Amusing as the U.S. election is to watch on news channels, or terrifying if you’re watching it via the Comedy Channel’s Daily Show, just sometimes, you don’t feel like having a herd of cattle flying overhead, dumping manure on you from great heights. A few abstract video antidotes then, to counteract the visual political overload of late.

Abre Ojos
Scott Baker, aka Abre Ojos, graced Melbourne Plug N Play recently with a fine audiovisual set, blending together well richly textured drones of ebb of flow with ethereal video footage, and appropriately stylised live animations. Walking into the venue though, one of the first things noticed was his rig, as he tends to use a range custom analogue equipment, and on this occasion had an impressive modular synthesiser embedded in a suitcase, spaghetti patchwork of cables arcing out of it everywhere, flanked by a range of controllers and a laptop for controlling video. A desk microphone let him use his voice to provide raw sound for filtering, processing into a swell of buzzing insects, mid ocean waves or a distant rumbling volcano. All the while letting slow and atmospheric video drift by on screen ( or into the screen in the case of road journeys into a floating cloud of mist ), or smoothly shifting animated light patterns over time.

Nice stuff, and he has a DVD out, a compilation of 4 AV tracks – all tracks are improvised, vision and sound recorded in a single pass, no overdubs, then minimal mixing/mastering / compressing / EQ etc. Visually, he works by taking photos and video with a consumer grade digital still camera ( the growing video quality on cheap still cameras continues to amaze and surprise me ), manipulating them in photoshop / after effects / motion and then layering these with quartz composer animations that are audio responsive and midi controllable. His work is also creative commons licenced, so you can both view and remix it over at abreojos.net.

Big Square Eye
Received this impressively realised DVD compilation in the mail recently, it having been produced for the Brisbane Festival 2008 at the tail end of workshops with 15 young Queenslanders given access to a range of gear, mentors and two things that help most projects – a deadline and a budget. The end result is surprisingly sophisticated, in both conceptual and aesthetic realms, and well supported by the DVD packaging and menu interface. The clips range from shimmery plays of light to stop-motion political critique, clip art animations, absurdist puppetry and abstraced visual effects. There are few visual cliches scattered amongst it all, but on the whole an impressive effort, and more so for the ways it is being distributed and displayed across many parts of regional Queensland in various non-gallery contexts like retail displays. Clips, artist information and related essays viewable online.

Digital Fringe
Happens in Melbourne soon ( Sep 24 – Oct 12 – digitalfringe.com.au ), bringing together a range of events, a mobile projection unit ( van with projectors, solar-charged batteries, online laptops, projector and video camera ) which travels around projecting onto Melbourne walls and sends the resulting footage onto the web in real-time. Anyone wanting to have their work projected with this, and on many screens all around Melbourne during the festival, can upload video at the Digital Fringe site ( you can also view / download other submissions for remixing ).

“Where are we when on the phone?”

On a rooftop it turns out. International no-budget short film made around 2003, based on the idea that if a few people around the world were able to film themselves doing something with a phone on a rooftop, this might be a fruitful plot device, or at least provide some kind of continuity and fun for editing later on. And so, a request was sent out through the networks, that pretty much said :

“Can you make 30 seconds of video that starts with you answering a phone, and ends with you dialling a call?”

Many months later ( imagine – a time before youtube! ), had compiled a diverse range of contributions from Sadie Plant, Neotropic, Scanner, Howard Bloom, a Colombian rooftop party, Rebecca Cannon, Captain Frodo, Anna Sagaponic and many more – and massaged these together into one ‘continuous’ tale linked by rooftop phone action.

Ended up on a Neopoetry DVD compilation, and subsequently screened at Straight Out Of Brisbane, Electrofringe & other festivals and exhibitions internationally. Came with a companion essay. And in the endless Melb-Winter-Of_Productivity 2008, it’s finally online.

.. one might think, lurks a Turkish Batwoman. Turkish Batman has been found. However, despite my best attempts before, during and after 6 months in Istanbul last year, Turkish Batwoman remains elusive. Batboy in the comments of a previous post about this search, located the internet movie database listing for Turkish Batwoman, but these aren’t the only steps closer…

Was aware of Mexican Batwoman ( pic above), (La Mujer Murcielago aka Batwoman ( 1968, Mexico ) : “pretty ambitious for what is in essence a Mexican wrestling film” ), but recently discovered a torrent download for that and The Wild World of Batwoman (1966 US), as well as learning the existence of Batwoman and Robin (1972, Philippines), and Batwoman and Robin Meet the Queen of the Vampires (1972, Philippines), Super Mario Nazi Batman, and then … Bathman dal pianeta Eros ( Bathman On The Planet Of Pleasure – 1982 Italy ) :
“Sexually-obsessed Bathman (Mark Shannon) and Klito-Bell arrive from the planet Eros and fight perverted criminals on Earth, such as prostitutes and rapists, in this outrageous Batman spoof. Holy lawsuit!”

