This should be fun… come along to horse bazaar in melbourne, or tune in via the web – and let’s hear an electronic drumroll for :
Peter Kirn ( 9am New York set – Create Digital Music + Motion )

Vijay + Sone
Vijay Thillaimuthu : Wild tangles of hair and distortion
SONE: Corey Sands, Keith Deverell ( beats + pixels )

Thugquota ( Live vocal hypnotics )

( from Bum Creek / Pikelet )
with video by Jean Poole, LED lights by DPWolf

Jaymis ( jaymis.com / CDM / Brisbane Plug N Play + Segue )

Share Outpost AV collective ( Sprawling tech improv )

VJ Zoo ( Perth Plug N Play )

Tokyo ( LightRhythmVisuals in the web-house )

Mobile Projection Unit ( roaming streets of Melbourne, projecting our event signal onto walls, and a video camera feed of that back to our event.. )

Broadcasting to the web with built-in chat client at Melbourne time 8pm-1am, Oct 9th :
http://www.mogulus.com/netlag
( Click through mogulus link, and ‘video on demand’ to see example footage from test gig on sep 25th )
Send twitter messages to netlag, which will scroll across the bottom of our webfeed :
( http://www.twitter.com/netlag or send messages to @netlag )

2008 marks a decade of the TINA festival, which each year brings together people from all ends of the country ( and globe) to Newcastle for a weekend of gigs, workshops, exhibitions, installations, panels and general mayhem. It’s actually an umbrella for Electrofringe, National Young Writer’s Festival, Sound Summit and more, and this time round is happening from Thu 2nd Oct to Mon 6th Oct.

As usual, there’s too much going on ( and much of it simultaneously ) for any one person to catch all of, so best bet is prioritising those sessions you really want to attend, and remain open to being swept along by the tides of stuff happening afterwards, be it the official sessions or the impromptu jams / meanderings / debates / disc swapping frenzies spread across the unique charm ( Baghdad as country and western surf town?) of Newcastle’s central business district.

Renewable Energy
Nice to note a festival in the steel city and one of the world’s biggest coal ports, running a trio of sustainable energy related workshops :

Going Green: Solar Power for Electronic Arts & Culture – Learn about benefits of solar power for artists, media makers, researchers & others involved in electronic arts & culture. Get equipped with all the information you need to assemble an environmentally responsible & creatively liberating solar power system.

Windmills workshop – Lock-up & Electrofringe artist-in-residence Chris Poole presents a hands on workshop exploring self powered & sustained micro-projectors. Learn to use wind power for guerilla style public art. Chris will also demonstrate & explain his innovative laser based projector. ( & later – Chris will create & install wind powered micro-projectors around Newcastle over the course of the festival. Keep an eye out for kinetic light emitting sculptures anywhere a little breeze might be blowing … )

The End of Travel?
Peak Oil’s coming; time’s running out to jump on a plane & see the world. How will this affect our relationship to place? What literary possibilities are afforded by a radical change in pace? What will it mean for the processes of globalisation that inform travel writing today? (( Cheery, eh? Luckily there’s also bicycle repair workshops happening @ the festival. Really! ))

Gigalicious
Aye. Many. There. Are. Including, in venues such as The Anti-Social Social Club, the following acts in various states of emotional and literal undress :
Antony Milton, Ben Byrne, Cotti, Curse ov Dialect, Hosebeast, KK NULL, Lucky Dragons, Maruosa, Rose Turtle Ertler, Western Synthetics, Birchville Cat Motel, Tranny Cops Rave Safe Team, b12shot, Ultra Violet MC, Oojah & the Trash, Fannyfighters, Pig & Machine, Press Eject, DJ Svensimu, DJ Baku, Pikelet, Fabulous Diamonds, Jim Denley, Kim Myhr, Matt Hoare, Naked On The Vague, Mt Eerie / Microphones, Subsketch, Boxed Voices ( and yes, more.. ).

