Some February eyeball snippets..

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

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

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

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

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

DJ Yoda 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aka, some stuff stapled to the ears of the year so far.

The Books ( Mini Review )
John Curtin Hotel ( Carlton, Melb Jan 09)

Thanks to the tasteful way they’d championed the collagey folktronica sound back in the day, what with their sparse guitar, cello, vocals and samples (though never sampling or playing drumkits, only using ‘inanimate objects like children’s toys and filing cabinets, sampled and looped’ ) and their charming albums ‘Thought For Food’ and ‘The Lemon of Pink’, New York duo The Books have gathered quite a following. Expecting they were only in Australia for the Sydney festival, I was pleased to discover they were also doing a Melbourne show, and that it extended their sampling to include video in the live show. Unfortunately the John Curtin’s low stage meant two things – only the front row of the audience could see them performing ( they sat near milk-crates to play with their electronic gear and play their guitar / cello ), and even the onstage projector screen itself was hard to see much of. Eyes closed the music was gorgeous, if a little too perfectly replicating their album sounds. Open eyed, the screen shared some of the responsibility for mirroring the albums so tightly : it seemed they were playing entire tracks of video for each song, which included lots of screen-based audio. Many of their known sample riffs’ then, were sampled from video in the first place, which makes for an absorbing av show, but limits their live improvisation when played as stand alone tracks. Later realised, they released a DVD of 13 music videos, ‘Play All’, in 2007, and you can watch snippets from these at www.thebooksmusic.com. New album on its way, Break, themed around New Age philosophies, and using samples from self-help and hypnotherapy cassettes.

{ And an abstract video take on that :
by David Lublin, one of the developers of VDMX. )

Stingray Sam

Kicking space musical western ass since 2001, the year of his debut feature, American Astronaut, storytelling musician and film director Cory McAbee was in Melbourne recently for the screening of his cinematic follow-up, Stingray Sam. Designed for both mobile devices and the cinema, it’s shot with smaller screens in mind ( a tendency for close-ups rather than long shots, lots of static shots, broken up into six small episodes etc ), the film’s another great vehicle for Cory’s uniquely combined explorations of musical storytelling and cinematic style. Although the songs of his band, The Billy Nayer Show, tend to be comedic, they survive or even thrive on the salt of the earth charm embedded throughout, and it helps that the film(s) can shift into song in such unpredictable ways. Recommendo.

Download episode one and two for free, check out the storyboards, buy the DVD at stingraysam.com.

Farewell Songs
This is the last song played at The Tote, the latest Melbourne live music venue to suffer under licencing changes. Complete with 2-3 minutes of arm-tingling cheers at the end.

Other Kinds of Magic:
Enter The Magical Mystery Chambers.

The World As Sonic Map?
Via @ballardian, a link to a nice post about collaborative sound mapping projects – from the BBC, others exploiting Google Maps, and sites that allow to pick a starting point and destination, then present a mix of field recordings between the two places ( sound transit ). The Freesound map gets a deserved shout-out in the comments at the same site, and elsewhere you can listen to the underwater atmosphere of Antarctica in realtime.

All of the above of course presumes we navigate by text / visual cues… what about if we navigated by sound?

The World As Instrument?
The World as instrument: A Theoretical Workshop Taught by Francisco Lopez ::February 16-18 2010

“focused on the historical, sociological and philosophical aspects of different practices that have the “real world” as a source, or an inspiration, for sonic creation. From ancestral manifestations of music derived from nature to the present massive sonic exploration of our world, analyzing the historical attempts at recording sonic reality and creatively transform it, from musical notation to digital technology… the workshop aims at stirring up discussion and at challenging many stereotypical and misleading conceptions about recorded sound in many diverse areas and objects of study, from bioacoustics to experimental music, from phonographs to hard disk recorders, from birds to cosmic radio emissions.”

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

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

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

No Chimpee, No Cry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Storyboarding is fun with Cinemek’s Hitchcock iphone application. (also known as Storyboard Composer )

When Cinemek’s Jonathan Houser dream of ‘making innovative film tools’ met the iPhone in his pocket, a new mobile storyboarding application was born: Hitchcock. Utilising the iPhone’s touchscreen and built-in camera, Hitchcock adds a layer of fun to location scouting, planning for films and storyboarding sequences. The app has two modes – a panel view that focusses on each shot ( gathered from the photo library ) and allows easy overlays of character stand-ins, camera and character movement and text overlays. The sequential mode allows a finger to slide the panels into a sequence, and control the timing between each shot. There’s something great about the immediacy of being on location, arranging a sequence, and watching it playback to see how well it works as an idea. Hitchcock is a simple app, but executed wonderfully, with a gorgeous interface that encourages play and re-use. When done, press a button and email your completed PDF storyboard. Future developments include : drawing functionality, adding audio, ability to add custom stand-in characters, export to .mov, etc. Cinemek’s Jonathan Houser was happy to answer a few questions about it below.

