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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One makes songs about gay dentists, the other is a legendary French comedian and director no longer with us. Between them, they’ve delivered us this year, a pair of French feature films about serial killing car tyres and struggling magicians.

French Rubber

Mr.Oizo, already somewhat notorious from his audio exploits at Ed Banger records, has earlier branched out into music video and film making. Steak, a feature released only in France in 2007, had a plot based around kidnapping, plastic surgery and the fashion world, and handily, featured cameos from French artists Sebastien Tellier, Kavinsky, and SebastiAn ( who appeared as wheel-chair bound car thieves ). Apparently Mr.Oizo himself, Quentin Dupieux, is the only person who has an English subtitled version, after the French producer lost interest post-release in France.

Rubber on the other hand, is already popping up all over the web video radar, with quirky trailers available at vimeo.com, or fresh from the leathery horse’s mouth at rubberfilm.com ( and as it turns out, writing rubberfilms by mistake, delivers a premium fetish gallery. Not to be confused with Rubber, the 1936 Dutch flick, or Chris Cunningham’s flickerfest, Rubber Johnny ). It’d seem easy enough to think of this as a quirky road movie ( and yet another feature film shot on the Canon 5D), but this rubber tyre serial killer flick might just transcend the genre’s usual offerings. Also on the soundtrack alongside Mr.Oizo, will be Gaspard Augé of Justice ( another Ed Banger ). Make of it all, what you will. See Rubber at the 2010 Melbourne International Film Festival.

And In The Other French Corner..

Being both a master of comic timing and carefully orchestrated cinematography, Jacques Tati’s films inevitably unfold with visual charm, and an abundance of surprise for the eyes. Playtime, his most famous film, took 9 years to make, was shot on 70mm and involved a set on the outskirts of Paris which resembled a small city in itself. Like his other films, it too took a sword to modern society, lampooning social attitudes and obsessions with gadgetry and convenience, and being near dialogue-less, requires viewing to see just how funny it and Tati are. Interest is high then, for The Illusionist, an animation based on a script by Tati, and directed by Sylvain Chomet ( who also directed the gorgeous Triplets of Belleville animation feature). Tati intended to make the film as a live action film with his daughter, with the plot revolving around ‘a struggling illusionist who visits an isolated community and meets a young lady who is convinced that he is a real magician.’ And being a French production, naturally everything is a little more complicated.

See The Illusionist at the 2010 Melbourne International Film Festival

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today’s players : Tom Waits, Roger Ebert, Ramin Bahrani and Werner Herzog.

Bone Machine Reverb
It should come as no surprise that Tom Waits has little regard for the conventions of modern recording. His lyrics, his demeanour, his gravel throated rasps – they all exude an authenticity unsuited to being captured within sterile, pre-fabricated surrounds. Back in 1992, along with his album Bone Machine, Tom released an interview disc ( ‘The Operator’s Manual’ ), which in some detail, discussed how the album came to be. Parts were hilarious ( “With Keith Richards, we’d try to finish a bottle and a song everyday. We’d always finish the bottle.” ), but all of it was fascinating. And when it came to choosing the recording location, Tom liked to know know / feel what had been there before, liking one of the rooms because it had been a children’s nursery at some point, and he liked how that resonated with what he had in mind for the album.

The Man Without A Voice
The man without a voicebox, more like it, is Roger Ebert, who with a Pulitzer prize for criticism in 1975, 15 books on film, 23 years of film reviews on tv with Gene Siskel, and his massively popular blog – definitely has a voice. His writing is a rewarding blend of personal anecdotes and technical insight, and it’s accompanied by a whirlwindy passionate army of commenters. It was his steady stream of twitter links and provocations that first hooked me into his writing though, and lead me eventually to his longer posts about Werner Herzog and Ramin Bahrani ( two of his favourite directors ), his going to watch Rocky II at the cinema with Muhammad Ali, and somewhere along the line realising that this busy juggernaut of a critic – can’t speak ( at least not without a computer voicebox to replace his, due to post-surgical thyroid cancer complications). Or eat or drink ( he uses a feeding tube). Not that he’s letting this get him down, or slow him down.

“I mentioned that I can no longer eat or drink. A reader wrote: “That sounds so sad. Do you miss it?” Not so much really. Not anymore…. The food and drink I can do without easily. The jokes, gossip, laughs, arguments and shared memories I miss…. Maybe that’s why I enjoy this blog. You don’t realize it, but we’re at dinner right now.”
- ( A long and profound read )

Ramin Bahrani
Admittedly the only film I’ve seen of Ramin’s is Plastic Bag, a 20 minute short – exploring the life of a disposable plastic bag, and threaded with a grim, existential gravity through its narration by Werner Herzog. And the way that was put together immediately adds his 3 feature films to the wishlist : Goodbye Solo, Copy Shop and Man Push Cart, each of them having won awards in recent years. Both Bahrani + Herzog lead a recent shot-by-shot discussion of Herzog’s Aguirre: The Wrath of God at a recent public festival.

