2012. Zowie. Time flies. And as the year ticks over, it turns out to be 3 months since I last posted.

Mostly I’ve been busy (doing video on the Making Mirrors tour with Gotye / making a set of motion graphic video clips for Audego ).

Partially, the skynoise part of my brain has been ant-eaten away by the likes of twitter.

There’s also a whole bunch of almost-ready posts waiting to be covered in finishing sauce :

- CoGe review (including an interview with Tamas Nagy)
- VDMX 5 (Beta 8 ) review ( it is now 10 years since I reviewed VDMX 2, including a tiny interview with Johnny DeKam )
- Resolume Avenue / Arena review
- Web Aesthetics by Vito Campanelli, book review
- Art Rage Pro Review
- Sydney Film Festival + Melbourne Film Festival reviews
- another Quartz Composer tutorial / set of links + observations
- science fiction books set in the non-anglo world
- reflections on touring with Gotye..

Expect those to start trickling through in January. And after that, probably occasional longer form pieces on current obsessions, and more with images and video, less of the pop cultural snapshots. That said – everything about 2011 was probably covered in David Weinberger’s amusing top ten list of top ten list of top ten lists. And as Umberto Eco reckons, liking lists is part of the human condition.. we face infinity and our mortality by making lists / catalogs / encylopedias / museum collections etc .

Anyways,  2012 – what a cracker - and only 360ish days until everyone stops talking about Mayans..

This week’s mission – finish off a video clip for Congo Tardis, using wobbly green screen footage sent by their charismatic guest vocalist, Marawa the amazing.

*PRIMATE-FIST-BUMPS*

(( PS. The duo above, aping the Gotye bodypainting filmclip with 35 million views(!!), were wandering around at the 2011 Peat’s Ridge festival, and they became a pretty apt 2012 countdown backdrop on the big screen.. ))

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.

After doing live video for 2 shows there last weekend with the Gotye band, I can add to that list:
- It is a rabbit warren under the sails.
- The salad sandwiches in the green room are very ordinary.
- The elevator under the concert stage is faulty (I was trapped there with a weary tech guy for 5 tense minutes.. )

I got roped in to do live video for Gotye’s tour for his just released Making Mirrors album, which has accompanying animations for most songs. There’s some pretty nice work amongst it – I’ll have to do a follow-up post soon with links to all the animation houses. For me, my work is mostly editing and formatting to suit the main screen and 2 vertical side screens, then while the band plays – triggering short sections of these clips to ensure the right visual moments are synchronised with the band playing live.

Despite an almost comical list of headaches – long fog delays at Melbourne airport, animations arriving at the last minute, software quirks, a compressed set-up time, hardware quirks, that elevator(!) and so on – the first shows of the tour ended up running really well. Having a crack team of musicians (and tech folk) definitely helps in that regard (including Tim Shiel aka ‘Faux Pas’ beside me onstage). Below, the band and my hard-drive covered laptop during sound / vision check at the Opera House.

And the VDMX interface spreading its wings up on the screen briefly during rehearsal.

And once again, with people.

( More Gotye gig photos )

The Graphic Arts festival

Awesome choice for tour opener – showcasing an album and animations within a festival dedicated to comics. Graphic Arts had some great highlights this year:

- Jim Woodring, the author of FRANK, did a pretty mind-expanding talk on DEATH-CAKE apparently, and fantastic inking masterclass (attended by comic-friend Gregory Mackay (Francis Bear)).

- Tekkon Kinkreet - fantastic animated film – with accompanying live soundtrack by Plaid (Warp) + Fourplay (strings) + Synergy (robotic rubber limbed percussionists). Really luscious sound, really luscious film.

- Silent Comics – a series of comic panels projected while musicians provide a soundtrack. This included sound foley artists, Captain Beefheart-esque carnival bands, Seekae, Wally from Gotye in splinter-sample mode, and probably nailing it best, Plaid. Great idea for a session.

- Scott McCloud – from ‘Understanding Comics’ (also used as a multimedia bible in explaining media and visual storytelling concepts ) did a great one hour presentation, which harnessed visual support material as effectively as you’d hope a guy like him would. Lots of interesting points, though I found myself laughing at his interface observation-  ”Why does Tom Cruise need a glove to do all that in Minority report?”. He also ended with this pretty funny reading of a scrolling comic that involved monkeys mutating into progressively crazier proportions.

- Pete Kuper – aka the guy who did Spy Vs Spy from Mad magazine.

- An assortment of Aussie comic artists doing talks and workshops – including Mandy Ord, Pat Grant and more.

Sadly Robert Crumb wasn’t part of the mix – but I was amused to learn from the Festival organiser about the communication process they had – “Yes, Robert uses email, but that involves….” –  his assistant scanning his recent emails, printing the interesting ones, highlighting the relevant bits, cutting those out and putting them in an envelope and mailing them to Robert, who replies on the back with his pen. When he’s around.

So a while ago I interviewed Fernando Llanos, a Mexican artist with a huge catalogue of artworks under his belt. Notably, this included the Videohuahua project – which involved a micro projector strapped to the back of his pet chihuahua. Turned out he was bringing a video blimp to Australia for the Splendour in the Grass festival, and was spending a few days in Melbourne afterwards – so we made plans to meet up.

A couple of days later, I was introduced to Gonzalo who runs the enchanting Magic Lantern Studio ( 155 Brunswick St, Fitzroy, Melbourne ), which is filled with puppets, optical illusion and vintage pre-cinema moving image devices. At some point I noticed he had a few paintings of chihuahuas on the walls, and we got talking about them – and then I mentioned Videohuahua – Gonzalo stared at me, then lead me laughing to his computer where he showed a series of paintings that feature chihuahuas with cameras strapped to their heads.

Inevitably Fernando’s Melbourne visit had to include a trip to Magic Lantern, where it turned out the art and chihuahua anecdotes flew thick and fast ( mostly in fast-forward Spanish). Below, Fernando on the left, Gonzalo on the right, in front of the shop and a painting of a chihuahua with an electric shaver as head. Photographed and blogged, so I can say, no, I am not making this up.

See also art, politics and the daschund.

