As we continue to outsource our memory processes to small pocket electronic devices, it’s nice to occasionally reflect about artists who play with the ways we remember, and how sound can shape this.

Emile Zile
Back in the twentieth century, pre-omnipresent digital cameras archiving all moments of urban life, Emile Zile was busy hustling the inner-city lanes of Melbourne, snapping photos of its vibrant graffiti scene, steadily documenting it for all to see at the now defunct cleansurface.org ( digital archiving is another whole can of worms for another time ). Everpresent in the collection were moments of humour, Emile having a keen eye for unlikely juxtapositions and everyday absurdity.

Emile’s now studying video in Amsterdam ( fresh Dutch blog action ), but the beginnings of his current video art explorations can be traced back to an appearance of his on National Australian television, where he was selected as a contestant on a game show, and proceeded to upstage the host with a series of gestures, later narrating his thoughts of the experience onto a video ( now archived alongside others ).

The video explorations continued, culminating sometime later in a phase of laptop black metal, with a much better Kiss theatrics kinda presence than that implies, with abundant fake blood, make-up, custom video and refried metal. Emile’s eclectic VJ tastes and style made it seem a natural progression when he became the band VJ for Melbourne’s infamous alt-hip hop crew, Curse Ov Dialect ( “our own sound somewhere betwwen mr bungle, public enemy and everywhere in beween sampling everything from inuit throat games to psychedelic folk—-but still straight up hip hop!” ). For last year’s European tour without their unavailable turntablist, Emile simultaneously handled sound duties – via VJ software, deftly mixing pixels while sending out the backing tracks – including pre-recorded turntablist video!

All of which is pre-amble for a recent peformance of Emile’s called ‘Post-It Kino’. Briefly back in Melbourne for the 2008 Next Wave Festival, Emile was one of 7 artists participating in ‘House Proud’ – a novel arrangement where the artists were invited to use strangers’ homes as both a gallery and the source of their inspiration, making site-specific work, that an audience would later visit and explore for one night only.

Arriving at the house in question, Emile’s audience were ushered into a lounge room that had been converted into a private cinema with surround sound ( six screenings / performances over a 3 hour period ). We faced a projector screen, Emile sitting beside it and pointing a video camera at a TV screen facing himself, a generic bouncing DVD icon moving around the screen. And then it began – a cluster of instantly recognisable movie soundtracks were loaded one by one, filling the space, and Emile scribbled words on yellow post it notes, and started sticking them onto the TV screen in various sequences. “Close up of eyes.” “Close up of holster.” “Tumbleweed blows.” Combined with the western movie soundtrack, it was surprisingly compelling cinema. The sounds of a helicopter rushed around the room. Two words : “Martin Sheen”. Then “ACID”, “a broken mirror”, etc etc. Apocalypse Now had never been so funny.

And Subsequent Krushing
Fresh after Emile’s House-Proud gig, went along to catch the touring Japanese turntable maestro, DJ Krush. Virtuoso vinyl performances inevitably involve playing with memories, in Krush’s case there’s now quite the back catalogue of treasures to trigger. Tonight though, moreso than usual, he seemed able to tease out those memories, and toy with our expectations, taking twists and turns, resplicing and reconstructing at will. A decade old classic hit is almost implied, rather than introduced, and as the crowd cheers with the recognition, the track seems to implode in on itself, somehow shuffled into an entirely new formation.

Bear with with me, but if track A was like an inflatable giraffe filled with water, walking around with orange fish swimming inside it, then this newly formed, this new track being created by the man with the decks and effects, would now be better described as an inflatable cheetah, filled with water, stealthily jogging with small inflatable giraffes swimming around inside it. Something entirely new yet based on the utterly familiar. And on it went …

Part of the arsenal to help these reconstructions are evident in the photos below, the shot by Melbourne’s Lynt showing Krush’s laptop based digital mixer interface, enabling him to load many versions or layers of a track, and the Vestax shot showcasing his PMC-20SL 10 year old mixer which features an in-built sampler and delay effect, and a bunch of sliders he was caning at the Prince of Wales gig…

