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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today’s headlines routinely borrow from the sci-fi pages of yesteryear. Once upon a time an author probably chuckled as he wrote about genetic engineered tapeworms that would allow gourmet food lovers in the far future to gorge as much as they want. Out to prove this wasn’t hare-brained speculation, are the Melbourne based biotechnology firm, Roboguts. ( Full product range available at www.roboguts.com)

I’m curious – how do the Robogut tapeworms ‘work’ ?
In simple terms, one Robogut pill taken with a meal will neutralise any weight gain. Enjoy the taste without the calories!! And if you can’t choose between the lamb roast and the beef lasagne, why not have both and let Roboguts take care of it for you?

But how do Roboguts ‘take care of it’?
Wonderfully! Our tapeworms are genetically designed with a very limited life span, which usually means when they have finished your meal, they switch off, or are rendered benign.

What does it feel like to eat with Roboguts in your stomach?
The consumer wouldn’t feel anything different from their usual meal. Except of course they will be just as hungry at the end of the meal as they were at the start. Which means you can double the fun for your tastebuds, or fit that extra dessert in without any worries.

20 million Africans face the worst famine in a decade (see www.plan.org.au). How can you justify developing Roboguts when so many have no food at all?
The miracle of biotechnology will end mass starvation in our lifetime, I kid you not. The benefits of projects like ours will eventually trickle down to those in need, and everybody will have abundant food to explore the delights of.

Aren’t you afraid people will be too squirmish to go for Roboguts?
Not at all. Why put up with petty limits? Our market research for Roboguts showed us that people are ready to take body modification to the next level, and will pay top dollar for biotechnology enhancements that put them more in control of their feelings, emotions and body processes. You know, people used to ‘see’ witches in the sky, but now they ‘see’ machines. I think we need to be aware of our attitudes to machines, accept their existence, and make them work for us. Who do you want to be today?

Have you heard about those giant worms in the tropics that grow up to a metre long inside you, then tunnel through your flesh to get out?
Yes, but our tapeworms are genetically programmed never to exceed a certain size, and really – they are more truthfully thought of as little robots.

Do you think that Roboguts might contribute to creating a divide between skinny=rich and obese=poor people?
That divide already exists. Those with a low income tend to have low nutrient diets high in fat and sugar – the standard fare of most burger franchises. Roboguts simply allows those with discerning tastebuds to enjoy even more of their good taste.

Inevitably the public will encounter some unusual side-effects. How do you see future of Roboguts?
Really, what we are doing isn’t that radical or dangerous, it’s simple science applied for the benefit of the consumer. We are confident about the safety of our products and hope to expand our Robogut weight-loss range in the near future.

Bon Appetit bunnies~!

(( doh-ski~! this was an interview done in ye olde times, transferred to skynoise just now and forgot to datestamp it in the prehistories… ))

(( + what a difference 2008 makes, as soon as it’s posted, the weightloss spam comes in… pingback on your post #425 “Robo-Guts”URI : http://blahblah….dailytidbit.com/weight-loss/robo-guts/ ))

He’s dead now, but the legendary comic novelist Kurt Vonnegut has been predicting today’s ever-escalating oil prices for a long, long time.

“I once had a high that not even crack cocaine could match. That was when I got my first driver’s license! Look out, world, here comes Kurt Vonnegut.” – K.V, 1994.

Kurt Who?
From Player Piano in 1952, a dystopian novel where human workers have been largely replaced by machines, through to a collection of post-humously published works in 2008 ( Armageddon in Retrospect ), the somehow simultaneously cynical and warm-hearted worldview of Kurt Vonnegut has been spilling onto the page of novels, film scripts, tv scripts, articles and essays. He’s funny too. And has an asteroid named after him ( 25399 Vonnegut – thanks wikipedia ). There’s probably a 2nd year arts student buying one of his books in a second-hand store right now. So he had it going on, wild leaps that were science fiction in scope, an ability to point out the absurdity of human endeavours, and as it turned out, he had a thing against oil.