What Else?
Solder Girls is a soldering circle with a whiteboard, for those who got a doll instead of a physics kit for Christmas. Take a spoken word tour of some of Newcastle’s most fascinating hidden locations. Tired? Chances are you’re suffering from ‘Artistic Fatigue.’ Come to the NYWF doctor’s surgery. Checkout an overview of Interactive Cinema Projects from the iCinema Centre for Interactive Cinema Research at University of New South Wales. Explore ways computer based systems can interpret, track & relate movement through a camera. Quartz composer? Two workshops. ( see also workshops for pure data, reaktor, ableton live etc ) Soda_Jerk launching Killer Mix Vol 2 & discuss their remix-based art practice. A midi controlled animatronic penis mask. Join Lucky Dragons (U.S.) as they workshop ideas on collaboration & theories behind participatory art making. Flipbooks & locked groove vinyl? Tick. Publishers from Neural.it (Italy) & Metamute (UK)? In the house. Large slabs of white plasticine to create depth & distortion for a projected image? Uh huh. Interactive video installation reframing real life as a classic noir comic book? You know it. Information Aesthetics? A chamber recital for robots? A chorus composed for 16 bluetooth enabled mobile phones? Japanese festival screenings? Etc etc etc…

While we can enjoy the fruits of being hyperconnected today – we have each other’s reading, listening and viewing habits at our fingertips, we can distribute globally on a whim – what creative performance options exist for real-time collaboration?

Remember ResRocket?
As long ago as 1997 ResRocket was developed by Willy Henshall (Londonbeat), and Tim Bran (Dread zone), as software to allow musicians to jam online, each represented by an avatar, and able to either play along in real time or perfect their part locally and add it to the mix later on – as long as you were playing MIDI instruments or traditional instruments rigged up for MIDI protocol translation. Some 65,000 users later in 2003, it was shut down by the Steinberg company who had bought it earlier. Various ex-rocket members cobbled together http://www.jamwith.us in 2004 which continues extending online jamming software to date.

Rocket tangent?
During their Australian tour in May 1999, Cold Cut agreed to perform a netcast from London to the Electrofringe festival in Newcastle Australia in October that year. Through a stroke of luck, the ISP sponsor for the festival had recently bought a warehouse beside the gig venue, and said “netcast? no worries, we can run a fibre optic cable across the carpark into the venue..” Bandwidth sorted ( which delivered us a 100kbs real video stream, luxurious at the time ), Cold Cut suggested doing an online jam at the end of their set with Resrocket. We hooked them up with beatmakers from Elefant Traks, who had been playing with their own online jamming software DASE ( Distributed Audio Sequencer Environment ), and the two groups jammed for a few months beforehand in preparation. On the night the ColdCut stream went fine ( with some of the loudest cheers for the text being written at bottom of screen ), but when it came time to have the jam, the Resrocket studio was inaccessible. The problem? Apparently a participating Resrocket sound engineer in San Francisco had fallen asleep, and the others couldn’t log into the room with the way he’d set it up.

Online Jamming Today?
Compared to Resrocket, the http://www.jamwith.us/ software is more a song production tool than a jamming tool, allowing musicians to synchronize and exchange audio material with most DAW platforms. “It has communication features to simplify the production process and keeps track of your tracks. You don`t need to be online at the same time as files are hosted on servers. The file exchange is optimized by compressing via the lossless flac algorithm.”

http://ninjam.com (Mac OS X and Windows) is a program to allow people to make real music together via the Internet. Every participant can hear every other participant, and tweak their personal mix to his or her liking. Since the inherent latency of the Internet prevents true realtime synchronization of the jam, and playing with latency is weird, NINJAM provides a solution ( as did DASE back in 1999) by making latency much longer. The NINJAM client records and streams synchronized intervals of music between participants. Just as the interval finishes recording, it begins playing on everyone else’s client. So when you play through an interval, you’re playing along with the previous interval of everybody else, and they’re playing along with your previous interval.