Surely one of the weirder news stories of late, but the first world champion chess player to ever be defeated by a computer ( the ‘Deep Blue’ machine, 1997), Russia’s Gary Kasparov, recently found himself in range of bizarre headlines after being attacked by a remote control ‘helicopter penis’. The youngest ever World Chess Champion in 1985, and ranked world no.1 almost continuously from 1986 until his retirement in 2005, Gary has been using his chess profile lately to promote the ideas of The Other Russia, a coalition opposing the administration of Vladimir Putin. He must’ve been as surprised as anyone to find a recent speech interrupted by a “large phallus-shaped helicopter started buzzing around the room.” The ‘protest’ seems related to a Second Life prank a few years ago, when a CNET interview was interrupted by a series of flying, animated penises. The Tube’d have more, keyword search at your own risk.

Likely amused by it all, is comic artist Chester Brown, who has published a range of graphic novels over the years, often detailing his attempts to grapple with his sexuality, and in one particular short story from ‘The Little Man: Short Strips 1980-1995‘, he brags to another schoolmate about how he escaped from school one day by swinging his penis around really fast and using it as a helicopter blade to jump from a rooftop. Chester is also famous however for a character being chased by cannibalistic pygmies and having the tip of his penis replaced by the head of a miniature Ronald Reagan from another universe. That’d be all for today.

(And late shout-outs to C.H.U.N.K. 666 – ain’t a welded bicycle gang with choppers meaner than theirs .. )

With over 200 video uploading sites available, including plenty offering better resolution ( eg vimeo.com ), better interfaces ( eg veoh.com ), better payment for people whose clips have been viewed ( eg blip.tv ), the ability to stream live video from your phone to the web ( qik.tv ), and even a capacity to remix files via a browser when uploaded ( eg jumpcut.com ), there’s lots of reasons to avoid youtube. And yet.

Despite it’s crappy resolution, and significant other failings, youtube has become something of an extended audiovisual memorybank. Childhood television rarities, esoteric film snippets, weird slices of history, all viewable in our own time, not when (or what) the networks schedule. Sample clips bookmarked recently at youtube.com/user/jeanpoole :

• Darth Vader edited to be shown removing his helmet to play a harmonica for a disturbed Luke Skywalker, and elsewhere having his voice overdubbed by the brutal Daniel Day Lewis character in There Will Be Blood.. ( maps surprisingly effectively ).
• Saudi Arabian guys on a freeway, holding onto their doors and kind of ice-skating on the ground as the car speeds along…
• Astronaut Buzz Aldrin punching a conspiracy theorist reporter in the face who keeps inferring humans have never been on the moon..
• Turkish E.T.
• La Jetee ( Chris Marker’s legendary sixties short film which regularly finds itself on best film-ever lists )
• William Shatner at a scif-fi awards night singing about the the problems of being a rocketman, being high as a kite up there and all.. complete with deliciously cheesy 70’s styled re-composited versions of himself.
• Footage of the last Tasmanian tiger.. which died in Hobart zoo in the 1930s… the last sighted specimen, it’s tragedy compounded by dying from a human error – a zoo attendant forgetting to put it indoors overnight during one night in the Tassie winter. ( Reviving the tasmanian tiger from a museum DNA sample has been the subject of much scientific work, recently getting a boost when scientists managed to resurrect the gene responsible for the development of cartilage and bone by expressing it within a mouse embryo, but stating that the full reincarnation of a full tassie tiger was a long way off. )
• Still undecided on the merits of his recent epic, Inland Empire? Try this David Lynch double-bill instead :
  1 – David Lynch eating panties.
  2 – David Lynch deflating Tom Cruise’s Scientology bubble.

Collage animator Run Wrake ( yes, he of the Rabbit fame, but there’s much more to him ) was chosen to promote a collection of vintage stock-art by CSA Images recently, and Control Master is the resulting animation, every bit as personable and quirky as could be hoped for. The vintage stock-art is reworked with plenty of imaginative visual twists, with a creeping tension helped along by Daniel Morgan’s great soundtrack ( mistakenly I’d picked the music as Run Wrake’s also, which is enough to say that it’s broodingly similar to many of his other short films ).

