Aye aye, thanks to a recent nasty spam attack, have had to rebuild the blog, and somewhere between that, the upgrade to wordpress 2.5.1 and the upgrade to Leopard, the RSS feed became broken, and after many attempts to revive it, have resigned myself to a brand new RSS FEED, something preferably avoided, but here we are.

Sooooooo if you were a Mongolian sheep farmer who subscribed to skynoise a long time ago, and no new posts have been popping up in your RSS newsreader for a long time, well they never will unless you change to the above new address. But if indeed, you have found me again, then please, come in, drop me a line in a comments, let me fix you a drink, welcome back, leave your shoes at the door, but come in, come in….

Wordpress blogs the world over, have been hacked and attacked, bruised and used, by an insidious spam injecting virus that riddled blog posts with hidden spam links. It also nailed skynoise ( as Homer Simpson might say – not funny because it happened to me ), and eventually left the blog crippled to the point where no blog entry would post. Some 48 hours of code-wrestling later, and a new install, should be back to smooth sailing this week, though am expecting some hiccups / rogue waves. Fingers crossed…

April 24th hosts both the ‘8Bit’ documentary about video games (6pm @ ACMI - introduced by the director) and a remarkably interstate gathering afterwards of 8Bit performers @ Horse Bazaar.

8 Bit : A documentary history of Video Games + Art
As part of ACMI’s current ‘Game On’ exhibition, ‘8Bit the movie’ hits Melbourne shortly – a decent rummage through the history of the computer game and it’s intersection with the art world, with culture, with the creation of meaning in the world. Aye, this means lots of talking heads and archival footage, but passionate peoples abound, gleefully reminiscing about their early exposure to computer games, and subsequent integration of games into their various art practices, music-making, storytelling and media creation.

History is a construct, but at least this version is colourful, choosing to include early software hackers, and computer game crackers in the computer hall of fame, and then later people like Johan Kotlinkski – the creator of the LSDJ software which enabled live music making on the Nintendo Gameboy, Oliver Wittchow ( who made a similarly seminal piece of software, Nanoloop ), Alex Galloway who created an artwork out of the bugs in the Tony Hawk playstation release, Eddo Stern talking about trying to overcome the novelty factor in machinima ( cinema made using a game engine ), Mary Flanagan discussing the mastery of power, fantasy and control within a computer game, Cory Arcangel who loves to create game-based art ( eg mario brothers minus everything except the clouds ) and facilitate others making their own games, Team Tendo wearing bear suits while performing in Paris, This Spartan Life who conduct talkshow interviews within an online shooter and Ed Halter, author of ‘Sun Tzu to Xbox : War and Videogames’, who points out that games play people as much as people play games – the game player not so much being in control of a game, but only being part of the circuit that completes the algorithim. All up a pretty entertaining and provocative crowd – with a relentlessly upbeat soundtrack, dripping with that distinctive early computer chip sound.

Bonus : director Marcin Ramocki, answering questions after the film, and performance by Adelaide’s DJ Tr!P.

8Bit Afterparty with DJ TR!P, Dot.Ay, 10kfreemen + Maddest Kings Alive
Crazy little pre-Anzac day holiday convergence happening @ Horse Bazaar – a stellar line-up of 8-Bit-hitters : DJ TR!P from Adelaide ( SID Vicious album launch), Dot.Ay from Brisbane, 10kfreemen from Sydney ( http://10kfreemen.com) and Maddest Kings Alive from Perth ( now living in Melb ). Rounding out that crazy line-up is game related panoramic video across 6 screens by myself + Keith Deverell, and two other events on either side – OffBeat DJ residents Lephrenic & Sea from 8-10, and the Make It Up Club DJs continuing after the 8Bitness. “Bring it!”

“sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ! is a Realtime-Mind-Music-Video-Re-De-Construction-Machine – conceptual software which makes it possible to work with samples in a completely new way by making them available in a manner that does justice to their nature as concrete musical memories.”

“Gramophone records, magnetic tapes, vinyl records, digital samplers and computers have already liberated the samples long ago. But still – to infringe copyrights – one has to decide which sample one actually wants to steal. One has to arduously load audio files into sample editors or sequencers. One has to cut, copy, paste and arrange. All that takes precious creative energy and a lot of time. Enough of that! Copyright infringements have never been easier than with sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ!”

Sven Konig’s in town, yes, performance and talk @ Footscray Arts Centre, April 22. His shorter summary? “Remixing video by beatboxing”. Even shorter, one-click jaw dropper summary. And check out the nice Dirty Dancing Remix by Scrambled hackz over at myspaz.

In other words, various ways to use the Four Joystick Buttons of The Apocalypse.

