Lying nearly horizontal, managed to catch some 180 degree immersive films recently, at the Melbourne Planetarium as part of MIFF.

Under The Dome
The Melbourne Planetarium (at the Scienceworks Museum in Spotswood) features a ‘16m domed ceiling, reclining seats, a stereo surround sound system and has recently been upgraded to incorporate Sky-Skan’s DigitalSky projection system’. In practice, this means craning your neck around everywhere to see what’s happening beyond your peripheral vision. MIFF featured 3 compilations of dome films, and I opted for the experimental collection – which could’ve been called screensaver collection and only a couple of films would’ve suffered by that description.

Domefest / Elumenati
Part of the compilation came from Domefest, an annual screening curated by Artslab, an interdisciplinary arts centre in the New Mexico desert. A big of googling reveals that festival to be connected with another group, Elumenati, virtuoso specialists in the field immersive projection design. Which also happens to be a group that Johnny De Kam ( founder of VDMX and vidvox.net ) has done a lot of work with. Small world dome thingy.

Anyways, best film of the evening? Celestial Mechanics by Scott Hessels (2005), which aimed to visualise the manmade aerial technologies between us and the heavens, starting from police and news helicopters, and working through a range of transmitters and satellites, beautifully evoking their processes as it unfolded. Less good? Cosmic Dance, self-described as ‘astrophysics meets Bollywood’, and a painful 48 minutes of a patronising female host, who when not speaking down to the audience, was being washed in cliched special effects and dancing with the universe. Or something.

DIY DOMING
“DomeXF is a content plug-in for Adobe After Effects, Windows version. For fulldome producers, it is a key tool for transforming flat-screen content to the dome. The DomeXF plug-in for Adobe After Effects is available from Sky-Skan for $395USD”.

DomeXF offers the three standard Full Dome video transformations: standard, panoramic and fisheye.
• Standard transformations give the artist the ability to represent true geometry on the dome allowing the composite layer to appear flat and undistorted.
• Panoramic transformations force the bottom of the composite layer to align with the horizon, even when resized.
• Fisheye transformations give the composite layer depth, akin to the traditional all-sky transformation.

And a vast array of potential filming and projection transformative possibilities await you at Paul Bourke’s site of maths and video surfaces.

Fulldome ANAT Masterclass Opportunity
Dome Lab 2010 wants you, applications due Friday 3 September 2010, masterclass to be held 31 October – 5 November 2010 :: Perth, Australia.

“… most fulldome content to date has been educational and comprised of computer-generated animation, data visualistion, or a combination of both. Now, however, there is a shifting focus, with producers turning their sights to the entertainment potential of live-action story-telling for large-formats such as fulldome. Dome Lab is a world-leading intensive workshop investigating this potential and the specific challenges involved in creating compelling live-action narrative content for large format and frameless screens.

Filmmakers and artists excited by the chance to leap beyond the frame and into the expansive creative potential of large-format, immersive screen experiences are invited to apply. Participants will work alongside a team of creative and technical luminaries including Academy-Award winner, Ben Shedd, 2010 Peter Rasmussen award-winner, Peter Morse and international fulldome pioneer, Hue Walker Bumgarner-Kirby.”

In an alternate universe you have been asked to do some live remixing of Tim Burton related films. However, in that universe, inter-universe messaging systems are commonplace, and your alternate self received the following, hopefully helpful note about possible films to sample.

Take Me Back To Wonderland
Congratulations on your assignment, you are going to have fun – there’s plenty of room to move here, from the whimsy of Pee Wee Herman’s Big Adventure through to much more macabre and grotesque cinema. And this little known fact should help: Bit Torrent works the same in all known universes.

Alice in Wonderland is a great place to start digging. Try the Ravi Shankar soundtrack soaked 1966 BBC production (one of the most psychologically engaging Alice films), with Sir John Gielgud and Peter Sellers. And there are twenty or so other versions, but Jan Svankmajer’s stop motion Alice packs more invention than most. His short film Ossuary, about visiting a cathedral of bones will cross-edit nicely too.

If you lived in a universe where Prince wasn’t a newly religious recluse who complained about the internet killing culture, you’d probably find the combination of his Batdance music video ( half joker face, half batface, 80’s music video aesthetics representing) and the unaired pilot episode of Batgirl irresistible. Especially say, when paired with matching shots of his purpleness on the rain era motorbike, and Batgirl swaying on her batbike in front of a green screen, while a presumably expensive blow-drier makes like wind with her hair.

Hit Tim Shiel / Faux Pas up ( iamfauxpas.com = alternaverse friendly) for some Major Beetle Juicy Lazer file transfers. Sadly, Tim is unavailable in other universes for live soundtracking and sonic manipulation of video clips, but if you’ve got the bandwidth, he’ll bring the Day-O / Beetlejuice dinner / remix party – with Harry Belafonte and the muppets, karaoke dreamers, ableton live splinter video cut-ups, and a Major Lazer infused Day-O for dessert.

Tim will also remind that Janelle Mondae’s ‘Wondaland’ is great accompaniment for Alice’s rabbithole comedown. He’ll also likely recommend a deluxe edit of Janelle Mondae’s The Archandroid album – “delete tracks 9, 10, 11, 18 and try again – another bloated over-ambitious r&b/futurefunk record saved by some judicious editing. 78 mins of blah becomes 47 mins of pure gold!”

In your universe, Ed Wood wears budgie smugglers and complains about boat people refugees while he directs films – and the Political Opposition leader of your country, Tony Abott, slinks about Parliament after hours in a blouse and skirt, with matching stockings and heels. Work with that.

In this universe, The Tim Burton exhibition runs until Oct 10 at ACMI, Melbourne.

Japanese audiovisual performance that takes in Super-Collider, NES emulators, circuit-bent Pikachus and custom iphone controlled sound synthesis programs and video sampling systems? Ah, that’d be Craftwife. They play “70-80’s style techno pop music in the special costume that may remind you (of) a German band (.. in a miniskirt).” Takeko Akamatsu took time out from touring Australia’s East Coast, to answer a few questions.

[ Above, Craftwife @ Horse Bazaar, Melbourne, Wed Jul 28, 2010. ]

How do you describe your show?
It’s an audio-visual performance and it looks like a techno pop music live. But I combine many elements in a show with many thoughts. So I’m very happy if audiences can see my performance in different, various way.

Kraftwerk liked machines playing notes, claiming it freed them up for composition… What have Craftwife been freed up to do?
Making music with computer is something special for me. I found many musicians are still following the traditional way, i.e imitating a physical phenomena with machine. I’m not interested in it, I’ve been trying to find the new way to play music with computer programming and technology. I really don’t like keep on doing a same thing, “Practice”. So that I’m happy I don’t need any sweaty practice to perform as Craftwife.

