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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Custom modify a browser and easily import those modifications to a browser on any machine?
  Ok, so ‘Firefox Environment Backup Extension’ supposedly takes care of that, backing up all your extensions and enabling you to wander to any computer with Firefox, install just that one extension, and then easily adjust the browser to the extension-packed way you prefer it. Except the OS X version is still playing catch-up.

• Start up your favourite / most needed sites in different tabs in one go?
  Can do this by setting a folder in your toolbar, bookmarking into it, and choosing ‘open all in tabs’, but Morning Coffee adds a few variants to this – allowing sets of bookmarks to be stored for particular days. One click to add a site to a list, one click to open your faves.

• Play a whole bunch of old nintendo games inside the browser?
  That’d be FireNes – www.firenes.com.ar .

• Bookmark things so they can be read on any computer, and browse/subscribe to collective bookmarks on your favourite topics?
  The delicious bookmarks extension is your very, very good friend.

• Get rid of ads on certain regularly used pages?
  Mmmm, Ad Block Plus.

• Block annoying flash apps on a page by page or domain by domain basis?
  Easy enough.

• Post about pages viewed to a blog?
  Many ways to do this, Scribefire does it well, allowing “users to easily drag and drop formatted text from the Web into their blog(s), post entries, take notes, and optimize their ad inventory, directly through the Firefox browser.”

• Save longgg, awkward URLs as short ones, with a simple rightclick?
  TinyURL, isn’t it?

• Allow yourself to have a gazillion tabs open, and have more control about how these are used or quickly navigated between?
  TabMix Plus, which is usually my first extension installed on a fresh firefox on another computer…

• Manage these gazillion must-read-soon tabs?
  Read It Later – “eliminates cluttering of bookmarks with sites that are merely of a one-time interest. ”

• Download all the media related photos, sounds, videoclips on a given page in one go?
  http://www.downthemall.net

• Copy all the URLs and titles of these tabs in one go?
  Haven’t been able to find something to do this in version 3 – theoretically someone should have already built it, it’s my fault for not having found it.

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

• Finding my keys, wallet, mobile phone, remembering my pin number?

• Blocking certain celebrities from ever appearing in any media consumed, inviting others over for BBQs, creative collaborations, island getaways.

• Going beyond net neutrality and taxing the bandwidth of anyone browsing media that involves certain celebrities and re-distributing that bandwidth to people watching ‘better stuff’.

• Keeping the cats fed but not overfed, when late-night rooftops need climbing over, islands need to be got away to.

• Auto-disseminating a whiff of extra tree seeds to farmlands and forest floors during every hour spent unnecessarily hooked up to the big smoky grid behind the browser.

• Auto-finding a yoga class in your neighbourhood, at a timeslot that suits, and giving you 20 minutes warning of your internet cutting off, to be resumed 20 minutes after the class finishes.

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

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

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

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

Wheeeeeeeeee~!

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…

Persepolis, a gorgeous and uniquely styled black and white film about a girl growing up in Iran, is definitely an animation that’d be worth checking out on the big screen ( Jun 21, 8pm, state theatre). Alongside that, graphic designer and renowned film title creator Saul Bass has a little known directed feature, Phase IV,( Jun 22, 6.45, State Theatre) a dark humoured sci-fi piece which shows an ant colony taking over SouthWest USA ( prescient, considering the recent ‘invasion’ of electronics-eating ants in Texas : truly! ) ( See also Star Wars credits if done by Saul Bass..)

Already passed by? Man on Wire – a documentary structured like a heist movie, about French high-wire walker, Philippe Petit, walking between the twin trade towers of the World Trade Centre building ( remember that? ) in 1974 ( footage at the time shot by Australian director of the oz-doco-classic, Cane Toads, Mark Lewis ). Oh those groovy times. Strong strand of Iraq war docos, including notably,
‘Standard Operating Procedure’ by Errol Morris, who is probably the documentary makers documentary maker.

Still to come? The Last Continent, a film about the land of ice we still have at the moment ( Jun 19, 10am, State Theatre). And more. ( sydneyfilmfestival.org Jun 4-22 )

Like clockwork, the arrival of winter in Melbourne brings with it a range of depraved and delightful animations on the big screen, this year’s regional focus being on the tick-tock friendly Switzerland. Aside from buckets of Swisstacular, we also gets 6 or 7 compilations worth within the ‘International Panorama’ section, Australian animations, ‘Late night Bizarre’, a digital selection and a puppet animation section, and two particularly attractive compilations : Fears of the Dark and visual music.

Visual Music Marathon
These are the culled highlights from a festival held in and curated by Jean Detheux (in Boston 2007) . Which is to say fans of Len Lye’s marvellously freestyling hand painted and scratch films, fans of abstract generative software visualisations and those who enjoy intensely integrated audio and video will be filling the seats at these sessions, so get in while u can ( tickets @ miaf.net )

Semiconductor – a UK duo to be filed under the category ( amongst others ) of visualists who write custom software to provide for their pixel needs, offer one of the standout selections, the end result of this particular coding process, being a stunning kind of hyper-animated handdrawn 3D origami beast, that gets mercilessly tweaked and prodded by industrial machines with faulty electrics. Elsewhere can be found muchos rotoscoped crazy drawing per frame madness, visualisation of throat singing.. spooky xylophones represented by organic decaying dancing squares, industrial drones given a suitably flickering and textured visualisation and Runa’s Spell – a gorgeous play with abstract organic shapes, mostly restrained colour palettes and blurry shapes that emerge from that long, darkened hallway of your David Lynch nightmares. Turns out to be a hallway leading to a New Zealand dairy farm, or where-ever it is that people make relaxy super dubbed out bass chai tent music these days. It gets prettier in other words. Both a strength and occasional weakness when it veers to more well known visual paths. Plenty more visual abstraction to follow, including Mugenkei ( also worth mentioning because the imagery is curator Jean Detheux’s response to Willfried Jentsch’s soundscape ).
Screening : Jun 20, 8pm, ACMI. Introduced by Jean Detheux.