Kings of Power 4 Billion %

Pixel auteur Paul Robertson ( Melbourne animators, represent! ) is clogging the internets again, – ie fans of supercute low-res hyperviolence have been busy downloading his latest gargantuan animation effort, this one a 12 minute epic of biblical proportions that combines alien invasions, most major religions, Hulk Hogan, Capt Picard, endless pop cultural cameos, and the usual cast of fighting masses.
Download details can be found over at http://probertson.livejournal.com, along with 200+ comments along the lines of :

“Are you using secret japanese technologies when making all the this bright flickering? The ones which make innocent children fall into satanic epilepsy attacks?”

Inadvertently, the video is also an advertisement for the bit torrent protocol: the large video is listed as being mirrored on several sites, but many of these are slow or hammered by the heavy demand. Bit torrent, however is a protocol and an application which gets around the limitations of small sites by sharing the bandwidth of the downloaders between them. So as some people download, some of their ‘spare’ upload space is also used to help someone else get part of the file. Which can lead to decentralisation… and eliminating the need for centralised all-powerful distributors – a good thing for a healthy ecology of media.

Annnnnnnie-ways, if you’re familiar with his 2006 effort, ‘Pirate Baby’s Cabana Battle Street Fight‘, then the above makes some kind of noodley sense. If not, distil the retro-game fighting aesthetic to an essence, then use this to super-saturate the plot, all of the characters, and all of the on-screen motion. And take the more surreal sequences of the Akira movie as a starting point, but as they may have looked if designed for a late 1980s or early 1990s arcade game machine. Except this clip is an even more herculean effort than the last one, as relentlessly stroboscopic and action-packed as befits an ‘end of the world’ epic. And then there’s the soundtrack.

Quatronica

Half French synthesiser spaceships, and half viking riffed glam metal guitar shredding – the soundtrack to ‘Kings of Power 4 Billion %’ definitely provides a lot of the animation’s energy and momentum, it’s sense of epicness. The dual synth and shredder sonics in this case were choreographed by Cornel Wilczek, another Melbourner who has been releasing music on Surgery Records and now Mush, under the alias ‘Qua‘. Equally at home playing acoustic instruments and laptop chopping with the nerdcorest of them, Cornel has 2 releases coming out this year and has developed a live ‘Qua’ show that playfully combines his instrument playing and splinter-funk with the live drums of James Cecil (ex-Architecture in Helsinki + check Paul’s AIH pixel clip too..).

As it turns out, am VJing for Qua on May 3rd @ Richmond’s Corner Hotel ( also playing : High Pass Filter, One Watt Sun ( Oz/Ger), which will also be interesting for 2 more reasons : Lemur & OSC. Aye, Cornel has one of those Lemur touchscreen controllers ( as recently popularised by Daft Punk in their video pyramid at the Grammys ) which allows multi-touch control, and highly configurable interfaces ( customise your controller to suit every gig if you want ). The Lemur also has a built in ethernet interface which allows it to connect to a whole network and it uses OSC ( Open Sound Control ), which has many advantages over midi when it comes to sending information between machines, including lower latency, higher data capacity and easy configurability. And so – it’ll be fun to see the Lemur in action, but also to have it sending OSC data and manipulating some vidi-yo in time with those splinter beats. “Good times”

Future Oil Wars made Fun

Even more apocalypso bang for your buck – via selectparks.net – check out Frontlines: Fuel of War, a high profile game out shortly which finds China & Russia joining forces against the U.S. + Europe and battling it out in an era of dwindling oil supplies. Not sure which side Mad Max picks there, but there’s something eerie about these kind of games modelled around contemporary news projections. Insert coin.

Experiments in Real Time Audio Visual Performance 2002 – 2007

Another experimental DVD available for click-purr-chase, hailing from Sydney label DeMux. Label founder, Wade Marynowsky, is no stranger to the live manipulation of screen and sound. Way back in the twentieth century he used custom made applications built with macromedia director to bang out sets of speaker crunching live cinema – lo-fi graphic animations married fantastically to the language of layered audio loops. Future explorations using software such as NATO, Max/MSO and Jitter delivered ever more sophisticated processes and audiovisual relationships, but the Demented Australiana theme stayed with him : native flora and fauna reinterpreted through the noise of the digital.

It’s a disc of gorgeous stuff, and so even though the boy’s shunning the AV limelight for a while (to pursue an obsession with building robots), the disc neatly encapsulates his diverse mutant flavours spawned over the last 6 years. Rewinding to one of the earlier pieces, ‘Apocalypse Later’ feeds us Australia’s history of violence in a haze of abstraction and digital decay. Landscapes ebb and flow in and out of comprehension, close-up plant textures scratched up and layered as though to reveal their underbelly of corrupted data. The building sonic tension never relents, albeit in a Gameboy edition of ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock’ kinda way. With the visual crackle of bush campfire, we are surrounded by flapping birds squawking to each other through vocoders. Convicts are lashed ( video footage from the now defunct convict theme park ‘Old Sydney Town’ ), stormy skies are mustered, and nature’s cruelty and splendour is displayed in equal measure.

