Deconstructing the photographs of Abu Ghraib with Errol Morris.

Melbourne’s Cinema Nova recently screened the latest Errol Morris documentary, and a few minutes after it finished, cut to the director on the screen, who chatted and answered audience questions enthusiastically for some 45 minutes via satellite ( or skype / ichat ). Felt quite the privilege to have such direct access to Errol, straight after his compelling and confronting exploration of events at Abu Ghraib, hearing his clarifications and reasonings behind his film making decisions. And felt surprisingly natural to have the director on screen at the audience’s disposal, a pretty effective way of distinguishing a cinema house from a home theatre, likely something we’re going to see more.

“Cinematic interventions? Oh, that makes me sound like some kind of psychiatric social worker.. ( much audience laughter ), ” was his response to an early question about his use of heavily stylised renactments within the film.
“I liked to think of them as ‘visual moments’ .. and the most important is that the filmmaker seeks truth, then the techniques available can be used in service of this.”

The truth Errol seeks in Standard Operating Procedure is the wider context and realities surrounding the events in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The prison received global attention in 2004 when photographs were released detailing many instances of humiliating and degrading behaviours and events seemingly being orchestrated by U.S. prison guards. Central to Errol’s film is examining these photographs with a range of interviewees ( including several of the guards ) and forensic experts and trying to piece together what actually happened, and to what extent the individuals charged and imprisoned were acting according to their own impulses or to instructions from above as part of a larger system.

A few key points jumped out from the screening : – although a military prison, the majority of those imprisoned were local males of ‘fighting age’ who had been gathered from the streets for various minor or alleged offences. – The photographs shown were from the ‘softening process’, something that was used before the prisoners were sent to be tortured. This was a preparation phase, and the public hasn’t seen photos from the ‘torture phase’. – the guards repeatedly described how they had arrived into and were consistently given instructions from above. – No-one higher in rank than the low ranking officers witnessed in the photographs has been charged or imprisoned, despite one of the photographs containing the dead body of a man who had died during torture, effectively having been murdered in prison.

The film is disturbing on many levels, and achieves it’s power in part from the way Morris interviews his subjects – he uses what he calls the interrotron ( see diagram : http://tiny.cc/iSgsv ), a camera technique he invented using a teleprompter to show the interviewers face in front of the camera lens, which allows the interviewee to make eye contact with the audience. And so much of the film involves U.S. military prison guards detailing explicit and depraved scenarios but while seeming to stare across with coffee table intimacy. In the Q+A afterwards, Morris was asked about this and pointed out that the person asking that very question had to choose between looking into a camera and looking at Errol on the screen, but couldn’t do both, hence Errol was seeing video of someone who was looking off to one side

Errol’s Got A Pedigree
The Fog of War – about the life and times of former United States Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, won best documentary academy award in 2004, but several of his earlier documentaries weren’t nominated as his various experimental techniques ( in the service of telling the story ) caused concern with the oscar givers.

The Thin Blue Line – investigated the murder of a police officer and famously helped someone facing the death penalty in texas get released, and introduced stylised renactments as a controversial technique for documentary making back in 1988.

A Brief History of Time – documented the life of physicist Stephen Hawking.

Fast, Cheap and Out of Control – a lion trainer, a topiary sculptor, a mole rat specialist, and a robot scientist, got the specialised Morris doco-treatment.

Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr – interviews with an execution technician (!) who is also a holocaust denier because he cannot conceive that the Auschwitz gas chambers were technically possible ( not that Fred has researched this much at all ).

Gates of Heaven – Errol’s first documentary about a pet cemetery business – and which spawned a short film in response : “Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe” in which the German director held up his part of a bet and cooked his shoe on stage with herbs and garlic then ate it upon Errol’s finishing the film.

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.

You are total strangers, have never even seen each other before, and yet as you ride towards the man further up the road, at the very last moment, you both know the right thing to do at this point, the only thing to do, is to stretch out your palms, and as your bike whizzes past, let a satisfying skin-slap be heard by the late night congregators on the footpath nearby. You keep riding, don’t even turn around, that was then, this is now, and now you are on a different part of the road, and you are grinning.

