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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is it?
Quartz Composer is a versatile visual programming environment ( mac only +needs either tiger or leopard to work), that enables complex compositions to be created without writing a single line of code. Any mac running 10.4 or later with Quicktime can play quartz compositions as stand-alone files, but importantly, they can also be easily integrated into various workflows for other software ( eg as customised FX in editing or real-time video software) or used as an iTunes visualizer or system screensaver.

In other words, you can build your own interactive software or effects using Quartz 2D, Core Image, Core Video, OpenGL, QuickTime, MIDI System Services, RSS (Really Simple Syndication), XML and various hardware inputs ( eg mouse, audio inputs etc ) – without needing to know any code. It is however, also kinda complicated to get a non-programmer head around. The benefits for mac visualists though, are starting to get too large to ignore: continuous developer and community momentum behind it, easy integration into many other applications ( eg VDMX, Resolume for live work, or other apps for production ), a large body of existing examples that can be customised to suit, and the potential to create or invent visual effects, transitions or processes that are exactly suited to your one-off or overall needs.

With that in mind, I’ve decided to try and document my own learning process with it here, and aim to post a weekly-ish blog post exploring what I’m learning, or what I’m struggling with. Hopefully this’ll motivate me to get up to speed quicker, but also provide something useful for someone else. This first post just sets the scene, puts Quartz Composer in some kinda context, and offers up some links to the key online resources for it. With the next post, I’ll try tackle what it feels like to dive into, and how to start making sense of it, what kinds of rules and quirks it has, and how to start making your own quartz patches. Yes, neantherdal baby steps, because they’re mine. Somewhere in the distance, there’s an endgoal though, of being able to execute a range of long desired visual effects and processes that would be handy / interesting in some situations. And so begins the Hobbit like adventure..

What You’ll Need
- A mac running the Leopard ( preferably ) or tiger operating system.
- XCode Tools ( free on the OS installer disc, once installed, Quartz Composer + examples can be found in the /Developer/Applications/ folder).

How does it work?
Quartz Composer creates Quartz Compositions ( motion graphics programs that work by assembling ‘patches’ in a workflow for processing and rendering. There are several types of patches eg Composite Patches / Controller Patches / Environment Patches – Filter Patches etc which can be combined in various ways.

User Interface
Opening up QC, options for Blank Composition, Graphic Animation, Graphic Transition, Image Filter, Music Visualizer, RSS Visualizer and Screensaver offer easy templates to begin from, and give some idea of the program’s scope.

Once open, there are four main windows to consider:
Editor window – a workspace for assembling and connecting patches. Also, on the editor window toolbar clicking the patch parameters button will open up the Patch Parameter Pane – a place for Editing input parameters.
Patch Creator – utility window for browsing and getting information about QC patches and clips. ( A good place to browse and familiarise with available patches )
Patch Inspector – Utility window for editing input parameters and patch related settings.
Viewer Window – Where you get to see the results of all your pixel mangling.

A good beginner exercise is just to open up the example patches that are installed with the program ( found inside Developer/Examples/Quartz Composer ). Exploring some of those will help clarify the relationships between the above four windows, and give an idea of how it operates. I’ll dive in further with the next post, and the resources below will help anyone wanting to keep on trucking.

Further Resources
Apple’s QC Guide – Comprehensive breakdown and introductory explanations.
QC Developer Mailing List –
http://kineme.net – A community surrounding the development of Quartz Composer custom patches, plugins, and other hacks.
VDMX wiki- Tips for integrating QC into VDMX, links to other QC sources.

Over at Vimeo –
vimeo.com/tag:quartzcomposer : 1,477 example QC clips and counting.
vimeo.com/groups/search:quartz
vimeo.com/5616060 – Shakinda shows the basic concepts for setting up QC.
vimeo.com/goto10 – bouncing balls, feedback effects, double helix, QC plugins, dynamic slideshows.

Extra Patches / QTZ FX
http://vdmx.memo.tv – QC patches ready to drop into VDMX.
http://002.vade.info – great QC add-ons from New York’s Vade.

Some February eyeball snippets..

Sculpture
http://tapebox.co.uk
http://vimeo.com/sculpture
Dan Hayhurst: Music, Reuben Sutherland: Animation
“DIY music and animation duo, who use zoetrope record deck, tape loops, cassettes, samples, and lo-fi electronic noise, cross-fertilizing analogue and digital techniques to generate vivid sonic and visual collages.”

Sculpture are one of my favourite discoveries of late. Notice the words ‘zoetrope record deck’ in their description? Those custom made picture discs ( just a sequence of images arranged around a vinyl disc and filmed from above ) definitely help define their aesthetic but there’s much more going on than that. Glimpse a few of their animations and live performances to grasp some more.

Everything
http://vimeo.com/6364896
A vibrant array of visual creators constantly pump out material on vimeo.com, so even casual exploration of the site usually brings some rewards. It’s especially nice though, to discover delights in clusters, masses of talented folk orbiting around one of vimeo’s groups or channels. Such as the awesome compilation ‘Everything’, curated by Danny Jelinek, each episode tending to feature 5-6 snappy segments, sharp editing and humour, and sophisticated but whimsically used visual effects.
 