The ‘Uranium Country’ and the ‘ISEA Baltic Sea’ performances document further interrogations of the above palette, as does ‘The Geek From Swampy Creek’ though attempting to transcend laptop performance limits by introducing live imagery of a costumed Wade into the mix. All three pieces exude Wade’s strong sense of both musical and visual composition, fluid manoeuvring providing ethereal transitions through his material. The boy has obviously mixed a lot of audio and video in his time ( and indeed, spotted some of my own footage in there from video jams with Mr.Wade ).

‘Autonomous Improvisation’ eliminates the performer entirely. First exhibited as an installation in Artspace in 2007, it exists as a stand-alone piano, which has been programmed to generate a random series of notes, each of which triggers a pre-recorded video of a Sydney artist playing their instrument. It’s a stellar cast of sonic freakery – featuring Singing Sadie, Toecutter, Wade, Lucas Abela, Shannon O Neill, clown turnablists, saxaphonists, celloists and a variety of surreally costumed performers. In other words – a ghost pianist in a saloon bar is triggering a fast sequence of holographic musical performers above the piano. Bring on the robots!

More : “>http://marynowsky.net ( includes 8 x early mp3 demos. )

( see also review of : Peter Newman’s Demux DVD release )

Choose the ‘Ableton Suite‘, and alongside Ableton Live 7, you’ll receive a swagger of new audio production tools. Naturally, all of these will integrate seamlessly with Ableton’s deservedly championed interface and work processes. For audio-heads, this latest bundle is truly an ‘embarrassment of riches’.

The New Flesh:

Three Collections of Instruments :

Tension - physical modelling string synthesiser – which means massive variations and otherworldly string sounds are possible.

Electric - classic electric pianos with physical modelling synthesis, allowing to dive inside the guts of the instrument.

Analog - emulates the unique circuitry and irresistible tweakability of vintage analog synthesizers.

Two Drum Collections :

Drum machines - classic drum machines, sampled to reproduce, with additional features not in the originals.

Session drums ( boxed version only ) – 28 Gb (!!) of quality drum sounds, multisampled in various ways, thereby offering a studio engineer level of refinement.

Operator - a software synthesiser designed to match the best of Robert Henke’s hardware synths, and integrated smoothly into Live.

Sampler - a software sampler with powerful multisample playback and import, and innovative sound design capabilities.

Live 7 Core Enhancements

Live 7 sounds better and it’s timing is more precise – there’s a new high quality compressor, a 64 bitmode EQ Eight, improved midi timing ( esp. when recording midi in Live ) and an enhanced audio engine. Live 6 sounded good to me, but the new compressor and EQ do sound tangibly better. Both the arrangement and session view timelines can now deal with multiple time signatures within a single live set. REX files can now also be dragged, dropped and played just like WAV or AIFF files (Recycle from Propllerheads converts audio files into REX files – which allow flexible retiming manipulations). Operator, Dynamic Tube and Saturator now feature optional High-Quality modes. Memory management has been enhanced to allow smarter use of large sample libraries ( such as those above ). And there are many, many other incremental improvements, but also some brand new pleasures.

Live 7 New Features

You can now view a spectrum analysis to pinpoint frequencies, gently nudge the master tempo ( useful for adjusting between tracks of different tempo ), insert physical instruments into the Live workflow like plug-ins, all of which is useful – but not nearly as cool as the brand spanking new Drum Rack feature. A single right-click on any audio file, offers the option of slicing the file up into different sections and instantly assigning these to a set of pads, arranged in a square like an MPC style sampler. Being designed by Ableton however, this simplicity is deceptive – each pad can actually contain a whole range of effects, instruments and presets ( meaning each individual sound slice can be treated very differently ). A MIDI clip is created for this collection of slices, and will play back each slice sequentially so the sample sounds the same. Shuffling the midi slices around however is a breeze, allowing beats and soundslices to be reshuffled in typically smooth Ableton fashion. Files can also be drag-and-dropped onto the pads, and REX files can also be used. And there’s much, much more to the Drum Rack, flexibility, complexity and power densely packed in.

