Reasons you might find yourself wanting to read this very long but very awesome Raquel Meyers interview:

- Because you love 8bit graphics and people who push them to their limits

- Because Raquel makes rad stuff ( eg her recent DVD of ‘fighting washing machines and killer lego ducks’, full of videoclips, remixes and collaborations with chiptune musicians and pixel pushers – Useless Yet Crucial).

- Because you want to find out about her ascii storytelling experiments with the C64 shredding musician Goto80.

- Because you love reading about how artists wrestle with their processes.

- Because you need a crazy and wonderful collection of visual links in your day.

Who knows, but I hope you enjoy these responses as much as I did. Thanks Raquel~!

- What’s inspiring you these days?

At the moment I am experimenting with storytelling and text-based graphics like Ascii, Ansi, Petscii and Teletext with Goto80. I’ve changed both the tools and the purpose of what I’m doing during the past months. I guess what I’m doing now is formally similar to text adventures, cartoons, silent movies, text art, demos…

I’ve been mostly inspired by animations and short movies from the 20th century, like “Little island”(1958) by Richard Williams or “Cowboys”(1991) by Phil Mulloy; and also, children’s books. Because of the brutal style of the “Simple storytelling”, the combination of a drawing plus a short phrase who builds a full dream up. This one makes me think about 2 frames animation, and how something simple it become even more brutal, especially working with the C64.

In the case of the short movies, the animation comes before the music, so the video is not the slave of the music (music video style). Sound effects increase the tension and the verve of the animation, and could be use in a shorter way like an interlude, or something longer. But the main thing is the story behind it, whit out it you cannot go further.

A cinematic new age terror is coming!. It operates in text mode, only using characters of the Commodore 64 and Amiga. This applies both to the graphics and the music.

[[ EDIT: Terror is now live - witness “2SLEEP1”, a "66-minute playlist of audiovisual performances in text mode, designed to make you fall asleep. Press play, go fullscreen and lie down. Made by Raquel Meyers and Goto80." screenshots below:]]

- What hardware and software do you use to create your animations?

I use several computers. A C64 with Letter Noperator and DigiPaint. An Amiga 1200 with DPIV, Brilliance, Prism and also an Amiga 600 provided by Archeopterix. A PC and Mac, with Flash, Photoshop, video editors and the (unreleased) petsciibrush software made by Linde. Soon I will add a Teletext device.

I’m not a gear freak. I don’t really care about the tools. I used to work primarily with Flash and Photoshop, which was a pain in the ass for the things I was doing. But I still liked it. Now I use old things (Amiga and C64), and that’s also quite painful sometimes. So to answer the question – I blend old and new technologies. It doubles the pain!

I am not a purist, I am a blender.

- How much of your creative process is defined by the limitations of such technologies?

I prefer to talk about possibilities instead of limitations. I think the technology is not the limited one, is the human behind it. It doesn’t matter how old or new the technology is, there is always something new to discover and learn. It’s not a such a big thing to use old technology, it doesn’t make everything more special, different or better. In my case, I use it because I like it.

But the things I do in Flash are different from what I do on C64. So the process is different. But I don’t really like to think too much about those things.

- Is there some cut-off line for retro computer graphics, where they are too new for you to use? What is it about 8-bit that manages to sustain appeal for you?

At least not for me, I’m not interested in the retro version of 8-bits, so I don’t think about if something is too new to use or not.

I remember playing pong with my brother in the TV console, meet my friends at ‘ la sala de máquinas’  and how I had stuck in my head every night before going to sleep the Tetris song. I grow up with arcade games and graphic adventures but, it wasn’t until 21 century when I discover a C64 music archive on Internet, and all these memories becomes something else because of the music.

It wasn’t a revival, it was something else, the imaginary frame in my head that before was a picture now become pixels looking for to be animated.

I don’t really know, but I think what keeps my interested in 8-bit is the brutalism. Big blocky objects, raw animation techniques, few frames, cuts, etc. I think it’s better if the animation method is brutal, because then it contains so much more than with some detailed video where there’s less room to think on your own.

- What do you find interesting about making live visuals versus production work?

A Live Performance is always open to improvisation and mistakes, meanwhile production work is always under control in the time line. You can rehearse or planning live visuals but at the end you don’t know what is gonna happen. Is really fun put yourself in a non control mode, keeps the spark. And since I don’t really use VJ-software to perform, it’s always a challenge.

- What work have you done on combining and compositing 8-Bit and recorded video together?

As part of Entter (2000-2007), the video clip Fantasy’ by Goto80, and ‘Dietetic Music’ by Eat Rabbit with graphics from Otro. Both of them were my earliest works in the 8-Bit, 2004 and 2005. Based on video recordings and post-production. In latest video clips, I mixed photo animations and graphics like the ‘Droidduck’ by Psilodump (2010), ‘Pink Snow’ by La belle Indifference (2010) and ‘Polybius’ by tr1c3 (2010), based on the main live cinema project ‘Polybius’ with Goto80. Also parts of the vj set contains video and graphics mixed. The reason of that is because my first background was Analog photography. I started when I was 14 years old, with black & white films and experimenting in the lab. The first thing jumping in my mind is always a static picture, a frame. My work is based in the movement or animation of such frames.

- Can you describe your AV set with musician Goto80, Polybius? ( and your aims behind it?)

Polybius …. the idea came from a post I read in my brother’s blog in 2007. The post was about an urban myth about an arcade game from the 1980s (Polybius) that created a sensory and cognitive deprivation in its users. So I started to talked with Goto80 about it and how much I would like to do something with it and with him.  The basic idea was explode the links between fiction and reality by encouraging a loss of senses. But it was not until 2009 when the french collectif ‘Homemade’ invited me for a 2 weeks residence at Le maki (Angoulême, France) when the Polybius experience become something else tahn talks. I developed there a first 20 min version, using a ‘cute’ character like a rabbit to hide my really epileptic and apophenic purpose, and Goto80 was working in the audio online from Sweden. The project was officially presented at the Cimatics festival the same year.

In the beginning of the 2010 we develop together in Berlin the second version who combines line vector aesthetics with video manipulation and 8-bit technology to induce feelings of apophenia, amnesia and panic. The Polybius experience – invented and created by us in the form of a white rabbit with a sectarian-politonic-track to be stuck in your head.

[[ Tangent alert! See also: previous 'C64 Shredding interview with GOTO80', and 'Cappadocia Skies' - a clip I'd made about a hot air balloon ride, with music by one of GOTO80's aliases, Extra Boy. ]]

- What’ve been the challenges of developing that, and what has worked or not, when performed live?

One of the biggest challenges was working in the distance via Spain-Berlin-Sweden thought Internet. Because we build the project together from the beginning and sometimes was really difficult to define and create the content without being in the same place. When we presented the project at Cimatics, we realized we need to meet physically to develop a second version and special place to performed it, out of the club experience. So in the beginning of 2010 we meet in Berlin for a week to prepared the second version, because we were invited by the PlazaPlus Festival in Eindhoven NL to performed it in january. We made a special pass before for the visualberlin collective at fh.meppen (Berlin) to test the extended version of 32min and got feed-backs from the public. The third and last version is pending, who icludes the physical game and an installation. But for this we need budget and maybe a residence to develop it. It’s one of the most complicated projects I have ever done.

- To what extent are you able to adapt the visual side of that with each performance?

My set is manual. To be able to adapt to whatever happens in the live performance. Before I was only using one laptop running an aplication who host all the visual content (graphics, animations, videos …) controlling by hand with the keyboard. So the rhythm was build in the way I click on the keyboard and load the different content. Now I’m working in a new set, who consists in a C64 and an Amiga, still in process, so I used the laptop as extra support with the same technic. A video mixer is used to change the sources, but there is not so much effects involve. The thing that takes more time is making all the animations, graphics and videos. I only used my own material, and always try to made a special set for each performance.

- Have your computer / animation processes ever entered / filtered / affected your dreams in any way?

Yes it does, because I listen so many times the songs when I’m working with it and also I dream with the animations. But ‘Polybius’ was something really insane, I had one of the tracks stuck in my head, like a trance mode to my own sense deleting experience.

- At the ‘Artists-Who-Inspired-Raquel Meyers’ Award Ceremony, who gets the following awards? 

- Visual artist who most steps outside the echo chamber of contemporary styles?

Nam June Paik, the retrospective exhibition ‘The Worlds of Nam June Paik’ in 2001 at Guggenheim Museum Bilbao I saw, put him for me in this category, like the “Magnet TV”.

- Visual artist with the most exquisite and hard to understand technique? 

Poison, I know the technique, but is not enough, because even if you use the same software you cannot have the same results. As PETSCII graphician was really impress how he made ’2frames’ animations and graphics for the C64.

- Visual artist who best gets under your skin? ( transcends technique to grab your emotions ? )

Otromatic, he is my favourite 8 bit graphician. He become one of the reasons why I start to make Lo-fi graphics and animations.

- Best coherent, integrated audiovisual act?

Gangpol & mit. Really impressive performance, one of my favorites. I really enjoy the animations.

But wait, there’s more:

This is something really difficult to do because inspiration doesn’t come only from visuals. They are so many things involve in this process. Here there is some of them, older and newer inspirations:

- Visions of Frank. The dreamlike world of ‘Frank’ a comic by Jim Woodring converted in animations.

- Jan Švankmajer and his surreal animations like ‘Meat Love‘.

- Professor Balthazar, a cartoon series for children, created for television by the Croatian animator Zlatko Grgić. Watching this as a child build a surreal imagery, who come up when you become older.

- Poison, C64 graphician. The ‘Notemaker Demo II‘, all you can do just typing characters.

- Russian and Eastern Europe cartoons (like Suur Toll- Estonia), even if we don’t share the same language, I can feel the eerie atmospheres.

- Bernd and Hilla Becher and their industrial buildings photographies. The motives of my early photographies were the factories buildings from my hometown at night when I was 15 years old.

- Kohei Yoshiyuki and his soft-core voyeur’s manual.

- Stalker, film by Andrei Tarkovsky (1979). This one change something inside me in the 90s.

The Gertrude st Projection Festival

This grows nicely each year, transforming lots of shopfronts and buildings in Gertrude st for a week. Above, a nicely mapped facade by Olaf Meyer. There was apparently a pretty good opening night party of projections, which I missed due to projecting elsewhere for the Scattermusic label launch party. Below, a mapped sculptural piece by studio neighbour, Kit Webster, alongside a fancy dress store where peering into a camera projected your face onto that of a shopfront scuplture. (More projection photos).