Op Art in Visual Chinatown

davidope.com
http://dvdp.tumblr.com
On the optical art front, albeit with a more contemporary feel, ‘davidope’ creates hypnotic looping animations, which he offers up as a series of tumblr gifs ( hosted at what he calls his ‘visual chinatown’), or java apps / quicktime movs for those inclined. His recipe?

1. I create a simple animated 2d looped pattern in Flash or with Illustrator+Javascript.
2. Then I use them as a displacement/diffuse/alpha map for a static 3d object in 3dsmax.
3. Rendering it with Vray or Illustrate.
4. Finally converting it to GIF with Photoshop.

DJ Yoda 

www.djyoda.co.uk/
youtube.com/user/djyodauk

Belated shout outs to DJ Yoda, who toured Australia in late December. Admittedly I was skeptical after glimpsing a set portion online a long time ago ( too obviously cut and paste in that mid-late 90s way, with little sampling subtlety in the choices or choreography), but for the sonic and visual heads in the audience alike(@ Falls festival) yoda ‘ripped it’, constantly weaving through pop culture grabs with fluid, sophisticated ease. This included a range of recently new worthy items as well as an extended encore of contemporary Australian TV.    

Apart from busily honing his live gigs, DJ Yoda also recently contributed to the DJ Hero game ( Playstation, XBox, Wii ), offering up two mixes for playing : Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back” vs. Gang Starr’s “Just to Get a Rep”, and Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” vs. Shlomo’s “Beats”. As an aside – has anyone ever used this? The game made a lot of splashes on release, but I haven’t heard from a single user of it since, or even seen anyone pointing to an interesting video of it (or it’s turntable controller ) in action. Meanwhile, ‘Scratch, The Ultimate DJ‘, being developed by Bedlam games and delayed because of legal troubles, is now back on track – with tracks by Mixmaster Mike, Kid Koala, Gorillaz, Salt N pepa etc. Stay tuned.

Pilotless floating killing machines now routinely fly over borders, grim drones of surveillance no doubt predicted by plenty of science fiction before them. The actual 21st century messiness of the drones was best nailed a near decade ago, by Patrick Farley of electricsheepcomix.com.

BackTracking
Over at No Fear Of The Future, Chris Nakashima-Brown wrote about watching the Alex Rivera film Sleep Dealer, ‘an amazing work of Mexican cyberpunk about info-maquilas and memories for sale in near-future Tijuana’. He goes on to mention ‘one of the more over-the-top plot elements was a reality television show in which viewers help drone pilots select their terror targets’ – a near identical premise to Patrick Farley’s web comic ‘Spiders’ ( which we’ll get to in a second.. ), and which he presumed as far-fetched – before reading a NY Times report about the Pentagon’s struggle to process ‘the huge quantities of data it is receiving from the proliferating network of Predator/Reaper drones patrolling the skies of the earth’.

You want video data? The U.S. military can give you video data. In 2009 the drones clocked up 200,000 combat flight hours, each generating a constant feed of live video and other data. In 2010, the drones will be able to begin recording video in ten directions at once, 30 directions in 2011 and 65 directions in 2012. Aside from the obvious storage and archiving issues, that also amounts to a serious analysis challenge. How to meaningfully process that much material?

In attempting to prevent an overload of video collected by the drones, the NY Times wrote that the air force and military are ‘turning to the television industry to learn how to quickly share video clips and display a mix of data in ways that make analysis faster and easier’ through a mix of text, live video, replays, and graphical augmentations of the filmed reality.

“Imagine you are tuning in to a football game without all the graphics,” said Lucius Stone, an executive at Harris Broadcast Communications, a provider of commercial technology that is working with the military. “You don’t know what the score is. You don’t know what the down is. It’s just raw video. And that’s how the guys in the military have been using it.”

As Chris saw it, ‘dudes in Department of Defence trailers in Orlando’ aren’t going to be necessarily that effective at analysing the footage from several hundred drones in the air, and suggests a more engaging scenario might be a distributed computing model to fight the war on terror, something along the lines of SETI (where distributed computing power of home computers are used together to help process analysis of signals from space ). As Chris puts it, “allow the private sector to turn the video into the basis of a real-world tactical game, in which teenage boys in suburban Chicago tag the Talis for special attention.” This kinda crowdsourcing was also used in two recent attempts to find missing people ( Jim Gray who went missing off the coast of California, and Steve Fossett whose plane went down in a small region). Making public recently available aerial imagery ( see Google Earth Blog), this was an approach to ‘more rapidly search a large area of imagery using many eyeballs of people around the world’. [ Wikipedia aside : "On May 25, 2007 the U.S. Director of National Intelligence .. authorized .. local, state, and domestic Federal agencies to access imagery from military intelligence satellites and aircraft sensors which can now be used to observe the activities of U.S. citizens. The satellites and aircraft sensors will be able to penetrate cloud cover, detect chemical traces, and identify objects in buildings and "underground bunkers", and will provide real-time video at much higher resolutions than the still-images produced by programs such as Google Earth."]