Ableton + Video

Ableton 6 introduced the possibility of importing video onto a timeline, mostly to help film soundtrack producers, allowing them to better match soundtrack elements to a videolip. Ableton 7 introduces the capacity to export video clips, including those which have been edited or warped by time – which perhaps marks the beginning of Ableton Live as a video editing or video production tool of sorts. Ableton’s sequencing and timing controls also address a feature lacking in all VJ apps – decent sequencing. Real-time video software has developed rapidly in recent years and now includes many of the different flavours of crazy that audio software has enjoyed for years – but no sequencing. As a result, many synchronised audiovisual performers send some kind of midi signals from audio applications, to trigger video clips within video applications. Ableton Live is usually the preferred application for live audio and midi in this context, and the last year has seen plenty of hacks with various techniques and plugins to try and deal with the many difficulties still existing in this process.

( The CreateDigitalMutants have been steadily documenting one of the best collections of the weirder options with Live. )

Ableton Suite Requirements?

649 Euros ( or half that for students / educators )

Mac: G4 or faster, (Intel Mac recommended) 512 MB RAM (1 GB recommended), Mac OS X 10.3.9 (10.4 or later recommended), QuickTime 6.5 or higher, DVD-ROM drive

Windows: 1.5 GHz CPU or faster, 512 MB RAM (1 GB recommended), Windows XP or Vista, Windows compatible sound card (ASIO driver support recommended), QuickTime 6.5 or higher, DVD-ROM drive

VERDICT ?

The Ableton Berlin kids are still slaying with this release. They’ve refined and extended the features of the application, integrated new instruments and processes, allowed ever more complex workflows and at the same time have managed to retain a smooth and consistent interface. When it comes to real-time audio – there’s really nothing else in town.

Ableton Live 7 Tutorials

http://www.ableton.com/tutorials ( how to rewire Live with other audio software, abundant tips, tricks, techniques )

http://www.ableton.com/movies ( useful video run-throughs )

http://www.ableton.com/pages/forum ( Giant community of Live-hackers, tinkerers and problem solvers )

http://www.ableton.com/artists ( Explore how plenty of big names are using it )

ableton tutorials on youtube

eg drum racks video.

Different approaches to using Live – ‘Draggers vs. Set-freaks‘.
livetweak.com host forums, as well as ‘custom Live instruments’ uploaded for sharing
eg “Glitch Rack – Rack Patch by 3rdordertrauma: For all the fans of glitchy random broken beat kinda sounds. And for those of us who don’t have the “Glitch” plug cause we are on mac os.”

remixmag.com/abletontipstricks, ableton-live-fans.com/forum : Warping Accapellas, Using groove shadows to spice up drum loops, Isolating vocals and sounds using the Ableton Live Utility plugin, VST Synths with polyphonic arpeggiator?, Live with MsPinky & more. loveableton.com, abletonlivedj.com/forum, 4 hours of Live video tutorials , Ableton Live 7 – Slice to Midi video, it just doesn’t end.

Useful Plug-Ins

“Just Add Music is your new powerful visual companion for Ableton live 6/7 on Mac OSX 10.4/10.5, from creation to production to performance Just Add Music takes you into the new audio visual DVJ world. All by using Ableton Live exactly like your used to.”

The Smart Electronix crew maintain a good collection of donationware VST + AU plugins for both mac/pc.

The Plogue Bidule Peeps also a do a range of free VST plugins ( mac/pc ).

Mangle, glitch + FSU in Live

Via Kyle ( thanks ) – Tobybear has some fantastic ( PC only) VSTs that have been around for a while. One of his that I use a lot is Peakfreak, an audio to midi converter. Great if your VJ app does not have something like this built in (and also good for AV with Live + Video app).

AND-D-D-D – this’d seem to be the mother-lode for mac-based VST / AU plug-ins… lots of other free mac audio tools here too… bring it!

Please Holler ( via the comments ) if you know of any useful / weird / great VST or AU plugins that help transform Live for you, especially any in relation to synchronisation with video and VJ software, and esp mac-compatible and I’ll add them to the list here…

(Previous skynoise review of Live 6 )

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

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

City Lights Project

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

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

Stencil Graffiti Capital Hearts Melbourne. More stencilly stuff.

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

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

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

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

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

Breakdown Press : Local independent publishers of provocative visual material.

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

Dorkbot Melbourne : Local tweakers of electricity and odd projects.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

UPDATE :

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

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

(found via ‘i flips me lid’ )

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

Plenty of folk tend to get speculative around this time of year, but there’s provocation to be found amongst the predictions.

State of the World

At the the turn of each year, sci-fi author, blogger, creator of the viridian design manifesto and all round sharp-fella, Bruce Sterling runs a spritely conversation at The Well, between himself and anyone interested. Moderated by media theorist Jon Lebowsky, the conversation generally ends up trying to puncture various conspiracy and apocalyptic theories, and make some vague sense out of the recent whirlwind of media and technology events. Well worth a read through, the sample quotes below give some of the flavour :

Jon Lebkowsky’s cheery introduction :
Everything’s peachy, with a few exceptions… the economy of the USA is crumbling, of course, and the U.S. government’s bleeding dollars (as well as real American blood) in Iraq. Climate change is accelerating, polar ice caps are melting, whole species are disappearing. Developing nations want their chance to be the next USA, and they’re not especially interested in hearing that it’s not possible for everyone to leverage the same increasingly limited resources. What happens when we pay everybody in the world a living wage, and give ‘em all a chance to own an SUV and a house in the suburbs? How many worlds would it take to float that boat? How pissed are they going to be when they realize “lifestyles of the rich and famous don’t scale,” in fact the lifestyle of the typical middle-class American is not sustainable.