Similarly, ejamming.com imposes a delay on your instrument to keep you in sync with other musicians. The amount of delay is bandwidth and distance dependent. The better everyone’s upload speed and the closer the other players are to you, the lower the delay. The site recommends connecting with musicians close to you so you can adapt to the sync delay, and with their capslock on :
“DO NOT TRY TO CONNECT TO MUSICIANS 5000-10000 KILOMETERS OR MILES AWAY THE FIRST FEW TIMES YOU TRY EJAMMING.” They also recommend headphones to minimize the sound level in the room of your instrument so you can focus on the delayed sound of your own instrument and the sounds of the other players coming over eJamming AUDiiO.

http://networkjamming.com is an Australian developed networked interactive software application aimed at introducing schoolchildren to play in a virtual ensemble and jam with audio and video.

Wiki for jamming online : http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Jamming_Online

Beyond Midi And Timezone Drift
Open Sound Control (OSC) is a protocol which attempts to transcend the limitations of MIDI, and provide a way of connecting machines more suited to modern networking technology, bringing with it greater interoperability, accuracy, flexibility, and enhanced organization and documentation. Much of today’s audio ( eg audio mulch, reaktor ) and VJ ( eg VDMX ) software is OSC capable, so online jams can include advanced ways of connecting parameters on machines located in different places. More sophisticated patch based software such as max/msp and pure data multiplies these capacities, as exemplified by the likes of Max Neupert’s Video Sampler where remote artists are both able to control an interface and see the other’s simultaneous adjustments, allowing a live remote jamming ( based on both sides having the same local set of media to start off with ).

And aye, haven’t even touched on games, the vastness of online multiplayer games somehow daunts me. I like to think though, there’s a bunch of rastafarian orcs singing acappella tunes together in some hidden corner island of World of Warcraft, a gathering of Grand Theft Auto gangsters making music with avatar gunclicks, and others tweaking out weird audiovisual levels with unreal tournament game engines.

And all kinds of remixing media possibilities have emerged with the widespread adoption of media storage sites online. Using a specific tag such as ‘melb2008digitalfringe’ on media uploaded @ pool.org.au, flickr, blip.tv or vimeo.com allows contributing artists from different locations to remix each others work during performances ( see below). Most media storage sites also tend to feature RSS feeds of media that can be subscribed to and utilised within software, and API’s ( programmer friendly code which provides database access to media for custom uses ).

And So..On Oct 9th – NetLag : Vapour Trails

In the Digital Fringe leg of the Melbourne 2008 Fringe Festival, Plug N Play Melbourne, and Share Outpost will be hosting an event simultaneously with others in Brisbane, Perth, Tokyo and New York, where we’ll be trying to milk some of the collaborative possibilities, and trying to provide some introductory way of linking our events. Aside from a range of performances that night @ Horse Bazaar, we’ll be using the streaming software at mogulus.com/netlag, to select feeds from the other cities at various times, and to send an overall mix out to the web and to those at other events. The mogulus software allows live chatting via web, and anyone watching can also send twitter messages from their phone or web to twitter.com/netlag and these will scroll across the bottom of the netcast.

The Mobile Projection Unit will be wandering around Melbourne projecting some of this, and also beaming back to the venue, and web, camera views of these projections. Crazy kinds of feedback loops possible to play with there – artists painting walls in NY say, being beamed through mogulus to our event, we select their feed and send to the mobile van, to project their art onto walls around Melbourne, video camera sends footage of this back to us, and back to the web, where the artists in NY can see how their work is being recontextualised in Melbourne, and adapt to it. The mogulus software is pretty good too, for allowing easing cueing and transitioning from feed to feed, so each member can send a feed to the web from their location, and the admin user can easily select which feed becomes the main feed. Should be fun at least, to cut in snippets from elsewhere, to our event in Melbourne, and hopefully fun for others to receive some of ours. And fun to see what kind of remixes emerge from the tagged media everyone has access to.

In the end, just an experiment at linking events, but will be interesting to see where it goes… ( esp with the end of travel being predicted and all.. )

Amusing as the U.S. election is to watch on news channels, or terrifying if you’re watching it via the Comedy Channel’s Daily Show, just sometimes, you don’t feel like having a herd of cattle flying overhead, dumping manure on you from great heights. A few abstract video antidotes then, to counteract the visual political overload of late.