On a negative note, the clip is flash only, so it can only be watched online, not saved and rewatched – an annoyance and a big mistake according to Motiongrapher, who argue that :

“While Flash may be the most ubiquitous media player on the web, QuickTime is still the industry standard format for distribution. Some reasons for this:
Easily downloadable, Easily scrubbable, Huge array of supported codecs – and if your site is targeted at designers, producers, agencies and other video-savvy clients – QuickTime is currently the expected choice for distribution.”

Quick scan of a few media file management apps that can help get to the fun stuff quicker :

Snapper

Snapper is probably the quickest and simplest way to find and hear audio files on a computer. That alone renders it an attractive app in many people’s eyes ( or ears ), but it has a few other tricks up it’s sleeve too. Once launched, Snapper enhances the built in mac finder menu, by immediately displaying a wave file benath the current window whenever a sound ( or movie with soundtrack ) file has been selected. Use arrows or mouse to skip through the various sound files in your finder window, and each file plays near instantly as you do, the soundwave changing underneath at the same time. Above the soundwave are a range of tools, which allow easy selection of a portion of the sound file, and with a right click that portion can be saved as a standalone file, converted to mp3,
uploaded into protools, split from stereo into L and R tracks, converted to mp4 and attached to an email. It plays back over 50 different sound file types, playback speed can be adjusted to between half and double speed, it works under itunes as well and quickly and elegantly executes it’s operations.

Available with a 100 day free trial, $79 after that. (OS X 10.4 or higher ).

Audio Finder

Audiofinder has plumbed the same terrain since 2003, and so can offer a much more complex set of possibilities for manipulating selected audio. In it’s full featured mode, I found it loses a little of Snapper’s speed and ease of use in the process, but it also includes an option for running in a more limited mode as well. Loaded up and once a sound file has been selected, the richer array of possibility is evident from the Audiofinder toolbar : there’s a built in BPM detector, a small keyboard to play the sample at different pitches, an audio unit effects menu, the capacity to extract and export a section – but also the capacity to process this in many ways. Some options include normalising, reversing, changing the gain, processing the mono to stereo , or on a more advanced level, the sound portion can be opened up within an Audiofinder sample tool which offers the ability to slice the sample into increments, and move these around, trim and edit sections, add effects and export in a variety of ways. All of which can be done in more complex programs, but the key here is the speed at which an idea can be executed. Search for a file, highlight section, crop as needed, export and done. Audiofinder also emphasises it’s own search functions – once your directory has been scanned for sound files, you can save and retrieve specific searches – eg a seach for bass drum, or a search for cat or dog will bring up all related sounds found with that, and using the arrows or mouse will let each sample be quickly heard and edited if need be. External drive and even sample DVD drive searches etc can be saved as specific searches and used when need be. There’s a range of powerful batch commands available for processing multiple files easily, comprehensive renaming features, and supports ReCycle, REX playback and export, creates EXS instruments and includes sysex transmission and SMF playback.

US$69.95 ( For Mac OS X 10.3, 10.4 or 10.5 Intel / PPC )

( Yes, both apps are mac only, drop a line if you know of an equivalent on PC. )

Adobe Bridge

On the visual front, Adobe’s Bridge media manager has probably been lurking unused on most Photoshop user’s computers ( it comes with most recent versions of that program), but offers some vast improvements for organising, finding and displaying visual media. Vast folders of photos and movies can be seen and navigated through quickly, there’s powerful batch renaming functions, clips or photos can easily be clumped together in ways that suit and folders remember this layout when next opened. It feasibly has use as a storyboard tool too, there being nothing like it which allows a folder of 200 videoclips to be viewed and rearranged so easily. See all the video thumbnails in one go, click on a file to see it played in the corner, move like files together, and rename or label or add metadata tags to batches of clips as need be. Hat tip to DFUSE for pointing out how useful this is.