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.

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:

June 5th, 2011.

Due to a weird Sydney Opera House ticket mix up – I ended up at YO GABBA GABBA live this weekend – instead of the planned pilgrimage to Chris Cunningham’s triple screen live cinema assault. Priceless. Etc etc

More laters…

Earlier Quartz Wrestling delivered a splitscreen effect which took any clip playing in VDMX, and replicated it 9 times to provide something like a video-wall. It also customised a few of the Quartz based VDMX transitions, and identified a new range of problems when creating in Quartz. After some more noodling, and helpful tips from both Dan Winckler and Joris de Jong (hybridvisuals.nl), I managed to solve some of these problems, and custom build an effect I’d wanted (attached below).

1. How to select a custom anchor point in Quartz, for rotating an image or video?
The idea here was to be able to generate rotations from a corner, or from create arcs of rotation, with the rotation centre being far below the image. None of the various Quartz patches I could find seemed to have an ability to adjust an anchor point.

The solution? “Reposition the clip so what you’d like to be the anchor point is in the center of the screen, then place it inside a 3D transformation patch, and use the rotation Z property of that patch to rotate it.” (via Joris)

Understanding three dimensional space is best done when you have at least a slithery grasp of 2D first, and it took me a while to figure out why the width of a quartz patch always seemed to fill the screen when it had a value of 2.

Welcome to the Quartz Composer coordinate system:

The width of a Quartz Screen is always 2, because Quartz treats the centre as 0, and gives the left and right borders of the screen the coordinates of  –1.0 and +1.0. The coordinates of the top and bottom borders depend on the screen aspect ratio (AR). In the case of a 4:3 aspect ratio, the values at the borders are +1.0 / AR = +0.75 and –1.0 / AR = –0.75. ( From the Quartz Guide written by Apple’s basement dwelling engineers. See also: Quartz Composer User Guide (PDF))

Ok. So rotating a video and changing the anchor point.

The 3D transform patch that Joris suggested placing the clip inside, is a macro patch (which in Quartz have square borders, unlike the rounded corners of most patches). Macro patches can be created as usual in the Quartz editor window, but can host subpatches within them (after double clicking them. Clicking ‘edit parent’ takes the user back up the hierarchy to the editor window containing the macro patch). Below, the anchor patch with the 3D transformation macro patch:

Some notes from that screenshot – the viewer window is showing the combined result of 3 layers – each of which is contained within the macro patch. One of those is an image of red manga speed lines (set as the top layer, with blend mode set to add), and the others are a VDMX input, and a mask image to frame the VDMX input. As you can see, the centre of the image is black – because there is no VDMX input at the moment. Creating quartz patches for VDMX seems to involve a weird workflow of using say a webcam ‘video input’ while building a patch, and then swapping over the ‘VDMX video input’ when saving, then testing to see how it works in VDMX, then going back to Quartz and reconnecting the webcam and making adjustments, before reattaching the VDMX input and saving again.

Previously I’d only been working with Billboards in Quartz, which helped avoid 3D space – billboards ’render a quad positioned with 2 coordinates and which always faces the viewer’. I’d been routing clips and effects in patches to a billboard, which generally meant  the viewer was filled with my video. So to create this anchor patch, I put a Billboard inside the 3D transform patch and set about trying to adjust the subpatch. This didn’t work, and Joris explained why:

“Billboards don’t work in 3d space, so you need to work with sprites. Sprites are basically the same as a billboard, but you need to do some of the height and width calculation yourself. I’ve attached an example of how to offset the anchor point, and how to size the sprite correctly based on different input images.”

The example included the image dimensions patch, which “gives you access to info about your current rendering environment (resolution in pixels and QC measures). You can then use the Math patch to further process this info to fit your needs. This way, when your output changes from 4×3 to 16×9 for instance, your patch will update accordingly. The QC coordination system takes a bit of getting used to, but using the RDD patch to keep things dynamic is a good practice.”

Rotations applied to the 3D macro patch, transform all of the sprites inside it, so I figured I’d try and add a few sprites and create a layered result that could be rotated at will within VDMX. Clicking on a sprite patch reveals in the settings, blend modes of ‘reveal’, ‘add’ and ‘over’. And I figured PNG images with transparency, or videos with alpha channels would allow masking and compositing within Quartz. After a bunch more trial and error, some blending tips via Dan came in handy:

“PNGs with transparency: alpha channels aren’t respected when the Blend Mode of Billboards and Sprites is set to ‘Replace.’ Choose ‘Over’ or ‘Add’ and you’ll see your black backgrounds disappear.

Blending in general: The drawing order of renderers (layers) is determined by the little 1,2,3,n… dropdown box at the upper right corner of blue Renderer patches. Make sure your Clear patch is set to 1 (first/bottom).

Other blend modes: if you type ‘blend’ in the Library search box, you’ll see all the Photoshop-esque blend modes. Again, it’s not like a video mixer — play with the patching order (the Image and Background Image inputs) some. Better yet, make your compositions into plugins and do your mixing/blending in VDMX or another QC host app!”

And eventually, I ended up with this custom masked anchor rotation effect for VDMX – which composites whatever video VDMX is playing, underneath the speed lines, masked by a circle, into the centre of the screen and allows real-time control rotation. Which is really satisfying – custom tuning an effect for a particular purpose. I’ve included the patch below – click on the image sources to replace them with your own, play around with the 3D transform values to create your own rotation variants, and for any parameters you’d wish to access inside VDMX, publish the relevant inputs and splitters.

Download the patch (with inbuilt masks. 2.3 mb) here to play in quartz, and here to use in VDMX ( place it in your QCFX folder and it should show up).

Thanks again to Joris and Dan, who provided insights at just the right times!

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.

Want to directly support a very legendary local musician, who recently had his solar powered studio broken into?

The unfortunate recipient of the break in was Monkey Marc (Lab Rats, Combat Wombat, esteemed solo artist, and relentless workshop and gig organiser – read more about his technicoloured musical history at monkeymarc.com, or in a previous Skynoise interview).