Bruce Sterling: Serious-minded people everywhere do know they have to deal with the resource crisis and the climate crisis. Because the world-machine’s backfiring and puffing smoke. ( eg see – http://climateprogress.org/2007/12/12/an-ice-free-arctic-by-2013/ )

I love the fringes of society, but, as great designer Henry Dreyfuss used to say, the best way to get three good ideas is to brainstorm a hundred weird ideas and kill off 97 of them. And we need to get used to that process, and not, say, shut down Silicon Valley because there are too many start-ups there wasting Microsoft’s valuable resources.

Jamais Cascio, in response : We really do need to learn to generate lots of prototypes, throw ‘em at the wall, search them, sort them, rank them, critique them, and blow the best ones into global-scale proportions at high speed. That’s what our contemporary civilization is really good at, and it is simply beyond the imagination of the 1960s.

Likewise, Elsewhere

The EDGE.org’s John Brockman asks a new question each year, and gets an interconnected crew of tech/sci/internet elites deliver short and nano-sharp replies. This year’s question: What have you changed your mind about? make Science is based on evidence. What happens when the data change? How have scientific findings or arguments changed your mind? Climate change and energy resources are again in the forefront of many heads, but there’s also insightful opinions about memory, the internet, language, distributed identity, wikipedia, the mind-body problem, online privacy, complexity, the ethics of animal research, software as performance art and muchos more.

Myths De-Bunked

Turns out that we don’t need to drink 8 glasses of water a day ( we get water in food in other drinks too ), our hair and fingernails don’t keep growing after we die ( the rest of us shrinks ), we use more than 10% of our brain ( the 90% supposedly never-used has never been found ) , and shaved hair doesn’t grow back darker or coarser ( when first shaed, the hair has a blunt edge, thereby seeming thicker, it is also bleached by the sun over time ). And more, at the Guardian.

And Other News Worthy of A New Year

The New York Times reports on signs of 21 st century civilisation:
“For the first time since record keeping began in 1960, the number of deaths of young children around the world has fallen below 10 million a year, according to figures from the United Nations Children’s Fund being released today.This public health triumph has arisen, Unicef officials said, partly from campaigns against measles, malaria and bottle-feeding, and partly from improvements in the economies of most of the world outside Africa.”

Hovering in deep space, two giant flagposts await their favourite blue-green ball. Thusly, all manner of fragments, almost-finished-bits, uncategorizables, overdue edits, and nearly-ripes pile up for gravity-bound folk stuck on the ball, and demand to be considered insignificant – until that would-be dotted line, millions of kilometres wide, is crossed once again.

The skynoise pile:
– reflections on the Istanbul Biennale, the Venice Biennale, a snapshot of Australia’s live-video peformers in 2007, an illuminating interview with UK VJ Toby *sPark,
a piece written for an eco-mag about the transition to ‘peak oil’, clip and documentation of my 6 Screen Animation Panorama – ‘Animals Really Are Funny People’, publishing some recently made videos, publishing some older videos (that may as well be stored on a public rather than private hard-drive) and a few more audiovisual DVD Reviews – Umfeld (Netherlands / US), V-Atak (France) and via demux ( syd label) – Paperhouse by Peter Newman & Interpretative Dance by Wade Marynowsky ( aka Spanky, AC/3P etc ) ( both DVDs discovered in a small mountain of post upon return to Melbourne), and linking to a long list of rad-people, provocative ideas and tools discovered in the last few months.

… all of which’ll happen sometime ‘soon’*.

Here’s hoping your 2008 is not just less wearying than usual, or merely life re-affirming, but in fact, super-rad.

*As will more filtering through the last few months ocean of photos.

Below, batch from a funtastic fortnight in Rome for the LPM video festival in September…

Waiting patiently for the 21st century to arrive seemed to pay off this year, with a few signs of evolved behaviour amidst all of our technological advances. And so, a little space for the celebratory, as well as this year’s unsung heroes.