The Turkish remakes keep popping out of the woodwork too – Turkish Bruce Lee, Turkish Zorro, Turkish Conan, and even Turkish Mad Max, but for now, Turkish Batwoman remains on the prowl…

Broadcast media organisations are slowly adapting to the idea that their audiences can produce and distribute media too, shifting the top down one-to-many model of media to one of many-to-many. Representing part of an adaptive strategy over at the ABC, pool.org.au is about to launch, a site where anyone can upload and publish material – or remix some of what is there already. John Jacobs ( Video Subvertigo, Indymedia, ABC’s Night Air ) was happy to be interviewed about the site’s aims.

The pool site is about to launch – what would you like to imagine it being in 2010?
By 2010 I’d hope that media professionals and consumers had used the live web to blur each others boundaries and used spaces like Pool to build the new public media forms and platforms. So maybe Pool 2010 is some kind of aggregated media tagzine.

To what extent are ABC radio and TV archives available now, and what kind of plans are there for increased future availability?
Opening up the ABC archives is an important goal for many people.  Like the BBC, the ABC recognizes the huge potential of digital access to its back catalogue. There’s a balancing act to be played out between intellectual property rights and public interest. Public media is shifting roles from broadcasting media units to hosting a digital connection cloud. Right now ABC TV’s iView (abc.net.au/tv/iview ) is one avenue for directly accessing popular current productions. I can see a future where less high profile ABC output is delivered to the pubic domain directly. Pool is modeling this with its use of Creative Commons licensing.

What ABC media would you especially enjoy seeing remixed by it’s audience?
In the night garden it’s one of my favorite shows. Like Telly Tubbies and Mr Squiggle before that, kids programming always has the most open agenda and abstract language that naturally welcomes remix or re interpretation. Just add a bit of ABC news actuality and you are in VJ heaven.

What contributions have surprised you so far?
I liked hearing Holy’s story of her squat but it was so great hearing Dan turn it into a song!

What limitations of current Pool system are you looking to transcend?
Pool is a space to rethink public media, there are plenty of limitations but also many possibilities. I invite you all to log in and start to co-create. Once media objects are free of ownership many options open up.

Examples of forward-thinking broadcast media projects online?
Engagemedia.org is a great homegrown example of direct video publishing. And viddler.com okay it’s like just another You tube competitor but check out it’s time line annotation feature. Soon social media will aggregate tags like “silly” into a channel and then I will have found a home.
 
Other video remix sites that inspire?
The “Related to” side bar on Youtube, I love browsing have you watched http://play.blogger.com?

Blame it on the Melbourne winter, but recently I’ve embarked on the task of republishing a few hundred odd articles from my former blog, the now defunct octapod.org/jeanpoole, which covered live video, electronic art and music, tasmanian tigers, gangsta rapping physicists and other odds and ends from 2001-2005. Though some are less relevant today, there’s plenty of still interesting interviews amongst it all, and figured if these files already exist on a hard-drive somewhere, that may as well be on a publically accessible one.

The archives has the full list of what has been transferred so far, and I’ll add another post when the process is finished, highlighting some of my favourites over the years ( though I’ve published the embarrassing ones too.. ). For now though, here are a few of the live video and VJ related posts which now live on skynoise..

Artist interviews…
A Brief History of VJing in Australia ( longgg interview heavy piece focussed around late 90s onwards), The Light Surgeons (UK), VJ Honeygun Labs(US), Jasch (Switzerland), Eye-Fi(Sydney), John De Kron ( Germany), Falk (Germany), Lalila (Sydney), Semi-Conductor (UK), Rawbone ( Perth ), DJ Spooky on cutting film ( US ), Falk on VJ blogging (Germany), Solu ( Finland/Spain), Runwrake (yes he VJs sometimes as well as being an amazing animator)(UK), DJ Yoda (UK), Neotropic on music and film (UK), audiovisualizers.com interview, meta, QBert on Wave Twisters (US), and Addictive TV ( UK) and 242 Pilots ( US/Europe) both of which slipped through as ‘recent’ posts.