Spiders
www.electricsheepcomix.com/spiders/
In Patrick Farley’s horizontally sprawling webcomic ( screens aren’t pages! ), the drones crawl along the ground. Rather than swooping planes, swarms of insect robots travel over Afghanistan’s desert mountain terrain, each beaming back a video image for spare-time mouse-clickers to watch and report on. Farley’s still unfinished story has plenty of twists, and tries hard to explore what comics on the screen can be, playing often with various technical conventions of the software he knows users will be reading his story with. Unfortunately the whole story isn’t available for viewing at the moment, while he rebuilds his site ( originally hosted at the domain e-sheep.com, but the domain registration lapsed ), but it’s still worth a look see, and there’s plenty of other webcomics and stories to see there too. Bonus Points? His offering of a ‘List of Story Premises’, free for Creative Commons use, noting “If any of these makes you rich, consider buying me lunch.”

HackTracking
Don’t forget SkyGrabber, the software used by Shiite fighters in Iraq to regularly capture drone video feeds. Available from your nearest torrent site.

Long-time live cinema enthusiast, (Toby) *spark from the UK, released a video about it this week, a decent attempt at exploring some of live cinema’s essence. What is live cinema? Who makes it? Why? How? The video features interviews with some live video luminaries, as well as a glimpse at what an ideal live cinema software interface might look like.

New kinds of cinema will inevitably continue to form and mutate. Video can now be chopped, shuffled and processed nearly as easily as audio, projectors continue to cheapen and shrink, and audiences practically expect moving images to appear in ever new screen and surface arrangements. Live cinema is just one of those possibilities, and within the video Toby explains part of why it appeals:

“Compared to Hollywood, it’s more like live jazz, a storytellers version.. telling different stories everytime – it’s not because there’s a definitive story, but because it’s more interesting that they have a sea of memories, every story they navigate through the sea making different associations, drawing different things in in different contexts. We can do the same with digital media as performers.”

Fellow Londoner, Mike from D-FUSE is less drawn to the narrative aspects, but still strongly attracted to what is possible with live cinema:

“It’s about the feel of it, as opposed to the other side of the tv, telling you a story… it’s about the texture, and the sound, like going back to a surrealist painting… ”

Toby welcomes feedback on the video, so have a watch and zap him a line. Myself, I think the Live Cinema aspect depends on a lot on context – where is the cinema and who are the audience? In that respect, his video would benefit from showing that better, rather than just clips detached from their screening context and audience. The live clips of the Light Surgeons used work best for that reason, but even then the wider context of the audience, or even audience reactions is still invisible.

And why does Live Cinema Suck?
It’s really, really, hard to produce a compelling feature film or create a compelling hour of music. Trying to do something in between both, and without a team of supporting cinematographers, actors, musicians, recording engineers, producers, and without any funds, means it’s a significant project for any solo laptopper to attempt, and yet it is often one or two people who are generally making ‘live cinema’. Playing with video in a more poetic way, and exploring with loops and rhythm, can reduce some of the burden, but it’s still a major challenge. Beyond merely producing a live cinema show though, what are the characteristics of a good live cinema show? And what are the cliches and easy pitfalls for producers? What makes a bad live cinema show? Why is there often a sense that they are fun for the creators but not the audiences? ( The same can be said about drunken bongo playing around a campfire ) Maybe this is a bit like the earliest scratch DJs a few decades ago trying to talk about what a good DJ mix is – from their limited perspective, the evolved styles, technologies and diversities of today’s DJing would’ve been unimaginable. But addressing some of these problems means identifying what works and also what doesn’t in a live context.

Elsewhere VJ Solu has articulated nicely some of the ways Live Cinema can distinguish itself :

“The traditional parameters of narrative cinema are expanded by a much broader conception of cinematographic space, the focus of which is no longer the photographic construction of reality as seen by the camera’s eye, or linear forms of narration. The term “Cinema” is now to be understood as embracing all forms of configuring moving images, beginning with the animation of painted or synthetic images…… Even though performance is a vital element in the live context, creating new narratives for visual culture should be equally important.”

Elsewhere she closes in on an important difference between cinema and live cinema, while showing how one can inform the other:

“Lost Highway (1997) directed by David Lynch.. is remembered for its long shot of a dark highway. I believe these kind of shots are the basic material for live cinema performances: the transitions, the movements, the pure visual beauty and intrigue, the atmosphere.”

Or as VJ Iko from Portugal put to me back in the day:

“Live video is as much about lighting and colour control as it is about creating interesting content. See the people watching the screen? See how the colour of their faces changes with what’s happening on screen? The light bouncing off their faces, that’s what you have to try and control.”