More : cinemek.com/hitchcock
Tutorials : vimeo.com/channels/hitchcock

How do you feel about Hitchcock today?
I’m pretty pleased with how Hitchcock turned out as it is version 1.0. It really accomplishes what I set out to do which was create a lightweight mobile app that allows creative people to jot their ideas down in a visual medium. 

What has the iphone platform been like to develop for?
As a non-coder I was really supprised at how easy it was to design the app under Apples specifications. They provide developers with tons of tools and free API’s. The hardest part for me was to find a person who had the calibre of coding necessary when you reach beyond those free API’s. Jason Thane at General UI did a great job with this. 

What changes would you like in future iphones / the future iphone development environment?
There are many small things that I would like to see. The biggest for me is Apple’s payment process. They are really ambiguous about how they pay you. You may receive reports for a given months sales and the actual fund paid are 20-30% less than what those reports reflect. The worse part is actually contacting them about such problems. It’s pretty messy but I’m sure it’s getting better. 

What’s missing for you to develop Hitchcock on Android?
Right now, proven demand. We have been talking to other developers and the success rate for Android porting is very very low. We have not by any means ruled it out, we are taking it one step at a time. There are many updates to the iphone version of Hitchcock we hope to do before we port to other platforms. 

Hitchock feels like the beginning of an interesting animation sketching app – have you had any thoughts about creating an app that tilted more towards animation?
Yes, we are definitely exploring different specialized uses for Hitchcock. I think the animation community is large enough to warrant a application designed directly for that community.

Other iphone apps that impress?
There are so many – for filmmaking, the guys at Chemical Wedding just released an app called Artemis. It’s a professional director’s finder for the iphone. It contains just about any lens you can think about shooting on. REALLY cool. As for non filmmaking apps, Convert bot has a really cool interface. Its just a conversion app, but the UI team did a great job with the design. Shazam is still such a cool app. There are a bunch of Augmented reality apps coming out which will prove to be pretty useful. 

What aspects of the iphone are least utilised by apps?
I think the biggest aspect of the iphone that is least utilized is multi-touch. It seems like most developers design their apps as ported desktop versions of their app. The buttons are too small and do too little. I think there will be more apps in the future which utilize the whole iphone. 

Do you have a gallery of favourite storyboards submitted by users anywhere?
Not yet. But we are planning on creating a community for that. Keep checking in. 

Popular feature requests?
.mov export is the biggest request. This will be available really shortly. Possibly the beginning of December. Local PDF creation and emailing. Available in the next update as well. Sharing Hitchcock files. This will be available in the Pro version. Many people want to be able to import more PNG’s for stand-ins. We are working on a slick way to exchange PNG’s on a server. This will be a great tool for people who work on specialized projects. Ie car’s, Zombies, Dogs, people with guns etc. 

Other iphone app areas you’d like to explore in the future?
I have a few projects which involved the ipod touch as the software/hardware interface. They are in their infancy still so I cannot go into detail, but they are oriented towards the filmmaking community. 

Hitchcock Demo from cinemek / Hitchcock on Vimeo.

This should be fun! Meredith Music Festival Sat 12th Dec : Outdoors Animal Collective gig at sunset, then Jarvis Cocker, then an hour or so later, an audiovisual gig with Lewis Cancut at the outdoor cinema. From the festival blurb:

“Jungle-Vision : A Live Audiovisual Safari by Lewis Cancut + Jean Poole
Deep in the heart of the Congo ( tram stop 124, route 1, Brunswick East ), Lewis Cancut has been cultivating his video-turntable chops – scratching and mixing customised videoclips by Jean Poole at the same time as cutting up regional sonic flavours like baile funk, cumbia and kuduro. Fresh from a more laid back performance @ ACMI by the duo (about the history of television), expect a more uptempo mix for Meredith – equal parts cinema hypnotism and dancefloor grind.

