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.

Surely one of the weirder news stories of late, but the first world champion chess player to ever be defeated by a computer ( the ‘Deep Blue’ machine, 1997), Russia’s Gary Kasparov, recently found himself in range of bizarre headlines after being attacked by a remote control ‘helicopter penis’. The youngest ever World Chess Champion in 1985, and ranked world no.1 almost continuously from 1986 until his retirement in 2005, Gary has been using his chess profile lately to promote the ideas of The Other Russia, a coalition opposing the administration of Vladimir Putin. He must’ve been as surprised as anyone to find a recent speech interrupted by a “large phallus-shaped helicopter started buzzing around the room.” The ‘protest’ seems related to a Second Life prank a few years ago, when a CNET interview was interrupted by a series of flying, animated penises. The Tube’d have more, keyword search at your own risk.

Likely amused by it all, is comic artist Chester Brown, who has published a range of graphic novels over the years, often detailing his attempts to grapple with his sexuality, and in one particular short story from ‘The Little Man: Short Strips 1980-1995‘, he brags to another schoolmate about how he escaped from school one day by swinging his penis around really fast and using it as a helicopter blade to jump from a rooftop. Chester is also famous however for a character being chased by cannibalistic pygmies and having the tip of his penis replaced by the head of a miniature Ronald Reagan from another universe. That’d be all for today.

(And late shout-outs to C.H.U.N.K. 666 – ain’t a welded bicycle gang with choppers meaner than theirs .. )

Well not quite, but a guest post by the author of Francis Bear*, Silent Army comic artist Gregory Mackay ( Francis Bear, Terminal, Syndrome, Morrisey Minor etc ), flexing his military-buff chops here to dissect Sylvester Stallone’s latest military entertainment fireworks. ( *Week in and week out, Francis Bear’s review of Scott McCloud’s Making Comics remains one of the most popular posts on skynoise. )

The fourth film in the Rambo legend has a few, perhaps unintentional qualities which make the film more entertaining than first intended. As an action film the story is generally secondary but in this version of the Rambo myth, Rambo is redeemed back to his former self by enacting the will of a Christian organisation going to its doom in the jungles of Myanmar. Rambo once again employs his typical Green Beret load out from previous films. In this case however Stallone revisits the blacksmith qualities of Rambo, cut from previous films, to make a handy Machete from a truck leafspring. It reminds a little of the Jawbone of a donkey used by Samson to smite some heathens. The famous knife maker Gil Hibben, who was responsible for all previous Rambo knives, was also asked to create this new monstrosity. It takes a great craftsman; it seems, to turn to a lump of truck into a sharp Rambo lump of truck. Rambo also makes a handy propeller for his boat out of some rebar.

The film takes advantage of the Digital Intermediate process, which enables digital manipulation and colour grading before a negative is printed. The cinematographer takes full advantage of this method showing of skills he learned on the Martin Short masterpiece “Jiminy Glick in Lalawood”.

In interview Stallone has remarked on the subtlety of the Christian overtones of this film. The crucifix hanging from his wrist as he performs the last rites of the heathen with a 50 calibre machine gun is about as subtle as you can get. Also rescuing a bunch of peace loving missionaries from themselves is also pretty righteous, as long as you have a bow and arrow. Why does Rambo carry a bow anyhow? In particular a Hoyt recurve bow. Firstly the fisherman angle of hunting fishes out of the river, secondly the silent a deadly state-trained mass murderer angle. The bow does not reveal your position to the enemy and nothing says ‘situation pear-shaped’ like an arrow in the head.

One thing really intrigues me about this film. The evil militia are forcibly recruiting soldiers from the villagers the missionaries are trying to brainwash. Rambo then has to save the Missionaries and villagers from the assaulting evil militia. This means that Rambo is in fact killing the villagers who are working against their will for the militia, and is indirectly performing the ethnic cleansing the militia has been tasked to complete. Thus the moral fibre of the enemy is reversed, they look like militia but are mostly villagers forced to be such, sort of a ‘reverse terrorist’ or unwilling combatant. This makes Rambo’s twilight world of post traumatic stress a little easier to understand as he attempts to redeem himself as some kind of righteous warrior in an obviously confusing scenario. It also helps that the evil militiamen’s commander is a paedophile and must be killed! The use of large calibre rifles and machine guns is also interesting. The film is rated R in Australia because of limbs and heads flying off after the catastrophic attentions of a Rambo commandeered Browning M2 machine gun. The realistic effect of these weapons is more disturbing than simple limb and torso detachment widely seen in the film. In reality bodies in contact with this type of high energy round are dispersed rather like gel or other similarly dense liquid. A bullet like this passing close to you carries enough energy to kill you, mostly from pulmonary barotrauma (exploding lungs). Limbs flying off are far more ‘Rambo’ then someone simply disintegrating or dropping dead.

