Disinfo.com & Microcinema.com

Some 60% of the world is covered by water, with underwater mountains taller than Everest, and places of immense pressure where sunlight never reaches. I mention this for no other reason than to remind of the pretty weird and alien creatures lurking in our oceans. They have some online too.

Disinformation
Founder of this cult-like ‘gateway to the underground’, Richard Metzger, said a long while ago, ‘New media is a great way to make money out of old media’ & seems to be finally reaping ye olde rewards. In other words, the Disinfo site which boasts a vast collection of links to ‘news, politics, conspiracy & weirdness’ has been busy moving into print publishing and broadcasting. ( Note – the site was edited until recently by Melbourne’s Alex Burns ( www.livejournal.com/users/alexburns). And so we see spawned : a series of investigative anthologies, distribution of a range of provocative books, and even a Channel 4 UK series focussing on counterculture interviews, also now available on DVD.

DVD Hi-lites
The Disinfo DVD bites nicely, rabidly, weirdly, charmingly. Like some sort of psychedelic car salesman, presenter Richard Metzger guides interviews through a range of New York’ s twisted underbelly. It’s typical Disinfo seduction : sex, drugs & rebellion – ranging from the freaky carnivalesque to counterculture esoterica, from investigative and confrontational journalism through to some kind of darkened, voyeuristic showbiz. Illuminatus! author Robert Anton Wilson is the sharp-witted interview subject you’d expect and there’s even a John Safran McDonald’s piece thrown into the mix. (Apparently Richard saw the unaired in Oz piece, and loved it ). The two discs contain more than six hours of viewing, and the companion book of interviews is also pretty classic, complete with colour photos.

Compilations
You Are Being Lied To: The Disinformation Guide to Media Distortion, Historical Whitewashes & Cultural Myths, edited by Russ Kick, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Howard Bloom, Douglas Rushkoff, Peter Russell, and other boys tackle hallucinogenic toads, hacking, bible codes, big bangs, species extinction, George Bush, female serial killers, the Columbine massacre and the cloning of humans.

Abuse Your Illusions: The Disinformation Guide to Media Mirages & Establishment Lies, edited by Russ Kick
Neglected information regarding the September 11 attacks, antidepressants & suicide, Mormon racism, Panama & Wall St, Islamic censorship, flouridation, resurrection and government-sponsored anti-drug ads and the real story about the founding of United Nations & more.

The Disinformation Guide to Magick and the Occult, edited by Richard Metzger
Aims to ‘redefine occult anthologies and a huge array of magical essays for a pop culture audience’. And so the usual suspects are lined up : Terence McKenna asking about alien contact through the smokable drug DMT, Mark Pesce exploring the relationship between spellcasting and computer programming, Grant Morrison explaining how YOU can become a practicing magician, Erik Davis dissecting H. P. Lovecraft, Robert Anton Wilson reflecting on the similarities between Crowley and Leary, Genesis P-Orridge recounting personal memories of his magical education under William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, Hakim Bey on Sorcery and Occult Terrorism etc etc.

MicroCinema
Some of the more tenacious deep sea critters are also the smallest, and at www.microcinema.com they digs deep in the service of independent short films. Browsing the site you’ll find a ‘totally sick’ range of short films that Microcinema exhibit and distribute on behalf of artists to festivals all over the world. Particularly successful are their ‘Independent Exposure’ compilations ( available on DVD ), which are regularly scheduled to screen at International venues the year round. Alongside the festival circuit, Microcinema have started a fledgling DVD Label which has already started to release collections of short films. Two discs I’ve managed to glimpse through their site, ‘Urban Visions’ & ‘Signal Drift’, are a mixed bag. Signal is a meandering audiovisual portrait of a ‘day’ with old colorisation and chroma keying tools that tires quickly, but Urban is a better compilation of shorts – with the inventive panoramic by Pierre-Yves Cruaud & fantastic squidgy animation by GG Tarantola as stand-outs. More micro to come.

by Sean Healy, February 20, 2004 0 comments

Tigers, Balls

Salvador Dali & David Lynch once collaborated on a fashion shoot, trying to make the world’s most expensive perfume commercial – for a fragrance rubbed under the balls. They never finished the project though, so the highpoint of testicle art in the twenty century is still attributed to artist Matthew Barney & his ‘Cremaster Cycle’ films ( More on that later ). Avoiding reproductive organs altogether ( none exist ), Austrian artist Robert Jelinek is hoping to reconstruct the pheromone scent of the long extinct Tasmanian Tiger and use this as a territorial fence of sorts for Tasmanian farmers. Presumably there’s also a future with it as a perfume additive.