“It took several months or hard work, a bit of a crazy idea and some help from friends to make the solar powered studio dream come true, and now its been going from strength to strength (despite a few ‘electrical’ issues) for nearly 2 years. It takes six solar panels on an old horse float and almost one tonne of batteries. The studio itself is built inside an old shipping container.”

- Monkey Marc’s website, describing his studio at Abbotsford Convent Artist Community in Melbourne, Australia, where he recorded all of the music for his latest album using solar power.

Solar Powered Monkey Fundraising
http://monkeymarc.bandcamp.com will let you specify whatever price you want for Monkey Marc’s most recent album (solo instrumental hip-hop, dub, future dub and dubstep) as an ‘immediate download of 11-track album in your choice of 320k mp3, FLAC, etc’. It’s a pretty good deal – gain a pretty fine album, and the knowledge your donation is going directly towards replacing stolen recording and musical equipment. Help a monkey in need!

MODUL8 + Mapping Festival, Geneva (19-29 May, 2011)

As well as a thematic focus on video projections mapped onto non-screen surfaces and shapes, this year’s festival will see the official release of MadMapper, a new video mapping software created by GarageCUBE (Modul8) and 1024_architecture. There are plenty of impressive demonstrations of Madmapper on the 1024 blog, and it lokos like the final release will include ‘native communication with Modul8 and QC, unlimited mapped surfaces, masking and drawing, and much more’. Festival bonus points – Melbourne’s Kit Webster was chosen as one of the few selected from International applicants to show an installation. See more at http://kitwebster.com.au.

VDMX Beta 8 + LPM, Rome (19-22 May, 2011)

Meanwhile, another gaggle of pixel-heads converge in Rome for the annual Live Performer’s meeting. Notable this year will be the rare fleshy appearance of the VDMX coders from vidvox.net, crawling out of their bunkers briefly to describe some of the benefits of their new BETA 8 ( such as built in Syphon support, and a whole range of underlying improvements). Also of note – the launch of a book on Quartz Composer, written by VJ Shakinda and Surya Buchwald (Aka Momo the Monster).

Audiovisual Mayhem With Maxforlive

Melbourne audiovisualist, Zealousy, has been developing a series of interesting looking Max For Live patches, which he calls Vizzable VJ Plugins, and he recently joined forces with Fabrizio Poce who makes the V-Module suite, merging their projects “to provide a comprehensive suite of video, effects and real-time graphics tools for Live,” and, “If you’d like to become involved in testing and developing these plugins please join the discussion at http://groups.google.com/group/jitterinmax4live-”

But What Does It All Mean?

Berlin’s clubtransmediale.de held a symposium in February, with a spotlight on the practice of media-based audio/visual live performance considering what ‘liveness’ entails in the age of media technology. Luckily for those elsewhere, a nice long list of provocative people, ideas, links, transcripts, and videos has been generously compiled by someone in attendance – the UK’s Toby *spark, who is both a live cinema pioneer and currently framing his Phd on the topic. If interested in live video, plenty to chew on here: http://tobyz.net/tobyzstuff/diary/

Teeming Void + Transmateriality

Also well worth a read, the latest piece by Mitchell Whitelaw (resident Canberra theorist and practitioner in generative art, data visualisation, physical computing, digital materiality etc.), which explores our fascination with glowing rectangles in today’s media ecology, and how processes and techniques such as projection mapping have been offering some ways to explore digital art beyond the screen. Great project examples and plenty to think about.

Above: Batgirl on a Bangkok rooftop, mixed with Tasmanian coastal footage and some quartz gradients and transitions in VDMX. This is a still from a series of recent video experiments that have involved recording video clips of live mixing with Syphon, then immediately bringing those clips into the mixing process, and repeating. And repeating. (Hats off to Vade and Bangnoise for enabling this workflow!) Will upload some sort of crash edit of video fragments to vimeo when time permits.

Below: More stills from this process, uploaded as a batch to Flickr.

Aquatic menage a trois: coral reefs, technology and underwater art.

Reef Beefs

While coral reefs have existed for over 200 million years, humans playing with technology have been causing them some grief in the last wee while. Coral is made by millions of tiny carnivorous animals called polyps that live together in colonies, and while coral reefs can sometimes take a battering from nature (damage to the Great Barrier Reef from the recent cyclone Yasi will apparently take 10-20 years to recover), it’s our use of fossil fuels that is their greatest threat – recent science reports predict that due to coral bleaching caused by increased temperatures, up to 95% of the Great Barrier Reef could be lost by 2050. That lust for fuel is also the reason for current controversy over Shell’s proposed deep sea drilling near Ningaloo Reef in Western Australia. Under the waves, a few artists are taking up the fight:

The Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef

Hoping to draw attention to the plight of coral reefs, the LA based Australian artist and scientist combo of Christine and Margaret Wertheim decided to crochet some as a ‘woolly celebration of the intersection of higher geometry and feminine handicraft, and a testimony to the disappearing wonders of the marine world’. Apparently helpful things to have in order to crochet a coral reef: ‘Knowledge of non-euclidean geometry*, Interest in embodied forms of reasoning, and A global sewing bee of serious science communication”. (*More at Believer magazine, and it turns out that Latvian crocheting helped solve a decades old mathematics problem of building a model of non-euclidean space.)

Jason deCaies Taylor’s Incredible Underwater Sculptures

Hoping to draw attention to the plight of coral reefs, and actually make some in the process – Jason has made an amazing series of concrete sculptures for the ocean floor. By themselves the statues are great but forgettable, but when viewed half covered in coral, with fish swimming past and starting to age with the ocean, they transform into enchanting otherworldly creatures. (In other, otherwordly news – did you hear the lost city of Atlantis may have been found?! The legendary metropolis believed swamped by a tsunami thousands of years ago might’ve been found in mud flats of Southern Spain ((And this via Reuters, not some UFO pamphlet..))

Coral Work

(Above image by Thea Beaumann)

Hoping to draw attention to the plight of coral reefs, by staging an underwater concert (!), artists at Aphids have begun creative development for their project, which they hope to perform later at the Great Barrier Reef. Recent filming tests utilised the 62,000 litre tank the Artrage complex has in down town Perth (Your local Art Complex has a 62,000 litre tank too, right?). (Also on the underwater concert tip – check out Nightswim, a Canadian pool party from sunset to sunrise with underwater microphones (were condoms used?), underwater speakers and specially composed works by Tim Hecker, FM3 and Hrvratski!)