The German Voodoo Man
Herzog, he who has physically hauled a ship over a mountain ( Fitzcarraldo ), has taken a camera onboard an experimental flying vehicle ( White Diamond ), and who has moved amongst the burning Gulf War fires in Kuwait ( Lessons of Darkness ), famously speaks of a ‘voodoo of location’, which Ebert suggests is the ways in which an actual location, where actual events take place, carries a psychic, or emotional, or sensory, charge to the screen – and the more intense and physical enduring the location, the more palpable the results onscreen. Herzog’s Aguirre: The Wrath of God, is a film about a doomed historical expedition in Peru, a conquest that Herzog reshot by retracing their steps, despite the various perilous conditions.

More Voodoo : New Orleans, home of the voodoo doll, is the setting for David Simon’s currently screening television follow-up to the Wire, Treme, which focusses on musicians living in post-Katrina conditions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The audio app ecosystem for the iphone is still fairly young, so there’s plenty of apps fighting for attention, and quite a diverse range of approaches to portable music and sound. Below, the fruits of an afternoon’s worth of downloading and testing (and about $73 all up).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Screen Sharing
No, not chat roulette. Skype. Video screen sharing. This has been around a while, but it has so much potential, I wanted to mention it here. As well as video chatting, Skype also allows the easy option of sharing portions of a desktop screen between people. It works at a decent framerate and crisp resolution, without much lag, and the audio chat works fine on top. Once you’ve used it – a few possibilities leap out straight away:

- collaborating on projects via tropical hammocks. (”no, no – I think an edit to a darker scene at 1:47.. like this… just a sec.. topping up my coconut juice”)
- remote tutorials (in real-time rather than recording and uploading).
- really direct feedback and refining of work ( compared to email ping pong and uploading / downloading test clips / songs / graphics etc )
- live remixing of processed video from afar

A friend introduced me to this while we were working on an animation project together, and it was so effective at jumping to problem areas on a timeline, and changing things immediately without having to render and upload etc. Move this bit here, put that on the other side of the screen, a bit less of that effect etc.

Working on an animation project with a friend, we began to use it quite a lot to show each other where we were at on the timeline, able to voice chat at the same time, and request to adjust parts, or jump to certain parts of the timeline. Really useful, and

MPEG StreamClip
Elsewhere in the so-damn-useful video software ballpark, is the free MPEG Streamclip from Italy, an awesome but under appreciated bundle of code downloadable from http://www.squared5.com:

“MPEG Streamclip is a powerful free video converter, player, editor for Mac and Windows. It can play many movie files, not only MPEGs; it can convert MPEG files between muxed/demuxed formats for authoring; it can encode movies to many formats, including iPod; it can cut, trim and join movies. MPEG Streamclip can also download videos from YouTube and Google by entering the page URL.

You can use MPEG Streamclip to open and play most movie formats including MPEG files or transport streams; edit them with Cut, Copy, Paste, and Trim; set In/Out points and convert them into muxed or demuxed files, or export them to QuickTime, AVI, DV and MPEG-4 files with more than professional quality, so you can easily import them in a DVD authoring tool, and use them with many other applications or devices.”

It support a huge range of file formats, allows easy cropping of images ( to get rid of bad borders etc ), it does batch processing, it lets you easily export snippets from DVDs, it can split large files onto multiple discs, and the list goes on. A must download for any video-heads.

http://fffff.at/fattag-meet-projector
For whatever reason, the iphone’s video out can’t be used while using apps – without jailbreaking the iphone. In other words, the phone has the capacity, but this is being annoyingly withheld. Once jailbroken, yes, there’s an app for ensuring video out while playing games or using visual tools. And a sign that this dormant feature might become activated? Try the ‘fat tag’ graffiti app – which although doesn’t support video out in it’s official version, has been made available as a custom version that does. Draw, paint, connect video out to projector and there’s a nice little portable touchscreen projection rig right there.

Bonus Round
http://wayneandwax.com/?p=3069 Free album by Mutamassik, That Which Death Cannot Destroy
http://flattr.com/beta – micropayments system designed by one of the pirate bay

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

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

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

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

Stingray Sam

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

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

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

Other Kinds of Magic:
Enter The Magical Mystery Chambers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No Chimpee, No Cry

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

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

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

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

Supposedly there’s an app for every splinter of today’s needs. Ask T-Pain and Trent Reznor. Time for a quick scan then, of the creative tools available for pixel-heads, visualists and cinematographers.

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

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

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

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

This should be fun! Meredith Music Festival Sat 12th Dec : Outdoors Animal Collective gig at sunset, then Jarvis Cocker, then an hour or so later, an audiovisual gig with Lewis Cancut at the outdoor cinema. From the festival blurb:

“Jungle-Vision : A Live Audiovisual Safari by Lewis Cancut + Jean Poole
Deep in the heart of the Congo ( tram stop 124, route 1, Brunswick East ), Lewis Cancut has been cultivating his video-turntable chops – scratching and mixing customised videoclips by Jean Poole at the same time as cutting up regional sonic flavours like baile funk, cumbia and kuduro. Fresh from a more laid back performance @ ACMI by the duo (about the history of television), expect a more uptempo mix for Meredith – equal parts cinema hypnotism and dancefloor grind.