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

Kings of Power 4 Billion %

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

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

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

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

Quatronica

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

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

Future Oil Wars made Fun

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

Had a craving for some good head-bending sci-fi lately, so was delighted to stumble across Nawlz, an exquisitely executed piece of illustrated writing from Tasmania’s Sutu, that uses clever and very appropriate layering, styling, sound and animation to navigate the story’s arc in a kind of visually messier, street arty update on the 90’s cyber aesthetic still being abused to this day. Go play.

And if still in need of a sci-fi fix after reaching that delicious last page, gotta recommend the Tom Cruise video doing the rounds, where he talks about his favourite religion invented by a sci-fi author, the one connected to beings from outer space.

3000 words written quite a while ago for Julian Oliver’s ‘Packet Garden’ exhibition @ Arnolfini(UK).

Appropriately, for an artist whose work has long been about exploring boundaries and intersections ( of media, artforms, of technologies ), Julian Oliver’s latest work is situated in that long celebrated interface between art and nature, between order and disorder, the garden. Across cultures, throughout time, the garden has been designed / created / explored / experienced as a place resonant with meaning, our relationship with the world probed through the use of symbolic themes and features. In Packet Garden, we are invited to map the world of our daily screens, to create our personal media landscapes. Creating order from our own disorder, we discover our own topologies, media patterns, our habits.

Structuring that disorder partially explains Packet Garden’s appeal, the allure of rendering a tangible world from the messy abundance of currently available media and communications technologies and protocols. Another way to make sense of the information ecology we wade through daily. Widespread adoption of the mediasphere as ecology metaphor in part informs Packet Garden’s sense of inevitablity, and one aspect of this metaphor is worth exploring in relation to the trajectory of Julian’s earlier works. In ecosystems the productive and most diverse areas are believed often to be found in boundary zones, where one ecosystem meets another ( eg where land meets the sea). Browsing Julian’s work prior to Packet Garden, it can be seen that his preferred terrain is that contained by overlapping boundaries, be they of art, software, games or performance.

Code = Poetry?

“By calling digital art “[new] media art,” public perception has focused the zeros and ones as formatted into particular visual, acoustic and tactile media, rather than structures of programming. Software art means a shift of the artist’s view from displays to the creation of systems and processes themselves; this is not covered by the concept of ‘media.’” – Florian Cramer and Ulrike Gabriel (1)

Explore enough electronic arts email lists or online forums, wander through enough digital arts collective manifestoes, collect enough ‘new media’ calling cards – inevitably this means swimming in slogans that argue for software and programming to be considered an artform. For every digital artist who uses off the shelf software with limited palettes, to create wonderful works of media, there’s another artist who wishes to redefine the palette itself, who recognises the art in extending the range and limits of software, its nuances and interface design, the merits in creating overall systems capable of delivering uniquely customised possibilities. Julian Oliver falls into this latter category, a group of artists whose work is too often critiqued on the merits of the media it outputs, as noted by software art theorist Florian Cramer:

“The software which controls the audio and the visuals is frequently neglected, working as a black box behind the scenes. “Interactive’’ room installations, for example, get perceived as a interactions of a viewer, an exhibition space and an image projection, not as systems running on code.”(2)

Understanding that the analysis of a user’s network traffic is what makes Packet Garden compelling, is not to deny that it’s stylised rendering of that network traffic is visually beautiful. The project’s merits however are in it’s underlying principles, reinforced by the appropriately chosen visual metaphor for displaying our net travels. As a project which scrutinises our relationship with data, the distribution licensing of Packet Garden is worth looking at more closely. At an explanatory homepage, Julian takes care to point out that Packet Garden is not ‘freeware’, but is distributed as ‘free software’ under a legally binding license which allows users to modify and redistribute PG as long as the license terms are followed. As an artist who likes to get under the bonnet Julian’s work often builds on the shoulders of coders before him. His long connections with the free software movement make visible both the ways his “>projects are indebted to modular components provided for use by others, as well as the ways in which Julian provides access to his own developed code for others to use.