The Big Collective Ostrich

The International Federation of the Red Cross (IFRC) says global warming caused a record number of natural disasters across the world in 2007, up nearly 20 per cent from a year earlier. Phrased another way, there were now 270 million people effected by natural disasters in 2007. This may have had some impact on humanity’s seeming to pull it’s head out of the sand this year, in regards to climate change. For something billed as the current greatest threat to humanity ( as well as threatening other species ), climate change seems to have only inspired the slowest of reactions over the last decade. This year however, saw a huge number of positive developments. Climate change is only one symptom of many, related to the way we live at the moment, and there’s still a long way to go, but at least we are finally facing the problem.

On a governmental level, the newly elected French leader declared ‘climate change’ his number one priority, the new Australian leader finally ratified the Kyoto protocol ( leaving the United States as the only country in the entire world who hasn’t signed this agreement to minimise greenhouse gases ) , the UK leader announced a plan to open all of their coastline to producing windpower by 2020, alongside several other major improvements.

Even more movement on a corporate level – many notable huge companies announced plans for going carbon neutral – including News Corp who vowed to make it an issue as well and Google who also have the largest company solar panel array in North America and have recently invested massively into trying to make renewable energy cheaper than coal.

And The Other Critters

Lucky winners in the World Conservation Union’s 2007 List of Threatened Species, included the Sumatran Orangutan, the Western Lowland Gorilla & the Cross River Gorilla, all of whom got upgraded to ‘Critically Endangered’( the last category before Extinct in the Wild ), and the Bornean Orangutan, who got added to the Endangered category. There are now 16,306 species are endangered with extinction, 188 more than in 2006. And it’s not just the individual species that are disappearing, but overall numbers within species are in decline also:

The Living Planet Index (LPI) is an indicator of the state of global biological diversity, based on trends in vertebrate populations of species from around the world. Between 1970 and 2003, the index fell by about 30%, a global trend which suggests that we are degrading natural ecosystems at a rate unprecedented in human history.

Computers

Are nearly omnipresent now, including the famed $100-now-its-$200 computer being sold in developing countries to children. It seemed to be a year for Facebook, the social network that seems to be absorbing most energies used online. There are plenty of words about them though, and about Google who continue to expand their array of online tools and services, and the various operating system upgrades seem hardly worth a mention. Noting that Nature magazine recently informed us about chimps beating students at a memory based game ( chimps are better at memorizing a snapshot view of their surroundings , summarised one scientist ), maybe this whole computer thing is a big sidetrack, and there are plenty of other technologies we could’ve been expanding ourselves with in more interesting ways?

Not Computers

Instead of a top ten list of software plug-ins or corporate gadgets, here’s another list – a list of genuine technological achievements for 2007 :

Most Satisfying Hammock Rest :

The problem with these end of year lists is that they suggest one person’s taste is somehow more significant. Without getting scientific on your ass though, it is highly unlikely there was anyone happier on a hammock than on Dec 9th (Western Australian Coast just north of Perth), when a long grey haired woman lay curled up in a flimsy yet obviously sturdy enough hammock (tied neatly between an avocado tree and a fencepost) beaming her peaceful face out at a slowly descending Indian ocean sunset with giant twinkles in her eyes.

Greatest skateboard trick :

Kick-flip ollie to grape bite – Venice, Italy, Sep 07 by anonymous skater in a black and white striped top, baggy jeans, red scarf around neck. What made this trick likely unrepeatable was the landing and subsequent fall from bridge by skater and grape holder – but remarkably landing in a gondola passing underneath with impeccable timing. And the board landed in the gondola too.

Watchmaker Repair of the Year:

While we may be building new pyramids out of recently obsolete mobile phones, computer software manuals and computers that are 18 months old, there’s something to be appreciated about actually repairing technologies rather than ordering replacements from China. $2 watches may far outnumber the number of quality watches in existence, but when it comes to horology, the study of the science and art of timekeeping devices, no-one did better in 2007 than a Japanese watch repairer living in San Francisco who managed to bring back to life a nearly crushed watchpiece, through a care daily dedication to reshaping, replacing and repairing the innards of a delicate timepiece crushed during a non-fatal pile up at a rollercoaster ride.

Best Act of Dentistry in 2007:

While we’re on that craft thing, the quality of a dentist’s work could be measured not only by the appearance of the teeth after the work, but by the amount of pain suffered by the patient, the amount of time taken and indeed, the cost. Maybe really advanced dentists would even use such subtle techniques to coax you in and out of the experience, that you may not even feel like you have been to the dentist at all, have merely popped into the newsagents to pick up a magazine, bumped into someone at the counter, coughed a bit, fiddled in your pocket for some change, and noticed how nice your teeth were while checking yourself out in the reflection on the window on the way out. Commendable, but difficult to make an award’s night out of.

Big in 2008 :

Blimps, underwater video, human powered flying machines, biotechnology detectors, contraception for animals, cloudmakers, gelati made from native flavours, social network assistants, underwater diving bells ( again! ), robot DJs, technologies derived from bacteria.