Abre Ojos
Scott Baker, aka Abre Ojos, graced Melbourne Plug N Play recently with a fine audiovisual set, blending together well richly textured drones of ebb of flow with ethereal video footage, and appropriately stylised live animations. Walking into the venue though, one of the first things noticed was his rig, as he tends to use a range custom analogue equipment, and on this occasion had an impressive modular synthesiser embedded in a suitcase, spaghetti patchwork of cables arcing out of it everywhere, flanked by a range of controllers and a laptop for controlling video. A desk microphone let him use his voice to provide raw sound for filtering, processing into a swell of buzzing insects, mid ocean waves or a distant rumbling volcano. All the while letting slow and atmospheric video drift by on screen ( or into the screen in the case of road journeys into a floating cloud of mist ), or smoothly shifting animated light patterns over time.

Nice stuff, and he has a DVD out, a compilation of 4 AV tracks – all tracks are improvised, vision and sound recorded in a single pass, no overdubs, then minimal mixing/mastering / compressing / EQ etc. Visually, he works by taking photos and video with a consumer grade digital still camera ( the growing video quality on cheap still cameras continues to amaze and surprise me ), manipulating them in photoshop / after effects / motion and then layering these with quartz composer animations that are audio responsive and midi controllable. His work is also creative commons licenced, so you can both view and remix it over at abreojos.net.

Big Square Eye
Received this impressively realised DVD compilation in the mail recently, it having been produced for the Brisbane Festival 2008 at the tail end of workshops with 15 young Queenslanders given access to a range of gear, mentors and two things that help most projects – a deadline and a budget. The end result is surprisingly sophisticated, in both conceptual and aesthetic realms, and well supported by the DVD packaging and menu interface. The clips range from shimmery plays of light to stop-motion political critique, clip art animations, absurdist puppetry and abstraced visual effects. There are few visual cliches scattered amongst it all, but on the whole an impressive effort, and more so for the ways it is being distributed and displayed across many parts of regional Queensland in various non-gallery contexts like retail displays. Clips, artist information and related essays viewable online.

Digital Fringe
Happens in Melbourne soon ( Sep 24 – Oct 12 – digitalfringe.com.au ), bringing together a range of events, a mobile projection unit ( van with projectors, solar-charged batteries, online laptops, projector and video camera ) which travels around projecting onto Melbourne walls and sends the resulting footage onto the web in real-time. Anyone wanting to have their work projected with this, and on many screens all around Melbourne during the festival, can upload video at the Digital Fringe site ( you can also view / download other submissions for remixing ).

Google, as part of fanfare for their new open source web browser, Google Chrome, released a comic to explain it, detailing their views on the problems with browsers to date, and their take on solutions. Radly, the comic was made by everyone’s favourite instructional comic maker, Scott McCloud ( why are his instructional comics about how to make comics so great, and his actual comics not so? ), who reliably manages to distil the complexities of web technology into an easily comprehensible visual form. It’s a 38 pager and includes a host of new features ( eg separate processes per tab so if one tab crashes the whole browser doesn’t ) and underlying technologies that aim to improve the overall browser experience, and let’s face it, maximise uptake of google technologies. After reading through it though, and having had to deal with teaching HTML workarounds to students because of Internet Explorer’s refusal to adhere to International Web Standards, gotta say the Google Overlord approach seems much more beneficial to everyone than that of the Microsoft Overlords.

The Google Chrome browser itself is due out in a few days. ( Like that logo too!)

See also, Francis Bear’s comic-book take on Scott’s latest book, Making Comics.

UPDATE : Says Franz, ‘for those too lazy to click through the comic you can download it as an ebook PDF here‘. Or check the 4-Chan-ned remixes.