Audiovisual Remapping & Synchrony

“…if we simply mimic the existing conventions of older cultural forms such as the printed word and cinema, we will not take advantage of all the new capacities offered by a computer: its flexibility in displaying and manipulating data, interactive control by the user, and the ability to run simulations, etc.’

Lev Manovich, Cinema As a Cultural Interface (3)

As well as sharing large threads of connectivity to the free software movement, the panorama of Julian’s work is inescapibly intertwined with the computer game. As an artist with programming skills, Julian consistently exploits the rich availability of game construction software to create opportunities for artistic exploration, interactive installations and performance. Game engines otherwise used for creating virtual architecture where players seek to shoot each other, are modified, customised and repurposed to develop innovative ways of generating sonic and visual material.

Amongst Julian’s earliest repurposing of game software was a series of ‘Quake hacks’, including ‘q3aPaint’ – a series of paintings and an automatic painting system made with QuakeIII Arena, and q3apd ( made with Steven Pickles) – a free software project that turned QuakeIII into a music-making system. Julian’s sonic experiments continued with the free 3D software package Blender, exploring ‘positional audio mixing’ and using ‘collision events’ to trigger and control sound generating processes in music making software ( Pure Data, which in turn used the OSC protocol to send information between the software applications ). Another sonic interactive study was Tapper, which explored positional audio and 3D mixing for a hypothetical installation, six machines manipulated to change the bounce cycle of a puck that emits sound on collision with the ground.

Aside from exhibited installations, these experiments are also used in a performance environment by Julian ( under the moniker ‘delire’ ) to harness the real-time capabilities and responsiveness of game engines for generating music. In practical terms, this means an inner-city bar filled with electronic music fans, a make-shift table covered in computing debris, a tangle of cables, an occasional crash and reboot screen, and then the launch of customised software. Unlike other acts simulating audiovisual synchonicity, Julian’s projected imagery and amplified sounds exert a real crackling synergy, movement and events in an abstract 3D space immediately and clearly defining the sounds, their sequence, their composition.

Computer games, as noted by Lev Manovich(4), are an area of computer culture that has been dynamic in its use and extension of cinematic language. One example of this is the incorporation of virtual camera controls and privileging the user with dynamic points of view and the capacity to enjoy several perspectives at once or switch between these at will. Julian has long held a ‘fascination with multiple viewports’, for both the ‘visual compositional possibilities and for the divided object/subjecthood’, and explores these to great effect within ‘Trapped Rocket’(2006), which built a ‘prison’ out of six virtual cameras, containing an aggressive rocket trying to get out. Together all six cameras form an inward facing cube, jailing the rocket as it toils trying new trajectories indefinitely. 2ndPS continues the fascination with perspective, attempting to move beyond the computer games traditional first and 3rd person shooters by building a ‘second person shooter’. In 2ndPS, ‘you control yourself through the eyes of the bot, but you do not control the bot; your eyes have effectively been switched. naturally this makes action difficult when you aren’t within the bot’s field of view. so, both you and the bot (or other player) will need to work together, to combat each other.’

Experiments which explore Julian’s explorations in sound and vision can be found at Selectparks.net, ‘an online archive of divergent and artistic game-development practices’ founded by Julian in 1998 and now established as a key destination for game-art related news and research. The site includes a dedicated ‘sonichima’ category (sounds produced with computer games) and experiments which combine audio and vision – such as Max Miptex (2001 with Chad Chatterton), an experimental ‘glitch’ machinima film, and the very well received game based audio/visual performance engine ‘Fijuu2’ (2006 with Steven Pickles).

Playing In The Garden

Designed to enable musicmaking using cheap Playstation 2 style gamepads, Fijuu2 is music improvisation software with a difference – it simultaneously generates abstract 3D graphics, and these visual representations can be manipulated on screen, an innovation that allows the exploration, anticipation and generation of music through visual means. Fijuu was performed at the Sonar festival in 2004, received an Honourable Mention at Transmediale 2005, then CyberSonica06 commissioned the development of Fijuu2, and the continuation of its attempts to transcend the limits of electronic music performance interfaces.