Grappling with Biology
Humans have always lusted after immortality, but perhaps in less embarrassing ways. Google ‘extropians’ online and you’ll find a mostly Californian bunch of techno_evangelists, who want to transcend biology, and seriously expect to be uploading their consciousness to a hard drive within their lifetime. On the flipside, this week’s artists embrace rather than abandon biology – Matthew Barney uses technology to explore the biological mystery and complexity of testicles, & Robert Jelinek who aims to recreate the scent of a Tasmanian tiger.

Matthew Barney’s Gonads
Email me if I’m wrong, but slang for male genitalia seems to vastly outnumber that for female genitalia. ‘Gonads’ is one of my favourites for testicles, but presumably Matthew Barney has a vast library of ball-names, given he’s devoted nearly a decade of his life to a series of conceptual films about the rising and falling of testicles. We’re talking full-bodied epic art-house pieces here, that smell of the sort of funding it might take to travel to the moon, or at the least – conduct a mini-war on terrorism. Somewhere in the American arts hierarchy, somebody loves this guy’s balls.

The Cremaster Cycle Crash Course: Parts 1-5
Screening shortly in Sydney & Melbourne, here’s some of what to expect.
– Lots of Vaseline ( Barney fancies this as a sculpting medium ).
– A car crushed into an actual set of dentures.
– A drum solo by Dave Lombardo (ex-Slayer) accompanied by droning bees.
– Barney appearing himself, as alternately – serial killer, Diva, Magician, Giant, tap-dancing fool etc.
– the erection of New York’s Chrysler building.
– elevator cables used as a harp.
– A woman in a blimp feeding grapes through tubes to dance formations in the stadium beneath her
– Poseidon the sea god with a flock of doves attached to his scrotum by silk ribbons Etc

Clearly then, puppetry of the penis, this is not. And for the record – the ‘Cremaster Cycle’ refers to the cremaster muscle which controls the rise and fall of testicles in response to ‘external stimuli’. Boggle more @ www.cremaster.net

Melb_Screening:
Feb 8 @ ACMI, marathon 35mm print screening of all five parts, back to back. Solo sessions later.

Syd_Screening:
Saturday 6 & 20 March 2004
10.30am – 12.30pm Cremaster 1 & 2
1.30pm – 4.30pm Cremaster 3
5.00pm – 7.00pm Cremaster 4 & 5

Phantom Smells
Also fascinated with the reproductive process, albeit trying to artificially recreate it, scientists from the Australian Museum in Sydney have long been hatching plans to resurrect the extinct Tasmanian tiger, and to resettle it in the wild in 2010. More recently in this doggedly ambitious project, Austrian Robert Jelinek has been working with them to synthetically reproduce the bodily scent (pheromone) of
Australia’s missing carnivorous marsupial, the Tassie tiger.

Already a scent has been tested during a three-week artist visit in December 2002. Yellow ‘air fresheners’ spiked with the scent served as ‘bait’ and were hung on low-lying tree limbs and shrubs. The animals observed (wombats, kangaroos, foxes, sheep and rabbits) reacted to the scent as if the surrounding territory had been claimed by the Tasmanian tiger and avoided the area. Eventually the artist hopes the scent could be utilized in large quantities as a spray to establish invisible scent fences, helping farmers to secure their lands against constant fox and rabbit plagues without resorting to barbed wire and poisonous substances.

Scratch N Sniff: www.sabotage.at/News/tiger.html

by Sean Healy, February 5, 2004 0 comments

The New Price Is Riot

During annual sales at the world’s biggest shopping mall, crowds with medieval helmets and body armour gather frontside, hoping to swarm the specials without too much cranial damage. Similarly, modem-hunters and mouse-clickers lurk web-side, riding the ebbs and flows of say – the Australian dollar – waiting for the riot moment to pounce. Whaz on spesh, Elle?

Hitler Wine Vs Chopper Beer
Lunardelli, an Italian vino company ( www.vinilunardelli.it ) has launched a successful range of wines. The artistic series features bottles of wine with labels from Van Gogh, Picasso, Gustav Klimt etc. It’s their ‘historical’ series which is selling shitloads however, and especially their ‘Der Fuhrer range with Hitler in a variety of poses. What sorta hang-over that comes with you’ll have to ask the Germans. And south-side, we have our own Chopper Read first launching his own wine label, and now trying the market out with a ‘heavy beer’. Saw Chopper do a ‘comedy show’ a while back – brutal tales of the old ultraviolence, followed by busy photo shoots with a long line of aunties and uncles jostling to be flashed with their arms around him.