Some storyboarded narrative film could try, but would have a hard time conveying what the rest of your bicycle ride actually felt like. Not what it looked like, but how it felt, the shift of internal gears, the slight electric buzz that comes with being in the right place at the right time. Nope, your best cinematic hope for conveying those feelings, would be to forgo the usual plot devices, transcend the usual visual techniques, and harness visual surprise as a way of describing your own experience.

Which leads us, down an unnecessarily windy garden path to the back shed of cinematic tinkerer and visual explorer, Joel Schlemowitz. If in doubt of just how busy Joel has been, how dirtily his fingers have been covered in film chemicals over the years, check his dot com, for a huge list of short experimental films, ‘cinepoems’ that explore the everyday in efforts to reach beyond them.

microcinema.com, bless their independent distributor socks, have been amassing a gigantic collection of experimental DVDs for distribution and recently added a triple-disc set of Joel’s work to their swelling catalog. “Joel Schlemowitz : short experimental films” gives what it suggests, 45 of them even, showcasing the scope and terrain of Joel’s work over the years. Definitely some room for improvement with the DVD authoring though – differences between the booklet and what appears on each disc, no easy menu that allows continuous play of all films, only a clumsy bottleneck of an interface to access each film and as it turned out on my copy – disc 3 containing all the same films as disc one, despite what was printed on it. But that’s not the point… that’s computer accountant land. We need the smell of a pine forest, a chimney with smoke rising out of it, homemade window sills, tool benches, vintage equipment, a film explorer’s den.

Disco One : Short Experimental Films 1 Through 20

Some favourites?

Abrasions – a bound and blindfolded man stands before the camera, and the film of this event is slowly scratched to oblivion.

Bacchanale – Characters wearing masks, that moment before a party goes to another level. Warbling, perspective warping camera.

Bagatekke Biolique – A animated beating heart, various anatomical imagery filmed, and the film itself hand painted to create motion through a body, complete with sound effects.

Bagatlle in Neon – Playful long exposure explorations of city lights, then hand painted over with a soft limited palette. (Technicolour vibes! )

Doris’ Garden – A baby’s voice wandering, a song. Buddhist garden statues and images baby superimposed over explorations into a near junglish backyard.

Extemporized – Wild camera movement wandering in a city of snow, sound effects added to suit mime artists who are performing in various parts of the city.

Eye Music – Silent film zooming in on an old turntable, using hand-painted splashes to convey the sonic scratch of the jumping needle.

Disc 2 – Short Experimental Films 21 through 40

Invitation to a Voyage – fast overlaid shapes elegant silhouettes extravagant fonts… solarised image of a naked man… zoom in…

slowly avalanching sound… curious little piece.. exactly what should be found somewhere on an experimental video compilation.

Little Nothings – poem by Wanda Phipps.. nicely overlaid footage, on top of the poet reading her work… reaching for cinepoetry…

Morris Engel Time Sculpture – gorgeous close-ups of weird timepieces… visual aesthetics associated with that weird human trait of measuring time.
the closer we zoom in, the louder the sounds get, until finally we zoom out, sound softens, and the piece’s time has run out.

Pillowbook – Black and white scene. the book is opened – we get red tinted flickery imagery suggesting entangled limbs, skin sliding over skin, panning vertically fast, images overlaid densely enough so that what feels lurid and pornographic, is also able to wash over the eyes like some gentle breeze.

Poem for the Past – Film strips twisted, decayed, overlaid

Purple Candle Poem – colour painted film, scratches, overlaid on footage of candles… lot more compelling than that suggests… flair for composition, motion… colour control… limited palette…

Reverie – more candles, statues in candlelight, old classical nude drawings given a perspective warping… offset by exotic string and percussion instruments in an echo chamber.. a hand, a desk, spectacles..

Silo – time lapse… of people at some filmic event, old projection systems, complete with burnt holes in film, accompanied by various laptop noodlers, guitarists… hey look – its an audiovisual happening… lying in the grass, the vividness of the colours in the outdoor projections are flanked deliciously by the silhouetted tree branches…

übel – fast flickering overlays of machinery turned abstract – metal scraping sounds in background hypnotic in their choreography over time… a pendulum of light playing on machinery to form shapeshifting shadows… shapes blended in.