In the end, despite the ongoing quest for software and hardware holy grails, there’s already today immense capacity for provocative and beautiful live cinema to reward both audiences and performers alike. Technologies aside, zooming in on exactly what makes live cinema unique and interesting, will hopefully help evolve the form for everyone. Shout outs to Toby for putting his take on it out there.

Other People Thinking Lots About Live Cinema
Brazilian Live Cinema: And as well as ideas, they also build festivals and hardware live cinema interfaces. “Live Cinema is cinema that unfolds live. It´s an audiovisual perfomance where the director, creator, performer or artist presents his work in person, before the audience. Imagine an artist being able to change his film’s ending, simulate new sounds and images, new sequences, and above all, create different narratives based on the audience’s reactions to the work.”

VJ Falk : Long time Berliner Live cinema prototyper : http://prototypen.com/beamaz + http://prototypen.com/lc/blog

http://www.vjtheory.net : Well curated group discussions about the possibilities for ‘performers, performance, interactors, audiences and participators’.

http://avit.info/vjtalk : A range of mostly VJ talks ( surprise! ) but touching on some relevant live cinema areas.

Timothy Jaeger : Had a good book online a while ago called Live Cinema Unravelled. Missing in action.

VJ Solu : Especially of interest, her thesis which “reviews the influences and explores the characteristics and elements of live cinema, a recently coined term for realtime audiovisual performances. The thesis discusses the possible language of live cinema, and proposes “vocabulary and grammar”.”

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

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

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

No Chimpee, No Cry

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

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

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

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

Slothdom has never looked so good, or been so lazily achievable. Reduced emissions from schedules of slackness, being able to outsource our workloads to increasingly rad software, better health, wealth and good fortune: all this and more are bundled up in The Way Of The Sloth.

Sloth Emissions
Like the twentieth century cyclist t-shirt slogans : ‘two wheels good, four wheels bad’, sloths have a message for the moment, and it is this :
“Less is more.” Or less is better, especially when it refers to expected global temperature rises this century. At the recent gathering of climate slash policy heads in Copenhagen, most preferred the idea of restricting that temperature rise to 2 degrees – which would still deliver a 50% chance of catastrophic climate events. Unsurprisingly, developing countries who would bear most of the brunt of this ( having coastal areas affected by rising sea levels, and densely populated areas that can’t afford further food and water difficulties etc ), wanted a limit of 1.5 degrees. Neither target was agreed upon ( in part due to Chinese Wrestling techniques), but there were still some hopeful signs : significant initiatives and funds were set-up for large scale rainforest protection, there was agreement on the science and the need for action, and there’s potentially a good foundation for the next climate meeting in Nov 2010 – which is being held in the sloth-friendly capital of Mexico City. Hammocks, siestas, cumbia : where better to sign an agreement for slowing the rate of emissions?

(Sloth shout-out to Melbourne’s Cumbia Cosmonauts who are on a roll. )

Sloth Software
Sure, military superpowers can build giant hi-tech infrastructure and send pilot-less drones spying over borders. But why bother with the work of competing with that, when there’s hashish in the hills to be had, it’s too hot to move, and as the Wall Street Journal reports:
“Shiite fighters in Iraq used software programs such as SkyGrabber –available for as little as $25.95 on the Internet — to regularly capture drone video feeds.. ”

The even lazier militants in the desert of course, would likely bypass shopping for such software and just grab the relevant torrent file from Pirate Bay ( no, really. Hat tip to Coburg’s military surveillance connoiseur, Francis Bear ).

And maybe when the sun sets a little and it’s time for some moderate exercise, something like this iphone controlled helicopter might come in handy. ( See the copter’s camera view on your screen, tilt to steer. )

Sloth Visions
Both budding sloth cinephiles and ascending sloth auteurs have much to be happy about. For those who like to watch, the continued splintering of the mainstream provides much of merit. District 9 and the ongoing Wholphin DVD compilations were amongst my favourites in the summer haze, along with an abundance of bookmarked shorts bookmarked online :

vimeo.com/jeanpoole
youtube.com/jeanpoole
delicious.com/jeanpoole/video

For the sloth-maker, it’s an interesting time. After 100 years of cinema, the cinema system is needing to reinvent, and creative and distribution opportunities abound. Who knows what we’ll look back on in fifty years time, who knows which changes with visual storytelling and exploration will seem significant. In the meantime, ongoing visual software developments continue to excite (documented well at createdigitalmotion.com), as does crowdsourcing ( hello kickstarter.com ). Perhaps it’s those that creatively leverage these everyday network technologies to create in ways that haven’t been possible until now ( have you seen the sour webcam video yet? ), that will seem like signposts in years to come. At any rate, fun ahead. And shout out to the the animated webisoders over at http://slothvision.com ( & bonus sloth / major lazer remix).

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

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

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

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

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

The sun seems to be melting people early in Melbourne, but harsh summers are the new harsh winters, when it comes to bunkering down and learning and making a whole bunch of new stuff. Some pixel making updates then.