Fijuu2 foregrounds the poetics of navigation, allowing 3D space and shapes to be played with in an instrument like manner. The tight real-time responsiveness of game engine software brings a real immediacy to the process, and the setting offers unique ways to respond to the unfolding music and visual display, uncovering accidental pleasures along the way, the user able to harness the system’s inherent quirks and glitches for musical benefit. By getting under the bonnet, new performance possibilities are created, and the scope of computer game as interface has been expanded.

Aside from abstract and performative explorations, computer games are regularly utilised by many artists seeking to create immersive worlds pregnant with provocative meanings, ripe for profound discovery and expression. Selectparks.net regularly profiles (5) such game-art, including an array of politically inspired games tackling issues from the war on terrorism (September 12th ) to the fast food industry ( McDonalds the videogame ), the history of Latin America ( Tropical America ) and apocalyptic religious cults ( Waco Resurrection – C-level ). If any doubt remains about computer games as a legitimate, powerful form of cultural expression, able to uniquely engage contemporary audiences, even the briefest of interaction with the above games should settle that.

Escape from Woomera was built by Julian Oliver with Katherine Neil & Kate Wild in 2002-3 as a response to the inhumane treatment of refugees in Australia. Set in remote desert, the harsh conditions of the Woomera detention centre are far from the public spotlight, something the makers of Escape from Woomera sought to remedy. Using extensive photographs of the compound and a modified version of the Half-Life game engine, the detention centre conditions were transformed into a 3D game – the user taking on the persona of a detainee in subhuman conditions, having escape as the ultimate goal. The refugees at Woomera have had to endure imprisonment for years at a time without knowing their ultimate fate, and raising awareness of this situation and their appalling conditions was a goal of the makers. This was achieved on a number of levels – through the engagement of gameplayers around the issue, through International publicity generated, and through even further publicity received when the Minister for Immigration Phillip Ruddock publicly condemned the game ( which had received some Government arts funding ). In a similar fashion, the Guantanamo Bay cell of Australian prisoner David Hicks ( who has been waiting many years for a trial as an alleged terrorist) has been recently recreated as a 360 panorama for users to navigate, similarly providing a fresh and intimate perspective on a political issue.

Aside from raising awareness of issues, computer games with an overtly political message have also helped contribute to an improving perception of the computer game platform. By leveraging sophisticated immersive and interactive to provoke players into considering particular issues, these games introduce gamers and non-gamers alike into further accepting on some level the merits of the computer game as an artform in its own right. This new batch of believers also includes media theorists, McKenzie Wark in his most recent book ‘Gamer Theory‘, stating that ‘computer games constitute the dominant cultural form of our time’.

Packet Gardening

Stepping back in history, playful information representation has long been alive in the garden. his book ‘Gardens of the Gods: Myth, Magic and Meaning‘, Christopher McIntosh cheerfully delineates the ways in which the garden has been used across many cultures to convey meaning – landscapes designed and manicured to reflect various belief systems and mythologies. And a rich history it is, from which today’s landscape architects, town planners, ecologists and horticulturalists draw on heavily when designing or seeking to conserve parks, gardens or landscapes.

McIntosh identifies three basic ingredients which give a common structure to the language of gardening – the form of the garden as a whole, the objects that are created or placed in the garden or existing landscape features to which specific meanings are attached and the plants in the garden and the meanings they are given. From this platform, the symbolic language of gardens is explored widely, from the renaissance gardens in Europe, that sought to search for, or recreate Eden (horticulture as reflecting the mingling of new scientific theories with older ideas and beliefs), to the Chinese & Japanese gardens that sought to balance the forces of nature ( with the influences of feng shui and taoism, balancing of yin and yang), to the Christian motifs in European gardens (renaissance magical and memory systems as a possible basis for the iconography and design of certain gardens), to the dense mythological symbolism of baroque and rococo gardens ( theatres of transformation ), the symbolism and allegory of gardens of the 18th century (reflecting ideas of 18th century enlightenment) and the foretaste of paradise suggested by Islamic gardens ( recurring features such as four water channels representing the rivers of Eden). Which brings us to our current tangle of light and wires.