“There needs to be a word for technological ennui, the state we exist in where anything is technically possible and the only thing that holds us back is our imagination. No sooner can you imagine a new application of an existing technology than someone has actually done it, posting details of their hack around the world.”

via things magazine ( although they weren’t writing about firefox, but an iphone ‘lighter-in-the-air-at-concerts’ app.. )

Firefox 3 Extension Wishlist
Firefox 3 is a great improvement, feels the fastest of any browser I’ve used, cleverly extends the URL auto-suggest idea to include parts of words in the description of a site as well ( more useful than it sounds, if you’ve been anywhere, this’ll help find it again really easily ). Not all extensions have been updated to be compatible with this new release though, but going by the above iphone-lighter principle, where things are being made somewhere else as soon as you think of them, we should be able to list a few desired features for a browser and find that in fact, they are already there. Let’s see.

– Custom modify a browser and easily import those modifications to a browser on any machine?
Ok, so ‘Firefox Environment Backup Extension’ supposedly takes care of that, backing up all your extensions and enabling you to wander to any computer with Firefox, install just that one extension, and then easily adjust the browser to the extension-packed way you prefer it. Except the OS X version is still playing catch-up.
– Start up your favourite / most needed sites in different tabs in one go?
Can do this by setting a folder in your toolbar, bookmarking into it, and choosing ‘open all in tabs’, but Morning Coffee adds a few variants to this – allowing sets of bookmarks to be stored for particular days. One click to add a site to a list, one click to open your faves.
– Play a whole bunch of old nintendo games inside the browser?
That’d be FireNes – www.firenes.com.ar .
– Bookmark things so they can be read on any computer, and browse/subscribe to collective bookmarks on your favourite topics?
The delicious bookmarks extension is your very, very good friend.
– Get rid of ads on certain regularly used pages?
Mmmm, Ad Block Plus.
– Block annoying flash apps on a page by page or domain by domain basis?
Easy enough.
– Post about pages viewed to a blog?
Many ways to do this, Scribefire does it well, allowing “users to easily drag and drop formatted text from the Web into their blog(s), post entries, take notes, and optimize their ad inventory, directly through the Firefox browser.”
– Save longgg, awkward URLs as short ones, with a simple rightclick?
TinyURL, isn’t it?
– Allow yourself to have a gazillion tabs open, and have more control about how these are used or quickly navigated between?
TabMix Plus, which is usually my first extension installed on a fresh firefox on another computer…
– Manage these gazillion must-read-soon tabs?
Read It Later – “eliminates cluttering of bookmarks with sites that are merely of a one-time interest. ”
– Download all the media related photos, sounds, videoclips on a given page in one go?
http://www.downthemall.net
– Copy all the URLs and titles of these tabs in one go?
Haven’t been able to find something to do this in version 3 – theoretically someone should have already built it, it’s my fault for not having found it.

All of which of course, are drab, banal expectations of a browser which stem from thinking within the browser’s traditional limits for too long. I’m sorry. Let me know when Firefox 3 extensions are ready for :

– Finding my keys, wallet, mobile phone, remembering my pin number?
– Blocking certain celebrities from ever appearing in any media consumed, inviting others over for BBQs, creative collaborations, island getaways.
– Going beyond net neutrality and taxing the bandwidth of anyone browsing media that involves certain celebrities and re-distributing that bandwidth to people watching ‘better stuff’.
– Keeping the cats fed but not overfed, when late-night rooftops need climbing over, islands need to be got away to.
– Auto-disseminating a whiff of extra tree seeds to farmlands and forest floors during every hour spent unnecessarily hooked up to the big smoky grid behind the browser.
– Auto-finding a yoga class in your neighbourhood, at a timeslot that suits, and giving you 20 minutes warning of your internet cutting off, to be resumed 20 minutes after the class finishes.

If there’s one thing the latest wave of webbery does well, it’s keeping track of sites that keep track of sites that keep track of…

Back in the Day
Used to be simple enough – find some curious brained folk who spend too much time wandering the web, and drop into their blog from time to time. The rise of RSS readers to easily subscribe to material like this, made it a snack to quickly gather a huge range of hand-picked curators and connoiseurs to keep you in touch with news in any number of esoteric topics. And then, when it happened that there were too many curators walking the earth, along came the re-blog (software that facilitates the process of filtering and republishing relevant content from many RSS feeds – reblog.org), enabling a new breed of curators to pick out the best .. curators, which was grand for a while, apart from the problem of still being limited to the perspective of that particular curator. More brains were needed, and that’s where things get messy.