And Maybe If We’re Good To Them..

Coral reefs could have a role to play in helping us identifying the next likeliest place to expect a quake (mapping where previous ones have split helps map faultlines and identify high-risk locations).

Wet Footprints: it’s flooding everywhere, but we’re running out of water? Information visualisation can help us get a grip on the slipperiness of water scarcity.

“Freshwater is a scarce resource; its annual availability is limited and demand is growing. The water footprint of humanity has exceeded sustainable levels at several places and is unequally distributed among people. There are many spots in the world where serious water depletion or pollution takes place: rivers running dry, dropping lake and groundwater levels and endangered species because of contaminated water. The water footprint refers to the volumes of water consumption and pollution that are ‘behind’ your daily consumption. Your ‘indirect water footprint’ – the water consumption and pollution behind all the goods you buy – is much larger than your direct water footprint at home.”

- worldwater.org

Visualising Water Use
Visit this eye-opening site to get a quick and easy grasp on water use around the world. Info-vis FTW!

“How much water do you consume based on where you are from? How much water do you consume based on what food, beverages, and products you purchase? This data visualization reveals the hidden water content in your nationality and your consumer goods. Label your lunch, your drink, your friends, yourself, even the whole world with its water footprint.”

The takeaway message: Australia uses around 3269 litres of water per person a day – over twice the amount of water for New Zealand, 3 times the amount for Indonesia or Korea, 4 times South Africa and 5 times Colombia. Who uses more water per person? Only the United States and Canada. At a glance, we mostly seem to use it on agriculture, followed by domestic then industrial use.

And Measuring Wet Footprints
The visualization site takes some of it’s information waterfootprint.org, where using their extended water footprint calculator, and guesstimating how many kgs of food I eat per week etc, I discovered my water footprint is pretty close to the global average of 1243. Agriculturally, coffee (and fruit juice) seems to require around 10 times the amount of water to produce as tea, and per kg of food, beef takes between 10 to 50 times the amount of water needed to produce potatoes, wheat, corn, rice or soybeans. They mention plenty of caveats*, and suggest the figures are best used as a guide to help think about our water consumption.

*These kinds of data are fraught with problems and uncertainties, and users should be extremely careful about using them for other than the most simple comparisons. When we can, we like to use ranges to try to bracket many of the uncertainties, but other sources rarely mention uncertainties or provide ranges of estimates. For example, the Water Footprint reports that 15,500 kg of water are required to produce beef, but work from the Pacific Institute reports a range of 15,000 to over 70,000 depending on diet, climate, the amount of product from each cow, and other variables. ( via http://worldwater.org/data20082009/Table19.pdf)

“When you see tuna, think panda. The bluefin tuna is now on the brink of extinction, thanks to industrial overfishing and corporate greeed. breeding populations could disappear from our oceans as early as 2012. Please do your bit to end this trade. Don’t sell, buy or eat this endangered species. And please support the bluefin defence campaign, Operation Blue Rage, at www.seashepherd.org.”

Facts about the endangered Bluefin Tuna

(IMG above found via Weekly Teinou Woman )

(Above, sunset Buka Ball near Bangkok's Siam district.)

That Novel

- is The Wind Up Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi, and it’s quite an engaging ride, vividly portraying what a Thai metropolis would look like through a Mad Max filter. Street ingenuity and cultural traditions mix and match in uniquely Thai ways to deal with the problems of a post peak oil city suffering from biotech plagues. And the problems are many, including – heat (Bangkok is the world’s hottest city according to the World Meteorological Organization), the threat of floods (from monsoons, rising ocean levels, and because the city is built on slowly sinking swamp land), and the need to feed (the novel offers a bleak future where biotech diseases have wiped out most of our biodiversity and provide a small number of disease resistant options to keep us from starving. Most of the book’s conflict and drama centres around battles for control of the city’s food chain). A cheery read then, when en route to Bangkok to have a dentist poke around in your mouth.

Those Teeth

True stories: dentists and surgeons in Bangkok have managed to cultivate a reputation and niche for medical tourism, offering high quality service at super competitive prices. It’s a reputation probably owing in part, to the popularity of gender switching in Bangkok, where billboards show cowboy hat wearing doctors offering their sex change surgical specialties. A taxi driver claims the high degree of microsurgery specialty is from the toughness of Thai women, and severed organs having to be re-stitched onto cheating husbands. Whatever the reasons for the abundant dental infrastructure in Bangkok, it means their dentistry is cheap. A sufficiently mangled mouth in Melbourne, for example, could find it half as expensive to get teeth fixed in Bangkok – even with the price of airfare included.

Of course, to avoid that drowning, dystopian version of Bangkok, probably requires that people aren’t flying halfway across the world to fix their ailments. According to carbonneutral.com, a return trip from Melbourne to Bangkok (16005kms) produces 1.58 tonnes of CO2, and the burden of this can be lifted by paying carbonneutral $24.81 to offset that CO2 in one of their renewable energy projects. Or just buy 20 toothbrushes and floss and give them to your friends.

Bonus Bangas: Sars Wars: Bangkok Zombie Crisis ( 2004 )

Bonus Bangas II: Comics made by a Bangkok artist, who also does a kind of spoken word with projected comic panels thing..

Bonus Bangas III: May Kaidee’s Cooking School does a pretty rad half-day vegetarian Thai cooking course for cheap. And they have great cookbooks.

Bonus Bangas IV: Turkish Batwoman still eludes me, but while scouting for rooftops, ran into Thai Batgirl on the 23rd floor of a building that had no security on their elevators.

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.

Scattermusic East Coast Tour Highlights from jeanpoole on Vimeo.