Saddam Sand
If you really, really don’t know what to do with your money – think about how great this’d look on your mantlepiece. An amazing ‘opportunity to own a piece of Iraqi and international history’. Apparently these entrepreneurs ( can you see them scheming this over a beer?) travelled North of Baghdad to a tiny farmhouse and got themselves some of the SAND where Saddam Hussein had buried himself in an underground chamber! What you get for your $US25 is … a limited edition commemorative presentation encompassing a small sample of sandy earth excavated from the hole that was Saddam�s last hiding place, a certificate of authenticity from a leading regional geologist, stating that the piece is genuine and actually from Al-Dawr and a plaque which states:
“GENUINE EARTH FROM AL-DAWR, IRAQ. TAKEN FROM THE HOLE USED AS A FINAL HIDING PLACE BY FORMER IRAQI PRESIDENT SADDAM HUSSEIN.” Hurry now, only 1,000 available.

Micropayments
When done with ordering all your alcohols, war memorabilia & DIY magic mushroom kits, videos of Japanese girls farting etc consider diverting some of your money-flows to some worthwhile and struggling independent artists, coders and organisations. Peeps everywhere be trying to squeeze an income from the web somehow, and ‘micropayments’ have long been touted as a way to make this happen. The hope being that if people were able to pay a very small amount for something they liked – liked 5 cents for an article they enjoyed, and it was very easy to do – like a click, then creators able to get enough readers / viewers / listeners might actually be able to scrape together an income out of that tally. This is also the principle behind shareware software – often coded by one person and made available for free, but requesting some small payment if the user finds the software useful.

The tricky bit is making it very easy for people to pay – and two online companies are trying their best to fill that gap : BitPass.com & PayPal.com. The way these work is that you purchase ‘cards’ or credit with them, which then allows you to click on sites which have bitpass or paypal logos and easily transfer a small amount of money from your account to theirs. For example, you could transfer some money over to www.e-sheep.com/spiders so that Patrick Farley can hurry along with his fantastic Al-Qaeda sci-fi-ish web-reality comic, ‘Spiders’. Tis a captivating story with really creative use of the web, with chapter 4 currently in production, and recommended viewing for any would-be online storytellers or designers.

Dodgy Brothas
Plenny-o-sharks in the money waters, be it Nigerians who need money transferred through your account, ‘banks’, credit card and webmail sites that want you to re-send your name and password for ‘security’ reasons ,or online auctioneers who want you to deposit money in a Western Union account in someone else’s name – when they see it is there they will send you the goods. If ever in doubt – who ya gonna call?
http://www.scambusters.org/Scambusters63.html

by Sean Healy, January 20, 2004 0 comments

Rock Hard Directions

On the krusty plains of the years ahead, lay a battered pair of mirrored shades. Zoom in like a mars probe and the curved reflective panorama reveals : our future is littered with spam. And so, some navigational strategies for the noise ahead.

Grasping The Situation
Not sure if you’ve heard the one about the disco-dancer who fell on a schooner glass, badly gashing his leg. Rushed to hospital by his friends, the emergency nurse couldn’t convince him to remove his pants for better access to the wound. Source of his reluctance turned out, of course, to be a rather large salami taped to the side of his thigh. Urban myth or not, I feel for this character. On NYE I’d decided to spend the following year aware of silver linings within dark clouds, and so upon later facing an inbox brimming with spam – I embraced all on offer and replied to every email. If you’d like to borrow a Paris Hilton video, I’ve got 36 copies on VHS, and 13 on DVD. I’ve already married 4 Russian ladies and thanks to a potent combination of lotions, creams, patches, pills, and herbal treatments, my penis is now 117 disco-dangerous inches long. I’m expecting most of the feeling will return when all bandages are removed, but swimming pools and tight jeans are out for now.

Adopt A Celebrity
Another way to embrace rather than suffer media overload, is to develop compassion for a front-page human. Next time you’re pushing a trolley full of soy sausages through the checkout, spend just a few minutes glancing over the tabloid mag covers to see who’s feeling the pain. Hard to go past Australia’s real-life croc-hunter at the moment, mostly because of unfair comparisons with the black-turned-white popstar with a penchant for baby-dangling. Once you’ve adopted, striking up conversations on public transport or in ATM queues becomes much more enjoyable, and you can enjoy subtly swinging to the defence of your fragile star eg “It’s not like he sleeps with the crocodiles is it? And I mean, really – have you ever tried to molest a 1000 pound reptile?” Of course popstars with rare skin diseases are also suitable adoptees.

Leave It All Behind
Your eyeballs have already been extended 170 million kilometres if you’ve browsed recent snaps from our Mars robot, so if you wheelie, wheelie wanna getz away from the advertising debris – why not join them? The DIY Space Travel expertise of The Association of Autonomous Astronauts should help you along nicely – but you’ll first face a few obstacles. Namely, you’ll have to figure out a way to get past the upcoming Aussie Star Wars Missile Defence System (code-named Woolly Woofta) and before that – you’ll have to wrestle with the proposed Australian microchip passports (true) to get yourself outta customs.