Software?
Via Spain : Check out the very impressive Playmodes ‘audiovisual sampler machine’ videos at playmodes.com. Built with Open Frameworks, it communicates using OSC with a ‘main logic system’ inside audio software Reaktor. The videos show a really fluid and malleable live capacity with impressive responsiveness. Shout-outs here to: the Pure Data tight AV sycn-ed experiments of Max Neupert ( done remotely too! ) and Austrian Arnold Martin, whose micro-stuttery edits are currently on display @ ACMI. Also worth a look on the Playmodes site, an impressively performed mapping of video to a building. Have gathered a few mapping creation and performance related links, and other live video links here : skynoise.net/video-primer, for a talk given at electrofringe recently.

Via Germany : Yes, MAXForLive is near, which should turbocharge audiovisual performance capabilities, bringing together the custom sophistications of MAX/MSP and MAX’s visual Jitter objects, with the musician grade sequencing capacities of Ableton Live, enabling the easy creation of complex and dynamic audio and visual relationships.

Via Hungary : Animata is open source real-time animation software, was built in Kitchen Budapest . It was especially designed for interactive theatre and projections, and
“… the animation – the movement of the puppets, the changes of the background – is generated in real-time, making continuous interaction possible. This ability also permits that physical sensors, cameras or other environmental variables can be attached to the animation of characters, creating a cartoon reacting to its environment. For example, it is quite simple to create a virtual puppet band reacting to live audio input, or set up a scene of drawn characters controlled by the movement of dancers.”

Via Finland: Thanks to Mansteri / Monsteri, a DJ/VJ, Animata can now be controlled with a quartz composer patch and OSC.

Via Hungary : As well as the free open source VJ software CoGe, the http://coge.lovqc.hu/forum also offers two useful quartz composer plug-ins for real-time compositing. CoGePSBrushes is a free and open-source Quartz Composer plugin, which enables photoshop brushes to be used within a quartz composition. And CoGePSDLayers is another Quartz Composer plugin, which allows separated photoshop layers to be played with inside Quartz. Real-time animation.
Via U.S. : You like to code with Open Frameworks? Thanks to Vade, your OF code can now swim happily within Quartz composer.

Theme from above? Quartz Composer. ( Hello summer tutorials )

Hardware?
Via the UK : DVI mixing comes a step closer, ie a mixer is being developed which will input and output VGA and DVI, and allow you to do what nothing else will: dualhead at 1600×600, triplehead at 1920×480, HD at 1920×1080@60Hz. In other words mixing of the good digital signals being given out by a computer, and to a range of screen possibilities. Toby *spark gives more details on his blog, about future availability and potential developments ( add + multiply blends etc ): The project is one where Toby is connecting a manufacturer with potential buyers ( there’s a form to register interest ), but apparently “The Swedes won’t buy a pig in a sack”, so a video is promised to show the existing DVI mixer in action.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another year, another super-soaking of inner Newcastle with a spray of the bizarre to the sublime. Density of programming, and that everything happens alongside the National Young Writers Festival, Sound Summit ( a gathering of independent record labels and artists), Critical Animals ( post -grad theory critters), and The Crack Theatre Festival – means everyone’s festival is quite different, the following of one path denying the surprises that thrilled others elsewhere. These are the shards that stuck to me.

The Vinyl Arcade by Lucas Abela* (aka. Justice Yeldham aka DJ Smallcock )
Upstairs : Sit in a dodgem car and watch the results of your steering, on a projector screen ahead of you.
Downstairs : A remote control car with record needles underneath it, zooms around a floor made from vinyl records all over the ground.
The mind’s ear might like to imagine this process resulting in distinct grabs of music being pumped out of the speakers – a little Stevie Wonder here, a little classical violin there, but the actuality was more akin to a stuttering noise orchestra. Didn’t seem to matter though, delightfully executed : simple, ingenious, stupendous.

* Experimental turntablism eh? Try : “stabbing vinyl with Kruger style stylus gloves, bound on amplified trampolines, performing deaf defying duet duels with amplified samurai swords, hospitalised by high powered turntables, record chance John Peel sessions with the Flaming Lips, and most recently touring the world armed with nothing but a sheet of glass.” Guess we can add remote controlled cars on vinyl racetracks to that list. Toecutter in assistance below.


The Church of Pimmon
A former church is the head quarters of the Renew Newcastle project, whose 30+ empty shops now inhabited by artists and galleries certainly added to the festival’s saturation of the city, and it was in this highly appropriate venue, that Pimmon delivered a beautifully surging and serene performance ‘like a slow-motion whitewater torrent.. in space’. Even included some laptop microphone vocal work towards the end, albeit just one subdued layer rippling amongst the haze. Gorgeous. ( Listen to his weekly ABC radio show: Quiet Space, Pimmon on twitter, and audioboo – an iphone audioblogging tool )

Let’s Paint TV
John Kilduff’s blurb:
“Host of, and genius behind, the art damaged Los Angeles public access program “Let’s Paint TV”. He teaches you, the viewer, how to paint, blend drinks, and keep yourself healthy all whilst jogging on a treadmill. Kilduff believes in breaking down the barriers between art and pretty much everything else, in the ultimate aim of embracing failure.” Add 25 people in fluorescent clothes, buckets of paint and foodstuffs, a loud sound system, and put them all in a small glass room, and mix heavily. This happened twice daily.