Part of the reason I’ve been quiet on the blog this year, was because of a very busy November and December with video. So it’s good to finally reflect some of that. Back in November I travelled up the Australian East Coast with the Scattermusic Sound System. Which meant 5 guys with 5 laptops in a van for 3 weeks, a dozen gigs, bouncing from Melbourne to Brisbane and back in a space-age Tarago, foam parties, passing through schoolies week in the Gold Coast, realising that our Wagga Wagga gig was at the same time as a world bantam weight boxing match being screened at the same venue, burnouts in Ballarat (as savoured by French Fries who had come along for that gig), Mat Cant twittering away and getting shout outs from Rinse.fm as we travelled, a projector mount that clamped onto anything ( including hotel cabin doorframes for late night movies ), and of course, a never ending supply of great tunes (most overheard sentence in the van? “This track is sick.”)…

Being able to actually document projections in a half-decent way now ( thanks to picking up a Canon 7D last year ), means I’m going to publishing a lot more video online from here in. It’s something that has been a long time coming, and I’m quite happy about finally getting that ball rolling.

Video credits:
Music: Scattermusic soundsystem feat Serocee – east coast anthem (mat cant dub edit)
Video edit, camera work and tour VJing by Jean Poole.
( Geelong photo by The Cheap Assassin, Bin Juice cover art by Michael Cusack )

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. )

Hugh Farrant and Giordano Nanni uploaded Episode 4 of Rap News to youtube in July 2010, a funny overview of wikileaks and the issues it raised. Their witty editing earned an invitation to meet Julian Assange, resulting in his cameo appearance in Episode 5 (Oct 27), nobody yet aware of the political chaos that would unfold a month later. (Photo above on the day of their video shoot )

How difficult was it to co-ordinate shooting a video with ‘the world’s most wanted man’, Julian Assange?
He managed to fit us in to an extremely hectic schedule. We were pretty sure he’d only have a couple of hours to spare, but at the end of the day’s shoot he told us he’d be happy to come back the next day and re-shoot some of it. Messing around in front of the camera definitely helped get his mind off more serious things for a few hours. He’s a great guy with a wicked sense of humour, and the calmest demeanour of any person we’ve ever seen.

Did you glean any insights about Wikileaks from the contact?
We got to see the project as it was about to enter this current Wiki-Trickle phase. We could tell that they were building up and unleashing progressively larger and more impacting data, but we have to admit that we were blind-sided by this ‘Cable-gate’ phenomenon. I mean, this is a real game-changer. It’s gigantic, and it’s just not stopping.

Given you’ve tallied half a million YouTube views, why refuse their offers of revenue sharing from ads?
We loathe advertising so passionately that the loss of a potential revenue stream is a small price to pay to keep the channel free of marketing. We have a donations system for people to visit, and since episode 5 dropped, plenty of people have been expressing their support with some cash. Donations keep Rap News going, and let us pay for ever more elaborate wigs and make-up.

What do you think of Auto-tune the news?
Seriously talented musicians, extremely funny, and Hugo has something of a man-crush on Michael Gregory. That guy’s got a lot of soul.

What other media inspire with it’s blend of politics and entertainment?
We both enjoyed Starship Troopers – hilarious and kick-ass sci-fi action movie, with some excellent calls about humanity’s interplanetary relations. We love South Park, and Team America is a high point of culture. Koyaanisqtasi – by Godfrey Reggio and Philip Glass – is a film which really inspires and opens one’s eyes to the world we live in. Videos of comedians Bill Hicks and George Carlin definitely taught us a few things. The greatest example of combining entertainment and politics is Jonathan Swift’s masterwork Gulliver’s Travels.

Good news – have we had any lately?
There’s never been a better time in history to be creative with access to a global audience. Wikileaks is excellent news. It was about time things got shaken up a bit. Evo Morales is excellent news for South America. Local band [Me] just signed a UK record deal. Also, Tool are visiting Melbourne in January. Very good news indeed.

Future musical projects for Hugo?
Regular gigs on the North Side. One day – some form of live Rap News format, initially within solo shows and build up from there – a full live touring Rap News musical extravaganza would be amazing. Keep your eyes out for new Branksome film clips, and the sci-fi farcical epic film clip ‘We Are The Humans’.

Future writing / journalist projects for Giordano?
Finishing touches to a book I’ve just completed, and embarking on a theatrical project – Coranderrk – in collaboration with Ilbijerri Aboriginal Theatre. And of course, future episodes of Rap News. Robert Foster’s could become an important voice. Stay tuned.

Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon ( see also: Snow Crash, The Diamond age and The Baroque Cycle ) is more than a decade old, but its themes of information security and encryption ( wrapped up in a swashbuckling adventure ) are particularly resonant this week, with the escalation of activity around wikileaks. The latest release of documents by wikileaks, dubbed ‘cablegate’, have Canadian politicans calling for the assassination of Wiki-leader Julian Assange, have Sarah Palin crying ‘treason’ (Julian isn’t actually a citizen of the United States), had U.S. politicians pressure Amazon into removing it from their hosting ( “If Amazon are so uncomfortable with the first amendment, they should get out of the business of selling books.”@wikileaks on twitter ), and they’ve provoked endless column inches in the world’s biggest newspapers and magazines dissecting the ramifications of the releases, as well as the philosophies, motivations and early writings of Assange.

Swordfighting
Anyways, back to the clashing of swords – and also in the historical fiction vein, Neal has been developing Mongoliad, an online experimental fiction project, which seems to have spawned from a bit of medieval sword fighting research slashed about with a bunch of his Seattle coder and writer and friends (including Greg Bear, another award winning sci-fi author). And so – an online serial novel, delivered to subscribers over the web and via iOS, android and kindle, with a strong emphasis on reader participation.
“Up until now novels have been defined by the technology of the printing press, and we don’t have to use that definition anymore unless it suits us. Some of the things that show up here will be chapters of the novel, some will be character portraits, some will be background articles about topics raised by the progress of the narrative, some will be maps.”

Julian Assange HipHop
Like an Aussie hiphop version of Auto-Tune the news, The Rap News uses the form of musical news broadcast to dissect and analyse current affairs. The brainchild of MC Hugo and editor / director Giordano Nanni, and made in a Melbourne bedroom studio, it’s impressively choreographed ( lots of different characters / costumes / accents / news graphics ) and manages to pack a dense analytical punch. Their video on wikileaks gained this tweet from wikileaks in response: “Hilarious Wikileaps rap gets it right. Is comedy the only honest commentary?” See for yourself.