How does a circuit bent Pikachu fit into your show?
I have a project called “Craftwife + Kaseo + “. Kaseo (is the author of Pikarumin – bent Pikachu) plays powerful and loud noise music. The style of our music is very different, but we have common thoughts about the sound and music. And visually, you may find some Japanese “Kawaii” or “character” culture. Also I love the contrast of my “clean” programming, software and his messy, physical hardwares.

What has been your favourite / ( or would be your ideal?)  place to play a Craftwife gig?
Craftwife plays everywhere if audiences are waiting for us. I had played in different places such as a small cafe to a nice club or fashion museum  even at an academic conference. I cannot choose which was the best, we’re going to have a show in planetarium of my small town in this September and I’m really looking forward it. Hopefully, it must be fantastic if we can play with my favourite German band someday.

What do you enjoy about super collider?
It’s difficulty. Memo: sometimes people are used….. to be used by technologies. bababa .. too sleepy…..

[ Above, Craftwife + Super Collider + custom software + iphone + bonus Kristin... ]

[ Side-note: First discovered Craftwife via a blog post by David Lublin, one of the VDMX head-coders. Popped off an email to see if Takeko would like to do an interview. As well as agreeing to one, Takeko mentioned she was touring Australia soon. Which later turned out to include Melbourne. On my birthday. Thereby continuing the weird sensation that VDMX pulses somewhere near the centre of a cult universe, an electromagnetic conduit for a small but growing band of dispersed pixel gypsies.]

Aside from the vuvuzela filtering and the demand for video replays of controversial decisions, there was also another newsworthy technology at the South African World Cup, 3D video.

3DTV
Wheeeeee! For those with 3DTV sets, SBS and some broadcasters from other countries beamed out select games on a 3D channel. That’s all fine and well, but the mammoth production needs of 3D meant the World Cup was both a test and a serious step up in live 3D production. Broadcast Engineering summarises the technical achievements well ( for both on-ground filming and MPEG4 compression and beaming to each country), and notes that each game uses 8 cameras ( Sony HDC-1500 ), mounted on Quasar 3D rigs from Element Technica ( for mobility, and built in motors that allow for remote focus/iris/zoom control.), and are fitted with Canon HJ22ex7.6B lenses ( 7.6mm to 336mm with 2X Extender, f1.8 ). Pro-tip: After some quick googling, better keep aside $30K for the lense, $67K for the Quasar rig and $90K for the camera when budgeting for this kit.. )

3D Cameras Under $200
Available for pre-order through Amazon : the Aiptek 3D HD (720P) camcorder for $199. $199. USB, SD card, HDMI connect to HD-3DTV – and “additional software for the camcorder should allow you to upload the stereoscopic 3D videos you made directly to YouTube 3D. And you’ll also be able to watch the recorded content on your PC with the help of anaglyph red-cyan glasses coming with the device even if you don’t have a better solution like 3D Vision, 3D TV or anything else that is better.”

3D on YouTube
Apparently this has been available for a year, the fruits of Pete Bradshaw’s spare “20%” time at Google. Stereoscopic 3D clips can be uploaded to Youtube, which will mix in real-time in your browser, and which allows a 3D pull-down menu to choose 3D options ( eg red/cyan glasses / mirror split etc ) Tag your video with yt3d:enable=true to enable the pulldown menu of 3D-viewing options. Example clips?

360 Degree Cameras
Available since January, and a weirdly named competitor to the portable Flip cameras, SONY’s ‘Bloggie’ camera comes with a 360 degree view attachment, and software which translates this into an extremely wide panoramic video.

3D or Not 3D?
As Brazil prepares for hosting the World Cup in 2014, they may do well to heed Mark Pesce’s advice: “Keep doing that and you’ll go blind“, where he notes that humanoid depth perception requires 10 different cues, and that the slightly different imagery in each eye ( parallax vision ) is just one cue. Watching 3D means we eventually ‘turn off’ these other depth cues while watching, and with lots of 3D viewing, this can cause serious problems ( known as binocular dystopia ). Watch those banana kicks!

How’s this for a decent software pricing model : rent QLab for $3 a day? QLab is a pretty amazing looking piece of event software that allows control audio, video, and MIDI from a single workspace. It offers sample accurate synchronisation of audio and video across different machines, sync for incoming timecode, real-time video and animation, camera control and quartz composer integration for customisation. Browsing through the features, plenty of well considered detail is evident, and it looks to be a powerful and flexible solution for controlling many sources of media during a live event. You can buy the pro bundle for $599 US, but for a lot of people, the $3 a day licence would be pretty ideal for one-off events. It’s a wonder more software companies don’t get in on this sort of model. And other industries too.

Car Sharing
Taking a leaf out of Kurt Vonnegut’s book, and looking at civilisation from a distance – we do seem to be a species of oil crazed demons, intent on paving the planet over, and shuffling ourselves around in vehicles that weigh a whole tonne all by themselves. In cities with better urban planning and public transport, it’s obvious to citizens living there that not every single person needs to own a car to survive. Extending this idea another step, car sharing is about renting out cars for short periods of time and thereby reducing the amount of cars needed for a suburb. Some people need a car daily for various reasons, but for others who only need the occasional trip, the car sharing service can save a lot of money ( and other problems such as maintenance etc ). If you drive less than 15,000km a year you will probably find carsharing will save money. There’s three main car sharing groups operating in Sydney and Melbourne, each blowing their own eco-trumpet about the benefts of having access to a newer, fuel efficient car when you need it, and through sharing it with others, effectively reducing the amount of cars needed.

Flexicar, phone 1300 36 37 80 GoGet, phone 1300 769 389 Charter Drive, phone 1300 135 358

Renting Two Wheels?


Like car rentals, daily bicycle hire has long been an available option for visiting tourists and wandery folk. Arguing that the short trip rental could appeal to the general public, and potentially encourage them to leave cars at home, the Victorian Government has launched a $5 million scheme which will see 600 bicycles available to pick up or drop off at 50 different bike stations across Melbourne. Subscriptions cost $50 a year, $8 a week or $2.50 a day – and the first half an hour of every trip is then free, $2 for the next half an hour and so on. A credit card is needed to participate, and helmets aren’t included, so it’ll be interesting to see whether people find bringing a helmet into the city more convenient than bringing a car. [ Yet to see a single blue bike 'in the wild', though plenty of them seem missing from their racks around the city... ]

While South Africa is busy getting their plastic horn on – the rest of the world has responded with a flurry of filtering techniques to keep the vuvu drones from our ears. Mostly the filtering is aimed at audio, but there are some implications for video too.