Wade Marynowsky’s Dancing Robots
Great to see one of these ‘in person’. As well as witnessing it in action, Wade gave a great talk, aided by his electrical engineer Aras Vaichas, about the process of building 8 robots that could detect audience members, dance around them, and occasionally fire lasers directly into their souls. Or just y’know, spook people with seemingly intelligent commentary / engagement. ( More : http://marynowsky.net/ )

Screenings
The Japan Media Arts Festival 2008 animation program was awesome – virtuoso technical animations, but also relentlessly imaginative and diversely themed. ( )

Electro-Projections curated by Michael Prior and Matthew O Shannessy, featured a great selection of unusual and engaging work ( eg the humourous abstractions of Justin Kelly ). Getting a particularly strong crowd response was Skate bang by Damon Packard, an absurdist piece that reveals the power of the edit – cutting between close-ups of snipers shooting rifles, and skaters falling over on handrails, never seemed to wear out it’s welcome, even if the clip is nearly all punchline. Apparently he got an inheritance sometime ago, and decided to spend it all making and remaking films, sending a few thousand DVD’s of them out to random celebrities as well. Aaaaaaaaanyways…

Gig Highlights
DJ Ripley! Fave act of the festival! ( aka Larisa Mann aka PhD Candidate on the social implications of copyright aka just listen to her mixes! ) She seemed to enjoy the festival too… and plays Melbourne this Friday 9th @ Roxanne Parlour.

Bum Creek – Performance art? Music? Elaborate prank? Crowd ate them up naturally.
Qua – Featuring Laurence Pike on drums, James Super Melody and Cornel on electronic wizardry, reliably engaging, definitely won new fans over.

Not Enough Hours in the Day
Ok, so I missed the zombie rights march, the carpark ghetto aerobics ( well, it was on Sunday morning, the Sabbath! ), the zine fair ( usually such a great selection of DIY comics, books, CDs etc at this ), The DeConverters ‘Witness in the Wall’ project ( combining surveillance cameras and theatre ), a session about how video in theatre was bad ( ie lots of room for reinventing it ), and scheduled at the very same time as I gave a presentation about ‘opportunities for real-time video’, there was actually a Brazilian live cinema practitioner giving a talk somewhere else ( Bruno Viana made 2 feature films, and uses this weird circular interface beside the screen to let the audience see how his live editing process is reacting to them. Hope to interview him later on. )

Speaking of ‘blurred and frozen time’, I also missed Katherine Bennett’s exhibition, but over a chat with her ( Assistant Professors of Physical Computing, Rep-re-sent! ) on the way to the light-house, managed to catch Mika Meskanen’s Temporary Sauna, a square roomed tent nestled amongst the sand dunes, with chimney, makeshift oven and sauna rocks.

Below, Indonesian trees testing the screen before my audiovisual performance with Dan MacKinlay ( am going to write some more about that later, particularly the Indonesian part of the set, which was based around a performance we did at the OK Video festival in Jakarta in late July 09 ). To the side, Brisvegan Tom Hall setting up for his audiovisual performance later ( which was nicely engaging for such an abstract piece ). Swiss sound artist Gilles Aubry also performed that night, a quite loud meditation on ‘planes’.

Swimming in images then, or if you prefer, lieing back in an inflated tractor tire and drifting downstream with the sky set to slideshow.

Your New Swimsuit
Whether it’s a technology divide, lack of awareness or interest, half of my friends remain oblivious to the charms of having their own personally customised internet delivered to their doorstep. Or to the their RSS reader more specifically. Which bewilders the other half, who wonder how anyone manages the deluge of information without the filtering and auto-update and delivery options of RSS.
At least as people become used to the likes of constantly updating Facebook status updates of friends, or twitter feeds, it gets easier to explain RSS in those terms : RSS allows you to subscribe to the parts of the internet you like, and then instead of going to say Facebook, you can just open up your RSS page online ( eg google reader ), or better, open a dedicated RSS application ( eg netnewswire ) and see articles / images / postings from whichever of your favourite sites have updated recently. ( How to use RSS? The BBC guide to rss, or ‘rss in plain english‘ if you prefer video explanations. )

Aside from world news from your preferred sources, blog postings from your favourite authors, mp3 postings from your favourite musicians, notifications from forums you are on, ebay auctions etc etc – you can also use RSS to subscribe to a steady stream of imagery, which can be a perfect mid-work break to dive into. Most of the photo and image storage sites such as flickr have RSS feeds that allow you to subscribe to everything by a person, by a group, or even by a certain tag or keyword ( inventing unique keywords thus enables lots of people living remotely to easily contribute to the same pool of imagery and easily stay up to date with anything added to that group ). Add a subscription to your RSS reader, and then when you next browse your RSS collection, you’ll see any new image additions and can let them flow past, stopping only for what really grabs, just as you might with a barrage of Facebook status updates.