Made under protection in Thailand from the Thai army, the film borrows heavily from the plight of the entirely underrated Free Burma Rangers who it is said inspired the movie. The first minute of the film is filmed by the FBR in Burma. The FBR is kind of represented in the movie as the rebels who show up now and again in the film somehow attached to the plight of the missionaries and generally saving the day. A great Rambo flashback is also incorporated into the early stages of the film with the use of an unused alternate ending from First Blood where Rambo is killed by his creator Col. Trautmen.

The film ends with a five minute continuous take of Rambo walking along a country road and disappearing into a far off building presumably to be meet his dad; it’s pretty much a shot of grass growing, unless you’re distracted by the credits. It represents a kind of fin de siècle for the Rambo legend with Rambo finally getting to where he was going to before Brian Dennehy pissed him off in the first movie. Stallone however will now go on to write and direct his next feature ‘Poe’ about the great and varied life of Edgar Allen Poe (no machine guns) (( Apparently this is true – jp ))

**

( Am inserting obligatory reference to Rambo death chart here, in which the “Woody Hayes Chair of National Security Studies at Ohio University” neatly maps the evolution in violence across the Rambo franchise. In short – everything increases exponentially, except for the number of men killed by Rambo wearing no shirt ( decreases dramatically ), and the number of Rambo sex scenes – a steady zero. )

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

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

City Lights Project

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

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

Stencil Graffiti Capital Hearts Melbourne. More stencilly stuff.

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

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

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

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

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

Breakdown Press : Local independent publishers of provocative visual material.

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

Dorkbot Melbourne : Local tweakers of electricity and odd projects.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Popcorn Taxi, Melbourne Cinematheque, Silver Screen Sundays, The Astor Theatre, Melbourne Underground Film Festival, Italian Film Festival, The Other Film Festival, Melbourne International Film Festival, Bicycle Film Festival, Melbourne Queer Film Festival, Antimatter Underground Film Festival, Rooftop Cinema, Moonlight Cinema, Junkyard Cinema, St Kilda Openair Cinema, Melbourne International Animation Festival etc etc and film festivals every second weekend or so for just about every clump of people big enough to call themselves a nation.

MISSED ANYTHING ?? Throw it in the comments, and I’ll add it on…

UPDATE :

Outpost / Share : last Wednesday of every month at Horse Bazaar. A/V jam night with feat. guests. ( thanks, Boz )

Time Capsules: ‘Screen Gems in Strange Territories’ every Friday 8.45, 127 Campbell St, Collingwood

(found via ‘i flips me lid’ )

AudioVisual Melbourne is a mailing list with frequently posted items about interesting (audio+) visual events in Melbs.

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.

Blogs make for easy updating of material online for artists, but they’re also great for readers / listeners / viewers /commenters etc – as they provide an easy way to stay in touch with work developed sporadically over time. Latest visual blogs have added to my list of feeds lately includes ‘AVFolklore‘, a new project based blog by the Light Surgeons, a UK AV act who have been kicking ass for most of the 21st century now, but havent been so great at updating their website. The new blog documents their behind the scenes workflow and processes on an AV piece about the history of ‘Uncle Sam’, with some useful insights and a sample clip of their new performance. More vidi-yo? Suuure : http://espvisuals.blogspot.com, with plenny-o-pixel and soft/hardware / clip updates.

Another fine UK-AV homey by the name of Toby Harris ( aka *spark ), has been steadily blogging his progress with quartz composer, VDMX and his custom use of those in extravagant public ways. Well worth a look, and if something even more specific is needed, highly recommend http://runningfromcamera.blogspot.com, a photoblog featuring nothing but photos of a lone cameraman in a variety of locations, running as far away from his camera as his 2 second timer will allow. Mandy Ord is pretty infamous around Melbourne parts for her barbed and gorgeously drawn black and white comics. Which can be now seen more frequently at : http://mandyord.blogspot.com.

Visual curators and connoisseurs abound on ze web, scraping together ‘news services’ for the wow brain. A few faves of late below.

Dark Roasted Blend(.com)
Presumably takes a special breed of hyper-caffeinated noodler to maintain this kinda relentless flow of delicious. On a given day, spectacular cloud formations, bizarre roadsign collections, an amphibious cars photo series, and it was worth subscribing for one picture alone this week – a photo of someone dressed up as a robot holding a cup for spare change and a sign that reads “Replaced by CGI, please help”.