A wild and woolly network of computer networks, the internet’s world-wide operations are made possible by the use of a common set of communications protocols. Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocols ( TCP/IP) enable globally understood interaction between machines, and each machine must have an Internet Protocol number or address for it to communicate with others. An IP address is a unique number consisting of 4 parts separated by dots, e.g. 163.117.235.3 ( which is also the type of address ultimately found when looking at a web address such as http://www.google.com ). In addition to these protocols, another layer of protocols enable software applications to send messages between these addresses.

Packet Garden generates a unique, explorable 3 dimensional world based on your internet use, and operates by monitoring the above protocols and noting which servers you have visited, quantities of traffic, geographic locations and which protocols were used. As Julian points out:
“Uploads make hills and downloads valleys, their location determined by numbers taken from internet address itself. The size of each hill or valley is based on how much data is sent or received. Plants are also grown for each protocol detected by the software; if you visit a website, an ‘HTTP plant’ is grown.”

Visualisation of such traffic is inherently interesting to the user, illustrating patterns and habits and often drawing attention to surprises – heavier than expected usage in some area, or by some application. Daily files or worlds can be stored and compared later to observe changing habits over time. In revealing the users internet usage in this unique way, an understanding of the underlying structure of the internet is necessarily nurtured – for example, wondering why some ‘plant’ is so prominent, might lead to discovering that some supposedly bandwidth benign application is using much more traffic than it should.

Space is the Place

“the space of flows… links up distant locales around shared functions and meanings on the basis of electronic circuits and fast transportation corridors, while isolating and subduing the logic of experience embodied in the space of places.”
– Manuell Castells (Informationalism and the Network Society)(7)

Eminent sociologists ( Hi, Manuel ) are great for mapping the contours of a networked society across its various dimensions ( social, economic, political ), and with fine-toothed detail ( quantitative analysis of changes in labour market demographics across decades??? anyone? *). In his comprehensive three-volume series, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Manuel Castells carefully outlines the impact of advanced communications and information technologies, and the ways in which they have facilitated globalisation and transformed identity and society. He argues that ‘information technologies foster a networking logic, because it allows one to deal with complexity and unpredictability, which in itself is increased by these technologies’ (8) and introduces the ‘space of flows’ as a key way of understanding the importance of networks. The second volume, The Power of Identity is dedicated to the core tension behind Packet Garden, the juxtaposition between our lives in the space of places, and our jostling for position in the ethereal geography-less networks, the space of flows.

It is often the cultural creatives who can best illustrate these tensions and nuances of our times, providing unique vantage points from which to gauge information technology’s continued transformations of our personal and collective identities across the globe. As Edward Tufte (9) might argue, well visualised information can make a strong contribution to helping distill the complexities of our aged. Lateral attempts to convey our times abound online : Richard Hodge’s rollercoaster version of the graph of US home prices adjusted for inflation (10), Carlo Zanni’s Ebay landscape which generates mountains from ebay stock market charts (11), and many mappings of global blog activity eg the Twingly screensaver which visualises global blog activity in real-time (12). See also Discover Magazines ‘Charting the network of jocks, gadget hounds, political junkies, and porn aficionados’ (13 ).

Beyond simply good graphic design and well chosen visual metaphors however, strong conceptual software design can engage the reader / viewer’s participation on deeper levels. An excellent recent example of using contemporary visual interfaces to promote understanding of complex issues, would be the inclusion within Google Maps, of densely overlayed information relating to the genocidal atrocities happening in Darfur, Sudan(14). Within an information software manifesto of sorts, ‘Information Software and the Graphical Interface’(15), Bret Victor puts forward that information software ultimately serves the human urge to learn:

“A person uses information software to construct and manipulate a model that is internal to the mind—a mental representation of information. Good information software encourages the user to ask and answer questions, make comparisons, and draw conclusions.”