PS. If lured in by swordfighting rap, hoping for new Wu-Tang hotel sheet shredding gossip, allow me to recommend instead, Iron Fist Pillage – a kungfu feature film with overdubbed vocals from the Wu crew ( and beats during the fight scenes).

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."]]

With the current rash of comics being turned into films, it’s probably a good time to remember there’s a fine array of Australian indie comic makers with a truckful of published inked pages between them. The Tango Collection, an anthology loosely themed around romance and edited by Bernard Caleo is the latest attempt to gather some of these in one place.

“If comics had a muse, she’d have crooked teeth and freckles and wear thick black-rimmed glases and old fraying cardigans, sensible shoes and embarrassing shirts her mother chose. She’d also have deep-green eyes and piercings galore, a hidden tattoo, a deliciously dirty laugh.”

Dylan Horrocks in the foreword to The Tango Collection.

And while the above description of a muse may or may not work for you, it has to be said The Tango Collection delivers when it comes to offering rawness of spirit, ideas and execution. It’s a passionate affair, featuring over 50 comic creators from Australia and New Zealand.

(image above by automobile fetishist, Gregory Mackay )

Highlights?
With such a diverse bunch, favourites are always going to vary, but these are mine:
Mandy Ord’s distinctive stylings always stand out, Pigeon Man…(up top, rats with wings! ) and ‘A Good Provider’ both deliver.
Gregory MacKay’s meditation on vintage aesthetics is really well timed and crafted.
Michael Camilleri’s mini-creature humans (see below), Andrew Fulton’s parent-son wrestling, Michael Fikaris’ food thoughts and Tim Molloy’s Shining Silver Path all manage to explore visual cuteness in interesting ways.
Glenn Smith + Gina Monaco take that a step further, gushing about sausage sandwiches at Bunnings and never eating sushi without each other. ( Apparently, they’s in lurvvvve )
Tim Danko brings some typically avant layerings from NZ… pondering about Melbourne as the world’s most livable city.
and Bruce Mutard’s internal food critic is well evoked in an exploration on the difficulty of eating ethically these days.

It’s an eclectic collection, though a few too many of the comics had visual styles or techniques that felt unpolished. That’ll vary depending on personal taste, and given the range, it’s a book well worth looking at. ( Out now through allenandunwin.com )

Web profiles of Comic Artists Involved?
Kirrily Schell – kirrilyblog.blogspot.com
J. Marc Schmidt – 3rdblade.net
Glenn Smith – glennoart.com
Ian C. Thomas – labyrinth.net.au/~iant
Bernadette Trench-Thiedeman bernadettett.blogspot.com
Bobby N – bluetoaster.com
Jenny Nestor – redbubble.com/people/nestor
Mandy Ord – mandyord.blogspot.com
Gordon Reece – gordon-reece.com
Daniel Reed – crumpletonexperiments.com.au
Angela Savage – angelasavage.wordpress.com
Tim Molloy – timmolloy.deviantart.com
Toby Morris – xtotl.com
Gregory Mackay – gregorymackay.com
Dylan Horrocks – hicksvillecomics.com
Jared Lane – jaredlane.co.nz
Zeldz Magnoonis – syrupcomeks.com
Scott Matthews – mediumtedium.net
Pat Grant – patgrantart.com
Nicki Greenberg – nickigreenberg.com
Edward J. Grug III – webcomicsnation.com/grug
Owen Heitmann – owen-draws.livejournal.com
Robert De Graauw – angelfire.com/mt/seymour
Michael Fikaris – braddockways.com
Adi Firth – adisillos.blogspot.com
Adam Ford – theotheradamford.wordpress.com
Mirranda Burton – pawpedaller.com
Bernard Caleo – cardigancomics.com
Tim Danko – deadxeroxpress.com
Oslo Davis – oslodavis.com
David Blumenstein – nakedfella.com
Bowb – ragingyoghurt.org
Brendan Boyd – myspace.com/boydiemusique

And Some Australian Comic Links?
http://comicslifestyle.ning.com
http://www.tabula-rasa.info/AusComics/Links.html
http://www.ozcomics.com/
http://www.rizzeria.com/about – collectively owned stencil-press printing group in Sydney
http://comicsdownunder.blogspot.com – history of Australian comics from 1930 to today.

The Executive Summary
We Made Our Own Disaster, A study of fascism in late 20th Century democracies : By Robin Mahoney and Si Begg, out now through Optronica (UK group founded in 2004 by artists/producers Addictive TV and curators Cinefeel ).
DVD, Dolby 5.1, 66 minutes.

Rewinding to The Noodles Foundation
If unfamiliar with the turn of the millenium era ‘Death Of Cool’ compilation series, browsing sibegg.com/noodles should give a good indication of what goes through the head of Si Begg when he’s not sculpting monster basslines and synth earworms (Actually, one step better – listen to 30 second snippets from each track on ‘The Complete Death of Cool’, which combined the best Noodling via the Leaf label ). Somehow those compilations managed to blend sonic sophistication, chunky basslines and quirky British humour into some sort of lovable mutant electronica. And at some point, they also released ‘a blitzkrieg assault of scratchpunk videos to feed your desktop’ entitled Ho-FuN – ‘The Smallest Film Festival In The World’.

Live Cinema and Dancefloor friendly DVDs?
Inevitably then, this study of fascism is more Ali G than Adam Curtis ( famed BBC documentary maker ). It’s best moments harness the curatorial judgments of the editors ( digital crate diggers, represent! ), their technical flair ( there are some captivating sonic and visual transitions) and the underlying dry British humour which milks televisual moments for every absurdity, horror, and occasionally sublime flavour. Midway through for example, a TV cabaret snippet is transformed beautifully, loop-stretched, as a zoom zeroes in, until eventually cross-fadeing into a clip of a cat spinning in zero gravity with a trainee astronaut. And some of the material is great by itself, such as a series of everyday characters staring awkwardly into the camera. There are many such golden moments, but on the flipside, the continual leaning to the dancefloor ( letting faster music and beats drive the editing, overly repetitive sample use etc ), diminishes its appeal as a DVD ( given the inevitable comparisons with cinema grade production levels and screenwriting ).

