, top quality packaging… Their rare records section is a kind heaven for people who don’t smoke, drink, take drugs, or have to put some fuel in the car, and so may start an addiction with records once in a while.

http://stephanomariano.free.fr/maison.php – top quality french artist

In what ways is your music a response to the disappearance of European wildlife?
We only try to daily escape from the real world as strong as possible. We’re maybe not wild people, but the world we try to reach is surely stranger than the low-cost hotel rooms we happen to sleep in.

When are you coming to Australia?
As soon as our space ship is gonna get repaired. Get ready.

Current / Future plans?
Make a cake, release records, make a 10 minutes long piece for our lives, feed the cats, go on tour in Poland, make a DVD, have a rest, and die.

Prone to procrastination? Call it research instead. Drop a comment to add to this list of worthwhile pixel haunts.

Web Illustrators

http://drawn.ca – The mother lode of drawn imagery, introducing 10 new sites / illustrators per day, which usually reveals something extraordinary no matter your visual tastes. The archives therefore oozing with all kindsa visual surprises.
www.comicslifestyle.com – international but very aus-friendly comics hub/blog/portal/community/propoganda disseminator/experiment/fun.
www.belfry.com/comics/index.php – Try *not* to find 3 web comics worth reading daily from this huge directory.
www.woostercollective.com – More ’street art’ actually, but relentless, global and at its best an enchanting collection of inventive, delightful art in the streets.
http://blogs.iloha.net/francis – The comic adventures of Francis Bear, via Coburg, Melbourne.
http://forepaw.org – Melbourne based monthly drawing collective. ( PDFs to see onsite )
http://pulphope.blogspot.com – Regular images and their dissection / contemplation from Paul Pope to you.
www.warrenellis.com – Aside from dystopian future observations, Warren keeps a regular splash of photos and illustrations, ranging from the sublime and evocative to the absurd and perverse.
http://diburtimentos.blogspot.com – Just love these weird-assed drawings.
http://tokyoblog.livejournal.com – Great comic journal kept by a visitor to Tokyo who took ‘requests’ via his site for adventures he would try and complete in Japan, then draw a short comic about.

Photoshop Chops
Usually down the daft end of the spectrum, but some great imagery is spawned from the web’s collection of photoshop contests :
photochopz.com, fark.com, worth1000.com, somethingawful.com, photoshopcontest.com, pixeladdiction.com, http://mechapixel.com and http://aliencelebrities.com/contests.html should be enough research for now.

B3tards from www.b3ta.com are regularly creating all sorta animated oddities, usually spammed out in their own e-newsletter which has gained quite a notoriety. One such B3tard is mutated monty / cyriak who has made the best skateboarding godzilla animation you are likely to see this year. Still on the photo tip, try flickr.com’s “interestingness” photos or subscribing to various ‘tags’ to get an ongoing feed of photos of your desire.

Video / Animation
Likewise there’s a gazillion various video sharing sites available now to throw keywords into and wander around. And a gazillion torrent sites with categories upon categories of downloads to explore ( eg talking hot dogs in LSD case study. Video blogs are a nice filter to keep on top of all this though:

http://videos.antville.org – Still the best collection of regularly updated music video links.
http://typolis.net/shortsville – Companion site for short films.
http://www.splitscreen.us – ‘Dedicated to the art of the split screen and multi-layered visuals’.
http://tvinjapan.com/blog – On TV. In Japan. Which inevitably means many brain hertz.(interview here)
http://ticklebooth.com – Well selected, contextualised short films, music videos.

The World Is An Amazing Place
http://monkeysforhelping.blogspot.com – Fun.ny stuff. Look for Turkish Star Wars, Turkish Spiderman, Turkish Superman, and the animated Planet of the Apes no more. Lotsa links, but as the author might write themselves, also comes with “Boss writing. Ice cold.”
www.we-make-money-not-art.com – More oddball electronic art projects, ideas and unexplainables than any one brain should be capable of taking in.
http://googlesightseeing.com – Skin of the planet, stretched to fit your browser. (Beware of low-flying google-mapping-aeroplanes. )
www.kirchersociety.org/blog – Provocative vintage oddities. Only place I’ve ever come across a dog powered tricycle.
www.notcot.org – Bit on the object/gadget fetish side, but enough weirdness to balance out the diet.
www.ektopia.co.uk/ektopia – As above, but with more of a graf flavour.
www.wurzeltod.ch – Adorable collections of the whimsical, esoteric and enchanting. Double plus good.

Science will tell you there is no centre of the universe, that the universe is expanding in all directions from every point. And so at the time of writing, Dec 14, 2006, this makes the left earlobe of the organist / accordionist / guitarist / vocalist of Melbourne’s ‘Flying Scribble‘, just as important, and expansive as any other square centimetred patch of multi-dimensional vibrating space. Below, some of what tickles that ear.