Buzzkill
Audio nerds the world over must love soccer, because there’s been a huge outpouring online of ways to filter out the drone. Create Digital Music have done a pretty great round-up of these, tackling everything from EQing with onscreen TV controls ( get rid of 233, 466, 932 and 1864 HZ if you can), free VST plug-ins for mac and pc, acoustic engineers explaining the science of why vuvzelas are annoying ( I actually enjoy the medieval carnival / sacrifice kinda vibe they add ), vuvuzela orchestra ( yes, really ), vuvuzela radio ( uhuh ), and how to re-route audio signals using JACK or Soundflower into another application that has better audio filtering and VST capacities.

Audio Re-Routing
Wormhole2 – allows routing of audio between machines on a network. Now you can make use of all the processing power in your studio. For example; set aside a machine for complex instruments or effects, route audio out to it, then back into your favorite DAW. Or route audio between your PCs and Macs to get the best of both worlds. Or share audio between laptops on stage.

Soundflower is a Mac OS X (10.2 and later) system extension that allows applications to pass audio to other applications. Soundflower is easy to use, it simply presents itself as an audio device, allowing any audio application to send and receive audio with no other support needed. Soundflower is free, open-source, and runs on Mac Intel and PPC computers. IS often used for podcasting to combine tow different audi streams, or to combine skip interview voices etc.

Jack (the Jack Audio Connection Kit ) is a low-latency audio server, written originally for the GNU/Linux operating system, and now with Mac OS X support. It can connect any number of different applications to a single hardware audio device; it also allows applications to send and receive audio to and from each other. Jack is different from other audio server efforts in that it has been designed from the ground up to be suitable for professional audio work. This means that it focuses on two key areas: synchronous execution of all clients, and low latency operation.

Video Re-Routing?
But let’s say you want to send a video signal from one program into another program – how to do that? No such re-routing software currently exists, but there is at least a work around through Vade’s excellent ( and free ) Screen Capture utility. This is a Quartz Composer patch ( and therefore mac only) which allows a portion of the screen to be selected, then sent into another compatible program. This can mean web browsing / web-flash games / computer games etc can all be displayed in one corner of a screen, and then accepted within VJ software such as VDMX and used as a live signal, and filtered, mixed or processed to your heart’s content. ( Be warned : Removing plastic horns visually is likely a bit trickier… )

But Wait, There’s More..
Vade has more in the pipeline, a video re-router that will work fast, and on the graphics card rather than CPU. Tests so far allow easy re-routing between Max MSP / Jitter / Quartz and VDMX. Bookmark his site for announcements to come. And in other news the Auvi Objects have been updated for Max 5, which will please live visualists who remember it.. )

“Auvi was designed with an attitude of sympathy towards beginners. Even now, Auvi can be a lot of fun for those who are less technically advanced — for example, those who don’t want to mess about with shaders and GL. I like to think of Max as a haven for artists whose needs aren’t met by standard software. Auvi was my attempt to increase the fun-factor for these newcomers.” Kurt Ralkse

Soccer Video Remixing
Because you need something to do with all those pipes, right? Recommendo : the 1981 Escape to Victory starring Sylvester Stallone, Michael Caine + Pele in a German prisoner of war camp. Or maybe? Pele’s viagara campaign, where he offers these last smiling words to the camera:
“Talk to your doctor, I would..”
An amusingly careful phrasing, which allows Pele to retain all suggestion of athletic virility, but let anyone else know – Pele says it’s ‘ok’.

Joined the old Digital Single Lens Reflex camera club recently (hello video capable Canon 7D), which has meant learning about photography (shout out to photo guru Dan Murphy), and about technologies that bridge the old and the new. And haunting Ebay a bit more than usual.

To DSLR or not to DSLR?
The benefits of digital image recording ( cost / workflow etc ) combined with the advanced light controls of a SLR camera – make DSLR cameras great for photographers, and now that they’re often capable of good quality video, DSLRs are lluring in a lot of film-makers too. It’s not all win though – videomakers expecting DSLRs to have the same ease of shooting will be disappointed. Weighing it up for those interested in video, David Torcivia has summarised the pros and cons over at Poetzerofilm.com:

Nay
Ergonomics – too light / small / awkward screen and controls
Moire and Aliasing – skipped lines in video, during process to shrink large image down to video size
Shutter Rolling – fast moving objects can be in different places in the same frame
Resolution – they don’t actually shoot as well as advertised
Compression – Canon records to lossy H264 format ( which needs processing before editing )
Audio – terrible on DSLR, need to record externally ( eg with Zoom H4n) + sync (pro-tip: Plural Eyes! )

Yay
Ergonomics – The small size can also mean shooting easily in cramped spaces, and more discreet filming.
Depth of Field – Hey look, it’s blurry in the background! Beautiful, but as the web fills with it, David helpfully notes:
“Don’t wear out the effectiveness of a shallow shot by making an entire “test” film filled with nothing but micro DoF. Shallow depth of field is just another tool in the cinematographer’s box to better tell a story. It is not a crutch or a gimmick to sell a shot or a product, an idea which cheapens the art.”
Low light – Zowie! For the price, DSLRs can shoot in hearts of darkness that video cameras cannot even see. Believe.
Price – Fantastic quality and value.
Photos – Oh yeah, do they do those too – 10 stops of dynamic range, full RAW files, 18 or 21 Megapixels – all great for timelapse .
Lenses – The variety of glass available for DSLRs vastly outweighs that possible for video cameras ( hello eBay, or hello rent-a-lense for important occasions )
Media – Tapeless workflows. Drag n drop, rather than slowly capturing footage.

Plunging In…
So in the end – disregarding all the science and numbers, you’ve found yourself swooning over luscious, colour-ripe non-grainy video shot by someone in such low light conditions that you’d packed away your video camera an hour ago. THAT’S OKAY, you’re with friends.

And if being the new owner of a DSLR finds you bewildered by the array of options available – Wikipedia’s photography page is incredibly useful for getting up to speed with photographic terms and principles, and pointing to a huge range of future learning. For starters you’ll be needing to understand :
Aperture – the lens opening, measured as the f-number ( eg f2.8 ), which controls the amount of light passing through the lense.
Shutter speed – time the imaging medium is exposed to light for each
ISO speed – The higher the ISO, the greater the sensitivity to light.

There’s plenty more, and plenty more starting points too..