Oil currently accounts for about 43% of the world’s total fuel consumption, and 95% of global energy used for transportation. Oil and gas are feedstocks for plastics, paints, pharmaceuticals, fertilizers, electronic components, tyres and much more. For every one joule of food consumed in the United States, around 10 joules of fossil fuel energy have been used to produce it. ( energybulletin.net )

Back in the Day
Part of what made Kurt Vonnegut unique his experiences in World War II. As later documented in the semiautobiographical ‘Slaughterhouse Five’ ( novel and then a film), he had been captured by Nazis as a 21 year old and sent to Dresden, where the Allies dropped enough powerful new bombs to reduce the fireballed city to lava-hot rubble, and killing all of the mostly civilian population of 135,000. Incredibly, Vonnegut and 6 other prisoners were in a meatpacking storage cell during the raid, and emerged upstairs to a destroyed town. That’ll make an impression.

1973
This was the year Kurt had finished Breakfast of Champions, another book later to become a film, which explored the relationship between an insane car dealer and a pulp science fiction writer – whose plots for various stories were outlined throughout the book. 1973 was also the peak of the seventies oil crisis, and so it’s not entirely surprising that one of these sci-fi plots involved a dying planet called Lingo whose inhabitants resembled american automobiles. The planet is visited, and the idea of the automobile was brought to earth by aliens who “did not know that human beings could be as easily felled by a single idea as by cholera or the bubonic plague. There was no immunity to cuckoo ideas on Earth.”

“So what is the principle exactly underpinning your 5 cent a litre cut? If it’s to ease the pain to the tune of about $2.50 a week, what do you do when the price of petrol goes up to $2 a litre and then $2.50 a litre. Do you continue to ease the pain by coming up with another 5 cents a litre cut and another 5 cent a litre cut? Is that really smart policy when you look at the total global picture of what’s happening with oil as a diminishing commodity in a world where oil is contributing to greenhouse problems?”
-Kerry O Brien, on the 7.30 Report slowly grilling the Opposition Climate Change Spokesman, Greg Hunt.

2004
“Can I tell you the truth? I mean this isn’t like TV news, is it? Here’s what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey. And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we’re hooked on.”

– K.V, ‘Addicted To Oil And Violence‘.

So It Goes.

Slow food? Supposedly an ‘eco-gastronomic movement that champions the protection of food diversity by encouraging regional production, taste education and pleasure’. Naturally Melbourne has a festival for Slow Foodies, complete with film festival @ ACMI from Feb 25th – Mar 5th.

We Feed The World

Erwin Wagenhofer, 96 mins, Austria, 2005

Wed 5 Mar 2008, 9.30pm

Why doesn’t a tomato taste like a tomato? How does one explain that 200 million people in India, supplier of 80% of Switzerland’s wheat, suffer from malnutrition? These questions and more are investigated as filmmaker Erwin Wagenhofer charts a contentious course through the processes of production of our food from Austria to Brazil, France to Africa. This is a film about scarcity amidst plenty, answering the question of what world hunger has to do with us.

((Saw this at Melbourne International film festival a few years ago – very provocative. Found myself really bewildered while watching it in the middle of a city of 3million people, thinking if all of Melbourne wanted say an egg on toast and a glass of fresh orange juice for breakfast tomorrow, what a crazy amount of food that is to try and provide.. Film’s worth it for the United Nations talker (Jean Ziegler ) in the middle somewhere, who nails a very lucid perspective on the politics of farming subsidies and people starving. ))

The Future of Food

Deborah Koons Garcia, 88 mins, USA, 2004

Mon 25 Feb 2008, 6.30pm

Shot in the US, Canada and Mexico, this film examines the complex web of market and political forces that are changing what we eat and presents a disturbing investigation into the genetically engineered foods that have surreptitiously filled our supermarket shelves. The screening will be introduced by Percy Schmeiser, a Canadian farmer who became an international spokesperson for farmers’ rights during his protracted legal battle with agrichemical giant Monsanto.

One Man, One Cow, One Planet

Thomas and Barbara Burstyn, 56 mins, New Zealand, 2006

Mon 25 Feb 2008, 9pm, Screening introduced by the filmmakers, Tom and Barbara Burstyn.

Peter Proctor is a 78-year-old with a glass eye and partial deafness. He is also widely known as the father of modern biodynamic farming, an arcane form of agriculture. This film follows Proctor’s journey to India where he works with marginal farmers to revive this traditional agricultural method to save their poisoned lands. It exposes globalisation’s mantra of infinite growth for the environmental and human disaster it really is.