Lewis Cancut : http://scatterblog.com + http://www.myspace.com/lewiscancut
Jean Poole : http://video.skynoise.net”

( Also fun : A Tim Sweeney DJ set @ 2am on Friday night, + a bonus 5-6am addition to the Saturday night line-up : Nathan Fake! )

Audiomulch ( Built in Melbourne! ) the ‘interactive music studio’, has long held a near cult status amongst electronic music producers, and upgraded to 2.0 a few months ago ( including a native mac version for the first time ). For those desiring more lateral performance approaches than Ableton Live allows, but without the steep learning curves of Max / MSP, the newly tweaked Audiomulch 2.0 might be just the ticket.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adam Curtis, Cicada, Ubin, Suckafish P Jones.

It Felt Like A Kiss
Mr.Curtis, you may remember from such documentary flourishes as: The Power of Nightmares, The Century of the Self, The Mayfair Set, Pandora’s Box, The Trap and The Living Dead. Each series it could be said, performs the same trick : pulling back the curtains on the twentieth century to reveal it’s hidden power structures and machinations. Not that this matters one little bit, his edits of the BBC archives are often as exhilarating as they are illuminating. The boy can really stitch things together. And write it seems, via his BBC blog where he’s been outlining some of the projects / research that’s kept him busy since his last series.

Your executive summary :
- Researching for the West’s relationship with Afghanistan.
- Researching for the legacy of European empires in Africa.
- Developing a piece about “the political and cultural ideas that underlie the internet – and the idea that we are all linked in an interconnected web – out of which can come a new form of democracy.”
- Edited a 54 minute film, ‘It Felt Like A Kiss’, with soundtrack composed by Damon Alburn, performed by the Kronos Quartet. This film was shown in a darkened sixth floor of an abandoned building, as part of a Manchester festival. The film ( available on torrent sites ) features Enos the chimp sent to space, Lee Harvey Oswald, Saddam Hussein, Tina Turner and Richard Nixon.
“Imagine walking into a disused building. You find yourself inside a film. It is a ghost story where unexpected forces, veiled by the American Dream, come out from the dark to haunt you…”

Pro Tip: Need to watch BBC iPlayer videos from his blog? ( blocked to those outside the UK )
Use Tor or mgeni.

cicada.tv
Cicada as the trio of Kirsten Bradley, Nick Ritar and Ben Frost, are accomplished at executing technically and artistically compelling audiovisual performances and installations, but have been busy in many directions over recent years. Kirsten and Nick have relocated from Melbourne to near Mudgee to try and go even higher resolution with their work ( and higher biodiversity), setting up the Milkwood Permaculture farm in an appropriately technical and creative fashion. They have the internets out there though, so stay tuned for future projects. Ben has taken his wall of noise to Reykjavik, Iceland. He is not to be confused with the other Australian Ben Frost, the visual artist behind benfrostisdead.com. Neither of them should be mixed up with the other Australian Ben Frost, the Emmy award, London dwelling winning puppeteer.

A Decade of Flashbacks
Oli Chang and Jo Lamont slayed dancefloors back around the start of this century, with a chopped and spliced sound that somehow integrated gamelan, funk and haunted children choir sounds and influences. Today Oli can be found over at : http://soundslikeoli.com, which redirects to a range of soundtracks and ‘cinematic remixes’ he has been working on. This includes an entrant in the dawning audiovisual genre of ‘chicken techno’, and a remix of Empire of the Sun. Jo Lamont was last seen trawling seedy Tokyo laneways for esoteric synthesisers.

Cross Continental Data Corruption
Suckafish P Jones has deserted the sunny shores of Brisbane ( you should really check out their fake beach, set inside landscaped gardens, overlooking their unswimmable river), for more jetlag jaunts, and is now based in Barcelona, where he has recently released his swanky ( swampy? ) new Phantasmatica EP ( free download ) on disboot.net. Next Up, Mr.Midnight, due before the end of the year. Fine, fine music!

Hey guess what? It’s a thrill to present an interview with one of the founders of E.B.N., pioneers of audiovisual radness, and inspiration to many since way back in 1991. Yeah, those guys beaming their live video sampler performances from a bunch of TVs atop a station wagon on the Lollapalooza tour, the guys that made a video remix ‘album’ from Gulf War footage, and opened U2’s ZOO TV tour. That was E.B.N., and they paved the way for much of today’s live video. Although long disbanded, Brian Kane and the other founders, Joshua Pearson and Gardner Post, have each continued exploring various multimedia technologies ( links to each and more E.B.N. details / videos etc at their wikipedia page ). Brian’s thoughts below.

Back in 1992, you invented VuJak, the worlds first video sampler. What real-time video software impresses you today, and what surprises you about the ways video software has developed?
Ableton Live is amazing, and I also like the Pioneer DVJ line. I still use Max/MSP/Jitter because you can do so much and I have worked with it for many years. The Cycling74 folks have done a great job with Max, and Josh Clayton’s Jitter objects are the greatest thing since sliced bread.  I’ve seen some incredible things done with Processing, though I haven’t used it yet myself. What interests there is Mobile Processing, I am more and more interested in mobile/handheld video applications.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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