Disc 3 – Collaborations and Experimental Documentaries – sounded interesting in theory, but in practice, turned out to contain the same data as disc one, which is a shame, because one of the shorts, Teslamania, like all good films exploring the aesthetics of tesla coils and violent bursts of electricity probably deserve a good viewing. (( UPDATE :: Joel writes in to say “This was a problem on a small number of “rush” pre-release copies and the problem was corrected before the the DVD collection went into distribution. ” ))

Close the door, leave the shed, the cine-laboratory concoctions still bubbling away, smell the air, blink anew at the world and wander away. And if you want to hi-5 Joel..

Disc 002 on Sydney’s Demux label, Peter Newman’s DVD debut covers an hourlong documentation of his audiovisual practice from 2003-2007. Cutely for a DVD, it’s tracklisting offers both a Side A and a side B, each covering material from Newman’s exhibitions, performances and installations. From the get-go we’re left swimming in abstract textures, Newman’s style reminiscent of the flickery film pioneers such as Stan Brakage or Len Lye ( a New Zealander with a major retrospective including kinetic sculptures coming up at ACMI next year ). Whereas these filmmakers sought to produce cinema by directly interacting with the actual material of film – by scratching and painting on it, by applying processes of decay and physical mutation to it – Newman explores some of what is inherent to digital cinema – the blending modes available for overlapping pixels, the fuzziness and grain found with various compression methods, the masking and keying out of colours, the blending of layers. While youtube demonstrates that the moving image doesn’t have to have glossy high resolution to be compelling, Newman reminds us that the types of compression artefacts usually associated with youtube, and typical of digital video, can also be played with and celebrated, a textural avenue of exploration in themselves.

( see also : wade marynowsky dvd review )

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 )

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.

Also by the Atak label, the nicely chopped intro to this, positions 4 different video artists and crews against each other in a battle of AV sampling skills. Quite varied styles on the disc and a bunch of interesting extras to wander through. Worth a look.

fame fame ( toronto )

The Fame Fame disc portion showcases clips from another label who exist for the ‘production and promotion of the aggressive, intense and volatile..’. So when Elvis & James Dean appear, it’s not long before they are whipped and sliced into an AV frenzy. Actutally works well, and followed by a more splattery stroboscopic piece by – cheerfully titled ‘i die u die’ by Jubal Brown. ‘In the eye’ by Tasman Richardson plays with surveillance cameras, mirror effects, layering of extreme close ups, tv glitches, all nicely composed then blending Robert De Niro in with rapid-fire micro-samples. Tasman follows this by remixing vintage guitar concert footage with white stripes drums, Ice cube, Public Enemy video samples..

eclectic method ( london )

Bill themselves as DVJs… “mixing music video and film snips like a DJ mixes records…”. Funny thing is – add together music videos by Blur, Prince, Snoop Dog, Beastie Boys, Aphex Twin, Metallica & Britney Spears etc etc all beat-matched and mashed together in a glossy high value production style, and you end up with a glossy, banal jukebox. Some cool moments, but they should be able to use their talents for far more interesting things than this.

madame chao ( new york )

“Everything is illegal’ – proclaims the intro by madame chao to a video described as ‘Violent slapstick’ best watched with a sword in one hand a drink in the other…’. The title sequence is quickly followed by a fast flickering density of hyper-speed collages, kaleidoscope warping, asian tv edits, and a text announcement that ‘copyright infringement is your patriotic duty’. Some genuinely inventive parts, bit relentless for myself though.

atak ( paris )
The label releasing the DVD leave a quarter of it for themselves, being a ‘hybrid mix of Vjs, movie makers and musicians’. Thusly, we get fed an initially sophisticated blend of medical experiments, horror movie special effects, motion graphics… with film sound bleeding through layered on a bed of industrial beats. Soon becomes a barrage, and a couple of high-speed carnage clips by Rko continue that pace.