Which Lenses To Get?
If you need, you can actually mount cinema lenses to a DSLR, using add-ons from hotrodcameras.com. For most people though, the existing range of photography lenses will be a vast enough jump in quality from handheld video. Things to note? Lenses with lower f-numbers are preferable ( and more expensive ). Aside from lenses specific to your camera, there are also a wide range of cheap adaptors that can be fitted to any DLSR, which will enable lenses from other manufacturers to be used ( functions like auto-focussing can be lost with some of these though ). And one more complication – the Canon 7D doesn’t have a full frame sensor, and it’s smaller proportion of a frame means you have to multiply the below numbers by 1.6. In other words, a 50mm lense on the Canon 7D is the equivalent of a 80mm lense (50 x 1.6), and the perspective it brings.

50mm - The classic lense. A lense this size renders perspective in a way similar to a scene is perceived by the human eye.
Wide Angle Lenses ( Below 35mm ) – allow you to fit more in frame from closer range ( think fish eye), but exaggerate distance between objects and can distort.
Telephoto Zoom Lenses (Above 70mm ) – allow magnification of distant objects / skateboarders / small furry animals etc ( though tends to compress distance between objects ).

Macro lenses – Want to shoot close-ups? These are the lense for you – or – seek out extension tubes or adjustable bellows ( both which are placed between another lense and the camera, changing the dynamics so that close-up is possible ), or get an auxiliary close-up lense to attach to the front of a lense, or get a reversing ring ( an adaptor that allows the lense to be attached to the camera backwards, which creates extreme close-up vision ). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macro_photography

( See also Tamron’s guide to lenses, and Cambridge in Colour about lense focal lengths, zooms vs primes etc )

A range of trick filters which can be added onto existing lenses for various effects ( find out what diameter your lense is ( eg 72mm), to find appropriately fitting add-ons ). And then there’s the tilt-shift lenses ( see also lensbaby ), and other trick lenses… ( on it goes.. ).

Time Lapse?
The image quality is significantly higher quality for photos in DSLRs, than it is for video. Correspondingly, animating a series of high quality photos in sequence for timelapse bumps the ‘video’ quality up even higher. Strangely the Canon 7D doesn’t have an automated sequencing function built in, and needs an external ‘intervalometer’ to do this. Canon sells one for around $200. Hong Kong vendors on Ebay sell adequate imitators for $30. There’s also an iPhone app for remote triggering / viewing of photos – but it requires the camera to be attached to a computer ( not great for out and about shots.. )

Stability… Later…
Someone walking around with a handheld video camera, will produce jerky footage, no matter the camera… but especially so with a small camera like a DSLR,, and then there’s the additional desire to avoid troubles like the Jelly Vision mentioned above. The image quality is good enough though, that a whole industry has spawned in providing ways to minimise trouble. And so…

Next DSLR Update : Stabilisation, active filming + Steadicam Systems ( from pro to DIY )

Extravagant lighting and video productions are increasingly expected with touring acts, but a little thoughtfulness can go a long way.

Massive Attack @ Myer Music Bowl, Melbourne
Enhancing Massive Attack’s recent sublime musical performances during their Australian Tour, was a very elegantly integrated lighting show designed by United Visual Artists. The kind of gorgeous, restrained and stylised light show you’d hope to see while visiting Blade Runner Town. The lighting set-up was deceptively simple – over the course of the evening, every one of the limited parameters available was gradually tweaked, revealing further variation where it seemed all avenues had been explored. Pulsing dots, became horizontal lines, and then combinations of dots and horizontal lines. From the palette of mostly white, red was sporadically and only very occasionally introduced, and very effectively. Occasional smoke bursts and white lights to reveal on stage depth behind the main plane of pulsing lights. And gradually, the dots are clustered closer, so we can approach something like ascii video playing through the spread out LED wall. Cycling through ascii characters, cleverly varying font sizes and cycling methods to effect the overall image. And again, occasionally using red as individual spotlights. While lighting rigs and lighting pre-visualisation and sequencing tools are getting increasingly sophisticated ( ie crazy ), this show worked because of the restraint shown, its thoughtful choreography and pacing over the evening, and because of its tight integration with the music ( they nearly became inseparable at some points ).

Chris Cunningham’s new Audiovisual Show
This is an exciting prospect. News that one of the most acclaimed music video directors of the last decade, is working on a 75 minute live audiovisual show certainly presses buttons.

“It’s a work in progress really. It’s three giant screens, lasers and a soundtrack that will be like a big mixtape. It’s the closest I can get to what I want to do: the visceral sound of a live show but with massive screens like a cinema,” he explained in the Guardian recently, arguing, “what I do is more experimental and the visuals usually come first. That’s why the live performance is exciting. It’s not film, it’s not a gig, it’s not an installation, but it has elements of all three.”

While it’s undoubtedly an impressive show ( what a great body of work to play with! ), unfortunately the comments on the Guardian article suggest that the performance seems far from live, a sidestage witness suggesting there wasn’t much meaningful being done by Cunningham on stage, others suggesting it seemed like a linear showreel. On the one hand thats fine, the show is a stepping stone, on the other – it’s a reminder that visual technologies tend to lag behind audio in terms of power ( it’s necessarily more computer intensive to manipulate 1 minute of video than audio ). And no doubt, given that the music world has decades more behind it with manipulating loops sequences and processes, it is likely also advanced more conceptually for dealing with time based media in performances. Looking at how someone like Autechre (touring Australia shortly, and themselves with a fine Cunningham video) approach time and samples, might illuminate other approaches to video than ‘jukebox compilation’.

[[ UPDATE ]] This review sounds a bit more promising. And an amusing anecdote from William Gibson about Chris potentially directing a version of Neuromancer:
“Chris is my own 100 per cent personal choice…My only choice. The only person I’ve met who I thought might have a hope in hell of doing it right. I went back to see him in London just after he’d finished the Bjork video, and I sat on a couch beside this dead sex little Bjork robot, except it was wearing Aphex Twin’s head. We talked.”

Weimar in The House
Max Neupert explores great and granular audiovisual compositions using the free software pure data, and now runs ‘Breaking The Timeline‘, a great course at the Bauhaus University of Weimar, which is dedicated to exploring ‘performative audiovisual artworks and experiments’.

“The third dimension of the moving image is time. Manipulation of the timeline means taking control over the creative potential of this dimension. Editing film or video transforms footage into a movie, thus film and video aren’t necessarily linear, but stay static in their determined timeline. Video made analog real-time effects popular but todays graphics processors in computers make it possible to fully explore the real-time potential of digital image and sound.”

Max also makes available patches which demonstrate audiovisual programming techniques in Pure Data and the Gem library.

And let’s not confuse Max with Max for Live – another exciting Audiovisual prospect – complicated max patches ( including jitter video parameters ), controllable from inside Ableton Live and it’s sophisticated sequencing possibilities.