Slow Food Revolution

Carlo Buralli, 52 mins, Australia, 2003

Tue 26 Feb 2008, 6.30pm, Screening introduced by Kelly Donati, Director, Slow Food Victoria.

Slow Food Revolution records the growing phenomenon of Slow Food in Italy, Mexico and Australia.. celebrating our natural bounty and a seriously sensual journey from earth to table.

Double feature: Tue 26 Feb 2008, 8.30pm

These compelling stories from Israel and Australia use food to examine the impact of war and conflict on communities.

Liam Ward’s Refugee: a recipe (24 mins, 2005, Australia) is part animation, part cooking show and an exploration of the impact of mandatory detention and temporary visas. ((+ Looks like I’ll be teaching with Liam @ RMIT this semester.. ))

Ayelet Heller’s Strawberry Fields (60 mins, 2006, Israel) tells of the daily struggles of strawberry farmers in the north of the Gaza Strip, whose crop has to be exported to the rest of the world via Israeli-controlled checkpoints. When problems arise, the strawberry fields become battlefields.

food and community – two shorts

Tue 4 Mar 2008, 6.30pm

Faith Morgan’s The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil (53 mins, USA, 2006) tells the fascinating story of how Cuba turned to organic farming and urban agriculture after a collapse* in its supply of cheap oil from the Soviet Union. (( *Hello 21st century ))

Daniele Atzeni’s The Legend of the Holy Fisherman (18 mins, Italy, 2005) spotlights San Pietro Island where tuna fishing has been practiced for hundreds of years according to an ancient ritual.

Black Gold

Wed 5 Mar 2008, 6.30pm

Marc and Nick Francis’ Black Gold (78 mins, UK, 2006) is an eye-opening exposé of the multi-billion dollar coffee industry that traces one man’s fight for a fair price. As westerners revel in designer lattes and cappuccinos, impoverished Ethiopian coffee growers suffer the bitter taste of injustice. Screening with ‘Squeezed: The Cost of Free Trade in the Asia-Pacific’ (40 mins, Australia, 2007). Travelling from the lush rice paddies of Thailand to squatter settlements in a Manila rubbish dump, Michael Cebon and Dominic Allen’s film creates an emotional document of how globalisation affects farmers in the Asia-Pacific.

Also of note – short film festival competition with two categories: best overall film and Soft Boiled Egg, a three-minute film category. Also playing at the festival – artists who look equally at home on a menu, as on a party poster : ‘Melbourne trip hop masters Miso as well as DJs Wasabi and Duck Roast’ – Feb 22, Edge, Fed square.

Plenty of folk tend to get speculative around this time of year, but there’s provocation to be found amongst the predictions.

State of the World

At the the turn of each year, sci-fi author, blogger, creator of the viridian design manifesto and all round sharp-fella, Bruce Sterling runs a spritely conversation at The Well, between himself and anyone interested. Moderated by media theorist Jon Lebowsky, the conversation generally ends up trying to puncture various conspiracy and apocalyptic theories, and make some vague sense out of the recent whirlwind of media and technology events. Well worth a read through, the sample quotes below give some of the flavour :

Jon Lebkowsky’s cheery introduction :
Everything’s peachy, with a few exceptions… the economy of the USA is crumbling, of course, and the U.S. government’s bleeding dollars (as well as real American blood) in Iraq. Climate change is accelerating, polar ice caps are melting, whole species are disappearing. Developing nations want their chance to be the next USA, and they’re not especially interested in hearing that it’s not possible for everyone to leverage the same increasingly limited resources. What happens when we pay everybody in the world a living wage, and give ‘em all a chance to own an SUV and a house in the suburbs? How many worlds would it take to float that boat? How pissed are they going to be when they realize “lifestyles of the rich and famous don’t scale,” in fact the lifestyle of the typical middle-class American is not sustainable.