Inherent Vice

The National Gallery of Victoria convinced some local comic artists (Pat Grant, Mandy Ord, Michael Fikaris and Simon Hanselman + more) to transfer their private studios into the the public spotlight for a few weeks. The results included a zine fair, 24 hour comic jams, tents and drum-kits set-up in the studio, drawing lessons, an Inherent Vice tumblr and a steady stream of bug-eyed kids and adults wandering through. Check the article in the Australian, or the artist interviews on the Age website.

Winterpark Exhibition of Artworks Inspired by Album

I went to this because local video artist Lucy Benson, now in Berlin, had a hypnotic piece in it - ’Gotta Sleep now’, but my camera phone couldn’t really capture her shimmery work. Below, a sculpture that nicely incorporates video and little people. Can’t figure out from the event page who actually made it though, maybe you can. Nice idea for an exhibition, and great to see the different interpretations of the tracks.

Nosaj Thing Live at Kensington

Hadn’t even heard of the warehouse venue Nosaj was playing at – Revolt – and arrived to a building crazily decked out with technical and bar infrastructure, including pyramid mapped video sculptures by Kit in the distance. Came complete with a 90s black light chill out room. The Nosaj set was great, the rest of it got a bit wonk-saturated after a while.

Audiovisual Performances

Zeal and Time Shield have been steadily honing their AV performances around town, and recently Zeal invited me to do an AV set at Bar Open in support of his threepiece Virtual Proximity (see above). I was quite happy with this set, playing with some ambient music, ocean footage and quartz patches in VDMX. Elsewhere, Sampology came down from the subtropics to do an AV show, and Naysayer and Gilsun more recently launched their new AV set. There be audiovisual things happening. (Often at Racket – first thursday of each month at Miss Libertines in the city, and Plug N Play – last Thu of each month at Kent st bar, Fitzroy. )

MÖBIUS by ENESS

MÖBIUS from ENESS on Vimeo. This ‘collaborative stop motion scuplture’ was the brain child of Benjamin Ducroz, an extension of his work with time lapse and physical sculpture – this time using lots of help from public volunteers in rearranging the pieces over and over throughout the day.

And yeah, Melbourne International Animation Festival and the 60th Melbourne International Film Festival just whipped past. Quite a few delights and surprises in there. Will bundle together a short post and some links to the films I liked in a while. This’ll have to do for now. Springtime!

Above, Pattern Machine, the fruits of a recent fourway collaboration in a weeklong residency on Cockatoo Island ( a former prison and shipbuilding yard in Sydney Harbour), during the 2011 Underbelly Arts Festival.

By the end of the week, after much tech configuration, island sampling*, and software wrestling, we’d concocted a work in progress that was deemed seaworthy enough for 3 x 45 minute audiovisual sets during the public exhibition night. And during that day the space was filled with people wandering around the inflatable sculpture, while cocooned by a generative surround installation busy mutating captured island sounds into new species. Turns out the accumulated ferry rides, nautical rust and winter winds were worth enduring in the end, as the performance seemed to go really well, much of the pieces falling into shape on the very last evening before the event.

For myself, it was very satisfying to have an opportunity to explore video composition in a great setting, and in a more spatial way – using an external graphics card to send a different signal to 3 different projectors simultaneously, using madmapper to position and map the video from each of these, and having the luxury of returning each day to experiment with equipment that was already set-up. And it was super-satisfying to be doing that with…

These 4 People = Pattern Machine

Jean Poole: spatial video composition and live video manipulation with 3 projectors, vdmx, quartz composer and madmapper.
Dan MacKinlay + James Nichols: Quadrophonic soundscapes using field recordings, vintage synthesisers and heavily customised super collider patches. (They don’t have much vinyl, but their phd maths books weigh a tonne.. )
Sarah Harvie: inflatable sculpture, tailor designed for our space with lots of late night industrial sewing machine sweat.

(( *My Cockatoo Island photo set, Dan’s photo set, and Dan’s stereo field recordings. ))

Underbelly Artists Shout Out:

Aside from the audacious setting, part of what made the residency great was the motley collection of artists also spending time on the island, each struggling with their own peculiar set of problems to solve. And it was inspiring to see everyone’s work evolving over the week. This extensive  festival review gives a good taste of how the exhibition day unfolded, and these were some of my favourites:

Case Study - This was my pick of the bunch, 6 artists who had the aim of building a new colonial society in their allocated portion of the island. Which they built out of everything they brought in their suitcases, as well as using their suitcases themselves to build individual artist houses. There were telescopes and projected moons, ornate water features, mossy forests growing from open suitcases and test tubes, every step a new photogenic overload.

Younes Bachir and Strings Attached got the jaw-drop-spectacle medal – with their meat-suits, paint-splashy aerial choreography ( imagine a dozen people 4 storeys up dynamically moving about in space ) and flair in abundance. ( This gives a good taste of why it excited.. )

Brad Miller’s Data_shadow video installation was super-slick, an exploration of memory, technology and how lusciously you can make a database of photographs and video wander across 4 screens with motion detection cues from visitors. Biljana Jancic‘s wooden boxed shafts of light played beautifully with the smoke machines, silhouettes and the industrial space and  SWANBRERO used inflatable car sales dancers to great effect in their piece - INFLATE MY HEART WITH 1000 GUSHES OF WIND .

Above, after much hair-pulling : VDMX merrily sending out 2400 x 600 pixels across 2 screens and 1 projector, via the set-up below.

ie – 2010 Macbook Pro –> mini display to DVI convertor –> DVI cable –> Matrox Triplehead2go Digital Edition –> DVI to VGA adaptors x 3.

According to Matrox, only the Triplehead2go DP ( Display Ports in/out) edition is compatible with the 2010 Macbook Pro. I wasn’t able to get that to send a signal to projectors, using display port to VGA adaptors. The DP-VGA adaptors by themselves worked fine on the ends of other cables, but when put after the TH2GO DP box, no signal. Weird science.

Was just about to sell the older Matrox Digital Edition, which ended up incompatible with my last machine, but aaaaaanyways. THREE SCREENS OUT. And with less than 3 hours til airport-to-Sydney time, for tomorrow’s video installing on Cockatoo Island, this is a good thing. Also good – the holy software trinity of VDMX, Syphon + Madmapper all worked perfectly across the 3 screens.

Below, Madmapper stretching across screens, even as computer leads are being stolen away from it and shoved into a bag.

Have been doing some experiments recently with Troy Innocent, involving laser cut characters, everyday scenes and projection mapped video. We’re trying to figure out what works well for us, with an eye to fleshing out something some kind of developed work later. Troy has access to a laser cutter at work, and obviously the attraction there is to play with the unique levels of intricacy that a laser cutter allows with materials such as plastic and thin plywood. Taking that a step further, we thought it’d be fun to develop some simple low frame animation loops with these physical characters and record them moving about in stop motion. We’ve done some simple tests outdoors which worked well, surprisingly popping to life when played in sequence onscreen, and most recently we tried an indoor shoot, which gave another chance to test out Madmapper.

Re-Routing Video in 2011

First up, the whole routing video clips between video applications thing, enabled by Syphon, is really fantastic. For me, this means VDMX to Syphon to Madmapper to the projector. Manipulate video in your preferred real-time software, then at the end of the chain remap this video onto what Madmapper calls ‘surfaces’, creating, positioning and reshaping as many of these surfaces as you like. This makes sense and so far the addition of running Syphon + Madmapper alongside VDMX hasn’t seemed to dent the performance of VDMX at all. That might change with more complicated projection mapping – we’ll see.

Some Madmapper Observations

As seen above, the Madmapper interface is minimal and intuitive, and this helps mapping happen super quickly. For our test mapping onto some paper skyscrapers, it was a simple process of selecting which part of the video to be sent to a surface, then clickdragging the corners of the virtual surface until it the video filled the actual surface of the paper skyscraper in front of the projector. Total time to line-up video on the sides of 3 buildings? About 5 minutes. This is a very simple example, and possible with other existing software – but this software certainly makes the process a breeze. Am going to post a full review of Madmapper soon, and discuss some of it’s strengths and weaknesses for dealing with more complex scenarios. In the meantime, it’s worth noting that although it’s pitched as a solution for reconfiguring 2D imagery onto 3D shapes – Madmapper’s ease of use also makes it a very attractive option for just even compositing imagery within 2D environments. From the close-up below it should be evident how straight forward it is to select portions of video, and quickly composite this into desired shapes.  More laters!

Now that I’ve finished marking all of the respective assignments from classes at RMIT and Swinburne, am looking forward to biting properly into a few long neglected creative projects / overloaded bookshelves / learning curves etc. And that overdue skynoise overhaul so it better reflects the 2011 web and myself. Next up though, a video island adventure in Sydney harbour.

As part of the 2011 Underbelly Arts festival, I will be creating video projections to accompany long time audio wizard collaborator Dan MacKinlay, James ‘Dubtable’ Nichols ( that’s him in the photo), and Sarah Harvie whose specialty is inflatable sculptures! We’ll be doing this as ‘Pattern Machine’ in the space photographed above, which is one of the ancient ship building rooms at Cockatoo Island in Sydney Harbour. Pattern Machine has a tumblr and a twitter account, where we’ll be documenting our preparations and experiments, and also has a festival page, alongside all the other festival artists.

This year’s festival was pitched as an island residency for developing some works in progress. Looks like it’ll be quite an interesting collection of projects, with many artists practicing / building / tinkering on site in public view, followed by a performance  and exhibition day on July 16th, showcasing what has been explored during the residency.

For our part, the work in progress will mean explorations into location sampling and weird algorithimic audio with Super-Collider (eg “New No New Age Advanced Ambient Markov Music Machine” and attempts to intertwine inflatable tendrils around the machine relic within our inherited room. Pixel-wise – I’m hoping to do some projection mapping experiments onto that machine relic, re-animating it as it were, in real-time response to the sounds happening, and similarly try to create some kind of responsive visual designs on the inflatable structures. Aside from that, I’ll also be testing out a triple screen external graphics card ( matrox triple head 2 go ) to experiment with simultaneously projecting various scenes onto the wall behind the machine and inflatable sculpture. For the scenes projected on the wall, will be playing with some simple responsive graphics and some filmed / composed sequences of various events / stop motion / locations from around the island. My tools of choice : VDMX + Quartz Composer, with Madmapper for the projection mapping (Madmapper review coming soon).