Generator.x: Generative strategies in art & design
Evolutionary architecture, interface exploration, interactive design, snapshots and provocations related to generative art. Thumbs up.

Suzanne G
Squirrels, squids, and not for the squeamish. Victorian era delicacies slipped into a macabre sci-fi blender. A browse of the archives will reveal cuteness and blood in equal measure, an animal kingdom perverted, mechanical oddities, regular snapshots of gorgeous contemporary art, and ultimately, the very quirky yet refined tastes of 1 x Suzanne G.

Ektopia
Hiphop and grafitti flavoured filter for all things visual. This might be a plastic toy design, an album cover, a Japanese robot, street art in South America, or whatever else tickles at the time.

notcot.org
Bit heavy on the fashion/gadget stakes, but the sheer volume of links inevitably unveils a daily wonder.

Diburtimentos
Ongoing sketches uploaded for others to goggle at – whimisical, perverse, improbable.

VADE
New York based VJ who regularly posts video snippets of his max patch experiments, and recently linked to an eyebeam video interview where he discusses his process.

The Perry Bible Fellowship
Nicholas Gurewitch brings the absurd pen and ink noise webside with weekly comics including such hits as ‘Boy Scout Condom badge, The Dreamcatcher 3000, & trampoline hero.

Activate Comics Collective
Rad collection of weekly updated comics by a rad crew, including Dan Goldman of ‘Kelly’ and ‘Shooting War’ fame. We’re talking a dozen or so fine comics updated everyweek in the one convenient location. Bellisimo!

ffffound

Discovered this recently via kottke, and it’s a pretty addictive eyeball fix, each click taking to another array of related imagery. Some social-web functions as well, can get lost in here. Wonder if sites like this will be made redundant to some extent when digg.com finally launches it’s image ranking functions.

Would Subscribe In a Heartbeat
To : a sketchbook by runwrake.com.
To : an extension of the stupendous Leviathan comic by Peter Blegvad.
To: a blog of dream cartoons by Aleksandar Zograf, a Serbian cartoonist with a unique capacity to capture and transmit his vivid dreamlife.
And you have to like someone who has work in an exhibition titled POOR IS A COUNTRY THAT NEEDS SUPERHEROES TO SAVE IT.

( Prefer real life superheroes? Welcome some of these people into your life. )

Dairy Shout Outs :

Or, last night a slab of cheese saved my life, buon giorno : ‘mozzerella de bufala‘.

Ramadan has started in Istanbul, a significant month for Muslims, where amongst various practices, they fast during daylight hours ( have been told to avoid taxi drivers near the end of the day during this month ). It was for Ramadan that the traditional Oktoberfest beer festival was held earlier than usual – in Israeli-occupied West Bank, in the Palestinian Christian village of Taybeh, where a microbrewery recently shifted dates out of respect for muslims . Now you know, thanks BBC.

At 4am a few nights ago, was introduced to another Ramadan practice – via what seemed like raucously drunk drummers pounding out harsh, brutal beats on oil barrels. Found out a few days later, this is a nightly ‘service’ during Ramadan, to wake Muslims before dawn for eating and performing their fajr prayer. And at the end of the month, the drummers will be coming around for payment for this ‘service’.

Which made the above drawing make a bit more sense. Piece is by Art Diktator, an Istanbul artist who plays in
Neoplast, a Turkish goth band. Apparently they do a nice ‘Black Wedding’ cover of Billy Idol’s ‘White wedding’. Text reads : “Ramadan is Cuming. Cosmos is Bleeding. You Bastards. Let me play for Ramadan Armageddon.”

Saw the drawing amongst a range of Art Diktator fusions of sex, violence, death and anti-tourism at The Triangle Project an Istanbul Biennale related project that brought 30 or so Danish artists from Copenhaegen to exhibit, perform and collaborate with Turkish artists. Adding to the cultural mix, most of the events were held in “The Hall‘, a cultural centre that has been converted from an Armenian church ( have only discovered since arriving in Istanbul, the intense historical problems between Turkey and Armenia. ) Shout outs to Mikkel Mayer (introverted folktronica wth great sounds), Kidkishore & VJ Cancer ( aka the albertslundterrorkorps – ‘Danish bhangra gabba mash-up ghettotech’ anyone?) and Band Ane, a 21 year old female singer/laptopper/dancer/prodigy who swings from to glittery idm pop, to ravish jungle by the end of her set.