Amazingly enough, there’s quite an array of tools ready to use, right there in the browser. Not just for basic file management, file sharing, communication and group collaboration, but also for recording, mixing and producing. Some are just convenient utilities, but others are powerful tools in their own right. Did a gather up of these recently for a music related course at RMIT – and so, below, your new, mostly free, portable office-studio-lounge:

File Management / Sharing / Collaboration
media-convert.com – Online file conversion of files to a huge variety of formats.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_collaborative_software – Huge list of software for group collaboration
docs.google.com – Very convenient way to co-write, co-edit material, and now share files as well.
filestomp.com – Online compression of media.
dropbox.com – Nice online file sharer that creates a desktop folder you can drag and drop files into, which then syncs with your online backup and anyone elses computer you’ve authorised it to sync to.
delicious.com – Still the best social bookmarking service. RSS Subscriptions available for your bookmarks, anyone elses, or even just a keyword ( as bookmarked by everyone or just an individual ). Takes a while to realise just how great this is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LazyWeb – For when the going gets tough / lethargic.

Actually Making Stuff From Within Your Browser
How about that! Again, just a convenience in some ways, and not meant to replace your more powerful desktop tools, but sometimes there’s more than enough power right there in your browser.

aviary.com – First shout out must go to Aviary – where from within the browser you can use a variety of their software to do – Photo-editing, adjust vector logos, play with web templates, filters, color palettes, screen captures, edit audio files and more.

looplabs.com – An online music mixing application with an impressive list of features in the sidebar.
online jamming : ninjam.com + jam2jam.com

soundcloud.com – Increasingly popular hosting service, which notably allows comments on specific parts of audio timelines, has convenient dropboxes for easy file sharing, and has many more musician-friendly features. (See intro video for more )

skype.com – Screensharing options for comparing software production notes / techniques / debugging. Voice chat, audio recording.

xtranormal.com – your text + their audio + button to publish = auto generated and published animated movie

pixton.com/uk – Templates for generating online comics.

slideshare.net – Easy development and publishing of slideshows with accompanying audio.

Need Files to Play With?
The popularity of Creative Commons has meant a continued growth of sites legally offering media files for creative re-use :

ccmixter.org – Huge collection of mostly musical sounds, including song parts, and full tracks by the likes of Chuck D and the Beastie Boys, DJ Vadim etc etc.
freesound.org – Giant library of atmospheric, FX and musical sounds.

flickr.com/creativecommons – Flickr’s creative commons collection is ginormous.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain_image_resources – Also ginormous.

archive.org – Noble San Fran cats with an abundance, an overload of audio and video work available for re-use. Lots of high quality and unusual vintage material, as well as contemporary netlabels etc.

And What To Do With It All?
Maybe something like this? starwarsuncut.com – where Star Wars is being remade by fans, in 15 second chunks – there are still a few scenes left – sign up and make yours, to be part of the final edit!

Get some print on demand books happening via lulu.com – upload a PDF and no-one pays a cent until a book is ordered online, then it’s printed and delivered to them, money put into your account, and all why you lie in your hammock.

Upload your work to bandcamp.com – and have them offer a variety of free to expensive downloads and even VINYL options!

Make $19,000 in ten hours on Twitter. ( Yes, this may work easier if you are Amanda Palmer )

What is it?
Quartz Composer is a versatile visual programming environment ( mac only +needs either tiger or leopard to work), that enables complex compositions to be created without writing a single line of code. Any mac running 10.4 or later with Quicktime can play quartz compositions as stand-alone files, but importantly, they can also be easily integrated into various workflows for other software ( eg as customised FX in editing or real-time video software) or used as an iTunes visualizer or system screensaver.

In other words, you can build your own interactive software or effects using Quartz 2D, Core Image, Core Video, OpenGL, QuickTime, MIDI System Services, RSS (Really Simple Syndication), XML and various hardware inputs ( eg mouse, audio inputs etc ) – without needing to know any code. It is however, also kinda complicated to get a non-programmer head around. The benefits for mac visualists though, are starting to get too large to ignore: continuous developer and community momentum behind it, easy integration into many other applications ( eg VDMX, Resolume for live work, or other apps for production ), a large body of existing examples that can be customised to suit, and the potential to create or invent visual effects, transitions or processes that are exactly suited to your one-off or overall needs.

With that in mind, I’ve decided to try and document my own learning process with it here, and aim to post a weekly-ish blog post exploring what I’m learning, or what I’m struggling with. Hopefully this’ll motivate me to get up to speed quicker, but also provide something useful for someone else. This first post just sets the scene, puts Quartz Composer in some kinda context, and offers up some links to the key online resources for it. With the next post, I’ll try tackle what it feels like to dive into, and how to start making sense of it, what kinds of rules and quirks it has, and how to start making your own quartz patches. Yes, neantherdal baby steps, because they’re mine. Somewhere in the distance, there’s an endgoal though, of being able to execute a range of long desired visual effects and processes that would be handy / interesting in some situations. And so begins the Hobbit like adventure..

What You’ll Need
- A mac running the Leopard ( preferably ) or tiger operating system.
- XCode Tools ( free on the OS installer disc, once installed, Quartz Composer + examples can be found in the /Developer/Applications/ folder).

How does it work?
Quartz Composer creates Quartz Compositions ( motion graphics programs that work by assembling ‘patches’ in a workflow for processing and rendering. There are several types of patches eg Composite Patches / Controller Patches / Environment Patches – Filter Patches etc which can be combined in various ways.

User Interface
Opening up QC, options for Blank Composition, Graphic Animation, Graphic Transition, Image Filter, Music Visualizer, RSS Visualizer and Screensaver offer easy templates to begin from, and give some idea of the program’s scope.

Once open, there are four main windows to consider:
Editor window – a workspace for assembling and connecting patches. Also, on the editor window toolbar clicking the patch parameters button will open up the Patch Parameter Pane – a place for Editing input parameters.
Patch Creator – utility window for browsing and getting information about QC patches and clips. ( A good place to browse and familiarise with available patches )
Patch Inspector – Utility window for editing input parameters and patch related settings.
Viewer Window – Where you get to see the results of all your pixel mangling.

A good beginner exercise is just to open up the example patches that are installed with the program ( found inside Developer/Examples/Quartz Composer ). Exploring some of those will help clarify the relationships between the above four windows, and give an idea of how it operates. I’ll dive in further with the next post, and the resources below will help anyone wanting to keep on trucking.