Sticking Around
If you decide to stay, your ride will be best enjoyed if the other passengers are also comfortable. Deeper rooted way to reduce terrorism too. Kevin Kelly is a Californian, but he also has some good ideas about ‘leveraging’ your donations in the best way. Based on critieria of aiming to help those with the least, where small makes a huge difference, of a gift expanding itself and having global range, he has built a short list of exemplary organisations who are helping improve the lives of many people. Scroll down past the gadget-fetishes at his homepage for more details: http://www.kk.org/cooltools/

by Sean Healy, January 5, 2004 0 comments

The 2003 Technoscape Inflatables

Terror of a year that it was, let the history books show that not everybody spent 2003 intent on blowing up neighbours they believed also possessing blow-up materials. Some air and lips please, to those carving their own path, and in particular to the following outstanding celebrants of imagination.

Machine Poet Of The Year : DJ Krush @ Prince of Wales, St Kilda
Flanked by two large screens showing his fluid and wandering child-like hands, the turntable samurai bewitched an already whooping crowd with a a sublime display of liquid beats, morphing textures and relentless bass hooks of his own that spanned decades. With the aid of the cameras on the untiring hands, sounds presumed to be digital FX could instead be understood as turntable riffs, the particular motions and patterns repeated as often as needed. Redefined in my mind, what a remarkable interface the turntable can be. Stunning.

Animated Discovery of The Year : Run Wrake ( .com)
Has been chugging for years as you can see on his site, but I only discovered his crazed yet composed, coherent animations a few months ago. Dense with clever and playful screen excitement, Run Wrake’s work covers a huge spectrum of styles from lo-fi photocopied textures through to hi-fi 3D modelling, and all somehow in a way that gels together. Some music video clips of his include ‘We Have explosive’ for Future Sound Of London, and a bunch for Howie B and others. So consistently inventive it kinda makes you wanna have a little lie down.

Fast Filmer: Virgil Widrich
This’ll make you want to go to sleep entirely. 65,000 frames of a film referencing 400+ movies, were individually printed out, then folded into origami, then rephotographed and combined to make a 10 minute short film which is quite unlike anything else I’ve seen. Check out the process here ; http://www.widrichfilm.com/fastfilm/

Cut N Pastry Sushi Pop Award: Sutekh @ Opera House
After being introduced by Sub Bass Luke as having the ‘largest max patch I’ve ever seen’, Sutekh proceeded to finely milk the opera house sound system, building an initially luscious soundscape into a cascading and eclectic range of sound aesthetics, before glitch-hopping home like a rodeo jukebox king. A gorgeously crafted set of sonics with plenty of fang.

Bootylicious Corey-Oh Graphics Award:
Ladies of Da League: Tour of Booty @ This Is Not Art, NCL
Any show that features a professional skipper who seems to bounce her ass off the ground over a high-speed skipping rope, followed by all manner of moves pulled from some blend of breakdancing, martial arts & aerobics – and all involving a skipping rope in some way – is already an attention grabber. When combined with 20-30 girls skipping through a range of comedy routines and solid day-time drama, complete with a fight scene that’d make Bruce Lee proud and slow-motion war scenes to boot – the effect is somewhat transcendental.

Dual Plover gig @ Electrofringe
On a night where Curse oV Dialect, Team Plastique, Suicidal Rap Orgy brought together the mashiest of Melbz, Syd & Briz, funny that a normal looking family would outweird them all. And god Bless The Von Trapp family – for who else will perform on stage with dad sawing his way through a guitar, mum, smashing records, and a little boy with giant headphones placing toys such as chattering teeth atop a snare drum, and being urged by his mum to go and smash an egg over papa’s head? As they rush offstage, yolk dripping down pappa’s ponytail, I wondered whether I would ever witness something like it again?

Notable Mentions
-Monolake’s sunrise set at an outdoor party in Brisbane, Berlin-head bobbing away beside a tree as people lay on the ground dribbling behind him…
-Amon Tobin’s dark sci-fi sounds finally getting a good bass workout…
-Waffa Bin Laden – the niece of Osama, was reported earlier in the year to be considering a record deal. Apparently she is studying law, likes to ‘party @ clubs and wear mini-skirts’ and doesn’t like her uncle very much. Stay tuned.
-The inventors behind meowlingual / bowlingual & babylingual devices invented for Asian speech research companies – which supposedly translate what cats, dogs and now babies mean by their various yelps.

by Sean Healy, December 20, 2003 0 comments