And Then
Expanding on the web curation idea, slashdot.org launched on the premise of allowing it’s readers to nominate stories, with a constantly rotating team of editors filtering these submissions and presenting the best on their frontpage. The shift to many brains was spectacularly successful, and then the founders of digg.com tried to expand on this idea by letting the audience not only nominate stories, but also become the editors themselves – by voting on the stories, the stories with the most votes being shifted to the frontpage, in turn meaning avalanches of traffic for the sites being profiled. newsvine.com and reddit.com are amongst those following the same path, both aiming to provide customised stories for you, based on what you’ve submitted or voted for over time. Popularity alone of course, isn’t necessarily a measure of quality, and acknowledging that is the latest iteration in the field, polymeme.

Sayeth Polymeme:

“We have a database of about 25,000 leading blogs covering specific topics — economics, architecture, media, and so on. Every few hours our unique buzz-detection system analyzes each topical cluster and determines what are some of the “hottest” articles — be they from the traditional media or other blogs — discussed by the blogs in our cluster. We then republish the most interesting of them on Polymeme.com, displaying the sources that are talking about each “hot” news article or blog post. We believe that relying on this “wisdom of clusters” and not just “wisdom of crowds” provides for superior buzz detection than most regular buzz-aggregators, which usually give preference to most popular stories across all topics, and not most interesting ones in specific areas.”

Sample Polymemes?
The Poly-feed offers about 50 headlines or so a day, eg ‘the decline of the american empire’ which offers an article about recent economic, financial and geopolitical events that suggest the above, but also shows how this theme is something that has been recently covered by many people and offers all the links to these. The extra contextualisation is really nice, and so for the time being am enjoying the feed quite well.

Face is The Place
Of course, the ease of publishing and reading links – and importantly, having access to a more direct group of peers ( for both reading and writing ), inside the walled garden that is Facebook, means many people are now filtering their web through their facebook account. Within most groups of friends, are a few who take with glee to the chance to spread the word about what they’ve been reading / viewing / listening to / thinking, and for a particular few, this extends to the compressing as much links, juice or wit into their ‘account status’ messages as possible. Which is exactly the premise and promise ( or threat ) behind the popular twitter.com service. While Twitter sounds maddening to many, the core idea of being able to send a short SMS sized message from phone or computer at any time, and have this be published on a site, be picked up by others subscribing, and responded to, is obviously compelling for many.

Too many accounts, too little time? Ping.fm updates your facebook, myspace, twitter etc etc accounts in one go. Tubemogul.com publishes your video to many different accounts at once ( youtube, blip.tv etc etc ) and Friendfeed.com gathers your updates, comments, bookmarks etc from a large range of sites in one place, and allows subscribing to the collected updates of friends – which actually provides a pretty useful service – being able to comment on and develop conversations with friends about their broader web travels, all from the one location.

“Where are we when on the phone?”

On a rooftop it turns out. International no-budget short film made around 2003, based on the idea that if a few people around the world were able to film themselves doing something with a phone on a rooftop, this might be a fruitful plot device, or at least provide some kind of continuity and fun for editing later on. And so, a request was sent out through the networks, that pretty much said :

“Can you make 30 seconds of video that starts with you answering a phone, and ends with you dialling a call?”

Many months later ( imagine – a time before youtube! ), had compiled a diverse range of contributions from Sadie Plant, Neotropic, Scanner, Howard Bloom, a Colombian rooftop party, Rebecca Cannon, Captain Frodo, Anna Sagaponic and many more – and massaged these together into one ‘continuous’ tale linked by rooftop phone action.

Ended up on a Neopoetry DVD compilation, and subsequently screened at Straight Out Of Brisbane, Electrofringe & other festivals and exhibitions internationally. Came with a companion essay. And in the endless Melb-Winter-Of_Productivity 2008, it’s finally online.