Further Resources
Apple’s QC Guide – Comprehensive breakdown and introductory explanations.
QC Developer Mailing List –
http://kineme.net – A community surrounding the development of Quartz Composer custom patches, plugins, and other hacks.
VDMX wiki- Tips for integrating QC into VDMX, links to other QC sources.

Over at Vimeo –
vimeo.com/tag:quartzcomposer : 1,477 example QC clips and counting.
vimeo.com/groups/search:quartz
vimeo.com/5616060 – Shakinda shows the basic concepts for setting up QC.
vimeo.com/goto10 – bouncing balls, feedback effects, double helix, QC plugins, dynamic slideshows.

Extra Patches / QTZ FX
http://vdmx.memo.tv – QC patches ready to drop into VDMX.
http://002.vade.info – great QC add-ons from New York’s Vade.

Erik Gandini, Erik Pauser & Johan Soderberg that’d be. Fine (interconnected ) feature film fiends. Let’s start with:

Videocracy ( 2009 )
Directed Erik Gandini / edited Johan Soderberg
Imagine a country where the owner of the biggest Television network, and several press outlets, also becomes the elected leader of the country. That country is Italy, and because the several sprawling scandals around President Silvio Berlusconi are not covered in Italian news ( but widely elsewhere), it’s surprising there aren’t a greater number of critical documentary documentaries about this.

“Berlusconi has created a culture of banality so that collective societal desires are no longer important. People in Italy now just want to be television stars so they can be famous and rich. There’s a strong tension between those who are on TV and those who are not. For young Italians, power is embodied by those who are celebrities…. What I’m really interested in here is how you can destroy a democracy by tits and ass. It’s shocking that the banality of culture can destroy a once mature and politically engaged populace,” argues Gandini in an Indiewire interview.

The resulting film is an almost spooky glimpse of a society governed by an obsession with celebrity, and a Governor obsessed by the power that television can manifest. Those who have seen Mike Judge’s comedy Idiocracy, about society’s devolution through television will be mightily amused / horrified at the parallels. Director Erik Gandini is well known for covering provocative topics, including – Gitmo, Bosnian refugees in Sweden, and the 100,000 children American soldiers left behind in Vietnam, but we’ll mention here his other Soderberg collaboration:

Surplus: terrorised into being consumers (2003).
Directed Erik Gandini / edited Johan Soderberg
This film is Gandini’s personal visual odyssey about the destructive nature of consumer culture, threaded together with Soderberg’s trademark rhythmic, often musical editing. While the film as a whole doesn’t necessarily provide a strong coherence, it has plenty of powerful moments, many which derive from the ways in which Soderberg marries sound and vision, and understands the power of letting raw images to play out by themselves over time, or looping and repeating them as need be. ( Available on DVD )

Lucky People Centre International (1998)
Directed + Edited : Erik Pauser / Johan Soderberg

Finally, this vastly under-rated film is available on DVD, do yourself a flavour. Lucky People Centre was a Swedish artist collective known for their electronic music, video projects, a couple of audiovisual albums ( not just tracks with videos, but editing video source material samples to make music ), and this film as their pinnacle achievement.

“Lucky People Center International takes us on a journey around the world, navigating by means of people’s inner life. The use of music and rhythm and the pulsating form of the film are reminiscent of the aesthetic tools of music videos, and provide a fresh approach to documentary filming. The film team spent two years travelling the world looking for people and ways of living reflecting the world.. and so we encounter voodoo powers, the investigative methods of a brain research scientist, Buddhism’s view of death, a former porn actress (Annie Sprinkle) and her thoughts on pleasure, a banker and his ecstatic needs, and much more, all held together by musical rhythms and the song of the gibbon.”

On an entertainment and provocation level, the film is loaded with a fascinatingly diverse range of people and situations, but beyond that, the film’s audiovisual relationships, the layered multi-linear storytelling, and the rhythmic approaches to editing ( sound and vision ), mean this is
( Can’t link to them directly ( Oh, Flash, hai there~! ) but click through the interface to find a series of LPC videos at soderberg.tv )
Tokyo Noise ( 2002 )
Directed + Edited : Erik Pauser / Johan Soderberg
This is a gentler documentary exploring the character of Tokyo through the lives of interesting characters, but again includes wonderfully expressive editing and audiovisual sequences.

Tong Tana (2001)
Directed: Erik Pauser
Powerful story about a Swiss man who went to live in the Borneo jungle, and ended up living with, and defending the locals.

The Voice ( 2005 )
Directed + Edited : Erik Pauser / Johan Soderberg
A well edited and animated music-video style exploration of global power. ( Available on DVD )

Read my lips, that Bush + Blair duet that blew up online a few years ago? That was Soderberg too.

Some February eyeball snippets..

Sculpture
http://tapebox.co.uk
http://vimeo.com/sculpture
Dan Hayhurst: Music, Reuben Sutherland: Animation
“DIY music and animation duo, who use zoetrope record deck, tape loops, cassettes, samples, and lo-fi electronic noise, cross-fertilizing analogue and digital techniques to generate vivid sonic and visual collages.”

Sculpture are one of my favourite discoveries of late. Notice the words ‘zoetrope record deck’ in their description? Those custom made picture discs ( just a sequence of images arranged around a vinyl disc and filmed from above ) definitely help define their aesthetic but there’s much more going on than that. Glimpse a few of their animations and live performances to grasp some more.

Everything
http://vimeo.com/6364896
A vibrant array of visual creators constantly pump out material on vimeo.com, so even casual exploration of the site usually brings some rewards. It’s especially nice though, to discover delights in clusters, masses of talented folk orbiting around one of vimeo’s groups or channels. Such as the awesome compilation ‘Everything’, curated by Danny Jelinek, each episode tending to feature 5-6 snappy segments, sharp editing and humour, and sophisticated but whimsically used visual effects.
 
Op Art in Visual Chinatown

davidope.com
http://dvdp.tumblr.com
On the optical art front, albeit with a more contemporary feel, ‘davidope’ creates hypnotic looping animations, which he offers up as a series of tumblr gifs ( hosted at what he calls his ‘visual chinatown’), or java apps / quicktime movs for those inclined. His recipe?

1. I create a simple animated 2d looped pattern in Flash or with Illustrator+Javascript.
2. Then I use them as a displacement/diffuse/alpha map for a static 3d object in 3dsmax.
3. Rendering it with Vray or Illustrate.
4. Finally converting it to GIF with Photoshop.

DJ Yoda 

www.djyoda.co.uk/
youtube.com/user/djyodauk

Belated shout outs to DJ Yoda, who toured Australia in late December. Admittedly I was skeptical after glimpsing a set portion online a long time ago ( too obviously cut and paste in that mid-late 90s way, with little sampling subtlety in the choices or choreography), but for the sonic and visual heads in the audience alike(@ Falls festival) yoda ‘ripped it’, constantly weaving through pop culture grabs with fluid, sophisticated ease. This included a range of recently new worthy items as well as an extended encore of contemporary Australian TV.    