5. References / links

(1) Florian Cramer and Ulrike Gabriel, ‘Software Art’, August 15, 2001.

(2) Florian Cramer:

“The software which controls the audio and the visuals is frequently neglected, working as a black box behind the scenes. “Interactive’’ room installations, for example, get perceived as a interactions of a viewer, an exhibition space and an image projection, not as systems running on code.”

(3) Lev Manovich, Cinema As a Cultural Interface

(4)Lev Manovich, Cinema As a Cultural Interface

Computer games, as noted by Lev Manovich, are an area of computer culture that has been dynamic in its use and extension of cinematic language. One example of this is the incorporation of virtual camera controls.

(5) September 12th – http://www.newsgaming.com. McDonalds the videogame – http://www.mcvideogame.com. Tropical America – http://www.tropicalamerica.com. Waco Resurrection – http://waco.c-level.cc.

(6) Christopher McIntosh, ‘Gardens of the Gods: Myth, Magic and Meaning’ ( I.B. Tauris 2005 ).

(7) (Informationalism and the Network Society. In: The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age. New York, Random House pp. 155-178, Himanen, Pekka 2001. )

(8) ‘information technologies foster a networking logic, because it allows one to deal with complexity and unpredictability, which in itself is increased by these technologies’ (1996: 60-65)

(9) Edward Tufte is a leading advocate of intelligent information visualisation and author of many books on the topic.

(10) Richard Hodge’s rollercoaster graph of US home prices adjusted for inflation: http://www.speculativebubble.com/videos/real-estate-roller-coaster.php

(11) Carlo Zanni’s Ebay landscape which generates mountains from ebay stock market charts http://www.vvork.com/?p=3720 Artist home page: http://www.zanni.org.

(12) Twingly screensaver which visualises global blog activity in real-time: http://twingly.se/ScreenSaver.aspx

(13) Discover Magazines ‘Charting the network of jocks, gadget hounds, political junkies, and porn aficionados’ ( http://discovermagazine.com/2007/may/map-welcome-to-the-blogosphere

(14) “Educating today’s generation about the atrocities of the past and present can be enhanced by technologies such as Google Earth. When it comes to responding to genocide, the world’s record is terrible. We hope this important initiative with Google will make it that much harder for the world to ignore those who need us the most.” — Sara J. Bloomfield, Director, USHMM. http://www.ushmm.org/googleearth/

(15) Bret Victor, ‘Information Software and the Graphical Interface’ http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/

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

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

Visual curators and connoisseurs abound on ze web, scraping together ‘news services’ for the wow brain. A few faves of late below.

Dark Roasted Blend(.com)
Presumably takes a special breed of hyper-caffeinated noodler to maintain this kinda relentless flow of delicious. On a given day, spectacular cloud formations, bizarre roadsign collections, an amphibious cars photo series, and it was worth subscribing for one picture alone this week – a photo of someone dressed up as a robot holding a cup for spare change and a sign that reads “Replaced by CGI, please help”.

Generator.x: Generative strategies in art & design
Evolutionary architecture, interface exploration, interactive design, snapshots and provocations related to generative art. Thumbs up.

Suzanne G
Squirrels, squids, and not for the squeamish. Victorian era delicacies slipped into a macabre sci-fi blender. A browse of the archives will reveal cuteness and blood in equal measure, an animal kingdom perverted, mechanical oddities, regular snapshots of gorgeous contemporary art, and ultimately, the very quirky yet refined tastes of 1 x Suzanne G.

Ektopia
Hiphop and grafitti flavoured filter for all things visual. This might be a plastic toy design, an album cover, a Japanese robot, street art in South America, or whatever else tickles at the time.

notcot.org
Bit heavy on the fashion/gadget stakes, but the sheer volume of links inevitably unveils a daily wonder.

Diburtimentos