As a DVD, this is a notch above many of the video mixtapes now abundant online – you don’t get to be veterans of collage without learning a few tricks. That said, the idea of a remix compilation based around mostly archival footage and nostalgic tv commercials is a less compelling idea today than it was a dozen years ago, and the ability to lure eyeballs away from fragments online to something longer form, really depends on the quality, coherence and originality of the overall vision. There’s plenty of adventure to be had on the disc and Sibegg’s soundscaping for the most part plays a great part in binding everything together, but some of the disc’s techniques are quite dated, such as mixing of badly keyed footage, certain visual effects and a stuttery on/off approach to vocal samples that becomes annoying after a while. Why the repetitive triggering and re-triggering of samples, when there can be much more sophisticated and fluid sequencing possibilities used in the live terrain ( eg final scratch / Serato / Ableton Live sequencing video clips with midi, max for live used with jitter etc )? Maybe this is a result of the DVD being edited with traditional editing software, rather than explored with real-time processes? Who knows? Anyways, yes, more Nom Nom than Noam, but a fun and commendable effort, and another reminder that creating live cinema, or ambient cinema that can be tuned in and out of like music, is actually pretty difficult.

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.

Ha-Ha Plants
Regan Tamanui’s website proudly proclaims in a banner, that he is ‘Australia’s most prolific and notorious stencil artist’. It’s a claim few in the stencil community would dispute, and to those outside that circle of spray paint fumes and stanley knives, there’s a fair chance Regan’s work has been stumbled across in the street, usually with his Ha-Ha tag somewhere nearby. Turns out though, that Regan is also quite the guerilla gardener, adapting lots of inner city spaces for one of his latest passions: growing food. I went to visit his inner city Melbourne studio to have a look at some of this in action.

“I was previously a landscape gardener for 3 years in New Zealand, and have done a bit of it here ( in Melbourne ), I just really like being around plants and gardening, it’s good to see some nature instead of the concrete jungle,” explains Regan in his studio, surrounded by plastic stencils, stacked canvases, and pot plants, and next to a window ledge full of apple seeds he is drying out for a fruit tree project. Outside that second storey window of his studio, Regan has attached a series of milk crates with pot plants in them, growing herbs and small vegetables, some of the seedlings growing in styrofoam two minute noodle containers and beer cans.

Aside from the studio, Regan also maintains mini-gardens in portions of the yards belonging to friends ( ‘they end up getting more excited about it than me in the end..’ ) and plants potatoes in vacant lots and spare space near train tracks.

“It’s just so satisfying to plant a seed and see something grow out of it, and then get to eat it. At a friend’s place we’ve set up tomatoes and zucchinis growing on his rooftop, and the owner of the building wants to turn it into a full proper rooftop garden which is great. I have a friend who grows cactus gardens in a shopping trolley on her balcony in Bourke st… so you can really grow stuff anywhere.”

And art? Regan’s stencils will be on gallery display Australia-wide from Oct 30th:
“The National Gallery of Australia bought a whole range of stencils in 2003, including some of mine, and they’ve organised a big touring exhibition of it called ‘Space Invaders’, which starts in Canberra, and then travelling to lots of places around the country.”

[ Update - Liisa from Eatwithme.net points to this tram stop garden as a great example of urban food growing, which reminds me I also wanted to link to Permablitz, a cool group that 'eats the suburbs, one garden at a time'. ]

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 )

How did you first get into aerial photography / video making?
I already had experience in RC helicopter and airplanes from about 10 years ago and was working as a semi-pro camera man and editor. I found myself catching up on the latest helicopter technology on the internet forums and saw people putting cameras on heli’s and was in.

Do you have some kind of remote viewing of the camera’s aerial perspective?
Yes, the heli is equipped with a 900 mhz transmitter to live view the video on the ground. (The transmitter takes the video signal from the video out of the camera, transmits it to our ground station and monitor. ) This is key to frame the shot, or track the action.

What range have you got?
The range if over clear ground is just over a mile.

What does it feel like, to be ‘feel’ like flying?
Even though I am not sitting in the heli while flying, sometimes you do really get into the flight and it feels like I am looking down at the ground.

You are standing on the top of a cliff or skyscraper. How far from the edge can you fly before you start feeling nervous?
This is a great question since perception of the heli is so critical. I have flown out over 200 meter cliffs with ocean below. You get a nervous feeling as soon as the heli goes out over the cliff since you know one mistake and you will never get you equipment back. How far out I can go depends on the wind, the visual sky or background behind the heli and just how dangerous I feel that day. On a shot like that, anything over 150 to 200 meters out is extreme.

How would you feel flying your copter around you, while in a boat mid-ocean, or hang-glider mid-air?
Flying from a boat would be great and I have been asked to do this before. It is kinda like the high cliff shot, because if any problem occurs there will not be time to safely land the heli and it will end up in the water.

Have you lost any cameras yet, or had any close shaves / dangerous moments?
In the last 6 months of working I have crashed the heli with my 5D attached twice. Lucky for me it was not over the cliff or the water and the camera / lens survived both accidents. Every time the heli leaves the ground it is a dangerous moment and too many close calls to mention, but that is what the clients want and I give it to them.

What have been some favourite scenes / events / locations to fly over?
Being a part of movies and tv shows are what I like best andmsome of the cool spots to fly have been downtown Toronto and also Big Sur California.

What do you like and dislike about the current range of DSLRs and their capacities?
I love the image quality that you get from these cameras and they are absolutely amazing for the price. I guess what gives me problems is how sensitive they are to vibration. Most people cannot shoot stable video while holding the camera and walking slowly. I put this camera on a whirling spinning helicopter which has to be perfect or the shot will be ruined by rolling shutter or other shaking.

What do you think about the iphone copters?
I think they’re awesome. There is so many very cool flight toys out now for $100 or less. It really allows anyone to get into flying for cheap.