(click above for full comic-style review )

As the creative media palette expands online, the storytelling and multimedia principles explored in Scott McCloud’s ‘Understanding Comics’, + ‘Reinventing Comics’ become more relevant everyday. ( Aye, aye’s they’s rad books that cannot be recommended enough to any kind of visual creatives ). ‘Making Comics’ is Scott’s latest, which he promoted on a yearlong U.S. tour, trialling mobile ‘home-schooling’ with his teenage daughter on the way. Given the way Scott uses the comic form itself, to deconstruct and explains the subtleties and potential of comics, art, technology etc, it seemed appropriate to review his book in comic-style. Melbourne’s fine comic auteur, Gregory Mackay stepped up to the drawing board for it ( or was it graphics tablet? ), with Francis Bear in tow. ( + Give him a poke to get some more of his enchanting dystopian inked suburbia up online too! )

Love, war and Brooklynite perversions. Plenty of bite in Dan Goldman’s comics, whether it’s his Iraq graphic novel with Anthony Lappe : ‘Shooting War’ (.com ), or “Kelly”, his ‘damaged romance Craigslist thriller serialized weekly on ACT-I-VATE ( a cool and prolific webcomics collective ). He was also cheerful enough to answer the comic fanboy questions below.

What made you realise you wanted to make Shooting War?

First and foremost, that reading it scared me. Aside from its snarky attitude, the plausibility of our near-future was as awful as it is likely. That and the script was full of things I wasn’t sure I could render as intended. As a rule of thumb, if something scares me… I charge right for it, my Taurean method of meeting conflicts head-on.

What roles and relationships did you have making Shooting War?

Initially, Anthony was to deliver the script in screenplay format and I’d adapt the script into comics. We’d meet early in the week, talk through things, and then I’d chicken-scratch the script into page layouts in my pocket moleskine. Pretty early on, we realized that ideas were coming into the script from these sessions, and the whole project got a lot more collaborative. Having never been in Iraq, I had a lot of questions that were important to me in making this place ring true, as a service to both sides of the conflict… but I’ve been writing/drawing comics for several years and my experience came into play structuring the story, pacing the rise and fall of the conflicts, developing Abu Adallah and weaving the threat of the Sword of Mohammed into what they ultimately become in the final novel. On the credits page, Anthony is the writer and I am the illustrator, but the baby definitely has his eyes and my nose.

What feedback surprised you about it?

How quickly it spread and how many people it resonated with; by the time the third episode hit the web, we’d gotten a glowing full-page review in the Village Voice and it was obvious that it was only the beginning. As happy as I am about all our press for the webcomic, I am twice as excited to see old fans blown away twice when they see the final OGN in their hands.

How do you feel about some of the criticisms from soldiers?

The constructive criticisms have been plugged back into the book version, fixing details that we simply weren’t privvy to during our online run. We were lucky to have a very vocal community spring up around our comic; SHOOTING WAR is by its nature controversial and polarizing, and I’m fine with that, as long as those offended understand the spirit the satire is intended, and how as horrible as the world is/will be, it’s the brighter future we’re all reaching for.

How does public sentiment about the war in Iraq seem to be changing in the states?

The public-opinion puppet show has deemed it OK to criticize the war in 2007, when doing the same in 2002 was a bit more dangerous. Is public opinion changing…? Depends on the media coverage; people have notoriously short attention spans here… and even more are simply tired of hearing about it and change the channel. That’s almost as disheartening as watching the government constantly extending that length of rope it’s supposed to be hanging itself with.

When’ll Shooting War be concluded in print, and will the conclusion eventually be published online also?

SHOOTING WAR will be concluded in print, but the entire print work will be re-cut and re-sequenced to have a more novelistic feel instead of being broken into episodes as it was online. As well, I’ve literally reworked every single panel in the graphic novel to nail the tone just right and best serve Jimmy’s journey. The print version will be previewed online but we’re not planning on concluding the book online for free; I don’t think Grand Central would be amenable to that.

Ze economics of comics. What ways do you see forward, and is there any divide between online and print comic makers?

The techniques, form and medium are all different, and the skills sets needed to create them as well. That said, what binds print and web comics together is the language they use, which is exactly the same glorious visual tongue. Any divide between the two is implied, in my mind; a comic is a comic is a comic to me, and the physical medium the story’s told in is just the container for the dream.

What binds the ACT-I-VATE online community together, and what has inspired about that?

Pure and simple: a love of reading/making comics, learning from each other’s experiments, and pride in the work that we’re all creating side-by-side. We all love what we’re doing over there, free and wild, and the instant gratification of the feedback from our viewers only stokes the ego-flames and keeps us happy as we take our stories closer to the finish line week in after week out.

Favourite non-ACT-I-VATE webcomics?