Bruce Sterling: Serious-minded people everywhere do know they have to deal with the resource crisis and the climate crisis. Because the world-machine’s backfiring and puffing smoke. ( eg see – http://climateprogress.org/2007/12/12/an-ice-free-arctic-by-2013/ )

I love the fringes of society, but, as great designer Henry Dreyfuss used to say, the best way to get three good ideas is to brainstorm a hundred weird ideas and kill off 97 of them. And we need to get used to that process, and not, say, shut down Silicon Valley because there are too many start-ups there wasting Microsoft’s valuable resources.

Jamais Cascio, in response : We really do need to learn to generate lots of prototypes, throw ‘em at the wall, search them, sort them, rank them, critique them, and blow the best ones into global-scale proportions at high speed. That’s what our contemporary civilization is really good at, and it is simply beyond the imagination of the 1960s.

Likewise, Elsewhere

The EDGE.org’s John Brockman asks a new question each year, and gets an interconnected crew of tech/sci/internet elites deliver short and nano-sharp replies. This year’s question: What have you changed your mind about? make Science is based on evidence. What happens when the data change? How have scientific findings or arguments changed your mind? Climate change and energy resources are again in the forefront of many heads, but there’s also insightful opinions about memory, the internet, language, distributed identity, wikipedia, the mind-body problem, online privacy, complexity, the ethics of animal research, software as performance art and muchos more.

Myths De-Bunked

Turns out that we don’t need to drink 8 glasses of water a day ( we get water in food in other drinks too ), our hair and fingernails don’t keep growing after we die ( the rest of us shrinks ), we use more than 10% of our brain ( the 90% supposedly never-used has never been found ) , and shaved hair doesn’t grow back darker or coarser ( when first shaed, the hair has a blunt edge, thereby seeming thicker, it is also bleached by the sun over time ). And more, at the Guardian.

And Other News Worthy of A New Year

The New York Times reports on signs of 21 st century civilisation:
“For the first time since record keeping began in 1960, the number of deaths of young children around the world has fallen below 10 million a year, according to figures from the United Nations Children’s Fund being released today.This public health triumph has arisen, Unicef officials said, partly from campaigns against measles, malaria and bottle-feeding, and partly from improvements in the economies of most of the world outside Africa.”

With climate change well and truly on the public agenda, energy use is being put under the spotlight in a wide variety of ways.

Go Australia~!

The BBC reported recently that when it comes to power stations, Australia’s emit more CO2 per capita than any other nation. Australian power stations emit 10 tonnes per person, China’s 1.8, the U.S. 8.2 and India 0.5.

Australia’s Sunshine coast however, made it to the news by becoming an official ‘Transition Town’ which means they have adopted measures to deal with the inevitable peaking of oil supplies, and the resultant transition needed to shift from fossil fuels.

Elsewhere in Australian, a town by the name of Cloncurry which boasts Australia’s hottest recorded temperature ( 53C in the shade ), will be the recipient of a large solar thermal power plant, which should mean the town is entirely powered by solar power by 2010. The project will use 8,000 mirrors to reflect sunlight onto graphite blocks, water gets pumped through the blocks to generate steam for electricity generation in turbines.

Artists & Energy

And on the micro-scale, long time video artists Cicada, have been busily documenting their transition from city to country via their milkwood blog ( with regular videos ), and recently installed a solar panel which they figure should give them “15 years of light”. Plenty of linkalicious at the milkwood site, as they’re quite productive little kittens, and keen to share this type of knowledge.

With a bit more cash behind him, Damien Hirst has apparently ordered Britains second largest solar panel system at a cost of £1.5M for a 310w solar power system to power his warehouses. While commendable, the article quoting this also mentioned that this was enough to power 150 houses, and somewhere later that this solar system was equivalent to 2% of the country’s solar power. Given that the population of Britain is 60 million people, this suggests that British solar power has a long way to go. (2%= 150, 100% = 7500 )

Rethinking Automobiles

Shai Agassi has a novel idea – free cars! Based on the idea that ‘the cost of the average used car in Europe is now cheaper than the cost of gasoline to drive it for a year’, his company is investigating plans to provide electric cars that are very cheap or even free – and sold the way mobile phones are – the money being spent on a monthly contract rather than the device itself.