VJ related Software reviews :
Comprehensive overview of VJ Software in 2004 with screenshots, interviews, smaller VJ software round-up in 2005, vdmx 2, VDMXX 4.0, Grid Pro Vs Arnold Schwarzenegger, v-track, Arkaos video sampler, Arkaos VJ 3, Wildform Flix, Isadora, Livid 1.1

Wheeeeeeeeee~!

(( Update : this interview was done in 2003, and is part of large import of writing from the now defunct octapod.org/jeanpoole, which covered live video and electronic art from 2001-2005. Mostly I’ve been publishing the posts with their original date, but this slipped through and has been linked to already. See the archives for more. ))

Satellites these days get so micro, you can practically zoom in on someone moving house and tell whether they’ve packed their underwear or not. Graham lost a nice pair of commodore 64 boxers once. You get this though, when relentlessly travelling around Europe to promote your UK-based audiovisual label, vj & TV production crew, Addictive TV. Coincidentally, they’ve released a DVD, ‘Spaced Out’ which has the likes of Cold Cut and EBN remixing 40 years of NASA space footage. They’d love some Aussie content for their acclaimed Mixmasters audiovisual DVD series, and some of this will be screened in a few months on SBS. Will review ‘Spaced Out’ next week, and leave www.addictive.com 2u.

What was a turning point for your understanding of how audio and vision relate?
Lots really. As a kid, I watched a lot of musicals. Check out, say, old Fred Astaire movies and often the music and film action is completely synched. Even Fiddler on the Roof or the total trippyness of Bedknobs & Broomsticks have very musical audiovisual scenes – where the sound from the action you see is incorporated in the music. But with our own work, I remember watching people’s faces when we had a screening of Transambient back in ‘98, they were completely fixated – that was a turning moment.

What’s the difference between your TV and club work?
With TV & DVD work, things have to work far more on a one-to-one basis between viewer and the TV. Repetition and loops can last much longer in a club than on TV, simply because people are maybe more focused on the music and experiencing the images in a less direct way. Similarly, some images work well on TV but look naff in a club. Also, a live performance is a one-off; so tends to be more spontaneous, which can also mean it’s less polished than recorded work, which has to stand up to being watched over and over.

What TV projects are you working on now?
Series 3 of Mixmasters for ITV1 over here – just started talking to labels, VJs, animators etc. As the series’ have gone on, they’re really reflecting the expanding global visuals scene, it’s great to see the really different work that comes out of say, Tokyo or Berlin. Mixmasters has always been a mixture of original audiovisual work and DJ/VJ mixes, but more AV artists are cropping up now so we’ll be seeing more of that. Should say by the way, that series 1 is on SBS this Spring.

How can aspiring OZ-VJs or audiovisualists submit for the Mixmasters series?
Send us examples – not just live mix tapes, but recorded work, promos, AV mixes, stuff they’ve put into festivals etc. Mixmasters is much more about VJs being visual recording artists than a “live DJ/VJ mix” project. Our postal address is on www.addictive.com and we’ll be all finished around July.

What bores you to tears about live video or videoclips?
Cameras on the DJ. The same short clips fired off a laptop all night. Old clips of breakdancers. Flying down tunnels. Endless spinning 3D objects.

What have you noticed about the evolution of the Mixmasters series?
How we’ve still got a long way to go in terms of AV and visuals being accepted globally, and how closed-minded so many broadcasters are around the world. It’s clear though that more and more people are getting into visuals – it’s really growing quite quickly. In some ways the whole thing might be growing too quickly. There aren’t enough media outlets for this and right now the entertainment industries (clubs, music, television and the wider media etc) aren’t supporting the whole ‘AV thang’ in all its guises enough to sustain a rapidly growing VJ / AV scene. Hopefully that’ll change in the coming years.

Audiovisual software & hardware stepping forward at the moment?
It’s good to see companies like Pioneer and Roland developing or making off-the-shelf gear now aimed at VJs. With software, there seems to be new stuff appearing every week! Also, I know someone creating work for some VJ gaming software for one of the games consuls, so someone thinks “there’s money in them there hills!”.

What’s Addictive.TV doing in 2010?
Running it’s own 24 hour channel – presuming the world’s not been reduced to a Mad Max style smallpox ridden wasteland by then, in which case we’ll be running an audiovisual club for mutants that still have eyes and ears.