Fears of The Dark
( fearsofthedark-themovie.com + celluloid-dreams.com )
Comic books tend to dismissed in the wider cultural sphere ( hence the popularity for comic artists to reframe them as ‘graphic novels’ ) , but an animation festival is one place they can crawl out from under the bed safely, ready to pollute the minds of the innocent. This feature length compilation draws together Blutch, Marie Caillou, Richard McGuire and a host of other gifted storytellers I hadn’t heard of, but will be keeping an eye out for now, and an artist destined for a compilation based on fear : Charles Burns.
The Burns piece is every bit as disturbing, engrossing and under the skin as fans of his Black Hole comics ( soon to be made into a feature!! ) would be hoping for within a Burns animation. Who knows what kind of erotic weird biology experiences inform or inspire the Burns imagination, but he sure keeps fanning the flames within the deep woods of outer suburban North America, a place where sexualised insects and aliens are prospering well, transmitting themselves through whatever human vessels they can find. It’s a credit to the compilation that the rest of it holds up so well to this piece. Full list @ miaf.net ( Screening : Jun 19, 8.45pm, Jun 21, 7.45pm, ACMI ) Recommendo.

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.

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

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

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

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

Disco One : Short Experimental Films 1 Through 20

Some favourites?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Disc 2 – Short Experimental Films 21 through 40

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another round-up of visual treats. Some with fangs.

Recent Work From Soda Jerk

Following on from their epic, feature length, I mean really, epic, compositing job in Pixel Pirates II, Soda Jerk have made a couple of shorts that again transcend most mash-ups with their pro-level recompositing of characters into various scenes. ‘Picnic at Wolf Creek’ ( as you may guess ) combines a whole swagger of iconic Australian cinema ( guest stars : Mad Max, Steve Irwin, Russell Crowe, Ned Kelly, Lindy Chamberlain, the drag queens from Priscilla Queen of the Desert, Skippy the Bush kangaroo and a few high school girls at Hanging Rock. Some greatly combined scenes here. More details and pics at the Soda Jerk HQ.

‘Astro Black: A History of Hip-Hop [episode 1]’ kicks off a hopefully long running series about the intergalactic origins of hip-hop turntablism. I haven’t seen this one yet, but there was something about the way the blurb was batting it’s eyelids at me:

“Set in the Bronx in the mid seventies, this video remix kicks off with the alien abduction of the three pioneers of the hip-hop “old skool”: DJ Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Baambattaa. Once on board the Mothership with Sun Ra and George Clinton, the three DJs are transported to Planet Rock where they are skilled in a secret alien technic – the scratch.”

Tokyo Streets

via microcinema.com

If the names Shibuya, Omote-Sando, Harajuku, Yoyogi, Shinjuku and Meguro light up neon-bells inside your head like some winning sequence in a Daft Punk poker machine, then it’s feasible this disc from fashionshow.ch will provide some amusement, and or satisfaction, in your life. The premise holds potential – a snapshot of life on the streets in one of the largest, densest and most colourful cities in the world, and given Tokyo’s range of crazy cosplay characters and weird-fashionites already well documented in the likes of the Fruits books / magazines, given the fact that well – it’s Tok-(e)-YO! – one of the world’s best examples of the future wedged firmly into the present, then surely, it’d be possible to edit together an exhilarating snapshot of super-sugoi critters wandering about in their natural terrain? Editing however, would suggest the makers had a range of decent footage to start off with, and some overarching threads / ideas or just flair for weaving this together. Unfortunately the DVD comes off as really flat – poorly shot ( not a sin in itself, but it doesn’t help the disc ), and badly edited – extended sequences of drab audiences looking on meekly at amusingly half-assed street-performers, a few random camera wanders past colourful characters, some live bands on the street, dreary pan and tilts over up-market building facades, etc etc. There are a few nice sections, but it would’ve been vastly improved by being edited down to 5 or 10 minutes. Get your hands on the classy ‘Tokyo Noise’ feature length doco instead.

Ryuke

Also from Tokyo, and the latest release from VJ label Light Rhythm Visuals, Ryuke provides a collection of works by native Tokyo pixelists VJ Reel and K-Mixx, a whirlwind of ‘experimental 3D animation and explorations of virtual space’ – a description which admittedly makes me feel queasy straight away – possibly limiting the disc to being another collection of motion graphics for some information technology current affairs program, with a little science fiction thrown in for good measure. As it turns out – only some of the disc is like that, the rest is densely packed with visual ideas and it’s nice to see Light Rhythm Visuals continue their tradition of including visual remixes on each disc, as well as keeping the discs region free and including quicktime clips ready for use within VJ software. The disc also loops without returning to the menu screen, savvily positioning the disc as a possibility for various venue owners or acknowledging that it can run continuously in the background occasionally provoking interest rather than needing to be watched all in one sitting. The stand out piece on the disc for me was the angle 2 remix by Kevlar of VJ Reel’s “illmatic chopper” – it playfully extended VJ Reel’s obsessive look at horizontal movements, adding plenty of innovative variations over time, used masks and black space fantastically, shifted to a tasteful 3D section ( ie – it wasn’t doing some generic object deconstruction / reconstruction, or moving camer