Which reminds of a conversation with a long time ago with Marcus Westbury ( who recently had that 3part TV show on the ABC, ‘Not Quite Art’ ), where he argued that the car registration fee ( then around $500 ) should be abolished – or rather that it should instead be shifted into fuel prices. The thinking being, that it should be as cheap or as easy as possible for the average person to acquire a car – but the burden of cost should be in the driving, so that energy use and pollution are minimised. Going another step, we really need to rethink the whole energy pragmatism of having one tonne vehicles to individually transport us around in. Do we really need, and can we really sustain a planet where we need to give vehicles enough fuel to carry around a tonne of metal on top of our body weight? Not so clever. And commented on nicely by UK artists Wilson and Radcliffe, who recently made a bicycle powered lamborghini – actually two bicycles within a thin, frame outline of a lamborghini. Also in the UK news, recent tax concessions which allow 50% off the price of a new bike, if you are riding it to work.

Take an energy vacation, or if stuck in the cubicle? Try google.com/search?q=facebook+carbon+app

Mmmmm playing Tesla Coils ( think giant lightning creating devices ) to make Super Mario soundtracks… ( check Tesla’s long list of exploits @ wikipedia )

Condoms on microphones, the Yangtze river dolphin, Douglas Adams, audiobooks & wondering what archaeologists in the future will think of this era.

Poker Machines in the Future

Measuring 5.6 on the richter scale, 1989 in Newcastle introduced many people to the idea that an earthquake was even possible on the East Coast of Australia. It was certainly news to my brain, which had instantly attributed the sudden shifting of the houses walls, to the neighbours next door, who who had been reversing a caravan into their driveway a short while ago. Rushing outside of that previously stable house, enabled the sight of everyone else on the street rushing outside of their previously stable houses. And the radio revealed this to be a Newcastle wide phenomenon, an actual earthquake, with all the fear and panic it brings. A few suburbs away, The Newcastle Workers club, a den of bad carpets, bad music and poker machines, was apparently the worst hit building, with many feared dead. In the end, the earthquake claimed 13 lives, and over 50,000 damaged buildings. Interestingly a US academic claimed in early 2007 that the Newcastle earthquake was probably set off by stress changes in the earth’s crust, after two centuries of coal mining. And the poker machines were not long without a home.

Douglas Adams @ The Newcastle Worker’s Club 1999

(the above photo is from one of Douglas’s many speaking engagements elsewhere )

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is the main way people have encountered the absurd and deadly sharp wit of Douglas Adams. Like most absurd science fiction, his work also serves to interrogate the present, gently reminding us just how strange our behaviours and societal habits actually are. In conversation with Robyn Williams ( ABC’s champion science reporter ), and charming all at the revamped Workers Club, it became clear that the science fiction of Adams was built upon mountains of scientific reading, an incredibly broad knowledge of the sciences, and a relentlessly curious brain. And something about being a very, very funny man. When he died in 2001, Douglas Adams left behind a rich collection of fiction, and only one work of non-fiction, a meditation on death, or rather the ‘death of death’, a book exploring the threatened extinctions of many species.

Last Chance to See

Published in 1990, and co-authored by Mark Carwardine, this is a book that details the exploits of Douglas and Mark ( a zoologist ), as they travel the globe attempting to witness actual living examples – in the wild – of some of the world’s most prominent endangered species. Along the way, we learn about what makes each of those species unique, filtered by Adam’s eye for the absurd, and discover the factors contributing to the disappearance of each species. A kind of comedic thriller whodunnit – where humans are always the bad guys. The book is a great jolting reminder of the biodiversity that exists beyond our urban centres, and the escalating threats our footprints are placing on species everywhere. Threatened species I remembered most from the book was the Yangtze river dolphin, because of the BBC audio recorder’s technique for trying to record that dolphin – placing a condom over a microphone, thereby allowing the recording of underwater sounds. As it turns out, there’s an audiobook torrent for this floating around online, read by Douglas himself, the storytelling humour amplified even more by his rich, comedic delivery. And supposedly, a follow-up TV series is due in 2008. This will unfortunately feature no new footage of the Yangtze river dolphin, as in August this year, this species was declared to be extinct.