Below, James and The Machine, moustache not to scale:

The downturn in advertising revenue was blamed variously on the GFC, a downturn in clubbing and an increasing shift by promoters to the internet. It was often weird writing a very net focussed column for a weekly print mag, but never more so than this week. And it has certainly been an eventful decade for a column about media technologies. ]]]

</TECHNOSCAPE>

1998: Remember when that new search engine came out, promising better results with it’s algorithmic interrogation of linked relationships online? That was Google, in its PRE-VERB DAYS. Paypal launched that year too.

1999:     Napster. RSS. SETI@Home

2000:    Blogger.

2001:     Wikipedia. Creative Commons. Bit Torrent. The first ipod arrived.

2003:     Myspace (remember that?). Skype. Second Life. the ITunes store. 4chan. Pirate Bay. Delicious. WordPress.

2004:     Facebook (Yep, it has only been that long). World of Warcraft. Flickr

2005:     Youtube. Google Earth.

2006:     Twitter, and a little site called Wikileaks.

2007:     Tumblr. The first iPhone arrived.

2009:     Kickstarter. FourSquare.

2010:     Instagram. Quora.

While I’d like to be able to say I was writing Technoscape since BEFORE GOOGLE EXISTED, I don’t think that was quite the case. 3D World on the other hand, goes back further, splashing it’s first club culture ink in 1989, before Facebook, before MySpace, before Youtube, before Google, BEFORE THE FIRST WEB BROWSER in 1993. Imagine – a time before the web even existed, and there were so many people dancing in dusty warehouses, that they needed their own magazine. In a time BEFORE STATUS UPDATES.

That loose timeline also shows we have no clue about what yet-to-be-invented internet services we’ll likely heavily rely on in only a few years time, and serves as validation for the ‘future proofing’ strategy of installing high bandwidth fibre optic under the NBN scheme. Less validating? Australia’s proposed net filter.

In 2001 some new fledgling software called Ableton Live was born in Berlin. You might’ve been using Photoshop 6.0, Final Cut Pro 3, After Effects 5.0, Cubase VST32 5.1, Pro Tools 5.0, Rebirth(!), Arkaos, VDMX and so on. And today, are we really much better, faster, stronger? A few quick keywords show how our tools and processes and possibilities have evolved: kinect hacks / serato bridge / maxforlive / processing / vvvv / syphon recorder / madmapper / quartz composer / touchOSC. More sophisticated, yepz, but arguably not much different.

3DWorld, it has been a fucking pleasure. Stay in touch via skynoise.net or twitter. I can’t believe this is the very last Technoscape sentence, and it is now exactly 400 words.

Measured in net years, Wacom’s Intuos 4 graphics tablet is already a sleek, sleepy dinosaur, having been released in 2009. On the other hand, given today’s infatuation with touchscreen tablets and their gestural capabilities, it’s worth reinvestigating what benefits a traditional graphics tablet can offer.

Straight Up
Touchscreen tablets are great media browsing devices and provide lovely accessible software interfaces. No argument there. But when it comes to fine, detailed control, touchscreen tablets can only manage the tiniest fraction of a graphics tablet’s input sensitivity.

But wait – your friend has paid money to a kickstarter project which will be sending them a newly designed conductive texta pen for use on their ipad. Or they’re getting a Bamboo stylus for the iPad. That’s awesome, but it’s still effectively only fingerpainting resolution. Fun to apply direct to the screen (and much cheaper than Wacom’s direct to screen Cintiq Interactive Pen Displays), but still very limited when it comes to precision and detail.

And when it comes to precisions, the Intuos 4 has the highest sensitivity of any graphics tablet available today (5080 lpi resolution, and 2048 levels of pressure). It also comes with a precision pen (60 degrees of detetctable tilt), customisable shortcut buttons and a radial menu system (think ipod) with LED labels (visible in the photo above). So when you’re ready to shift from fingerpainting little animated flipbooks on your touchscreen tablet, to creating highly detailed worlds, the graphics tablet is your new best friend.

Special Features
I’ve owned an Intuos 2 in the past and was skeptical there’d be much difference, but a range of carefully implemented design changes make the Intuos 4 noticably better to use. The physical shape has been slightly adjusted to feel more comfortable, the USB cable can be attached from 2 locations to suit left or right handers (there’s also a wireless Intuos option), the pen has been made more ergonomic (it actually feels better), and the express buttons and a touch ring have been nicely integrated beside the drawing surface, for easy access to whichever software menu items you set them up for (on a global or application by application basis).

What really brings it all together though for this version of the tablet though, is the addition of LED labels that accompany the express keys and touch ring, as these lit up labels help enable easy navigation of complex customisations and menu layers, which makes it possible  to avoid your keyboard for long periods of time when manipulating software.

The four mode Touch Ring for example, can be used for accurate and intuitive control of actions such as scrolling, zooming, changing brush size, rotating the canvas, flipping through layers, and more. Click the ring to select a mode such as brush size (which is LED displayed), then slide around the ring controller to change the actual size of the brush. Use one hand to modify tool properties, while the other continues on the tablet with the pen. It’s an effective combination, and can be customised to suit whatever combination of onscreen tools and menu items you need.

Whether seeking an alternative to the mouse or just seeking to avoid RSI, the precision and comfort of the Intuos 4, along with its newly lit-up custom shortcuts, make it an attractive input device for those wishing to manipulate their graphics, animation, audio or video software. Well worth a look!

Requirements for Intuos 4 tablet (USB Version):
Windows: Microsoft Windows XP with Service Pack 2 or 3 or Windows Vista
Macintosh: Mac OS X 10.4.8+
Cashola: The Intuos 4 Medium is $449 from buywacom.com.au

In Sydney

Chris Cunningham brings his triple screen live audiovisual performance to Sydney Opera house as part of the Vivid festival. To what extent his performance is live has already been debated, but the lure of this director’s back catalogue and the teasers glimpsed online mean that expectations are like that astronaut suited guy in the hot air balloon at the edge of the atmosphere. Who knows?

In Montreal

Already a fond pilgrimage for those wanting to worship at the altar of techno, drone, glitch and bass – this year’s Mutek festival promises a stellar collection of audiovisual related events:

- Mexican ambient-techno producer Murcof – teamed with Anti-VJ – co-performing a ‘three dimensional cosmos’ across 3 screens.
- Finland’s Mika Vanio ( ex – Pan Sonic ), debuting a new live audiovisual concert.
- UK’s Sculpture play their homemade zoetropic discs – “slabs of vinyl illustrated with otherworldly patterns that they play at various speeds and then film to create simultaneous cycles of analogue sound and looping, mind-melting imagery”.
- Women with Kitchen Appliances have a name that demands festival goers will at least wander in to check out what they might be doing.

Oh and ‘just music’? Amon Tobin debuts his new ‘live performance featuring an enormous stage set-up that promises otherworldly experiences’. And there’s Gold Panda, Mode Selektor, Siriusmo, Adam X, Plastikman, Fourtet improvising with UK jazzy house fusionists Rocketnumbernine, and so on. And a series of workshops including one by the makers of Madmapper, the much anticipated projection mapping software due for release shortly, and panel discussions about Augmented Reality as a creative playground. Mutek. Montreal. Daayum.

In Melbourne

Okay, so not strictly audiovisual, but visionaries like Sun Ra see with more than their eyes, and either these next few words will mean a lot to you, or they won’t, but the Sun Ra Arkestra is.playing.in.Melbourne. Also known as The Solar Myth Arkestra, His Cosmic Discipline Arkestra, The Blue Universe Arkestra and The Jet Set Arkestra etc. They’ve been kicking for six decades now, and although no longer fronted by afro cosmonaut and renowned composer Sun Ra (who passed away in 1993), this performance represents the Australian premiere and a chance to experience their unique and exhilarating, free-floating explorations of ‘tone-science’. At the Forum theatre as part of the Jazz festival, Space is the place, ladies and gentlemen.

UPDATE : The Syphon app (mentioned below) routes video losslessly between video software using the graphics card, and now the Syphon recorder can record the output of these apps. Send feedback, flowers to Vade and Bangnoise.

Free screen capture options:
PC – Camstudio /, Mac – Capture me. And Vade’s free screen capture tool (mac) allows you to ‘capture your entire desktop, or a portion of it, to an image and further process it within Quartz Composer or supported host applications. This can be used to sample other application’s windows as a source input for post processing, texture mapping on to models, etc’. Which means in practice, VJs can use it to grab screen content (eg games, DVDs, web, cams, other software output – whatever you can see on the screen ), and then process this feed in VDMX however they like.

More Broadcasty Tailored Options
Snapz Pro (mac:$69) and Screenflow (mac$99) offer simultaneous camera, microphone and audio capture as well as screencast options such as highlighting the mouse, key commands or certain windows.GrabberRaster (mac) allows sampling of any portion of the Mac screen for use as input for Quartz Composer, or as virtual camera input for QuickTime Pro, Skype, CamCamX or other QuickTime-compatible webcam software. $99 bundled with a bunch of other cam FX.

Sampling VDMX with Syphon and BoinxTV

Boinx TV is a custom video application for live mixing and recording of presentations / tutorials / news stories etc. Syphon (mac) not only samples the screen – but allows real-time sharing of full frame rate video or stills, with other applications. Future versions of Syphon are likely to have built in recording options. For now though, combining Syphon with Boinx, Berlin’s @fALk_g and Leon von Tippelskirch, one of the Boinx developers, came up with an effective way for recording VDMX – and it works in HD!

This could be a great workflow breakthrough for people creating motion graphics or doing compositing or visual effects. Being able to easily improvise with VJ software and midi controllers will never replace some of the detailed micro-level animation and editing done in dedicated editing and compositing software, but it should make it much easier and more fun to create certain kinds of clips for layering / visual effects / remixing and re-use etc. And who knows what kinds of new workflows (playflows?) and processes might follow from there..