Space Lady Vs The Sonic Manipulator
‘Kooky space-a-delic busker of the year award’ could only ever be tied between these two buskers, were they both on the same continent or in the same competition. The Sonic Manipulator = Claude Woodward, ‘Urban Spaceman and Planetary Citizen’, subject of a recent documentary “Ground Control to Major Tron”, and self described as ‘Fred Astaire meets Neil Armstrong’. What this translates to on the street (often in Melbourne’s CBD ) is a tinfoil covered astronaut making ethereal wailing noises with a wild range of custom-made musical inventions, designed to allow body motion and gestures to control aspects of his songs, eg THE CLAUDE-A-TRON: controls a synthesiser’s pitch by a 190mm rod moving in an arc, and the synthesiser’s volume by the swivelling of the rod, or THE SHOE: a 7 AXIS continuous controller pedal used for modifying synthesiser timbre in real time, which allows emulation of various trumpet mutes or cross fading between different vocal samples. Sample tracks – such as ‘Robot Wars’ and ‘The Martians Are Coming’ are available to download at : sonicmanipulator.com.

San Francisco’s ‘Space Lady’ (free tracks at myspace.com/suzysoundz )is another ’street level superstar’ who plumbs the depths of outerspace to bring haunting, humorous and ethereal sounds to those passing by. Donning a steel helmet with angel wings, The Space Lady’ll carve out her very personal renditions of songs such as ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’, or ‘Major Tom’ with a range of FX pedals, an accordian, vintage casio keyboards and an array of lights.

“My whole approach of playing on the street was to make my music available to as many people as possible for free. Now the Internet has the potential to dwarf the persistent and diligent efforts I made over 20 years … and keeps my music alive without the wear and tear on my poor aging body! “

Feline Accordionists
Kittens can trigger the cute overload, but none more so than the musical pawed beasties who channel their inner meow through instruments and choreographed sound. Flying Scribble are known to have at least one grumpy sonic genius who can make the other alleycats weep with the tender sounds of his late night accordion melancholy.

Jim Avignon
“I’d rather sell a thousand images for one dollar, than one image for a thousand dollars.”
http://jimavignon.com/

Berliner Jim is a whimsical, relentlessly creative artist, who is equally at home painting giant canvasses everyday at a festival and jumping through them at night, building snowsculptures, making giant murals, creating installations for parties or …Flipping through his ‘Attack Delay’ book, you’ll find the Mona Lisa painting with the background crudely photoshopped over her head, a keyboard covered in honey, extra fingers photoshopped onto Jim’s hands to allow his fists to pumped at the camera with the letters ‘a’ ‘t’ ‘t’ ‘a’ ‘c’ ‘k’ & ‘d’, ‘e’, ‘l’, ‘a’, ‘y’, fake tattoos painted onto pornstars, biscuit sculptures, animal languages vs machine talk and on it goes, near every page a winner. Tagline for the book – “Have you ever had the best time in your life?”. But wait there’s more: playing as Neoangin ( http://neoangin.badtaste.ru & myspace.com/neoangin ) Jim keeps pumping out the tunes, super-crafted pop tunes with funny insightful lyrics, like some lo-fi electronics alt-cabaret-sitcom soundtracker from the 80s with beats from now.

Michel Gondry
“It has always been my goal to make people feel alright when they watch my work.”
Endlessly inventive as a music-video maker, Michel made a wonderful transition to feature films with ‘Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind’, and has a current follow up to this : the ‘Science of Sleep’. There’s a pretty cool 50 minute video interview with Michel, discussing sleep, dreams and ‘the science of sleep’, over at Seed magazine.

2007? ‘Be Kind Rewind’ - comedy film directed by Michel Gondry and starring Jack Black, Mos Def, Sigourney Weaver and others..
2008? ‘Master of Space and Time’ – Gondry’s adaption ( with Daniel Clowes*) of a 2005 novel by sci-fi author Rudy Rucker that centres on an inventor, Harry Gerber, who discovers a way to create his own tailor-made universe. Also to star Jack Black.

Flying Scribble
As well as being fantastic musicians, the Flying Scribble girls are of course also vivid animators and innovative theatre performers. And so Gondry gets a definite nod in as an inspiration. As for the Scribblers themselves, their music best speaks for them, also available in live doses along the East Coast of Oz over summer, Northern hemisphere tours to come. Say they :

“Neo-soul / Freestyle / Ghettotech – mischievous beats, broody organic keys, sampled textures all loving together with ethereal vocals, wak effects and all new atmospheres. We sit on a little boat together rocking on sound waves that come from the pits of somewhere deep down the waters – our music got bell soul and wood worms.”

Pingmag have a nice recent interview up with champion animator and illustrator, Run Wrake. ( found via accent feed ) Seems he was visiting Japan for the Hiroshima International Animation Festival – where his new short ‘Rabbit’ picked up a special jury prize. Plenty of screenshots and storyboard shots in the article too, worth a look. And especially exciting to hear he has his eyes on a feature film.

Run Wrake’s home page,
director showreel site,
& compilation DVD @ Gasbooks
Ye olde Skynoise Runwrake interview here
( and aye :: suffering some blog-formatting issues @ ze moment, hence sidebar down the bottom of page…. any words from wordpress wizzes welcome… )

Another round-up of all things pixelish : software, hardware, VJ toys & interweb distributions.