Atak hails out of Paris, an audiovisual label with a quite a few releases under their gallic belt by now. ‘Meat’ features a series of clips by 3 artists on their roster, on a DVD boasting to be ‘DVJ ready’ – ready for looping and scratching by those with access to DVD turntables. The disc’s cover is a good clue to the content within, an eye-popping collage of photoshopped flesh in various states of life, augmented by various bolted on bits of electronic technology.

Cinemassaker start off with various close up screen textures, layers of surveillance cameras and jolts of colourised tv news, punctuated by beeps and glitches. It’s nicely done, with mostly restrained palettes, and quite hypnotically edited, up to and including the introduction of footage from John Carpenter’s legendary ‘They Live’ movie, where the main characters discover special sunglasses which enable them a capacity to decode all public advertisements ( put the glasses on and a billboard for a car now reads in stark black and white : ‘work, consume, die’ ). Overlaid barcodes and pixelated animations, along with burnt colours help their editing condense the film’s samples down to a bare repetitive essence, and they manage to lock into some kind of ambient audiovisual groove. Next track follows the same recipe, gradually introducing a film I didn’t know and paring it down over time, and the final track is a sequence of ever bloodying hi-speed martial arts chops.

Mutation continue the gore with a chicken killing scene that comes off as some weird voodoo circus scene the way they’ve colorised and framed it. Some wasted human dominates the next clip in eerie close up, and their final clip plays with highway panoramas and nicely overlaid motion graphics with sound on top of footage of overhead power lines sweeping by.

Lifesteak start off in a much more ambient vein, overlaid layers of light streaked plant close-ups, building up in slow intensity, the next clip musically editing and layering the squawks of birds flying from clifffaces. Factory machine close-ups are sequenced in the next clip, getting denser over time and it closes with butcher footage interlaced with motion graphics and some lab hand analysing a human brain.

Not for the squeamish then, but some worthwhile moments on the disc.

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

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

Beaming in from Japan, International in flavour, a new DVD compilation of pixel-twisters from Lightrhythmvisuals(.com).

( Suryummy on left, actop on right )

What is a DVD by VJs?

Tricky to produce that’s for sure. Performing live a VJ tries to stay responsive to sound, the ambience of the setting, and the audience, and generally keeps it dynamic with constant refinements, manipulations, cutting and blending, effecting etc. In a live setting, a lower resolution of image is accepted and various errors and over adjustments are easily forgiven as part of the live performance. Once recorded to disc however, and played back in some home theatre system, the VJ is in competition with all of Hollywood and it’s production values, up against all the storytellers and their attention to narrative craft, compared with all the motion graphics artists and agencies, all the animators, cinematographers, and all the directors and their abilities to tie everything together. Still, up against all that, a compilation of real-time video wizards can still stand out with force of personality and quirkier experimental visual explorations.

Spinning The Disc

Promo compilation blurb said the DVD was “inspired by the book ‘Notations’ (compiled by John Cage)”, and aimed to “explore the new techniques in visualization of sound in the same way that Cage explored new forms of written music.” And so, on it spins and we are introduced to a variety of visual experiments over the course of 12 clips set to electronic music, followed by remixes of the same 12 clips – the artists included all shared their source files for other artists to visually reinterpret. Also cool – the DVD multi-angle function can be used to switch back and forth between the original and the remixed video. Overall the disc flows well, and while sometimes suffering flat spots, or descending into dated cybernetic visual cliches, has enough moments of visual surprise and polish to maintain interest. The remix section seemed to stand stronger, that extra layer of process lending them a more sophisticated feel.

Highlights

Global Giraffe by Suryummy : Nice cinematography, tasty compositing of complex moving 3d elements onto urban train lines. Some nice mask transitions too, nice elements, but combined lacking something to make the piece compelling.

Shabondama by Ben Sheppee : Smoothly realised 2D graphic overlays and transitions in train station. Well edited.

E of Bwe by Alien-Eye : Sumo wrestlers given the scratch video treatment.

Global Giraffe (remix) by actop : Fantastic recompositing into sequenced slices, enhancing the original clips colours and masks well.

lake (remix) by Alien Eye : Weird and wonderful visual distortions of the 3D objects, nice light overlays.