Instructions via @fALk_g:

- Install Syphon and Quartz Syphon Plugins (free), and BoinxTV Home Edition ($49) ( see Boinx review)
- Activate Syphon Output in VDMX (beta 8 via vidvox.net)
- Load custom quartz project into BOINX, that can tap into the Syphon source. (download file 82k)
- Hit record. The custom project records with the Apple Intermediate codec (for best balance of quality and performance), but can be adjusted within settings. For best quality and framerate, Falk recommends playing clips from one drive and recording to a separate drive.

Bonus speed gain: Because Syphon is feeding video to Boinx, you can deactivate VDMX Output and use the Boinx 2nd monitor output to view your VDMX mixing – it actually seems to improve performance / frame rate.

The above instructions and file worked fine for me, but I haven’t really tested how far it can be pushed (eg lots of layers and CPU heavy FX in VDMX, while recording HD to a drive). Fun times ahead.

And finally on the screen capture front – a shout out to 9-eyes.com – an incredible collection of unusual moments captured by Google Street View, photographing every road in the world – For The Surrealist Win!

Vat Ist?
Video mixing software (mac only) set up for easy, intuitive real-time control over live cameras, recorded clips, slides, infographics, text and capable of streaming live as it happens.

The BoinxTV Interface
There’s almost nothing within BoinxTV that can’t be done with VJ software – with a lot of customisation and editing. The value of BoinxTV is that a lot of functions very useful for live video presentations, have been compiled thoughtfully into an easy to use interface. New features are selected easily and added as layers to the central interface component. Editing and refining for each layer is done in the left side panel, and the right panel shows the master output. Selecting between and triggering layers and events ( eg switching to a new camera, adding an infographic, doing a cross fade to a net based camera etc ) can be done onscreen, with user keyboard shortcuts, a midi controller or via an iPhone app. It’s a fast and efficient system and would greatly simplify the workflow for making video presentations, tutorials, podcasts or framing live event broadcasts.

Features
Aside from the basics (implemented well) such as video switching, camera switching, scaling and adjusting image quality, inserting graphics and text, Boinx also enables the use of high-grade AXIS network cameras, multiple cameras, the easy inclusion of video skype calls from others, integration of RSS feeds for ticker tape scrolls, as well as twitter feeds (allowing comments from viewers), drawing on screen and decent chroma keying (for an easy newsdesk feel or for the use of virtual backdrops). Users can also create their own custom layers using Apple’s Quartz Composer software.

One of it’s best features is the capacity to bundle all of this up and send all the final master out live online – although this isn’t as simple to access as the rest of the features and will hopefully get integrated into a future version. To stream live requires installation of further software ((either GrabberRaster($) or Camtwist (free)), which makes the Boinx signal compatible for the likes of streaming software such as quicktime broadcaster, ustream, stickam and justin.tv.

Bonus points: Using Syphon, Boinx can record real-time HD output from VJ software running on the same laptop (via @fALk_g in Berlin)

Requirements
Intel Multicore CPU based Mac with discrete graphics (MacBook Pro’s starting late 2007), Mac OS X Leopard (10.5.8) or later. QT 7.66 or later. Webcam or professional video camera with Firewire, SDI or HDMI.
And $49 for Home version, $499 for Full version. (See : http://www.boinx.com/boinxtv/home/compare)

Verdict:
The Home version will probably suit most people’s needs, and is a remarkably featured piece of software, which can greatly simplify the production of video presentations, video podcasts, screencasts, and tutorials. It’s also a very easy and convenient way to add a layer of professional depth to any live net broadcasts.

Vat Ist?
Stop motion ( or stop action ) animation creates the illusion of movement by photographing objects in new positions for every frame. iStopmotion is software dedicated to streamlining that process as much as possible, offering a range of previews, adjustments and relevant effects for monitoring a camera connected to your computer and ensuring accurate controls over the movement of your objects.

Features
While there are for more powerful (and expensive) animation software packages available, the beauty of iStopmotion is in it’s dedicated focus, and the feature set is tailored and trimmed to specifically suit the needs of stop motion animators, avoiding other animation complexities. Below, some of the ways stop motion life becomes easier:

- Image capture adjustments ( flip or rotate image / colour correction and presets / use of overlays and grids for guidance ).
( Note – in terms of image capture, most Canon DSLR cameras are no longer supported in Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.5 and 10.6.6. This is a result of Apple’s dropping of support for those cameras though, not a fault of iStopmotion itself, but hopefully it’s something that will be resolved soon. )
- Onion skinning ( overlays of each frame to allow understanding of how a sequence of movements will look )
- built-in chroma ( or green / blue ) screening
- Custom foregrounds and backgrounds can easily be inserted
- No in-built painting / editing of frames, but it does support easy transferral of frames to Photoshop for that purpose, and then adjusts the frame to suit the new edits.
- Support for using a soundtrack and/or other layers of video as animation guidance.
- Support for the Apple remote control, to capture images from your animation work-table.
- Support for multiple cameras at once
- Integration with Final Cut Pro
- Tilt Shift effect – for applying that miniature real world look.
- Time Lapse capture – create time based effects by capturing frames at specified gaps of time.

And cutely, there’s an option for printing animation sequences as a Flip Book.

Requirements
OS X ( it’s mac only software ), Snow Leopard recommended, but earlier versions still available for use on earlier systems.
Cash: $49 for home version, $99 for Express version and $499 for Pro version ( Major differences are the maximum resolution size, and integration with FCP. Free demo available.

Verdict
No, it’s not After Effects, but for stopmotion enthusiasts, this is a great way to streamline and focus animations.

Augmented Billboards 2: The Artvertiser @ Transmediale 2010 from Julian Oliver on Vimeo.

They Live!
Indeed, as might be expected from a project that seeks to detect and replace billboards with other imagery in real-time, there is some inspiration expressed on Julian’s site for the great cult classic by John Carpenter, They Live – which features rebel sunglasses as a major plot device ( they decode the ‘real’ message of a billboard when worn ).

Developing the Artvertiser as a software platform that can detect advertisements viewed through a device, and replace them, Julian and Damian Stewart consider their work as an example of ‘Improved Reality’, claiming “The Artvertiser situates the ‘read-only’, proprietary imagery of our public spaces as a ‘read-write’ platform for the presentation of non-proprietary, critically engaging content.”

In practice so far, this seems like it works best within their own custom built device, which they’ve dubbed the Billboard Intercept Unit. Key qualities of that beast include a high-quality wide-angle lens, fast CPU and GPU, powerful wireless adaptor, long battery life and plenty of solid state storage space. Interestingly though they seek to develop versions for Linux, OS X, Google’s Android OS, the Nokia N900 (Maemo 5) and the iPhone and a single shot photo substitution version for the Symbian OS ( used by the great bulk of the world’s camera phones).

The software works by users training it to recognise individual advertisements, which can then be replaced by alternate images or videos. Then whenever that advert is encountered – “It doesn’t matter whether the advertisement is on a building, in a magazine or on the side of a vehicle” – the ad will be replaced within the viewer, by the alternate image or video. If an internet connection is available, the scene and substituted image can be immediately documented and published online, ‘providing an alternative memory of the city’.

See selectparks.net/~julian for more, including Escape from Woomera ( a 3D game set inside one of Australia’s refugee detention centres ), Packet Garden ( watch your daily net traffic generate a visual garden ), Levelhead (Augmented Reality spatial-memory game and tangible interface prototype) and Fijuu, his 3D music AV experiments.

( See also, Julian Oliver: The Art of Gardening, a piece I was asked to write for an exhibition of his, many a moon ago. )

Syphon Teaser from vade on Vimeo.

Syphon
Syphon is “an open source Mac OS X technology that allows applications to share frames – full frame rate video or stills – with one another in realtime. Now you can leverage the expressive power of a plethora of tools to mix, mash, edit, sample, texture-map, synthesize, and present your imagery using the best tool for each part of the job. Syphon gives you flexibility to break out of single-app solutions and mix creative applications to suit your needs.”

Out of the box, this means you can send live video signals between these applications: quartz composer, max msp jitter, Freeframe GL and Unity 3D Pro ( a game engine ). Within a short while of release though, this list has been extended to include Modul8 and the MadMapper mapping software, Resolume Avenue, built-in support within the new beta of VDMX, Isadora, CoGe, Open Frameworks, Cinder and Mix Emergency ( software for scratching video with a Serato turntable set-up ).

It all happens on the graphics card, not the CPU, which means HD video can be shuffled between applications at 60 frames per second. This is a great boost for live video flexibility ( lossless live video mixing in and out of 3D game engines? No problem. ), and when it evolves to include being sent over networks, awesome collaborative possibilities await.

Kinect
Another splasher in the visual tech world has been the recent release of the Kinect camera add-on for the XBox. The device features “an RGB camera, depth sensor and multi-array microphone running proprietary software”, and enables 3D motion capture, facial recognition and voice recognition. Being such a hacker’s delight of a device, within a week of release there’s already a growing range of software written that enables it to be used outside the Xbox. Some of these include the ability to draw in 3D (and rotate the image) using gestures, visual FX applications and thanks to Syphon, there’s already a way to include Kinect 3D depth images within Quartz Composer – by first using it within OF and then sending it through Syphon to your visual app of choice.

Notable Kinect shout-outs: real-time light sabers(love the use of the little mirror to frame and juxtapose the original footage here), kinect puppet shows and instant fat-suits.

And there’s a nice extended Kinect round-up of projects over at Creative Applications.

So there you go, the future is already here – *and* it is starting to become more evenly distributed…

Velcro + Laptops

Attaching spare portable Hard-drives to your laptop lid with velcro is a super-win. Not only does it save precious performance space and avoid drives being bumped, it also extends to three, the list of questions VJs will most likely asked at venues.
1- ‘Can you play a track by Another tip? Minimise external drives cutting out when firewire cables move or get unplugged, by using cable ties to tighten the firewire cable to an ethernet cable plugged into the port beside.

Hardware Mixer-Free Zones*
Hardware mixers have become a luxury (or an insurance policy against computer crashes) rather than a necessity, as most clip mixing and blending is preferably done through software and a midi controller. If tight on budget / space, mixers can be avoided. Need a live cam? Use a USB webcam to mix within your VJ software. Other USB capture devices open up worlds of lo-fi video capture, play-through and mixing. Portable midi controllers? My two favourites are the Novation Nocturn and the set of Korg nano controllers… which give the best value in terms of buttons and sliders per buck.