Lewis Cancut : http://scatterblog.com + http://www.myspace.com/lewiscancut
Jean Poole : http://video.skynoise.net”

( Also fun : A Tim Sweeney DJ set @ 2am on Friday night, + a bonus 5-6am addition to the Saturday night line-up : Nathan Fake! )

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adam Curtis, Cicada, Ubin, Suckafish P Jones.

It Felt Like A Kiss
Mr.Curtis, you may remember from such documentary flourishes as: The Power of Nightmares, The Century of the Self, The Mayfair Set, Pandora’s Box, The Trap and The Living Dead. Each series it could be said, performs the same trick : pulling back the curtains on the twentieth century to reveal it’s hidden power structures and machinations. Not that this matters one little bit, his edits of the BBC archives are often as exhilarating as they are illuminating. The boy can really stitch things together. And write it seems, via his BBC blog where he’s been outlining some of the projects / research that’s kept him busy since his last series.

Your executive summary :
- Researching for the West’s relationship with Afghanistan.
- Researching for the legacy of European empires in Africa.
- Developing a piece about “the political and cultural ideas that underlie the internet – and the idea that we are all linked in an interconnected web – out of which can come a new form of democracy.”
- Edited a 54 minute film, ‘It Felt Like A Kiss’, with soundtrack composed by Damon Alburn, performed by the Kronos Quartet. This film was shown in a darkened sixth floor of an abandoned building, as part of a Manchester festival. The film ( available on torrent sites ) features Enos the chimp sent to space, Lee Harvey Oswald, Saddam Hussein, Tina Turner and Richard Nixon.
“Imagine walking into a disused building. You find yourself inside a film. It is a ghost story where unexpected forces, veiled by the American Dream, come out from the dark to haunt you…”

Pro Tip: Need to watch BBC iPlayer videos from his blog? ( blocked to those outside the UK )
Use Tor or mgeni.

cicada.tv
Cicada as the trio of Kirsten Bradley, Nick Ritar and Ben Frost, are accomplished at executing technically and artistically compelling audiovisual performances and installations, but have been busy in many directions over recent years. Kirsten and Nick have relocated from Melbourne to near Mudgee to try and go even higher resolution with their work ( and higher biodiversity), setting up the Milkwood Permaculture farm in an appropriately technical and creative fashion. They have the internets out there though, so stay tuned for future projects. Ben has taken his wall of noise to Reykjavik, Iceland. He is not to be confused with the other Australian Ben Frost, the visual artist behind benfrostisdead.com. Neither of them should be mixed up with the other Australian Ben Frost, the Emmy award, London dwelling winning puppeteer.

A Decade of Flashbacks
Oli Chang and Jo Lamont slayed dancefloors back around the start of this century, with a chopped and spliced sound that somehow integrated gamelan, funk and haunted children choir sounds and influences. Today Oli can be found over at : http://soundslikeoli.com, which redirects to a range of soundtracks and ‘cinematic remixes’ he has been working on. This includes an entrant in the dawning audiovisual genre of ‘chicken techno’, and a remix of Empire of the Sun. Jo Lamont was last seen trawling seedy Tokyo laneways for esoteric synthesisers.

Cross Continental Data Corruption
Suckafish P Jones has deserted the sunny shores of Brisbane ( you should really check out their fake beach, set inside landscaped gardens, overlooking their unswimmable river), for more jetlag jaunts, and is now based in Barcelona, where he has recently released his swanky ( swampy? ) new Phantasmatica EP ( free download ) on disboot.net. Next Up, Mr.Midnight, due before the end of the year. Fine, fine music!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers film adaptation of long revered ‘Where The Wild Things Are’ is almost out, and part of their promo blitz includes what turns out to be a really great blog ( weloveyouso.com) – one that aims to shed light on some of the influences that’ve helped make the film happen, but ends up pressing so many kinds of resonant buttons, it may as well be a drunken gypsy piano accordionist eloping with a QWERTY keyboard.

Lightning Bolt Down Under
Drummer and bass player duo with a supposedly religious experience type live show, they are touring Australia in late November ( Bring The Noise! ), and get mentioned at weloveyouso for a recent video clip which features someone dressing up in a home-made Wild Thing costume (DIY music video wardrobe stylists, rep-re-sent! ) and wandering ( veering madly all over the footpath, scattering people as they go ) through the streets in stuttery stop-motion style ( which suits the song to a tee ). Release dates mean that by the time Lightning Bolt are touring Oz, the only way to have seen the film locally will have been by the inevitable cam-held recordings made in Northern hemisphere cinemas, and released as torrents online. We get it in cinemas in Dec in Oz, but really – what’s with release dates a few months apart in the 21st century?