Apart from busily honing his live gigs, DJ Yoda also recently contributed to the DJ Hero game ( Playstation, XBox, Wii ), offering up two mixes for playing : Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back” vs. Gang Starr’s “Just to Get a Rep”, and Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” vs. Shlomo’s “Beats”. As an aside – has anyone ever used this? The game made a lot of splashes on release, but I haven’t heard from a single user of it since, or even seen anyone pointing to an interesting video of it (or it’s turntable controller ) in action. Meanwhile, ‘Scratch, The Ultimate DJ‘, being developed by Bedlam games and delayed because of legal troubles, is now back on track – with tracks by Mixmaster Mike, Kid Koala, Gorillaz, Salt N pepa etc. Stay tuned.

Long-time live cinema enthusiast, (Toby) *spark from the UK, released a video about it this week, a decent attempt at exploring some of live cinema’s essence. What is live cinema? Who makes it? Why? How? The video features interviews with some live video luminaries, as well as a glimpse at what an ideal live cinema software interface might look like.

New kinds of cinema will inevitably continue to form and mutate. Video can now be chopped, shuffled and processed nearly as easily as audio, projectors continue to cheapen and shrink, and audiences practically expect moving images to appear in ever new screen and surface arrangements. Live cinema is just one of those possibilities, and within the video Toby explains part of why it appeals:

“Compared to Hollywood, it’s more like live jazz, a storytellers version.. telling different stories everytime – it’s not because there’s a definitive story, but because it’s more interesting that they have a sea of memories, every story they navigate through the sea making different associations, drawing different things in in different contexts. We can do the same with digital media as performers.”

Fellow Londoner, Mike from D-FUSE is less drawn to the narrative aspects, but still strongly attracted to what is possible with live cinema:

“It’s about the feel of it, as opposed to the other side of the tv, telling you a story… it’s about the texture, and the sound, like going back to a surrealist painting… ”

Toby welcomes feedback on the video, so have a watch and zap him a line. Myself, I think the Live Cinema aspect depends on a lot on context – where is the cinema and who are the audience? In that respect, his video would benefit from showing that better, rather than just clips detached from their screening context and audience. The live clips of the Light Surgeons used work best for that reason, but even then the wider context of the audience, or even audience reactions is still invisible.

And why does Live Cinema Suck?
It’s really, really, hard to produce a compelling feature film or create a compelling hour of music. Trying to do something in between both, and without a team of supporting cinematographers, actors, musicians, recording engineers, producers, and without any funds, means it’s a significant project for any solo laptopper to attempt, and yet it is often one or two people who are generally making ‘live cinema’. Playing with video in a more poetic way, and exploring with loops and rhythm, can reduce some of the burden, but it’s still a major challenge. Beyond merely producing a live cinema show though, what are the characteristics of a good live cinema show? And what are the cliches and easy pitfalls for producers? What makes a bad live cinema show? Why is there often a sense that they are fun for the creators but not the audiences? ( The same can be said about drunken bongo playing around a campfire ) Maybe this is a bit like the earliest scratch DJs a few decades ago trying to talk about what a good DJ mix is – from their limited perspective, the evolved styles, technologies and diversities of today’s DJing would’ve been unimaginable. But addressing some of these problems means identifying what works and also what doesn’t in a live context.

Elsewhere VJ Solu has articulated nicely some of the ways Live Cinema can distinguish itself :

“The traditional parameters of narrative cinema are expanded by a much broader conception of cinematographic space, the focus of which is no longer the photographic construction of reality as seen by the camera’s eye, or linear forms of narration. The term “Cinema” is now to be understood as embracing all forms of configuring moving images, beginning with the animation of painted or synthetic images…… Even though performance is a vital element in the live context, creating new narratives for visual culture should be equally important.”

Elsewhere she closes in on an important difference between cinema and live cinema, while showing how one can inform the other:

“Lost Highway (1997) directed by David Lynch.. is remembered for its long shot of a dark highway. I believe these kind of shots are the basic material for live cinema performances: the transitions, the movements, the pure visual beauty and intrigue, the atmosphere.”

Or as VJ Iko from Portugal put to me back in the day:

“Live video is as much about lighting and colour control as it is about creating interesting content. See the people watching the screen? See how the colour of their faces changes with what’s happening on screen? The light bouncing off their faces, that’s what you have to try and control.”

In the end, despite the ongoing quest for software and hardware holy grails, there’s already today immense capacity for provocative and beautiful live cinema to reward both audiences and performers alike. Technologies aside, zooming in on exactly what makes live cinema unique and interesting, will hopefully help evolve the form for everyone. Shout outs to Toby for putting his take on it out there.

Other People Thinking Lots About Live Cinema
Brazilian Live Cinema: And as well as ideas, they also build festivals and hardware live cinema interfaces. “Live Cinema is cinema that unfolds live. It´s an audiovisual perfomance where the director, creator, performer or artist presents his work in person, before the audience. Imagine an artist being able to change his film’s ending, simulate new sounds and images, new sequences, and above all, create different narratives based on the audience’s reactions to the work.”

VJ Falk : Long time Berliner Live cinema prototyper : http://prototypen.com/beamaz + http://prototypen.com/lc/blog

http://www.vjtheory.net : Well curated group discussions about the possibilities for ‘performers, performance, interactors, audiences and participators’.

http://avit.info/vjtalk : A range of mostly VJ talks ( surprise! ) but touching on some relevant live cinema areas.

Timothy Jaeger : Had a good book online a while ago called Live Cinema Unravelled. Missing in action.

VJ Solu : Especially of interest, her thesis which “reviews the influences and explores the characteristics and elements of live cinema, a recently coined term for realtime audiovisual performances. The thesis discusses the possible language of live cinema, and proposes “vocabulary and grammar”.”

Aka, some stuff stapled to the ears of the year so far.