Video Peoples
Everyone’s favourite acid-rave art casualities Paper Rad have been getting jiggy with motion – with a recent Trash Talking DVD release ( ravetastic qt trailer ) , and via www.wyldfile.org a whole range of animated music videos for artists like Beck. Dirty-flash-a-licious, and found via Jaclyn Campanaro’s Image Journal, who has made a very cute tutorial for making Stop-Motion Video Shorts with Your Digital Camera.

The Psychasthenia Society presents satiric storytelling blended with remixed vintage movie stills, live video, and electronic music. Includes an interesting video trailer.

Also on the performance tip – Furthernoise.org hosted a month of Sunday afternoon live audio visual internet performances throughout June 06 in the online file mixing platform visitorsstudio.org. Click to see the 5 performances.

Melb pixelist Kirsten Bradley, one half of Cicada.tv, now has a blog to document her current phase of “obsessive research on timelapse and organic animation.”

Sydney’s Spanky has started demux – a new audiovisual DVD label and blog.

Japanimation? Try the Optical Sisters, 24 Invaders, the crazed lo-fi pixels of eyehz – www.eyehz.com ( follow the links to their blog updates for especially fun retro-future pixel action ) – or Super Deluxe.

Web Video
The video blogging universe continues to expand – see for example, the followup film by the makers of Shaun of the Dead, detailing with much humour the entire production process – www.comingsoon.net. But the video blog expansion hasn’t been without it’s hiccups – rocketboom.com lost of it’s announcers recently, and journalist videoblogger Josh Wolf has been jailed defending a journalist’s right to protect his sources. He refused to testify before a U.S. grand jury and also refused to hand over unpublished video footage he shot during a clash between San Francisco police and anti-G8 protesters in July 2005. He is now in prison.

Second Life, the appropriately named online 3D world, has had it’s fair share of in-game video screenings and lectures, conferences etc – but as it’s population growth continues, the audiovisual experiments flourish – eg Portuguese artist um.mu creating a venue with 3 virtual screens to practice in a simulated space, his actual upcoming audiovisual shows. “When I compose, I stream live straight into SL, audio and video on 3 screens. It’s great having people being able to walk through your studio while you are practicing.”

Software
Lightreading has a useful overview of the top 50 online video storage sites, which includes the likes of jumpcut and their capacity to edit videos online. A nice one-stop glimpse of the alternatives to the crap resolution and uneditable clips offered by youtube.

Likely to impact on these video storage sites is the release of the ‘drag n share’ AllPeers – a free firefox extension which ‘combines the strength of Firefox and the efficiency of BitTorrent to transform your favorite browser into a media sharing powerhouse’.

Wikipedia continues to be the best friend of those seeking up to date technical information – egList_of_VJ_Software, and their digital video and VJ entries are very useful also.

For those moving on from stand-alone VJ software, processing and jitter continue to shine. Exhibition of software made with processing. Processing VJ application. Quite awesome rubber screen effect – built with processing – which works within the webpage – click around for extremely fluid image warping.

Jitter glitch patch, VJ sync jitter patch, more jitter patches, VIP mac/PC app which requires max & jitter, and Anti-Keyframe – a jitter based application, which places an emphasis on improvisation – in part by triggering random clips, in part by ‘moving the physical interaction away from the computer and the eyes away from the screen to start focusing on the present’. The interaction can be simplified to fit a standard game-pad.

FLxER : interactive free flash software to mix audio, video and multimedia sources during live performances, with a web-community of more than 4000 people sharing their productions.

FreeJ – free linux VJ tool – tutorial now online - to try Freej without installing it, just use the dynebolic live CD.

On the editing and post-production front : 10 final cut pro tips via dv guru
& an introduction to expressions in After Effects – or how to explore relationships between elements.

Hardware
Video circuit bending : awesome collection of DIY hardware hacks for video, new virtual vinyl product from numark & now online : Radical Software – a collection of video art technology magazines from the 70s.

related posts : july video snippets , may video snippets, live audiovisual round-up (april)

Z-Z-Z-Zidane~! Legendary French soccer player, and after his headbutt, the top search term for the technorati blog search engine, filling 8 of the top 20 youtube videos, and inspiring the piece of code to the left ( via waxy). According to a newspaper with Italian translator glued to the replays, Italy’s Materazzi called Zidane “the son of a terrorist whore”, before adding, “So just f— off”. From the youtube videos uploaded ( some before the game had even finished~! ), we can read Materazzi’s lips, we also see the ‘nipple cripple‘ given by Materazzi, watch a music video of Materazzi’s greatest fouls, and re-live ze headbutt. ( ze headbutt animated? )

Another way of looking at all this though, is as another milestone in the emergence of a user-contributed global video network. Though many query whether or not video has a napster problem with copyright, it does seem as though there is now that little bit more expectation that video coverage of the freshest news will be easily found online. Youtube may have snared the limelight for now, but whether they or several competitors succeed seems irrelevant in the face of easy uploading, easy categorising, cross-referencing and peer to peer distribution. Bring it on.