(*At least until *SPARK’s tiny DVI mixer is released! )

Projectors
Projectorcentral.com is a fantastic resource for comparing different projectors, and provides a great overview of what to look for in a projector.

Lumens: (brightness ) – aim for minimum 2500 for a small room, and get as many as you can.
Contrast ratio: ( eg 2000:1 ) Higher is better, richer blacks.
Zoom range: The difference between minimum and maximum sizes, which enables flexible distance from screen.
Resolution: Aim for a minimum of 720P (1280×720), which is the smallest HD size, or WXGA (1280×768). Full HD of 1920×1080 will avoid any scaling, and delivers the best image.
Aspect ratio: 16:9 native is preferable over 4:3
Inputs: VJs will want VGA inputs, and HDMI if available. Most will include RCA / composite.

eBay offers 15m VGA cables for around $30, and if you need more distance between projector and your laptop – maybe consider entering the world of baluns ( connectors / convertors that allow video signals to be sent over the much cheaper ethernet / coax cable for much longer distance without signal degradation. )

Need to build a Projector Mount that will go anywhere? ( http://vjkungfu.com/archive/build-projector-mount ) Clampalicious! Allows a projector to be easily and very securely mounted to lighting rigs, poles etc. Before and after shots below..

Got any other portable touring / rig shrinking / making-video-life-easier tips? Send them along..

[[ UPDATE: Extra tips in the comments:
via the well oiled touring machine-human hybrid, Filastine: "for VJ’s that work from stage, or for solo audio/video performers like myself-project from stage into an automotive sideview mirror clamped to a mic stand, no ladders or long cables needed"
via uDart: a more compact solution to VJ Kung Fu’s mount.
"For that reason I always buy projectors hat have a 1/4-20? camera fitting. Also the ball joint can be substituted with a ‘magic arm’. That gives you countless positioning possibilities."]]

What’s a DVD again?

a) “Another Useless Ironic Colourful Object In The Long List of Items Produced By The Falling Western Empire”
b) Plastic taking up room on shelves you wouldn’t need if you didn’t collect plastic
c) A great way to support independent visual artists and musicians
d) A snapfrozen piece of the internet, a medley of fragments and crosswired influences
e) All of the above, ie Faits Divers by Gangpol & Mit, published by Pictoplasma publishing, beautifully packaged and designed by Wiyumi.

“Sonic and Visual in Love”
Faits Divers finds my favourite French audiovisual duo heading off into a more narrative driven direction than previous animated efforts. Sure, the sugarbuzzy pop charm is still there, and they are still farming the possibilities of blending nostalgic sounds and visions with a caricatured cutting edge tech. Where this once presented itself as mutant rhythmic AV probably best suited to a live environment, we are now treated to extended explorations in their cartoon worlds – where deviant plots unfold over time and the music doesn’t try to fit so much in at all times.

“Many of the characters in the clips are easily read as extensions of the creators themselves, battling it out on the ping-pong table, aloof deities on a tiny cloud, lusty beings united in tantric embraces, or sailors stranded on a distant shore, on the verge of embracing cannibalism”

The DVD comes in 4 flavours: Clips/Stories (eg The Hatred Boat), Activities (eg Stand on Waste) and Art with Heart (Interviews with fake artists) and Archives. There is no option to play the soundtrack by itself, which is maybe deliberate, but there is available:
“A special free gift mp3 package delivering 4 new edits of its soundtrack, alternative versions especially reworked to animate your new years celebrations, wedding parties, mystic choirs, ethnic orchestras and goat skin percussions etc”.

“In times where digital media and low-cost travel shrink the globe to the size of a pixel, we are haunted by the computer generated nightmare version of this carnival. The man-eating feast is taken place just millimetres below your computer screen – slaughter on the motherboard.”

“Gangpol & Mit’s message is subliminal: Eat technology before technology eats you!”

Everything in quotation marks has been nabbed from the French horse’s mouth… ie the DVD liner notes*, “The Cannibalist Ethos of Techno Cannibalism,” by Lars Denicke and Peter Thaler, or the G+M website, where many treats await you.

Software Aided Innovation
A stoner sitting on the edge of a rooftop tells you: “Y’know what? I really looooove software.” Grinning insights follow, some of which make sense, some which don’t. Software can permeate so much of our interactions today, our existence, that it’s easy to take for granted that effectively we live with swarms of robots in our midst. Robots that automatically pay our bills, robots that share communications with friends, robots that search for us, robots that play back media for us. When it comes to robots that might aid us in the creative disciplines though ( be it art, music, design, architecture, etc ), in what ways are we limited by their design? In other words, in a question that’s at the heart of the Form + Code book, and aimed directly at creatives who use computers – to what extent do we wish to be limited by the constraints of any particular software system?

Defining Form as visual and spatial structures and Code as computer programs and non-computer instructions ( eg IKEA furniture building instructions, or instructions for knitting a scarf ), the book wanders through a history of computer aided creative work, and attempts to meaningfully categorise the different ways code can be useful. The book is definitely aimed at non-coders, an attempt to encourage more creatives to explore the options they have available for customising and creating code to make their work. For someone only recently dipping toes into the visual programming / patch based environment of Quartz Composer, the book provides a nice framework for thinking about image manipulation, and removes some of the ( … well, let’s just say it.. ) fear surrounding abstract coding.

Some general core coding principles are presented simply, which is followed by examining how the computer relates to form – through defining co-ordinates, shapes, and colour, and then the extra layers of light, printing and fabrication bringing the form to life. It’s an approach which works well, demystifying the possibilities, and illustrating them well with a range of provocative contemporary and historically important examples ( in graphic design, typography, data mapping, digital fabrication, interactive media etc ).

Naturally there’s code to play with ( via the companion site ), and the aims behind the book are reinforced when it is understood co-author Casey Reas has also co-authored (with Ben Fry) the programming language Processing ( free for mac, linux, PC), which is described as ” a software sketchbook.. an open source programming language and environment for people who want to create images, animations, and interactions”.

( Out now through Princeton Architectural Press )

“Insights for Search aims to provide insights into broad search patterns. Several approximations are used to compute these results. (And it has to be said – their secret sauce yields a few surprising results) The Insights for Search map is intended for general analysis of volume patterns. Borders are an approximation and may not be accurate.”

( Remember, the map is not the territory, Google said so. )

VJ as a search term? Down slightly, but still flying along. Most popular by far, by people searching from countries in South East Asia, topped by Indonesia. Top search? MTV VJ, followed by Burma VJ. Couldn’t find the part where they listed ‘cool people squinting into laptops’.

VJ Software?

Arkaos lovers are most likely to live in Portugal, then Belgium, Argentina.
Resolume: Portugal, Czech Republic, Austria.
Quartz Composer: Japan, Austria, Switzerland (*Australia 4th!)
Modul8: Esp Switzerland then Austria, Italy.
VDMX: Esp Germany then UK, US.

Of note – Portugal and Austria seem to be pixel hotspots! The Arkaos graph is on a sharp decline over time, and if the search is restricted to just 2010, the numbers tilt a little differently. And also – *why do more people in Australia search for Quartz Composer, than all of the people in the United States?

And for less off the shelf VJ related packages, in order of popularity: Isadora (by a fair margin), VVVV, processing + video, max msp + jitter, pure data + gem.

Questions People Ask VJs
“What software are you using?” +300% (Bedroom VJs are on the up )
“Can you play this song?” -57% (People are getting better at distinguishing DJs / VJs, or are just sending their requests through twitter and facebook )

‘Video Jockey‘ as a search term, is thankfully on a decline. ( Most popular by far, in India.)
‘Scratch video‘ peaked in late 2005, declined, and seems to have stabilised since then. ( Most popular in U.S. )
‘DVDJ‘ – by far most popular in the U.S., on a slow decline.
‘Video mapping‘ – on the up and up, esp in India.

And In the Wild: What’s it like for practicing VJs? Are conditions improving? A few more search terms:
“Goddammit! I’m VJing from a milk crate on the side of stage again, drowning in foldback.” -24%
“This venue has built-in projectors, as well as preview monitors and cameras for use in our in-house digital mixer.” +6%
“Your VJ rider includes meals, top shelf drinks and professional shoulder massages on the hour.” +1.7%

MIDI vs OSC: Midi canes, and is apparently searched for the most in Madagascar, 4 times the nearest search-nation, France. Something to do with evolution and volcanoes I suppose. Germany loves OSC the most, followed by the Taiwanese.

Adobe After Effects Vs Apple Motion : Unsurprisingly, AE is the gorilla here, and especially in the Philippines.
Final Cut Pro VS Adobe Premiere : Premiere well ahead, though in decline. Australians are the 2nd biggest searchers for FCP ( after the U.S.).
VJ iPhone vs VJ Android: One side gets steamrollered. Guess which has the flat graph.

VJ Styles:
Worryingly, kaleidoscope is on the increase (esp in UK) and fractal remains high. Tunnel effect sacred geometry and lens flare remain threatening. ‘Data moshing’ is not yet searched for in high enough volume to warrant google graphing.

[Update: From the heart of pixelated heart of Berlin, Lucy confirms in the comments, that indeed, Google's aim is true - Germans love beer, hiking *and* VDMX. And confirmed again via Kyle, searching for VJ Loops -"Seems Portugal is the mecca!"]

[[ Update 2 (aka newsflash) : Apparently people who play behind laptops making real-time video - seem to really like statistics. The comments keep on coming - from India, Germany, Austria.. y'know, all the pixel powerhouses... ]]

[ 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.]

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!

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’.

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 )

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.

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 )

Beatmaker $19.99
- Mobile sampler interface with 16 pads (multi-touch up to 5 sounds at once ). Load or record your own samples or use the built-in banks from the likes of Richard Devine, or from genres such as hiphop, dub etc.
- On-board wave editor to select in/out points of samples.
- Fairly intuitive easy to use step sequencer to play arrangements of those samples.
- Delay, 3-band EQ + BitCrusher FX.
- Export audio and midi.

Touch DJ $23.99
The most expensive app on my afternoon list, this offers scratching, looping, positioning, equalization, effects and pitch controls for 2 simultaneously playing mp3 or m4a files. Claims to offer a ‘new’ DJ technology it calls ‘visual mixing’ – which basically shows the waveforms playing as every other piece of DJ software before it has done for the last 10 or so years. Has an onboard sampler ( limited to 3 samples ),

Spoke $2.49
Interesting radial design for creating drum loops. Sounds placed closer to the centre are more quiet, sounds placed further are louder. A clock hand spins around triggering each sound as it passes over it. Something about the lack of any grids seems to make this all the more fun for making loops work. Lacks tempo control, exporting capacity or ability to load samples. A fun toy anyway, and maybe interface ideas worth noticing by other developers?