*A.D. by Josh Neufeld : a nonfiction narrative structured around Josh’s experiences in post-Katrina New Orleans.

*NOWHERE GIRL by Justine Shaw is quite interesting as well; the art is cozy and clean.

*Anything by Derek Kirk Kim; his “Same Difference” made me cry at work and got me thinking about webcomics in a different way (and he’s so goddamned good it hurts). There are literally thousands more for you to check out; planet comics is fit to explode at the seams, it seems.

As a comic artist, do you harbour plans for storyboarding and making animated films?

Someday I’d love to make some films, it’s what I studied in university… but at the moment I’ve got complete creative control over my works, and that’s something nearly unique in the artistic landscape. Wouldn’t trade that for the world.

Review of a book of a festival of a brain-tickling idea.

“The goal of science and the arts, and of education must be to decipher, not the genetic code, but the perceptual code,”

Marshall & Eric McLuhan, ‘Laws of media : The New Science’

as quoted in ‘Book Of Imaginary Media‘.

It’s a tricky question to answer – how do our current media and communication technologies alter the ways we perceive the world and each other? Coming at that from an unusual angle in 2004, was the Amsterdam festival : “An Archeology of Imaginary media”, which sought to explore ‘Imaginary media of past, present and future hoping to glean some insight into our relationship with media. A range of talks happened, and a play written by Peter Blegvad was performed, both later to appear in a book with DVD companion. Which as it turns out, is quite an engaging read (& watch ) despite the seeming abstractness of it’s theme.

“All communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact ( and perhaps even these ) are imagined.’ Communities are to be distinguished not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined,” points out the introduction, before further contexutalising ‘imaginary media’ : ‘like communities, all media are partly real and partly imagined. Without actual or imaginary characters, media cannot function’.

Imaginary Media, the book argues through a series of essays ( & DVD accompaniment), can encompass fictitious characters ( hello Sherlock Holmes), mythical beasts ( hello Pegasus ), the faded futurism of years gone by, and all manner of machines built to enhance or replace human interaction.
“Imaginary media may give rise to actual media, even when their final realization falls short of initial expectation. Media that were once imaginary may at some point become true. Imaginary media may also be sources of inspiration, in which case their effects might very well be felt and made manifest outside of the field of media itself.”

It’s a fun, provocative read, various authors exploring the book’s subtitle ‘Excavating the dream of the ultimate communication medium’ , with explorations of photographs of seances, a vinyl video player which plays back a video signal on a television set, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho distilled and blended down to one single frame, artificial intelligence as imagined early in the 20th century, Nikola Tesla’s plans for developing wireless transmission across the globe, a project that got well underway but was never completed, Thomas Edison’s early plans for a ‘psychic telephone’ that could communicate with the dead, Bruce Sterling’s ‘Dead Media Project’ where he collects dead media technologies… ( for more Bruce mythology, try his sci-fi novels, his viridian manifesto, or spimes ) and Roland Barthes comparing the eye contact he could still have with his mother via a photograph:
‘grasping the delayed light of a star, observing something in it’s course of it’s journey through time’.

DVDly Speaking

For those unfamiliar with the wondrous comicstrip and graphic novel, The Book Of Leviathan, remedy the situation via Amazon or however possible, muchos recommendos. Comic author of that greatness is Peter Blegvad, and he has a few comics on the DVD ( send your prayers faster and further with these patented flippers ), alongside comic authors such as Ben Katchor ( a large electronic eye with melancholy sensors, crying at an exhibition trade show ), Gary Panter and Aleksandar Zograf ( a new breed of plant was cultivated – sensitive to the mind of a dreamer. as a reaction to the close presence of a dreaming mind, the plant forms in one of its big leaves a temporary drawing like configuration that could be observed, photographed and analyzed as it sublimates the general mood of a dreaming consciousness… ).

Beyond these sequences of still pages though, is a 35 minute video by Peter Blegvad of a theatre piece made for the festival, titled ‘On Imaginary Media’, and dripping with his usual wit and esoteric wanderings. Speaking vegetables, a god-detector, Peter’s head as thatched house from which hatchlings emerge, virtual death goggles, mood enhancing military media and much narration, onstage action and occasional displayed quotes such as this future bumper sticker for VJs:

“It should be possible to project on a screen the image of any one object one conceives and make it visible,” Nikola Tesla

and:

“What is real is the life we lead when we lose ourselves, when we abandon or are driven from the rational fiction of our identity; when we fall in love, for example… “
– Michael Wood, the magicians doubts…

‘Book Of Imaginary Media’, Edited by Eric Kluitenberg, NAi Publishers.

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

Web Illustrators