Distinctly Extinct

And so, the Yangtze river dolphin can die no more, a fate that happens to many species over time. What disturbs in 2007 thought, is the rate at which species are being wiped out, forever. Archaeologists and biological historians point to five eras of mass extinctions during the earth’s history, and many scientists argue that the current rate of extinctions sees us on the cusp of a sixth era of mass extinction. Time will tell.

What do Cyrillic Graffiti, Anti-Americanism in Europe and wikipedia edits have in common? Let’s find out.

Cyrillic Graffiti

Sofia, Bulgaria is 12 hours bus ride from Istanbul, a journey which facilitates extensions of 1 x Turkish VISA, a necessary process for foreigners every 3 months. The netcafe which delivered these words, is a dark Soviet styled bunker called “The Matrix”. There are 2 doors to walk through, a photo to be taken, and card to be printed and issued, before a final 3rd door can be entered through. Like most European countries, most young people speak enough English to help direct wandering bug-eyed folk. Unlike most European countries, the Bulgarian language uses not the Roman alphabet, but the cyrillic alphabet, which to eyes unused to it, comes off as some kind of machine-code graf wild-style combo. Wikipedia has more than enough Bulgarian language info to satisfy curious linguists, but precious little about cyrillic graffiti – which is surely the first thought in most minds upon seeing this square funked shaped alphabet. As it unfolds, the streets of Sofia have precious little cyrillic graf either, mostly Bronx alphabetics. There’s a little Bulgarian graf online, and more here ( Артисти – means ‘artists)but much more Russian around ( which also shares a cyrillic alphabet ). Especially love the otherworldly characters of http://ik.graffitizone.kiev.ua and http://englishrussia.com/?p=799. And for the touring curious,
http://myspace.com/waytorussia notes: “For DJs and bands—we can arrange a gig for you in Russia, especially Moscow, St. Petersburg, Novosibirsk and Volgograd.”

Anti-Americanism in Europe?

While the cyrillic graf scene ain’t ain’t exactly setting downtown Sofia ablaze, there’s no lack of visual ‘disapproval’ of one of the United States most unpopular Presidents. Spray paint and stencils stain almost every second wall with the likes of “Bush=War Criminal”, alongside various caricatures and generally demeaning portraits. Not so surprising maybe, given Bulgaria’s proximity to the Middle East where George Bush is hoping to spend an extra USD140-billion if he can get congress to approve his war budget for 2008, or East Europe’s proximity to Russia and the former Soviet empire. Some Americans are aware of this Anti-US sentiment though, as covered in the PBS documentary “The Anti-Americans” which covers attitudes from France, Britain and Poland. British singer Ian Brown ( former Stone Roses singer probably adds himself to that list with his recent single with Sinead O Connor, ‘illegal attacks’, which urges the return of US & UK soldiers currently in Iraq.

Wikipedia Edits

One of my favourite wikipedia edits is still the Penny Arcade comic “I have the Power’, which it shows an enemy of He-Man ham-fistedly transforming “He-man is the most powerful man in the universe.” to “He-Man is actually a tremendous jack-ass and not really that powerful”. And with wikipedia entries becoming so dominant in the top of search engine results, the desire to control perception of a nation, individual or company, event etc is becoming increasingly political. Wikiscanner, a site that exposes the digital fingerprints of those who make changes to wikipedia pages, has been in the news a lot recently. There’s plenty of corporations trying to improve their image, and both the CIA and Vatican have been nailed with changing articles. The Australian Government is no exception in this age of “info-war”, flying the flag with notable edits from the Defence department changing details in articles about the “9/11 truth movement”, and the Prime Minister’s office who added to an entry on martial arts: “Poo bum dicky wee wee”. Go Australia~!

This weeks shout-out goes to couchsurfing.com >> the best rad-person locator have found on the internet yet. And to my waycool Bulgarian hosts who brought me along yesterday to an amusing cardboard box ‘flash-mob’ style protest yesterday evening, aiming to draw attention to illegal building currrently happening in protected Bulgarian locations.

Aside from skynoise posts and the weekly technoscape column at threedworld, have found myself with a few other places to send words while in Istanbul. Currently working on a piece for a new Australian publication, Greenpages magazine, who asked for :
“an optimistic view on what peak oil might mean for the future of Australian society at least – big shifts bring opportunities to do things differently..”