The Books ( Mini Review )
John Curtin Hotel ( Carlton, Melb Jan 09)

Thanks to the tasteful way they’d championed the collagey folktronica sound back in the day, what with their sparse guitar, cello, vocals and samples (though never sampling or playing drumkits, only using ‘inanimate objects like children’s toys and filing cabinets, sampled and looped’ ) and their charming albums ‘Thought For Food’ and ‘The Lemon of Pink’, New York duo The Books have gathered quite a following. Expecting they were only in Australia for the Sydney festival, I was pleased to discover they were also doing a Melbourne show, and that it extended their sampling to include video in the live show. Unfortunately the John Curtin’s low stage meant two things – only the front row of the audience could see them performing ( they sat near milk-crates to play with their electronic gear and play their guitar / cello ), and even the onstage projector screen itself was hard to see much of. Eyes closed the music was gorgeous, if a little too perfectly replicating their album sounds. Open eyed, the screen shared some of the responsibility for mirroring the albums so tightly : it seemed they were playing entire tracks of video for each song, which included lots of screen-based audio. Many of their known sample riffs’ then, were sampled from video in the first place, which makes for an absorbing av show, but limits their live improvisation when played as stand alone tracks. Later realised, they released a DVD of 13 music videos, ‘Play All’, in 2007, and you can watch snippets from these at www.thebooksmusic.com. New album on its way, Break, themed around New Age philosophies, and using samples from self-help and hypnotherapy cassettes.

{ And an abstract video take on that :
by David Lublin, one of the developers of VDMX. )

Stingray Sam

Kicking space musical western ass since 2001, the year of his debut feature, American Astronaut, storytelling musician and film director Cory McAbee was in Melbourne recently for the screening of his cinematic follow-up, Stingray Sam. Designed for both mobile devices and the cinema, it’s shot with smaller screens in mind ( a tendency for close-ups rather than long shots, lots of static shots, broken up into six small episodes etc ), the film’s another great vehicle for Cory’s uniquely combined explorations of musical storytelling and cinematic style. Although the songs of his band, The Billy Nayer Show, tend to be comedic, they survive or even thrive on the salt of the earth charm embedded throughout, and it helps that the film(s) can shift into song in such unpredictable ways. Recommendo.

Download episode one and two for free, check out the storyboards, buy the DVD at stingraysam.com.

Farewell Songs
This is the last song played at The Tote, the latest Melbourne live music venue to suffer under licencing changes. Complete with 2-3 minutes of arm-tingling cheers at the end.

Other Kinds of Magic:
Enter The Magical Mystery Chambers.

The World As Sonic Map?
Via @ballardian, a link to a nice post about collaborative sound mapping projects – from the BBC, others exploiting Google Maps, and sites that allow to pick a starting point and destination, then present a mix of field recordings between the two places ( sound transit ). The Freesound map gets a deserved shout-out in the comments at the same site, and elsewhere you can listen to the underwater atmosphere of Antarctica in realtime.

All of the above of course presumes we navigate by text / visual cues… what about if we navigated by sound?

The World As Instrument?
The World as instrument: A Theoretical Workshop Taught by Francisco Lopez ::February 16-18 2010

“focused on the historical, sociological and philosophical aspects of different practices that have the “real world” as a source, or an inspiration, for sonic creation. From ancestral manifestations of music derived from nature to the present massive sonic exploration of our world, analyzing the historical attempts at recording sonic reality and creatively transform it, from musical notation to digital technology… the workshop aims at stirring up discussion and at challenging many stereotypical and misleading conceptions about recorded sound in many diverse areas and objects of study, from bioacoustics to experimental music, from phonographs to hard disk recorders, from birds to cosmic radio emissions.”

Chimps are now making movies. It’s true. And their movies are getting screened on the BBC. A bunch of chimps were given access to specially designed chimp-proof cameras as part of a scientific study into how chimpanzees perceive the world and each other, and could also use some touchscreens that allowed them to view remote parts of their enclosure. This was all part of a natural history documentary, and the relevant chimp clips were shown as part of the program Chimpcam on BBC 2.

When Chimps Make Noise
Am eternally indebted to Jim Knox ( I Flips Me Lid ) for casually pointing out that the makers of the Get Smart sitcom also made Lancelot Link, a 24 episode detective series with a cast entirely comprised of chimps. Which isn’t to say they held back on the storyboarding. As well as car driving chase scenes, there were water skiing chases, camel rides in the desert with falcons on shoulder, chimps dressed as undercover surgeons performing surgery – and so on. And then some. Complete with musical interludes to break up the show, with magic trick performing MCs introducing the ‘live band’, of instrument wielding chimps, bashing along in time to some sixties psychedelic sitcom rock. ( More on that here ) The chimp band’s name? ‘The Evolution Revolution’.

Inside The Chimp Mind
Radio Lab at WNYC produce an excellent weeklyish radio show and podcast, where on given themes, they carefully craft together a show using a range of interviews, sounds effects and themselves making provocative jabs at each other. That the end result comes off as so freewheeling and conversational is testament to their editing skills, but anyways – a recent show was about the Animal Mind and they asked whether it was possible for one animal to know what is going on in another animal’s mind, and looked at the problems of anthropomorphising too much (Said one animal scientist : Expecting that every other creature perceives the world as humans do, vastly reduces the complexity and diversity if the world ). Can we really see inside a chimp mind? Or they, ours? What type of communication is really possible? The one hour show is worth listening to for the interesting scientist perspectives, but it’s the tale involving a large, floating whale eyeball that did it for me.

No Chimpee, No Cry

Carson Mell is “an artist/filmmaker living in Hollywood, CA without a wife or an animal”. It said so on the internet : vimeo.com/user520733. Animal owner or not, Carson makes great short films, as featured on the also wonderful Wholphin DVD compilation ( from McSweeneys ), and it’d seem from the sprawling animated carcass of his short about an aging touring rocker, Chonto, Carson and animals, they have a special relationship. Get your Chonto fix at vimeo, or over at http://www.carsonmell.com. (Or aye, full-length atyou-toob )

Chimp Shout-Outs
It’d be appropriate here to mention, Soda Jerk’s The Dawn of Remix which features a wonderful scratch video section using the apes from Kubrick’s 2001 to great effect. Soda Jerk? Those Sydney cine-remixers behind the likes of Picnic at Wolf Creek, Pixel Pirate II. They spend a residency in India recently, so future work may have a Bollywood tinge, and they’re currently working on ‘The Dark Matter Cycle’ of videos, exploring the intersection of death, temporality and cinema. “Go(o)d times”.

And Then There Were None
Did you know there are as little as 21,000 chimpanzees and 25,000 gorillas floating about? As it turns out – around ‘1.2 million years ago, only 18,500 early humans were breeding on the planet- evidence that there was a real risk of extinction for our early ancestors, according to a new study‘. We’ve managed to rise to 6.8 billion now. Is is possible there’ll be more chimps than then in another 1.2 million years? Not at our current rates of deforestation. If there is however, what will the future chimps think of the ANIMATED series, Return to Planet of the Apes?

Also : image up top from infamous Melbourne beatmaker, Monkey Marc’s new album, As the Market Crashed.