Infinite Paged Coffee Table Magazines
There are also a wide and wonderfully eccentric collection of dedicated image blogs, lovingly ( or dementedly ) curated by photographers, illustrators, artists and others with the twitchy thing behind their eyelids when the lights go off. These are a few recent additions I’ve been enjoying diving into lately.

Ephemera Assembly man
It was the collection of Tibetan anatomical paintings that hooked me on this, a series of vividly coloured alterna-clown skeletons complete with cosmic medicine colour coding. Mostly vintage imagery collected here, but it’s a fine pair of sharp-eyes to borrow if it’s yesteryear you’re after.

Skull Swap
Aight – this ladies a comedian – and not just in the -look at how many netspeak hooks i can pack into 140 characters kinda way – but an actual stand up on stage full of nerves and swagger and try to make people laugh by saying things into a microphone kinda way. By the comments under each photo, and the mutant clan of jpegs themselves, I’d imagine she’s probably pretty good at that microphone thing too.

Bodyworld
Well, mostly, this blog is subscribed to in case *anything* at all is published by the creator of the Bodyworld, a 12 chapter comic online in full, and dripping in equal parts with the apocalypse, psychedelic inter personal relationships and quite crazy layered imagery. His tangents, experiments and off-cuts that appear in the blog are well worth the price of admission.

Abandoned Places
What is it about urban decay? Maybe growing up in Newcastle has something to do with my fascination for it, and you’ve likely seen photo collections of the once thriving Detroit going around, but if in need of more, this site seems to have an army of contributors the world over, whose mission seems to be to document every broken window, every moss covered spiral staircase and every graffiti covered haunted theatre space they can find.

Awkward Families
Painfully funny. No matter how weird your upbringing, there’s something to outdo it here.

And Ye Olde Regulars
ffffound.com – an image bookmarking site, whose members keep it eyepopping.
Drawn.ca – the illustrators blog, that illustrators want their work published on.
http://riotclitshave.livejournal.com – Enchanting, bewildering, ever-fresh.
http://www.woostercollective.com – Street-art the world over.
http://www.ektopia.co.uk/ektopia – Well filtered graf + street art.
http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com – what other eyes have seen long ago.
http://www.vvork.com – like all of the above, except these self-identify as ‘art’.

Variety in the diet is nice though, drop a line if you have any recommendations…

Bored with manbabies.com and thereifixedit.com? Got you covered:

Documentary Bloggers
Adam Curtis (The Power of Nightmares, The Century of the Self etc) recently got his blog on over @ the BBC, featuring :
“a selection of opinionated observations and arguments. I’ll be including stories I like, ideas I find fascinating, work in progress and a selection of material from the BBC archives.” For fans of his provocative and entertaining film-making style, this is good news indeed. Already featured, ‘It felt like a kiss’, an experimental film he made for the BBC last year with the aim of trying to find “a more involving and emotional way of doing political journalism on TV”.

Blogging on the other side of the Atlantic, Errol Morris ( director of The Fog of War, Standard Operating Procedure, and many more) has been applying his interrogating powers onto photography, art forgeries and documentary re-enactments. Warning : while pursuing his trains of thought, his lines of investigation, you might find a need to go and have a lie down, several times before even getting halfway – the man has the research jaws of a vigorous bulldog. Expect your understandings to flip several times during the course of an investigation.

Comic Remixes
Written and directed by comic author Marjane Satrapi, with Vincent Paronnaud, Persepolis is an animated film showing Marjane’s coming of age while the Iranian revolution unfolded in 1979. It’s a powerful film, showing Marjane’s childhood obsessions ( Bruce Lee, Michael Jackson, punk rock ) juxtaposed with the politics surrounding the Islamic fundamentalist rulers of Iran. Using the very same comic book panels, a pair of comic artists have re-sequenced and re-worded Marjane’s comic to reflect the contemporary situation in Iran, and the lead up to current dissent about the recent election results.

Says Marjane :

Dear Friends
To all who believe in freedom and democracy
Please sign this petition to the United Nations to stop the violence,
arrests and torture in Iran.
( http://www.petitiononline.com/12June/petition.html )
The situation is really really bad.

Please forward it to whoever you know
Best and lots of love
Marjane Satrapi

Tongue Tips
As far as the continued outsourcing of our mental tasks to an internet application goes, this one’s pretty cute – using a combination of dictionaries and word matching algorithims, Tip of My Tongue tries to help with a word that is just out of reach. Clues you can enter include the starting and ending letters, the word’s meaning, the minimum and maximum length and what it sounds like. Good luck with that.

The Pirate Bay Sold Off
The world’s largest torrent site ( hosting over half of the world’s torrent files ), recently the subject of a landmark court case in Sweden, just announced they were being acquired by the Global Gaming Factory for nearly $8 million US. Which by itself might sound ominous for the site’s future, but they have also decided to decentralise the storage of the site’s torrent files, hoping that BitTorrent users will be less reliant on the uptime of The Pirate Bay’s servers alone, the burden now to be spread among several independently operated services.