( Is there wireless? Exiled Surfer & Synesthete of artificialeyes.tv on the west coast prowl)

Will be processing my 6 month stay in Istanbul for a long, long time, but thankfully get to enjoy an extended goodbye with my hosts artificialeyes.tv as they’re joining me in Perth for the Byte Me festival ( Dec 1-9, Perth Town Hall ). We’ll both be doing outdoor audiovisual performances this Sat Dec 1 (meet outside Perth Town Hall at 8pm for wandering to secret outdoor projection location ), meaning 20 minutes each of video projection onto a building with accompanying soundscapes, along with AV sets by VJ Solu ( Finland / Barcelona ) and VJ Zoo ( Perth, and the festival organisers ). Then next Thu Dec 6, all of the above will be audiovisually jamming with DPWolf ( Melb ), Perth locals & Peter & Jaymis from Create Digital Motion at a Perth ‘Plug N Play’ event. Plenty more happening at the festival too, with a lot of interesting animation, film and digital media folk gathered ( each with their own intriguing website to explore.. ).

With climate change well and truly on the public agenda, energy use is being put under the spotlight in a wide variety of ways.

Go Australia~!

The BBC reported recently that when it comes to power stations, Australia’s emit more CO2 per capita than any other nation. Australian power stations emit 10 tonnes per person, China’s 1.8, the U.S. 8.2 and India 0.5.

Australia’s Sunshine coast however, made it to the news by becoming an official ‘Transition Town’ which means they have adopted measures to deal with the inevitable peaking of oil supplies, and the resultant transition needed to shift from fossil fuels.

Elsewhere in Australian, a town by the name of Cloncurry which boasts Australia’s hottest recorded temperature ( 53C in the shade ), will be the recipient of a large solar thermal power plant, which should mean the town is entirely powered by solar power by 2010. The project will use 8,000 mirrors to reflect sunlight onto graphite blocks, water gets pumped through the blocks to generate steam for electricity generation in turbines.

Artists & Energy

And on the micro-scale, long time video artists Cicada, have been busily documenting their transition from city to country via their milkwood blog ( with regular videos ), and recently installed a solar panel which they figure should give them “15 years of light”. Plenty of linkalicious at the milkwood site, as they’re quite productive little kittens, and keen to share this type of knowledge.

With a bit more cash behind him, Damien Hirst has apparently ordered Britains second largest solar panel system at a cost of £1.5M for a 310w solar power system to power his warehouses. While commendable, the article quoting this also mentioned that this was enough to power 150 houses, and somewhere later that this solar system was equivalent to 2% of the country’s solar power. Given that the population of Britain is 60 million people, this suggests that British solar power has a long way to go. (2%= 150, 100% = 7500 )

Rethinking Automobiles

Shai Agassi has a novel idea – free cars! Based on the idea that ‘the cost of the average used car in Europe is now cheaper than the cost of gasoline to drive it for a year’, his company is investigating plans to provide electric cars that are very cheap or even free – and sold the way mobile phones are – the money being spent on a monthly contract rather than the device itself.

Which reminds of a conversation with a long time ago with Marcus Westbury ( who recently had that 3part TV show on the ABC, ‘Not Quite Art’ ), where he argued that the car registration fee ( then around $500 ) should be abolished – or rather that it should instead be shifted into fuel prices. The thinking being, that it should be as cheap or as easy as possible for the average person to acquire a car – but the burden of cost should be in the driving, so that energy use and pollution are minimised. Going another step, we really need to rethink the whole energy pragmatism of having one tonne vehicles to individually transport us around in. Do we really need, and can we really sustain a planet where we need to give vehicles enough fuel to carry around a tonne of metal on top of our body weight? Not so clever. And commented on nicely by UK artists Wilson and Radcliffe, who recently made a bicycle powered lamborghini – actually two bicycles within a thin, frame outline of a lamborghini. Also in the UK news, recent tax concessions which allow 50% off the price of a new bike, if you are riding it to work.

Take an energy vacation, or if stuck in the cubicle? Try google.com/search?q=facebook+carbon+app

Mmmmm playing Tesla Coils ( think giant lightning creating devices ) to make Super Mario soundtracks… ( check Tesla’s long list of exploits @ wikipedia )

Your mission should it choose to accept you, and it did, is to turn yourself inside out. There may or may not be a relationship between this mission, and your recent phone call to an airline requesting that they delay an unchangeable flight for a week ( which they did ), given that you were vomiting blood ( which wasn’t entirely true*).

You are at a deluxe 5 star hotel, in a large conference room, hustling yourself across a maze of tables ever more urgently. Finally, you reach the hall, take a sharp left and head for the bathroom, picking up the pace. The first stomach lunge hits and you hold it in, rushing past the tuxedo’d gents exiting the bathroom. Many lunges follow.