Engage Media maintain a website for video about ‘social justice and environmental issues in
Australia, Southeast Asia and the Pacific’, and they’ve also asked for some weekly words to be sent their way. Engage Media are looking to ‘harness the growth of digital distribution tools to bypass the control of big media conglomerates’. To that extent they’ve already released Plumi – ‘a Plone-based video-sharing CMS. Plumi enables you to create a sophisticated video-sharing and community site out-of-the-box’, which features video uploading in any format, automatic server-side Flash video transcoding, embedded playback and much more. Will be diving into that shortly.

Have also been enjoying ‘reblogging’ over at the Artificial Eyes Reblog, ‘a mix of video and contemporary arts of interest to vjs, and visual artists curated by Todd Thille and Michael Parenti, with guest rebloggers’. The Reblog software allows quick and easy reposting of favourite posts from your selected feeds, and is free to install on the server of your choice. So have been harvesting various visual inspiration feeds there, with more recently some posts reflecting local politics : ‘satanic’ raves in Iran, water rationing in Istanbul, and death threats to Turkish writers. Alongside this Artificial Eyes maintain their own news blog.

Albert Einstein – grinning bicycle lover, scientist and fond of reminding people that ‘imagination is more important than knowledge’. Were his animated head floating in a jar on a shelf somewhere today, no doubt it’d be smiling at the lateral ways the bicycle is being harnessed.

Two Wheeled Energy

Bicycle on a stand = an easy pedal powered generator, and an idea often seen powering fruit juice blenders at outdoor festivals. At the 2007 Coachella festival in the states a group called Global Inheritance took the idea a step further, providing 24 bicycle generators to power some stage equipment, and also making the bicycles available for recharging mobile phone batteries. Instructions are available for building your own with a bike trainer stand, bike, car alternator 78” belt and other parts, or there’s an “email us to buy one” option as well.

In other random Coachella news, Scarlett Johansson joined the reformed ‘Jesus and Mary Chain’ on stage for backup vocals on “Just Like Honey,” a combination that does odd things to my brain. Supposedly shes got a covers album of Tom Waits songs up her sleeve too, but back to bikes…

Bicycles, Projectors, Amplifiers

DIY high performance bicycle lighting system? No problemo. ( via metafilter ) Those after a bit more light might enjoy The Magnificent Revolutionary Cycling Cinema, UK touring bicycle-powered cinema who transport their cinema to festivals and events by bike, and then power it by bike while there. Plenty of inspiration on their site, including details of a recent gig which featured The Jelly Royale, ‘a five piece which in sound check were pulling around 250W from four amps at their loudest… all three bikes are fired up and there’s a queue of people ready to jump on the bikes if needed. As it turns out, the band probably averaged around 170W continuous, so there wasn’t much need for ‘change-overs’ on the bikes.’ They were supported by Pedalo Folk who sings and plays guitar through a pedal powered amplifier – while he rides on stage at the same time~! ( “Apparently it’s a bit like patting your head and rubbing your belly at the same time” )

Just Weird Bikes

Couchbike : the true story of Brent and Eivind’s travels through Maritime Canada on a human powered couch in the summer of 2002. Worth it for the pictures alone, but the story is funny too.

Sideways Bike
: A bicycle that is ridden sideways and is balanced by using human Front to Back balance, rather than side to side balance, and also uses Front and Rear steering. Mind boggling pictures, can’t imagine what this would feel like to ride. The Author asks to think of the difference between skiing and snowboarding : where the latter’s use of front-back balance allows more refined and expressive movement.

Sharing Bikes

Bicycles are the ideal way to get around large, flat, congested cities. Even more convenient is being able to pick up and drop off a very cheap rentable bicycle from lots of locations all over the city. It’s an idea that has been adopted in many European cities before, and is being scaled up in Paris, where they are currently installing over 10,000 bikes at 750 stations. The Paris program is being funded by an advertising company in exchange for 1,600 billboards around the city and is computerised and credit card driven. Swipe a card, release a bike, and buy in for a day, week or year. Across the Atlantic they’re giving it a go in New York as well, where a credit card or cell phone can unlock the bike for riding, until finished with and another swipe at a bike rack returns it to the available network. Via comments @ the ever entertaining BLDGBLOG, someone from Washington wished them well in NY, mentioning their city had tried the same but half of them had ended up in the river within a year.