Paper Rad
- are an art-flouro collective whose output seems to alternately thrill and revolt, and amongst their posse is Jacob Ciocci, who has a new 45 minute DVD-R out ( Peace Tape ), with soundtrack by Extreme Animals. This is discovered of course, through weloveyouso, alongside an interview snippet with Ben Jones, another artist in the ‘Paper Rad Orbit’ :
“Any really good artist, or just any happy smart person can explain quickly and simply why things like fame, or the art world, or war are essentially meaningless and then also how these things attract young stupid white kids, or people with mental problems, or classic Americans as a result of the of these populations having low consciousness and/or intelligence. If you really are into the art world or TMZ or the Taliband it means you have a type of retardation.”

Web Cam Synchronicity
Weloveyouso posts stem from a variety of folk, but occasionally from director Spike himself, including a link to the recently popular ‘Sour’ music video which was shot by people all over the world on their webcams. It’s an incredible video, full of relentless ingenuity and all made with tightly interwoven webcam contributions from a large number of people. So it’s hardly surprising people have been linking to it everywhere, but it must be nice for the producers to read Spike Jonze write :
“The amount of pre-planning and choreography by the directors Masashi Kawamura, Hal Kirkland, Magico Nakamura and Masayoshi Nakamura remotely from the other side of the world is of Michel Gondry level complexity.” Which in turn is followed up with an interview about how they made it. ( Zero budget filmmakers win the day (again)! )

http://threeframes.net/
Got hooked on this a while ago. Click. Click. Click. A sea of next pages to be explored, each with animated GIFs made up of 3 frames from a movie scene, micro-stroboscopic events that say so much and so little. Thanks for the reminder Wild People.

Wild Things Skate
Well directors of such films do anyway, how else to amass a crazy back catalogue of genre-stretching skate videos, and count the likes of the infamous Mark Gonzales amongst your friends. Inevitably Mark gets mentioned a few times, including this link to an art gallery video, where he had invited to exhibit work, and ended up dressing up and skating at high speed in a variety of goofy poses around the gallery and it’s audience, at times blasting coffin style through a tunnel made from cardboard boxes. No chardonnay seemed to have been spilled during the making. Unsurprisingly there are also a range of Wild skate decks available, which Spike decided to give away a set of for the best movie poster mash-up. Max On Wire, featuring a tiny silhouetted Max racing along a tightrope between the two world trade towers was a particular favourite.

And Sure, More Self-Promotion
But aren’t you curious about ‘a book by Dave Eggers adapted from Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are and based on the screenplay by Eggers and Spike’ ? And isn’t it refreshing to see movie-makers that actively encourage movie-poster remixes? And if moviemakers must show photos of their new movie billboards, it’s refreshing to see the director exclaim that he loves the graffiti modifications people have done to it, and looks forward to seeing more people painting over them.

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elsewhere. Meanwhile. Would you believe that German film director Werner Herzog has invited you to study with him? BYO bullet-proof vests.

“The Rogue Film School will be in the form of weekend seminars held by Werner Herzog in person at varying locations and at infrequent intervals. The Rogue Film School will not teach anything technical related to film-making. For this purpose, please enroll at your local film school.

The Rogue Film School is about a way of life. It is about a climate, the excitement that makes film possible. It will be about poetry, films, music, images, literature. Excerpts of films will be discussed, which could include your submitted films; the attention will revolve around essential questions:

How does music function in film? How do you narrate a story? (This will certainly depart from the brainless teachings of three-act-screenplays). How do you sensitize an audience? How is space created and understood by an audience? How do you produce and edit a film? How do you create illumination and an ecstasy of truth?

Related, but more practical subjects, will be the art of lockpicking. Traveling on foot. The exhilaration of being shot at unsuccessfully. The athletic side of filmmaking. The creation of your own shooting permits. The neutralization of bureaucracy. Guerrilla tactics. Self reliance.

Censorship will be enforced. There will be no talk of shamans, of yoga classes, nutritional values, herbal teas, discovering your Boundaries, and Inner Growth.

Follow your vision. Form secretive Rogue Cells everywhere. At the same time, be not afraid of solitude.”

( Previous round-ups of Werner World, for the unfamiliar )