You are back in the conference hall, no-one the wiser. Time passes, and given how much you had emptied before, you presume it is all over. Not quite. You are quicker to spot the build-up this time however, and make a hasty effort to reach your destination in time, which you unfortunately don’t quite manage. Beside what looks the most expensive shoes you have ever seen ( sequins or diamond studded?), more of today’s lunch splashes vigorously against the floor. The three or four women you are hunched over between, squeal and scatter, but you are already rinsing your face in the bathroom. A man with a Swedish accent helpfully points out the exact location of the motion sensor for the tap, which makes the rinsing much more effective. Thankfully, this is the last time you will visit this bathroom.

Next up, the conference room maze is avoided with a quick dart into the hotel kitchen behind the stage. Dodging dozens of waiters carrying trays of what looks like exquisite chocolate mousse, a quick analysis of the environment reveals a black plastic bin as the preferred location for repeatedly heaving further contents of your stomach into. The sheer volume hurled by now, is dizzying.

It is as though you have more than one stomach, you are channelling the stomachs of entire families. You have grown extra stomachs, some kind of rapid-fire evolution/devolution. You are possibly a cow. Anything seems more plausible than that much food fitting inside your body. Still hunched over, watery-eyed, you notice David Lynch is sitting in the corner of the kitchen. Meditating. 10 inches from the ground. Simultaneously, the sounds of hurrying waiters get softer and David’s breathing rises up in volume, eventually becoming the only thing you can hear. Subconsciously perhaps, your rapid stomach flutters grow less violent and slow to the pace of the soft, deep breaths.

You are floating in space. Or rather, your stomach is. You are your stomach. It twists and turns, clenches and releases, ebbs and flows. It is dark, but a darkness teased by flickering sparkles of light. Relentlessly your stomach toils on, turning over everything to find and expel that one last molecule of disagreeable foreign matter. Out of the darkness you make out a spiral staircase, and drift in a daze downwards. The staircase seems to sway from side to side, faster the further down you go. Doors open and a blast of cold air greets you. You are shuffled into the back of a black hearse-like vehicle. Told to lie down. Hold onto these flowers. It’s for the best. We’ll open the lid when we get there.

You cannot find your pistol. You do however, seem to have been successfully transferred to another hotel. The bathroom floor is different here, as is the sink, the bedroom floor, and the stairway. Foetal curled in bed, your vision catches briefly a neon-like light. You close your eyes, then open again. You can’t quite figure out whether the neon-like writing is happening when your eyes are open or closed. You lie there flickering. Eventually it dawns that it is the act of opening and closing your eyes that triggers the lights, as thought the writing utilises the motion and energy of opening your eyes to display the messages. You close and open at a slower rate, and eventually are able to make out two words: ‘Mission completed’

*at all.

Monolake plays Istanbul with The Field soon enough, and a quick visit to his page shows plenty of busy projects extending his music ( & Ableton Live involvements etc ). First up, he’s been writing “small max + jitter patches.. to create interesting video for my monolake concerts. The complexity is low, but all is generated in real time and constantly morphing, which is a very different asthetic than the usual live mixing of pre prepared video footage. but faster laptops will allow more complexity and higher resolution in the future.”

Screenshots look simple indeed, but undoubtedly match well the vast number of sonic parameters he relentlessly tweaks live. The Atlantic Waves project also features a heavy visual component, being a networked sequencing project that allows online remote jamming, and an intricate, stylised interface which allows audiences to see ( guess at?) the processes being played with. Most interesting though, is Monolake’s recent Atom performances – where balloons are arranged in a grid and connected to tubes that allow them to be filled with certain amounts of helium. The balloons also have LED lights inside, which can vary the brightness of the balloon. The end result is a computer controlled three dimensional display that can shuffle between arrangements in time with the soundscapes being triggered. The gallery of photos look great.

UPDATE:

Greg Smith points out in the comments, this related Monolake interview :

“VT: ‘How does visual representation of sound (i.e. waveform editors) changes our perception of it?’

RH: Visual representation of sound is evil. A waveform editor is an enormous help when editing sound but at the same time it has the potential to keep the composer effectively from listening. The visualization by nature stresses the abstract formal quality of a work but makes no statement about its content. The result is obvious, a lot of music these days works correctly according to a formal scheme but lacks beauty within. It takes quite some courage to work against the visual scheme, because oddly structured parts look so wrong. The timeline always tells us how long a piece is in bars or seconds but it knows nothing about our perception of time. We might think a part is too long because it looks long on screen but in fact it is interesting enough to be much longer and we would not shorten it if we could not see it but just listened. I often turn off the screen or close my eyes when listening to my edits because the visual representation is a false friend.”