See also : another addictive interview for ministry mag and
addictive tv DVD reviews

Video odds and ends eh? Below, footage from a few hundred kilometres north of Perth in Dec 2007, with Shultz Marshall aka ‘Captain Rad’, ( ex-drummer for Aleks + the Ramps ) and my new underwater camera casing. Little intro sequence of waves crashing @ the Bogey Hole in Newcastle, NSW. Music by Suckafish P Jonez from Brisbane, and we used this clip as part of a 12 minute AV performance @ NIDA in Sydney early 2008.

(click the pic below to see the video @ my blip.tv page, the 640×480 is too wide for ze blog )

Deconstructing the photographs of Abu Ghraib with Errol Morris.

Melbourne’s Cinema Nova recently screened the latest Errol Morris documentary, and a few minutes after it finished, cut to the director on the screen, who chatted and answered audience questions enthusiastically for some 45 minutes via satellite ( or skype / ichat ). Felt quite the privilege to have such direct access to Errol, straight after his compelling and confronting exploration of events at Abu Ghraib, hearing his clarifications and reasonings behind his film making decisions. And felt surprisingly natural to have the director on screen at the audience’s disposal, a pretty effective way of distinguishing a cinema house from a home theatre, likely something we’re going to see more.

“Cinematic interventions? Oh, that makes me sound like some kind of psychiatric social worker.. ( much audience laughter ), ” was his response to an early question about his use of heavily stylised renactments within the film.
“I liked to think of them as ‘visual moments’ .. and the most important is that the filmmaker seeks truth, then the techniques available can be used in service of this.”

The truth Errol seeks in Standard Operating Procedure is the wider context and realities surrounding the events in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The prison received global attention in 2004 when photographs were released detailing many instances of humiliating and degrading behaviours and events seemingly being orchestrated by U.S. prison guards. Central to Errol’s film is examining these photographs with a range of interviewees ( including several of the guards ) and forensic experts and trying to piece together what actually happened, and to what extent the individuals charged and imprisoned were acting according to their own impulses or to instructions from above as part of a larger system.

A few key points jumped out from the screening : – although a military prison, the majority of those imprisoned were local males of ‘fighting age’ who had been gathered from the streets for various minor or alleged offences. – The photographs shown were from the ‘softening process’, something that was used before the prisoners were sent to be tortured. This was a preparation phase, and the public hasn’t seen photos from the ‘torture phase’. – the guards repeatedly described how they had arrived into and were consistently given instructions from above. – No-one higher in rank than the low ranking officers witnessed in the photographs has been charged or imprisoned, despite one of the photographs containing the dead body of a man who had died during torture, effectively having been murdered in prison.

The film is disturbing on many levels, and achieves it’s power in part from the way Morris interviews his subjects – he uses what he calls the interrotron ( see diagram : http://tiny.cc/iSgsv ), a camera technique he invented using a teleprompter to show the interviewers face in front of the camera lens, which allows the interviewee to make eye contact with the audience. And so much of the film involves U.S. military prison guards detailing explicit and depraved scenarios but while seeming to stare across with coffee table intimacy. In the Q+A afterwards, Morris was asked about this and pointed out that the person asking that very question had to choose between looking into a camera and looking at Errol on the screen, but couldn’t do both, hence Errol was seeing video of someone who was looking off to one side

Errol’s Got A Pedigree
The Fog of War – about the life and times of former United States Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, won best documentary academy award in 2004, but several of his earlier documentaries weren’t nominated as his various experimental techniques ( in the service of telling the story ) caused concern with the oscar givers.

The Thin Blue Line – investigated the murder of a police officer and famously helped someone facing the death penalty in texas get released, and introduced stylised renactments as a controversial technique for documentary making back in 1988.

A Brief History of Time – documented the life of physicist Stephen Hawking.

Fast, Cheap and Out of Control – a lion trainer, a topiary sculptor, a mole rat specialist, and a robot scientist, got the specialised Morris doco-treatment.

Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr – interviews with an execution technician (!) who is also a holocaust denier because he cannot conceive that the Auschwitz gas chambers were technically possible ( not that Fred has researched this much at all ).

Gates of Heaven – Errol’s first documentary about a pet cemetery business – and which spawned a short film in response : “Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe” in which the German director held up his part of a bet and cooked his shoe on stage with herbs and garlic then ate it upon Errol’s finishing the film.

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

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

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

(* ie not this )

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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