Camera technology you’d be excited to see in 2011?
A 5D III and the possibility to output raw video – would be a game changer. The new 3D cameras are also very interesting and I am working on a new heli that will carry larger camera such as EX1, Panasonic 200, etc.  Thanks so much for letting me share some information with you. I hope to come fly my heli down under very soon! I can be reached at eric@helivideo.com

[[ Previous DLSR related posts: stabilisation and steadicams, an introduction to DSLRs, macro photography and video, time lapsing and a Canon7D review ]]

As with all self-publishing though, technical hurdles are only one part of the challenge to survive, and while their are some self-publishing success stories, getting word out there can be incredibly difficult and time consuming. It’d be great to see Francis Bear become a self-publishing phenomenon ( if only so it means we get to read more of these books ), so I offer a twin pronged attempt to convince you to purchase: In one window, stare into this image, and with your credit card ready in the other window…

(See also: Francis Bear reviews Scott McCloud’s Making Comics, Francis Bear reviews Larry Gonick’s Cartoon Guide To Physics, and Francis Bear takes on Sylvester Stallone.)

World War Gay

Also hailing from Melbourne’s Silent Army era (it’s comic veteran day at skynoise), Clint Cure ( Q-Ray) and Kieran Mangan are in the midst of raising funds to produce a short video series for the web. Loosely framed as a John Waters meets John Carpenter / sci-fi / action adventure about the development of an anti-gay serum, at time of writing they’ve raised $426 of their modest $1000 goal. Says Kieran: “Why does a film cost $3 million? Well, I know why, but I also know it doesn’t have to. ” And something that may increase or decrease your likelihood of offering some small support – Clint recently finished a short zombie remake : ‘Hanging at Picnic Rock’. And interestingly, this fundraising is all powered by the new Australian micro-fundraising site Fundbreak, an Australian version of kickstarter.

“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... ]]

Meathaus.com
Meathaus is a number of things – a loose collective of New York cartoonists and illustrators, a sporadic comic anthology, and a fantastic blog abundantly filled with wonky and woozy illustrations and comics. Check their about page for their amusing modus operandi.. or their wikipedia page which lists those who’ve been on-team over time, including the likes of now-famous illustrator James Jean and the engaging and disturbing comic storyteller..

Dash Shaw
If you have enough spare time to gobble down 12 free chapters of Dash Shaw’s Bodyworld, then hop to that mother-lode of weirdness and expansive skulled nuttery right here: dashshaw.com. If already gobbled, then you’d be excited to know that Dash has followed up his animation series, The Unclothed Man in the 35th Century A.D, with work on an animated feature film, Ruined Cast. It’s great to see something so far from the Disney template getting the feature green-light, and even better that work in progress is available to view: Ruined Cast.

Scott McCloud’s Blog
Aye, the author of the oft-revered ‘Understanding Comics’ ( great for thinking about art, multimedia and the web, not just comics), has a site, blog, and twitter account. Very comic-finger pulsey, for those inclined. I’ve been enjoying his blog over the last few months because it often points to innovative web designs and comics I mightn’t have otherwise discovered, such as… Vincent Giard This Montreal-based cartoonist has a huge palette of vivid illustration style, but I especially enjoy the way he uses animated GIFS within a series of comic panels to create something that lies in between comics and animation – there’s a few hours to be lost clicking through all these pages.

Thisisnthappiness.com
Another collater of unusual images, these kind of sites are swarming all over tumblr now, but this one manages to keep the images eclectic and surprising enough to stay interesting.

Print on demand, itself novel enough, has been shifting into the third dimension.

2D Print on Demand
Instead of having to do a minimum print run that earlier print technologies needed, it’s now possible to print single books. This can be done at various printers who can do print on demand (eg Melbourne University’s Custom Book Centre, or by uploading a PDF to a variety of sites ( eg lulu.com / or this much bigger list)), then having others print (and mail) your book whenever someone orders one. Compared to indie print publishing of recent decades, this is a pretty amazing scenario. And then there’s …

3D Printing of Actual Objects?
Leader of the online pack seems to be Shapeways(.com), who define 3D printing as

“.. any additive manufacturing process whereby one machine turns a digital file into a finished physical object by building up that object layer by layer,” noting that,”if you were to be more precise the technology would be called rapid manufacturing and 3D printing would just be one of the manufacturing processes used to create objects in this way.”

The overall process seems similar to using lulu to print a book – upload a file, and they manufacture the object whenever someone selects one to buy from the gallery. Digital 3D file formats accepted include STL, VRML2/97, COLLADA and X3D files and they recommend Accutrans or Meshlab if you are using another format and need to convert to a shapeways friendly format. At the moment the maximum size any product can be is 49x39x20cm (19x15x7inches), which also depends on the machine and material. Possible materials for your 3D object include: stainless steel, alumide ( WSF with aluminium dust ), glass, sandstone, and various photopolymers. Their servers check your 3D model for manufacturing compatibility once uploaded, and if approved, pass it along to their production facility for processing. And judging from the gallery, objects can range from a few dollars, through to the tens of thousands.

And while noting that the future has already been arriving a while now (3D print on demand isn’t new, it just boggles me), should probably give a shout out here to sci-fi author Bruce Sterling*, who has been keeping track of such objects and processes for a long time now at his wired blog. Bruce also coined the term ‘spime’ for objects that could be tracked over space and time during their lifetime, something that could help recycling complex manufactured goods for example. See his 2005 book, Shaping Things for more on that.

((Naturally, at the time of writing, Bruce’s blog blob-blurted out a pretty important new 3D printing development: “The MakerBot Cyclops 3D Scanner! The MakerBot Cyclops 3D Scanner is a cheap, structured light scanner to turn real things into digital designs. It’s a 3D scanner!”))

(( & Elsewhere, the New York Times writes about how 3-D Printing Spurs a Manufacturing Revolution : “A California start-up is even working on building houses. Its printer, which would fit on a tractor-trailer, would use patterns delivered by computer, squirt out layers of special concrete and build entire walls that could be connected to form the basis of a house.” ))

(( (And the pic? A still from a Brunswick rooftop video made a while ago ))