Bicycles & Windmills

Malawi in Southern Africa is home to 19 year old William Kamkwamba, who has used the bicycle to enhance the efficiency of a windmill. Admirably though, this was a windmill William had made by himself – with locally found parts, a book on electricity and despite having no formal qualifications and having to leave school at 14 because of poverty. His first windmill was used to create light in his house for his family, but this second windmill, enhanced by the bicycle, is able to generate electricity for his village, providing a capacity to recharge car batteries and mobile phone batteries. His success story has been
widely circulated, which introduced him to the internet and email for the first time at a conference in 2007. Initially impressed with the speed of search engines for getting information about ‘windmills’ and ‘solar energy’, he now has a month old blog clocking plenty of hits. Donations welcome!

Like some mechanoid Arab Godzilla, Dubai emerges from the desert haze and Persian Gulf coastline, super-sizing itself as it goes. A mega-project studded spectacle that unavoidably boggles the mind. Audaciousness on such a scale, and yet alongside that arab saying “My father rode a camel. I drive a car. My son flies a jet-plane. His son will ride a camel,” it’s hard not to think of it as foundations for the world’s most elaborate ghost town.

Vat Ist Dubai?

Back in 1971 the modern emirate of Dubai was created with the formation of the United Arab Emirates, a federation of seven emirates on the Eastern side of the Arabian peninsula, at the entrance to the Persian Gulf. Surrounded by oil-rich nations and within short distance of most of Europe and Asia, Dubai has established itself as a key financial centre and trading route destination, featuring the world’s largest human made port. And they seem to like that kind of scale there.

Mega Mega Mega

Higher than 800m tall when finished, will be the world’s tallest structure : the Burj Dubai. Then there’s ‘The World’, a collection of 300 artificial islands – that means yes, each one is being constructed – that form the shape of the world’s continents. ( Apparently Australasia has already been sold to a developer from Kuwait.) The World (( “Take a tour of the world, and view our corporate video” ) is not to be confused with The World’s Largest Shopping Mall – due for completion in 2008, and not to be confused with the worlds largest shopping mall which already exists in Dubai. Nor should The World be confused with the Palm Islands, the three largest artificial islands in the world. There is already one giant indoor ski resort ( while it is 40-50 degrees C outside! ), and a second one is planned, complete with revolving mountain. Also revolving – each floor of a planned rotating skyscraper, a ‘tower in motion’ with heliport, swimming pools, outdoor gardens and floors that rotate independently from each other ( from stored solar energy) . There’s a Chess City planned, with 32 tower blocks of 64 floors, each in the form of a chess piece, The Restless Planet dinosaur theme park featuring more than 100 moving animatronic dinosaurs, a pyramid and a building called Atlantis that will cost $600m and include a “swim-with-the-dolphins encounter programme”, an actual underwater hotel and recently proposed – one of my favourites – ‘The Cloud’, still in concept design but has to be seen to be believed, a small village ( complete with lake and rotating bridges ) elevated 300 metres in the air above Dubai ( “a translucent floating island” ) and supported on slanting legs resembling rain. Check the artist sketches, I like the guy playing cricket at the base.

All those projects just end up sounding like science fiction in the end…. for a better sense of Dubai out of controlness, try this all you can eat photo explanation of why one fifth of the world’s cranes are currently at use in Dubai.

Arriving in Dubai

Turned out just before June, that the cheapest available Melbourne to Istanbul ticket ( for arriving by a certain date to play pixels with artificialeyes.tv ) was with Emirate Airlines – which also meant a stop off in Dubai, flying in over the desert to a sudden and abundant sprouting of buildings, hyper-green landscapes and football fields, resources from all over the world converging at this one particular location and seeming to swell after every blink of the eye.

Browsing through Open Skies ( the in-flight magazine for Emirate Airlines ), confirmed I was not remotely / ballpark / galaxies near their target market. Having passed on the calf-skin credit card holder ( only a few hundred euros ) and other delectable duty free items, scanning and skimming the magazine highlighted a few key phrases such as :

“open the door to a new member of t