Broadcast media organisations are slowly adapting to the idea that their audiences can produce and distribute media too, shifting the top down one-to-many model of media to one of many-to-many. Representing part of an adaptive strategy over at the ABC, pool.org.au is about to launch, a site where anyone can upload and publish material – or remix some of what is there already. John Jacobs ( Video Subvertigo, Indymedia, ABC’s Night Air ) was happy to be interviewed about the site’s aims.

The pool site is about to launch – what would you like to imagine it being in 2010?
By 2010 I’d hope that media professionals and consumers had used the live web to blur each others boundaries and used spaces like Pool to build the new public media forms and platforms. So maybe Pool 2010 is some kind of aggregated media tagzine.

To what extent are ABC radio and TV archives available now, and what kind of plans are there for increased future availability?
Opening up the ABC archives is an important goal for many people.  Like the BBC, the ABC recognizes the huge potential of digital access to its back catalogue. There’s a balancing act to be played out between intellectual property rights and public interest. Public media is shifting roles from broadcasting media units to hosting a digital connection cloud. Right now ABC TV’s iView (abc.net.au/tv/iview ) is one avenue for directly accessing popular current productions. I can see a future where less high profile ABC output is delivered to the pubic domain directly. Pool is modeling this with its use of Creative Commons licensing.

What ABC media would you especially enjoy seeing remixed by it’s audience?
In the night garden it’s one of my favorite shows. Like Telly Tubbies and Mr Squiggle before that, kids programming always has the most open agenda and abstract language that naturally welcomes remix or re interpretation. Just add a bit of ABC news actuality and you are in VJ heaven.

What contributions have surprised you so far?
I liked hearing Holy’s story of her squat but it was so great hearing Dan turn it into a song!

What limitations of current Pool system are you looking to transcend?
Pool is a space to rethink public media, there are plenty of limitations but also many possibilities. I invite you all to log in and start to co-create. Once media objects are free of ownership many options open up.

Examples of forward-thinking broadcast media projects online?
Engagemedia.org is a great homegrown example of direct video publishing. And viddler.com okay it’s like just another You tube competitor but check out it’s time line annotation feature. Soon social media will aggregate tags like “silly” into a channel and then I will have found a home.
 
Other video remix sites that inspire?
The “Related to” side bar on Youtube, I love browsing have you watched http://play.blogger.com?

Blame it on the Melbourne winter, but recently I’ve embarked on the task of republishing a few hundred odd articles from my former blog, the now defunct octapod.org/jeanpoole, which covered live video, electronic art and music, tasmanian tigers, gangsta rapping physicists and other odds and ends from 2001-2005. Though some are less relevant today, there’s plenty of still interesting interviews amongst it all, and figured if these files already exist on a hard-drive somewhere, that may as well be on a publically accessible one.

The archives has the full list of what has been transferred so far, and I’ll add another post when the process is finished, highlighting some of my favourites over the years ( though I’ve published the embarrassing ones too.. ). For now though, here are a few of the live video and VJ related posts which now live on skynoise..

Artist interviews…
A Brief History of VJing in Australia ( longgg interview heavy piece focussed around late 90s onwards), The Light Surgeons (UK), VJ Honeygun Labs(US), Jasch (Switzerland), Eye-Fi(Sydney), John De Kron ( Germany), Falk (Germany), Lalila (Sydney), Semi-Conductor (UK), Rawbone ( Perth ), DJ Spooky on cutting film ( US ), Falk on VJ blogging (Germany), Solu ( Finland/Spain), Runwrake (yes he VJs sometimes as well as being an amazing animator)(UK), DJ Yoda (UK), Neotropic on music and film (UK), audiovisualizers.com interview, meta, QBert on Wave Twisters (US), and Addictive TV ( UK) and 242 Pilots ( US/Europe) both of which slipped through as ‘recent’ posts.

VJ related Software reviews :
Comprehensive overview of VJ Software in 2004 with screenshots, interviews, smaller VJ software round-up in 2005, vdmx 2, VDMXX 4.0, Grid Pro Vs Arnold Schwarzenegger, v-track, Arkaos video sampler, Arkaos VJ 3, Wildform Flix, Isadora, Livid 1.1

Wheeeeeeeeee~!