JR Hexatone $12.99
More interface weirdness here : load six samples into a hexagonal grid, and start six oscillators by pressing play. These oscillators then ‘travel’ through the grid to an end point, changing position on the beat, and being affected by commands as they travel. Four modes of Play : GRID, CELLS, SND, or SET-UP, allow you to rekindle that feeling of playing Dungeons + Dragons with strange numbered a dice and a manual of elaborate rules. Bizarro, but can import + export, change tempo, so maybe of use to some.

Finger BassLine $3.99
I could say this reminds me of making acid-basslines with the old Roland TB-303 Bass Line Synthesizer – but I’ve only ever played around with Rebirth (RIP: rebirthmuseum.com ), software built in 1997 to emulate the old 303 (and the TR-808 and TR-909 rhythmic composers ). And so, now on my phone: monophonic synthesizer with built-in pattern based step sequencer. Sawtooths. Square waves. Filtering. Modulation. Tempo tap. Kids these days.

Nanoloop $8.99
Sequencer, sampler and synthesizer modelled on a version made for the nintendo game boy back in 1999.
“It does not simulate the Game Boy’s sound or other functions, but has been fully optimised for the iPhone’s capabilities.”

RjDj Free / $2.49 option
The original augmented reality music maker. Microphone + algorithims + auto-layered beats = fun times. Featured examples include work by Perth’s Chris McCormick ( Girl Science records ). Branching out these days into other apps :
“Experience LOVE by AIR in a new way, through four real-time soundscapes. Record yourself as you become part of the music, and send your own Love message to someone special.”

EveryDay Looper $4.99
“Record yourself, loop it, layer it, mix it, merge it. And do it again.” The equivalent of a loop pedal used by a guitarist or vocalist. Simple to use, lacking any sort of manipulation capacities ( eg changing pitch / speed or moving loops further forward or backwards in time ).

Tonepad (Free)
Draw dots on a big grid. Erase some of them. Draw more dots. Move your fingers around the screen. Congratulations, you’ve just made a soundtrack for a Japanese shampoo commercial.

Game Show Sound Board (Free) + Pocket Studio (Free)
Crowd laughter. Applause. Oohs. Ahhs. Bad answer honks. Etc

DrumPad (Free) + Mad Decent (Free)
They’re free. You like hitting stuff, right? A drum kit. And : Air horns, sirens, elephant groans, lazer guns, gunshots, delay. Optional looping, delay and warning siren if someone picks your phone up.

Overall verdict? Lots of little prices add up over time. Necks get sore from hunching over and peering into a little screen for a few hours. And yet, there’s lots of engaging fun to be had. Beatmaker struck the best balance for me, between being fun to use and seeming versatile enough to use for vaguely serious occasions. ( It’s sample bank functions should help get rid of a few sound-board apps too. Except maybe cat piano. That stays for now. )

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.

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”.”

Sloth Emissions
Like the twentieth century cyclist t-shirt slogans : ‘two wheels good, four wheels bad’, sloths have a message for the moment, and it is this :
“Less is more.” Or less is better, especially when it refers to expected global temperature rises this century. At the recent gathering of climate slash policy heads in Copenhagen, most preferred the idea of restricting that temperature rise to 2 degrees – which would still deliver a 50% chance of catastrophic climate events. Unsurprisingly, developing countries who would bear most of the brunt of this ( having coastal areas affected by rising sea levels, and densely populated areas that can’t afford further food and water difficulties etc ), wanted a limit of 1.5 degrees. Neither target was agreed upon ( in part due to Chinese Wrestling techniques), but there were still some hopeful signs : significant initiatives and funds were set-up for large scale rainforest protection, there was agreement on the science and the need for action, and there’s potentially a good foundation for the next climate meeting in Nov 2010 – which is being held in the sloth-friendly capital of Mexico City. Hammocks, siestas, cumbia : where better to sign an agreement for slowing the rate of emissions?

(Sloth shout-out to Melbourne’s Cumbia Cosmonauts who are on a roll. )

Sloth Software
Sure, military superpowers can build giant hi-tech infrastructure and send pilot-less drones spying over borders. But why bother with the work of competing with that, when there’s hashish in the hills to be had, it’s too hot to move, and as the Wall Street Journal reports:
“Shiite fighters in Iraq used software programs such as SkyGrabber –available for as little as $25.95 on the Internet — to regularly capture drone video feeds.. ”

The even lazier militants in the desert of course, would likely bypass shopping for such software and just grab the relevant torrent file from Pirate Bay ( no, really. Hat tip to Coburg’s military surveillance connoiseur, Francis Bear ).

And maybe when the sun sets a little and it’s time for some moderate exercise, something like this iphone controlled helicopter might come in handy. ( See the copter’s camera view on your screen, tilt to steer. )

Sloth Visions
Both budding sloth cinephiles and ascending sloth auteurs have much to be happy about. For those who like to watch, the continued splintering of the mainstream provides much of merit. District 9 and the ongoing Wholphin DVD compilations were amongst my favourites in the summer haze, along with an abundance of bookmarked shorts bookmarked online :

vimeo.com/jeanpoole
youtube.com/jeanpoole
delicious.com/jeanpoole/video

For the sloth-maker, it’s an interesting time. After 100 years of cinema, the cinema system is needing to reinvent, and creative and distribution opportunities abound. Who knows what we’ll look back on in fifty years time, who knows which changes with visual storytelling and exploration will seem significant. In the meantime, ongoing visual software developments continue to excite (documented well at createdigitalmotion.com), as does crowdsourcing ( hello kickstarter.com ). Perhaps it’s those that creatively leverage these everyday network technologies to create in ways that haven’t been possible until now ( have you seen the sour webcam video yet? ), that will seem like signposts in years to come. At any rate, fun ahead. And shout out to the the animated webisoders over at http://slothvision.com ( & bonus sloth / major lazer remix).

VIDEO
REEL DIRECTOR – $9.99 and a video editing mobile (3GS) now lives in your pocket. Although understandably limited in scope, it does allow to assemble different clips from your library onto a timeline, edit those, and add a variety of transitions.
REEL MOMENTS – by the same company, is all about creating time lapse videos.
SLOMO – let’s you make videos 8 times slower or 2 times faster – with an option to change audio pitch or not.
AClapboard – $7.99
VINTAGE VIDEO MAKER $3 – Adds a retro effect. Not really sold on one-filter apps, but it’s probably a while away before there’s going to be an After Effects killer on a phone. Key frames on trams.

PHOTO / GRAPHICS / ANIMATION
pCAM Film + Digital Calculator $47.99 Calculates Depth of field, focal length matching, running time to length, underwater distances and other long lists of technical details useful for Directors of photography, film, visual effects etc.
phone photos swapped with others randomly?
SKETCHBOOK MOBILE – $5.99 from Autodesk. Multitouch 2500% zoom, paintbrushes 3 layers / import photos. Closest to a mini-photoshop in your pocket I’ve found yet.
PETIT DUMMY – Add any photo, add audio track, select mouth points, create moving animation.
FLICKMATION – Frame by frame animation with layers, onion skinning ( transparency which let’s you see the last frame while drawing the new one ) and a stamp system that can be made from existing photos.
STORYBOARD COMPOSER – $23.99 – An excellent storyboarding app (formerly Hitchcock ), which is possibly the most native feeling app I’ve used. It just seems to harness the touchscreen and gesture controls well, has easy integration of photos, has a great interface, and has a certain immediacy to playing with it, that really encourages exploration.
REAL CAM SP – $1.19 – onscreen menu items to help control iphone camera better… digital zoom, white balance for specific areas in frame etc. That said, there’s a LOT of one-function photography apps out there, with their one cheesy effect that can be added easily to your snap of the day.

INTERACTIVE
TOUCH OSC – $5.99 – Let’s you send and receive Open Sound Control messages over a wi-fi network using the UDP protocol. Which means controlling software on your onstage-laptop, from the dancefloor or in front of the speakers / screen etc. Faders, sliders, an X/Y pad, multi-touch. And a visual editor available from their website.
MRMR – Another OSC app, this one’s free and multi-user by design.
OSCEMOTE – $5.99 multitouch TUIO, accelermoter xyz
ispy Cameras $1.19 – view + control camera from public cams, take screenshots
TONETABLE $9.99 – produces a control tone – for controlling a digital vinyl system – eg serato scratch live / traktor scratch / m-audio’s torq etc. It also allows easy jumping between different pitches through a series of buttons. By the makers of Mix Emergency ( a video mixing app for use with Serato ). And included in this visual app list, because the digital vinyl system can control video as well.
VLC REMOTE $3.99 – Because you wanted a way to browse your hard drive of Al Jazeera recordings from the comfort of your bed.

Shout out to CANABALT, a kind of one-finger Bruce Willis platformer, which has captivated this week. ( My record? 5204m )

When Cinemek’s Jonathan Houser dream of ‘making innovative film tools’ met the iPhone in his pocket, a new mobile storyboarding application was born: Hitchcock. Utilising the iPhone’s touchscreen and built-in camera, Hitchcock adds a layer of fun to location scouting, planning for films and storyboarding sequences. The app has two modes – a panel view that focusses on each shot ( gathered from the photo library ) and allows easy overlays of character stand-ins, camera and character movement and text overlays. The sequential mode allows a finger to slide the panels into a sequence, and control the timing between each shot. There’s something great about the immediacy of being on location, arranging a sequence, and watching it playback to see how well it works as an idea. Hitchcock is a simple app, but executed wonderfully, with a gorgeous interface that encourages play and re-use. When done, press a button and email your completed PDF storyboard. Future developments include : drawing functionality, adding audio, ability to add custom stand-in characters, export to .mov, etc. Cinemek’s Jonathan Houser was happy to answer a few questions about it below.

More : cinemek.com/hitchcock
Tutorials : vimeo.com/channels/hitchcock

How do you feel about Hitchcock today?
I’m pretty pleased with how Hitchcock turned out as it is version 1.0. It really accomplishes what I set out to do which was create a lightweight mobile app that allows creative people to jot their ideas down in a visual medium. 