Gravith (remix) by VJ Anyone : Super, strong introduction… and transition into splintery slowly panning graphics, that unfortunately devolves later into cyber-fare, but maybe the clip only seemed to get much worse because he seems to have added or emphasised some embarrassing text overlays – let me paraphrase, and imagine this text on top of 3d wireframes of a glitching human – “because of global warming, if we don’t find help from extra terrestrials, soon our only hope is to download the human psyche onto micro machines… ” Uhuh.

Brologic (remix) by Jasper Vader : Some nicely added mask elements, but still missing something.

Hoofprints in the sand (remix) by Ben Sheppee : Recomposited and re-layered to create some nice light and dark interplay.

Full details of all tracks, artists and musicians (and ordering details ) etc included at Lightrhythmvisuals.com

Aside from it’s wii-like accelerametor ( movement gestures as data for controlling software ), the iPhone’s touchscreen interface and hard-drive with internal operating system, makes it a potentially awesome device for manipulating software. Say hello then, to the i3L MIDI BRIDGE for the iPhone by artificialeyes.tv, software developed to work with their upcoming 3D software 3L (‘thrill’). Software that translates the sliding and pressing on the touchscreen into midi information, which is sent wirelessly to a small piece of software on the desktop, which in turn can be routed to the software application of your choice. In my case below, this was VDMX. Is it fun to use? Hell yeah!

Though they developed it to work on their upcoming app, full credit to artificialeyes.tv for releasing it as freeware to work with any software. More details and download over at artificialeyes.tv.

Aligning the movement of stars with the state of human affairs on the ground may not be everyone’s cup of tea ( including mine ), but the Sep23 – Oct 23 calendar phase that marks folk as Libran around the world, is as good a marker of time as any for a tech round-up.

Up And Coming:
Australia’s annual tech-creative implosion happens from Thu 27 Sep – Mon Oct 1, all capitals and satellite towns suffering brain-drain as peeps converge in Newcastle for the Electrofringe.net / thisisnotart.org etc. Highlights include Canada’s white-noise-delicious aka the orchestral sweeper of tones known as 1 x Tim Hecker, a deserved champion of late night playlists the world over. Tim also plays ethereal sounds with a more bangin’ techno orientation under the Jetone moniker, but the show should be fantastic to check out live no matter what way it swings. The typically eclectic collection of DIY workshops, panels, performances, screenings etc is again a monster, gathering the cream of electronic artists from across the continent, and far too much to summarise in print, especially when it’s all clickable at the freshly updated : Electrofringe.net.

Happening :
At the time of writing, Italy is hosting the Live Performer’s Meeting, where 250+ live video performers gather in one place for a Roman orgy of pixels Sep 20-23. Mentioned it before, but worth reiterating that to encourage exploration of the huge list of VJ artist websites included. My hosts in Istanbul, Artificial Eyes, have been busy installing their moving mirror projectors since arriving, (they’ll be appearing on stage 4 times all up ; ), this fresh on the tail of having successfully managing to control their 3L app with an iphone using virtual network computing. (see video)

Still Cooking Til Mid Oct:
Melbourne’s Digital Fringe, the electronic sideshow alley accompanying the Melbourne Fringe Festival, happens again from 26 Sep – 14 Oct ( see http://digitalfringe.com.au for more info and a smorgasbord of festival related webstreams ).

A Disaster Movie Named Capitalism
Naomi Klein author of the well received ‘No Logo’ book, has recently released ‘The Shock Doctrine’, a book exploring what she calls ‘disaster capitalism’ – the use of public disorientation following massive collective shocks ( wars, terrorists attacks, natural disasters ) to achieve control by imposing ‘economic shock therapy’. Director of the ‘Children of Men’ Alfonos Cuaron was so impressed by the book he decided to make a short
film about it, which is currently happy ping-ponging it’s way around the internet to to some kind of viral marketing nirvana.

And South American Style Shock Therapy?
Mr.Synesthete noticed an Alejandro Jodorowsky film on my hard-drive and mentioned he’d attended a lecture by the infamous /notorious / South American film director ( now aged 77 ). Uns