MSA Remote for the iPhone
Good news as video producer Memo finally gets his iphone app approved :
“MSA Remote is a remote control application for iPhone & iPod Touch that sends OSC messages over the wifi network. This allows you to control any OSC supporting applications such as Max/MSP/Jitter, PureData, Reaktor, VDMX, vvvv, Resolume, Quartz Composer etc. By mapping the OSC to midi on desktop (e.g. using OSCulator) allows further control of any application which supports midi such as Ableton Live, Cubase, Logic Pro, 3DSMax etc. In addition, developers can easily integrate OSC into their applications knowing it can be controlled remotely. The application can be distributed to visitors, guests, members of the public etc. to interact with an installation or performance, or used by dedicated performers.”

Electropical? Bleepy cumbia? Such hybrids are inevitable, given a generation raised on candied synthetic computer game sounds, and the speed at which localised bass variations now travel from shore to shore. They are also core chunks of the Meneo sound, alongside ‘electro-gameboy-reggeaton’, which describes their recent CD, Santa Nalga ( mastered @ Mad Decent ), as well as their recent EP, Papi. Rigo Pex makes the music, Raul Berrueco makes the video, both use gameboys to do it. Music, videos, nude performance photos and more : http://www.entter.com/meneo/istheshit.html

What’s your quick and easy definition of ‘reggaeton’ ?
Rigo: Old School reggaeton= booty marathon with ass sweat dripping down your ankles. Current reggaeton= boring ego rap, with some exceptions to both.
Raul: Atun Con Pan!!!! Yeah… it’s kind of a joke ’cause the rhythm sounds like saying in Spanish ‘atun con pan, atun con pan’ which literally means: tuna sandwich.

I am gathering your happy blend with many other styles, which of these are you enjoying a lot at the moment?
Raul: Gabba Lounge, nah kidding… we both love the new electronic cumbia made by artists like Uproot Andy and Sonido del Principe
Rigo: Yep, all that comes out from the Zizek and Bersa labels…also dubstep never stops to amaze me.

How does the Gameboy fit into your musical processes?
Rigo: I use LSDJ, a gameboy sequencer made by Johan Kotlinsky.. It’s actually a tracker. I love the way you can alter the values that define the sounds to come up with noises that you never heard before, digital rawness.

What kinds of tools and techniques do you use to get that chunky retro graphic style?
Raul: At the beginning I go through a lo-tech process where I use applications designed by freaky programmers without girlfriends. I’m talking about ROM hacking and prehistoric hardware/software emulators, but I also use the pencil tool to draw pixel by pixel sometimes. When I put all this material together I use more conventional languages like Action Script while wearing my cool designer specs.

In what ways do you collaborate / build performances / audiovisual sync / themes?
Raul: we are into creative freedom, so mostly we don’t talk about doing this or that, we both do our own stuff with almost no feedback and then show it ’till we’re on stage…like some Dadaists did back in the day. In that way, we keep the surprise even to ourselves and focus more on feeling than acting. When we let go, things flow depending on the stage, public and energy.
Rigo: Then there’s the part of capturing what happens on stage and communicating it through pics, blogs and overall media management, which is truly an important part where we really work as a military team.

Nakedness seems to be a visual trademark too, care to explain some more?
Raul: we usually do it if we feel good on stage, so if the sound and visual equipments are working all right, then they get a technical seal of approval… MENEO √.
Rigo: It also means that we can safely climb up to the stage roof and then jump into the speakers while the crowd is licking each other’s sweat to a 280 bpms backward version of popcorn.

Santa Nalga ‘was mastered by DJA at Mad Decent..’ What were you happy with about that album, and what differences are there coming up in your next release _Bitnik?
Rigo: Santa Nalga was pretty much done in 2006, when reggaeton and 8bit was still something whacky for me, but since it was the first album it took some time to surface. Diplo liked us and pointed us to DJA, who was great for achieving that bouncy epileptic feeling we like. The soon to release BITNIK album has more of a band sound an less club breaks, since it’s mostly all 8bit coming from the game boys sound that shred more than a million distorted guitars and their marshalls put together.

Your thoughts on the wii, iphone and other portable competitors to the Gameboy?
Raul: In 20 years will say “wow, we were really into waving a stick in the air, like it was a tennis racquet…hahah!
Rigo: there are no competitors to the gameboy… no portable game will stick around for more than 8 years these days… and even if technology didn’t changed so fast, it would be hard to achieve such a strong graphic and audio personality: the gameboy chip limits were it’s advantages.

What would be your ideal gig, and who else would be playing at it?
Rigo: Meneo playing on the greek coliseum with John Bonham on drums, the bass player from Primus, Milli Vanilli as choir…
Raul: and a 3d screen so everybody could wear those amazing 3d glasses!!!