What has the iphone platform been like to develop for?
As a non-coder I was really supprised at how easy it was to design the app under Apples specifications. They provide developers with tons of tools and free API’s. The hardest part for me was to find a person who had the calibre of coding necessary when you reach beyond those free API’s. Jason Thane at General UI did a great job with this. 

What changes would you like in future iphones / the future iphone development environment?
There are many small things that I would like to see. The biggest for me is Apple’s payment process. They are really ambiguous about how they pay you. You may receive reports for a given months sales and the actual fund paid are 20-30% less than what those reports reflect. The worse part is actually contacting them about such problems. It’s pretty messy but I’m sure it’s getting better. 

What’s missing for you to develop Hitchcock on Android?
Right now, proven demand. We have been talking to other developers and the success rate for Android porting is very very low. We have not by any means ruled it out, we are taking it one step at a time. There are many updates to the iphone version of Hitchcock we hope to do before we port to other platforms. 

Hitchock feels like the beginning of an interesting animation sketching app – have you had any thoughts about creating an app that tilted more towards animation?
Yes, we are definitely exploring different specialized uses for Hitchcock. I think the animation community is large enough to warrant a application designed directly for that community.

Other iphone apps that impress?
There are so many – for filmmaking, the guys at Chemical Wedding just released an app called Artemis. It’s a professional director’s finder for the iphone. It contains just about any lens you can think about shooting on. REALLY cool. As for non filmmaking apps, Convert bot has a really cool interface. Its just a conversion app, but the UI team did a great job with the design. Shazam is still such a cool app. There are a bunch of Augmented reality apps coming out which will prove to be pretty useful. 

What aspects of the iphone are least utilised by apps?
I think the biggest aspect of the iphone that is least utilized is multi-touch. It seems like most developers design their apps as ported desktop versions of their app. The buttons are too small and do too little. I think there will be more apps in the future which utilize the whole iphone. 

Do you have a gallery of favourite storyboards submitted by users anywhere?
Not yet. But we are planning on creating a community for that. Keep checking in. 

Popular feature requests?
.mov export is the biggest request. This will be available really shortly. Possibly the beginning of December. Local PDF creation and emailing. Available in the next update as well. Sharing Hitchcock files. This will be available in the Pro version. Many people want to be able to import more PNG’s for stand-ins. We are working on a slick way to exchange PNG’s on a server. This will be a great tool for people who work on specialized projects. Ie car’s, Zombies, Dogs, people with guns etc. 

Other iphone app areas you’d like to explore in the future?
I have a few projects which involved the ipod touch as the software/hardware interface. They are in their infancy still so I cannot go into detail, but they are oriented towards the filmmaking community. 

Hitchcock Demo from cinemek / Hitchcock on Vimeo.

Vat Ist?
The AudioMulch elevator pitch : “Software for real-time sound synthesis, music composition and performance-oriented audio processing.”
Translation: Easy to grasp ( even for a pixel-head ) modular software that focusses on the flow of an audio signal through a range of ‘contraptions’ which are ‘patched’ together in a window with patch cords from the input and output of various contraptions.

Contraptionism?
AudioMulch’s signal processing modules (‘Contraptions’) include:
Signal Generators ( eg drum machine, bassline synth, loop player, arpeggiator etc )
Effects ( eg Reverb, flanger, delay line granulator, ring modulation, pulsar comb filter, 16 channel live sampling looper etc )
Filters ( eg Parametric EQ, resonant comb filter bank, granular filtering, resonant lowpass with pattern triggering etc )
Mixers ( Mono and stereo mixers and gain elements, crossfader, matrix with variable fade times. )
Your  VST  plugins ( AudioMulch supports VST audio effects plugins )

Humming Like A Bird
Key to the ‘feel’ of Audiomulch is the ease at setting up a chain of contraptions for processing your audio. The interface is deliberately kept simply to three areas : A ‘Patch window’ where contraptions can be chained together, a ‘Properties’ window where the details for each contrpation can be viewed or manipulated, and an ‘Automation window’, which allows you to define the way selected parameters change over time. Automation can be applied to the values of knobs, sliders (both single-value sliders and Range Sliders), check boxes and Contraption Presets.

eg start off with a ‘sound out’ contraption, connect a mixer to it, connect a loop player to one channel of the mixer, a bass synth to another, some effects to another and off you go.

Importantly, everything happens in real-time and all of your experiments with signal flow can be heard immediately without any drop in responsiveness. If in doubt of this, understand that this has been the choice of live performance software for every gig in the last 9 years, for that sweaty man who covers his laptop in gladwrap at gigs to avoid sweat pouring onto it ( aye, that’d be Girl Talk ).

Other Features
- MIDI – every knob and slider on the user interface can be controlled with a MIDI controller.
- multichannel input and output, with support for up to 256 channels ( great for live mixing, multichannel speaker arrays )
- Clickable built in help on every contraption ( great for beginners and advanced users alike )
- Metasurface – unique to the mulch, ‘the Metasurface lets you blend smoothly between dozens of parameter settings on a two dimensional plane’, Instead of having to turn one knob at a time with the mouse.’ This can also be automated and looped.

Audiomulch Resources
audiomulch.com
vimeo.com/audiomulch
twitter.com/audiomulch
facebook.com/group.php?gid=5443009226

Requirements :
PC : Windows XP or Vista
Mac : OS x 10.4 or later, Intel processors only.
Cash : $US189 ( with generous unlimited 60 day evaluation option )

Verdict
This’ll be the sweet spot for many producers and manglers of sound, easy to explore and yet offering incredibly lateral and complex audio manipulation and performance possibilities. Double thumbs up.

UPDATE : When asked about whether OSC support would be included at some point, Ross from Audiomulch wrote back :
“In terms of the roadmap OSC support fits into the “possible enhancements” which may (or may not) happen later in 2010 – basically it will depend on what users want the most when I get to that phase. I’m not convinced that OSC is useful without a mapping layer to translate OSC messages (ie a scripting language or some such) so I’m still trying to work out how that would fit in to AudioMulch.”

YouTube is now serving 1 billion video views a day, so it’s hard not to be impressed with YouTube. They got it right, and they continue to drive video usability, which has helped make online video become so popular.

One of the main goals of making the video sampling tool was to give people a way to deconstruct/reconstruct the media. When you deconstruct television, it helps you see how messages are created and used to manipulate peoples emotions. So I had always seen VuJak as a counter-ops measure to help the public fight back against manipulative media and propaganda. This has certainly taken hold in the laptop era and in the modern art world. These days it’s called an intervention, but it’s basically a force multiplier for the public against perception management.

Emergency Broadcast Network left quite a footprint in the live audiovisual arena. What extent of your original video sampling vision did you manage to execute?
Video sampling and cut-up is mainstream now. Yesterday I saw a segment on CNN called Mashup where they cover remix videos on YouTube. Remix culture has become its own art genre and has been pushed beyond anything I had imagined in the early 90′s.  There are some very talented artists putting their work on YouTube – such as Kutiman – which blow me away. Auto-tune the News is great, too.

The same is true for the generative school of video art, too. It has become mature as a genre and and the tools are robust. So now we have the tools to do anything, but what should  we do? So now I think it’s all about content.

For me, the big “oh yeah” moment was in 1991 when I managed to get a quicktime movie tied into Max. The first time I pressed a midi keyboard note and saw a movie play, I knew it could be done.

What are your thoughts on today’s live audiovisual acts, or the evolution of AV performance? What has improved? What has stagnated?
My favorite recent live acts are Addictive TV, ColdCut, Hexstatic, eXceeda.  DJ Yoda is amazing, I wish I could’ve seen him with Shlomo. The production quality of shows has improved vastly, and there is essentially no barrier to entry as well, which means there are lots of people doing it, which I believe is a good thing. Audience interactivity in live shows hasn’t yet taken off on in a big way, but I could see that happening now, since everyone has a cell phone. My only criticism these days is that I think it’s boring to watch two guys fingering their laptops on stage.  I’m guilty of this myself. But I’d like to see more fun presentation styles for live shows. There’s a lot of room for fun input devices using things like Arduino boards and such as well, too.

What do you see as the various interesting trends amongst live video at the moment?
I’m fascinated with the new micro-projectors that are coming out, and expect to see interesting innovations there. Also of personal interest is optical mixing with multiple projectors, as well as L.E.D. architecture. I want to play Pong on the side of a mountain.

What did you learn about humans and technology from your online casino days?
Humans are unpredictable as individuals, but predictable in groups. People don’t mind losing money if they are having fun. 1 attention unit equals 7 seconds. People prefer playing with a machine to playing with people. 1 button is enough.

What about commercial holography, where has that gone since the early nineties?
The latest generation of large scale full-color holography is truly impressive.  Zebra Imaging produces the best in the world. Full color, full parallax. Optical computing is progressing rapidly, too, which will bring about the next major advance in computing.

And to continue this techno trajectory of art forms you’ve been involved with, what were you doing with robotic software?
In 1994 I started to believe that the screen image is useless – meaning that people have become numb to video images and that there is simply no way of communicating with people in a meaningful way via screen images. This is a deep and long conversation, and in many ways I still believe it is true. So I stopped working with video and became interested in building physical experiences for audiences – moving objects in the real world that people can have a relationship with.

At that time, I met artist Chico MacMurtrie who was building robotic sculptures, and we started to work together. George Homesy had build a midi-to-voltage control box for the machines, but the software piece wasn’t robust yet. I wrote a variety of max patches which control the machines and sequence them into shows. Some of the machines required feedback to operate and so we needed an intelligent system to drive those, while at the same time allowing for improvisation within the framework of a master sequenced show. We toured extensively in the 90′s with a large show, and over time this became a rather complex system, all built with Max.

I continue to work with Chico to this day, although the latest piece, the Birds, is an autonomous installation piece.  There is more information on my website and on http://amorphicrobotworks.org.

What kinds of ideas are you hoping to provoke with your sculpture series?
I’m interested in taking the virtual experience into the real world.  Creating physical manifestations of our shared virtual experiences.

I see these as documentary objects which capture a common cultural snapshot of the present and preserve it for the future. As our present shared virtual culture decays though continuous obsolescence, very little remains beyond its’ designed 18 month life cycle / memory cycle.  So by physicalizing these experiences, we can archive them for the future.

As people switch off their televisions, projects like wikipedia spawn from their free time. Or like Urban Dictionary, which I noticed you’ve been contributing to. What draws you to that, and what are some projects that point to more interesting group dynamics and collaboration?
I’m drawn to Urban Dictionary because it is funny as hell.  I went through a period when I was putting in words, but that seems to have passed, like most transient newisms these days.  One of my entries was Urban Word of the Day, so I guess that means something.
Flash mobs are another great new form of collaboration, as well as local currencies.

Three things you’d tell a class of young interactive designers today?
Fast. Fun. Easy.
Design for humans.
Pay attention to the way humans behave. Watch what people do.
If an application is pretty, people are impressed for a few moments.  If an application is useful, people will use it repeatedly.

Thanks Brian!
Plenty more to visit over @ slashboing ( eg speed baraka / double game / meat water / HDADD™ – Attention Deficit Cinema / etc etc )

The Vinyl Arcade by Lucas Abela* (aka. Justice Yeldham aka DJ Smallcock )
Upstairs : Sit in a dodgem car and watch the results of your steering, on a projector screen ahead of you.
Downstairs : A remote control car with record needles underneath it, zooms around a floor made from vinyl records all over the ground.
The mind’s ear might like to imagine this process resulting in distinct grabs of music being pumped out of the speakers – a little Stevie Wonder here, a little classical violin there, but the actuality was more akin to a stuttering noise orchestra. Didn’t seem to matter though, delightfully executed : simple, ingenious, stupendous.

* Experimental turntablism eh? Try : “stabbing vinyl with Kruger style stylus gloves, bound on amplified trampolines, performing deaf defying duet duels with amplified samurai swords, hospitalised by high powered turntables, record chance John Peel sessions with the Flaming Lips, and most recently touring the world armed with nothing but a sheet of glass.” Guess we can add remote controlled cars on vinyl racetracks to that list. Toecutter in assistance below.


The Church of Pimmon
A former church is the head quarters of the Renew Newcastle project, whose 30+ empty shops now inhabited by artists and galleries certainly added to the festival’s saturation of the city, and it was in this highly appropriate venue, that Pimmon delivered a beautifully surging and serene performance ‘like a slow-motion whitewater torrent.. in space’. Even included some laptop microphone vocal work towards the end, albeit just one subdued layer rippling amongst the haze. Gorgeous. ( Listen to his weekly ABC radio show: Quiet Space, Pimmon on twitter, and audioboo – an iphone audioblogging tool )

Let’s Paint TV
John Kilduff’s blurb:
“Host of, and genius behind, the art damaged Los Angeles public access program “Let’s Paint TV”. He teaches you, the viewer, how to paint, blend drinks, and keep yourself healthy all whilst jogging on a treadmill. Kilduff believes in breaking down the barriers between art and pretty much everything else, in the ultimate aim of embracing failure.” Add 25 people in fluorescent clothes, buckets of paint and foodstuffs, a loud sound system, and put them all in a small glass room, and mix heavily. This happened twice daily.

Wade Marynowsky’s Dancing Robots
Great to see one of these ‘in person’. As well as witnessing it in action, Wade gave a great talk, aided by his electrical engineer Aras Vaichas, about the process of building 8 robots that could detect audience members, dance around them, and occasionally fire lasers directly into their souls. Or just y’know, spook people with seemingly intelligent commentary / engagement. ( More : http://marynowsky.net/ )

Screenings
The Japan Media Arts Festival 2008 animation program was awesome – virtuoso technical animations, but also relentlessly imaginative and diversely themed. ( )

Electro-Projections curated by Michael Prior and Matthew O Shannessy, featured a great selection of unusual and engaging work ( eg the humourous abstractions of Justin Kelly ). Getting a particularly strong crowd response was Skate bang by Damon Packard, an absurdist piece that reveals the power of the edit – cutting between close-ups of snipers shooting rifles, and skaters falling over on handrails, never seemed to wear out it’s welcome, even if the clip is nearly all punchline. Apparently he got an inheritance sometime ago, and decided to spend it all making and remaking films, sending a few thousand DVD’s of them out to random celebrities as well. Aaaaaaaaanyways…

Gig Highlights
DJ Ripley! Fave act of the festival! ( aka Larisa Mann aka PhD Candidate on the social implications of copyright aka just listen to her mixes! ) She seemed to enjoy the festival too… and plays Melbourne this Friday 9th @ Roxanne Parlour.

Bum Creek – Performance art? Music? Elaborate prank? Crowd ate them up naturally.
Qua – Featuring Laurence Pike on drums, James Super Melody and Cornel on electronic wizardry, reliably engaging, definitely won new fans over.

Not Enough Hours in the Day
Ok, so I missed the zombie rights march, the carpark ghetto aerobics ( well, it was on Sunday morning, the Sabbath! ), the zine fair ( usually such a great selection of DIY comics, books, CDs etc at this ), The DeConverters ‘Witness in the Wall’ project ( combining surveillance cameras and theatre ), a session about how video in theatre was bad ( ie lots of room for reinventing it ), and scheduled at the very same time as I gave a presentation about ‘opportunities for real-time video’, there was actually a Brazilian live cinema practitioner giving a talk somewhere else ( Bruno Viana made 2 feature films, and uses this weird circular interface beside the screen to let the audience see how his live editing process is reacting to them. Hope to interview him later on. )

Speaking of ‘blurred and frozen time’, I also missed Katherine Bennett’s exhibition, but over a chat with her ( Assistant Professors of Physical Computing, Rep-re-sent! ) on the way to the light-house, managed to catch Mika Meskanen‘s Temporary Sauna, a square roomed tent nestled amongst the sand dunes, with chimney, makeshift oven and sauna rocks.

Below, Indonesian trees testing the screen before my audiovisual performance with Dan MacKinlay ( am going to write some more about that later, particularly the Indonesian part of the set, which was based around a performance we did at the OK Video festival in Jakarta in late July 09 ). To the side, Brisvegan Tom Hall setting up for his audiovisual performance later ( which was nicely engaging for such an abstract piece ). Swiss sound artist Gilles Aubry also performed that night, a quite loud meditation on ‘planes’.

[[Update: Fernando in Melbourne, 2011 ]]

Six legged video projection anyone? You’re going to need a miniature projector and cables, you’re going to need a Mexican video artist by the name of Fernando Llanos, and most of all, you’re going to need, a chihuahua. Fresh from their recent Mapping festival performance, Fernando explains some more.

You are sitting at an airport with a chihuahua, laptop and video projector. A Californian with long blond hair wants to know what the ‘Videohuahua’ sticker on your laptop means. What do you tell him?
It’s a project I made as an artist, it started with me becoming a superhero, VIDEOMAN, and projecting video on the streets, like videograffiti, and now my Chihuahua projects some video too. I’m like Batman, a weird man with no super powers but some technology and lots of guts, and Chamaco is like Robin.

Still curious, he wants to know :  ”What kinds of places you project with these ingredients?”
Different places, I have been projecting in 5 cities in 4 years. I call them “urban accupunture”, they cause certains reactions, that in certain ways help heal the city or the people that saw them. For example, the first video projection I ever made was called: POETIC TERRORISM, and was the projection of airplanes having accidents on the Airport of Porto Alegre in Brasil.

Impressed that you brought your chihuahua to Switzerland, the Californian is inevitably wanting to know how difficult it is to bring a four legged creature around the world, during times of such cross-border disease phobias. 
It’s easier than you thought! You just pay, have the papers ready, and that’s it. Nobody told me anything in Switzerland when I arrived. When I arrived to Zurich I made a passport to Chamaco, now he is European.

“And what kinds of things do you project? Do you use sound as well? How does the dog feel about all of this? Is it ever integrated into the show somehow?”
The first time we did the VIDEOHUAHUA, Chamaco got really scared, so while I was putting the equipment, he pissed. People in Europe are more sensitive to this, when they saw him shaking and scared, they started telling me things like DOG ABUSE, etc. But I didn’t care, he’s my dog and he has to work, it’s like in a circus, there’s a price the animal has to pay, in order to eat foagra in France and jamón in Barcelona.

The first videohuahua projection was called: CHIHUAHUA’S ATTACK!! And was some video of some Chihuahuas barking really mad at the camera, with sound as lound as we could play: Chamaco got that in his back so he was really afraid!

“And what other kind of art do you do?”
Drawing, Guitar in a band, all kinds of videos, I’m writing a book, published first on my blog and I also like to cook.

The guy at the airport fumbles for his drivers licence, and smiles sheepishly at you. He wants to point out he’s from California, that he knows California and Mexico were once part of the same nation, before California shifted away to join the U.S. in 1846, and you, are not sure why he is telling you this. You receive a text message, and use this as an excuse to turn away briefly, before reading an invitation from a friend in Mexico City to participate in an upcoming show. You are excited by this, the event has a great range of Mexican artists, and a typically creative approach to how it will be happening. What is this event, and who else would be involved?
Actually today I got an email, with an invitation, and I got very excited, it’s a review of the 20 years of FONCA, like the official art support institution in Mexico, they are inviting me to participate, everybody is there!

“Ahh. So who are some interesting digital Mexican artists / art collectives?”
Arcangel Constantini,
Ivan Abreu,
Fran Ilich,
Alfredo Salomon
Hector Falcon
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer
Rogelio Sosa

And if you speak spanish, check my radio programme.

And which airport are you at, anyway, and where are you going?
I was travelling too much, Switzerland, France, Spain, Buenos Aires, Chile, Tijuana, San Luis, etc…. but now happy at home!!

Which robots have exhibited the most signs of life to you?
Hmm most are kinda quirky and you get over it real quick. I like David Hanson’s Phillip k Dick robot head that you can talk to.
(( “Somewhere on a shelf in a cavernous warehouse in Alabama rests the life-like noggin of Philip K. Dick, quietly dreaming of electric sheep. Or maybe the robotic head of the legendary sci-fi author got blown up. These are among the possible explanations for the bizarre disappearance of an artist’s homage to Dick.” ( more on Robot Dick’s head, over @ Wired )))

How’ve audiences responded to your previous robot installations? Did they react in any ways you didn’t expect?
One older lady put her scarf around the robot and had her photo taken with it. People have been convinced that I was inside the robot and that the robot was intelligent in some way.