Writing - Page 112 of 130

4 Imaginary Websites

Certain perverse pleasures exist in finding that the web’s reach encompasses even our most trivial and banal of thoughts, ideas, obsessions. Almost like – the weirder the obsession webbed, the more it rekindles faith in humanity as a limitlessly diverse set of oddballs. There’s still plenty of unchartered territory though, so here’s a few ideas for any wannabe domain name hustlers and web-entrepreneurs. Can you believe no-one has these URLS yet?

dalai-lama-groupies.org
As well as surely a fascinating documentary, following a gaggle of globe-trotting women between Buddhist conferences the world over, there is muchos merit in these would-be web hills too. Word is, that his holiness is chased by wannabe wives across the planet. Remember the plaster-casterers of the 60s? This is what we get 21C style. Kinda reminds me of that Monty Python skit for some reason – where a man gets to choose his method of execution and ends up being chased off the top of a cliff by all these topless (rollerskating?) women. The poor Dalai~! Shuffling along in his robe trying to find some peace, and all of these fee-mails trying to nail his ass. Maybe it’s more than physical – perhaps they feel he speaks to them directly, them alone? Maybe there was an article about the sexiness of shiney domes in Vogue sometime ago? Think of all the website features you could include – and a members only section with paparazzi ginseng bath shots.

arnie-loves-tofu.com
The scoop the world’s bean waiting for. Son of an Austrian soy bean farmer, the world’s most famous strongman derived his strength from a childhood carrying sacks of soy, and a steady diet of bean-curd delights. Realising at an early age that much more land and resources were needed to sustain a population with beef than with soy, the young Schwarzenegger boy decided to terminate his association with mass-produced red meat. With 6 billion people onboard, and another 3 expected by 2050, Arnold decided that promoting his brand of strength and fitness wasn’t enough to swing around our dietary habits. And so a health conscious California was chosen, Hollywood infiltrated, and a marriage into the Kennedy family preparing his next step. Stay tuned for the Governator’s radical soy bean farmer subsidies, cattle ranch reforestation and food redistribution programs. And really – who wouldn’t want to be Arnie’s webmistress? Arnie loves tofu – spread the word.

germancannibals.net
Can you believe this guy? Apparently he placed an ad looking for someone to mutilate, then eat, all in front of a video camera. But what’s weirder – that someone could place an ad – or that someone answered it, and volunteered, consented to it all. He was looking for his second ‘victim’ when discovered by German police. An undoubted cult in the making, and imagine – by jumping quickly – you could be the proud owner of such prime web real estate~! The Germans have also been in the Quirk News lately for Porno Karaoke – where couples simulate the sounds and ‘lines’ of classic adult movies being projected and the audience votes on the best simulators. Combine these two ideas into the one website, and you’re probably the next web-Tarantino.

by Sean Healy, December 20, 2003 0 comments

The New Aussie Siesta

This week, a gift for all bored activists, motivated hedonists & believers in a better Australia : a new royalty, tax and copyright free campaign for you to run wild with. Consider it your own to bend as you please : a campaign for an Australian siesta.

Advancing Australia
I had a dream…. around midday yesterday. This wouldn’t have happened without deciding to enjoy a freelancer’s siesta, a little noon-day nap away from the summer heat. And the dream was one of a giant hammock, large enough to fit 22 million people, generously shaded by coconut and mango trees. If you can measure the quality of a society by it’s leisure time, then surely we should have come further over the last 40,000 / 200 years? Who do you want to be today Australia? If they took away your leisure time, let’s be stealing it back.

Solar Century Behaviour
In case you missed it, the end of the 20th century brought with it some of the hottest years in recorded history. More than half of the world’s Nobel prize winning scientists agreed that this was the result of global warming, a condition we will continue to face for many decades to come. Part of a solution to this involves shifting from fossil fuels to solar power, and another is getting out of the bloody midday sun – and winding down the industrial machine from 11am until 2pm every day in summer. It’s bad enough that we continue to design Australian houses more suited to the English climate, but tis even dafter that we organise ourselves in the cities around patterns of work and play that don’t accomodate our local living conditions. Bring on the siesta and watch our cities spring to life – becoming living areas rather than transit zones between the factory and the accountant.

Do It for The Economy
Think of all the Aussie pillow manufacturers who would benefit from a siesta. All of the grinning cafe and restaurant owners. The hammock knitters, massage therapists, swimming pool operators, roller skate hirers and motel managers. Tuesday’s work still happens on Tuesday – it’ll just be with a bigger gap in the middle where we can enjoy ourselves. Not that you have to work later if you don’t want to – in a society where we are continuously training machines to do our work, we are always going to have large unemployed numbers. And so people who want to work less hours should become national heros, selfless citizens creating employment for others. Stay out of the midday sun, work less hours, create more jobs.

Bring On The Hammocks
It won’t happen overnight, but it may happen. Write letters to senators, appeal to your bosses, your unions – but more importantly, take matters into your own hands. See if you can cut back on your work hours around lunchtime. Get yourself a medical certificate that says you can’t work when it’s over 34 degrees. Bring a pillow to work. Fall asleep on the job. Organise public sleeping parties in prominent locations. The options are endless, so get creative. Together we can end this midday slavery.

by Sean Healy, December 20, 2003 0 comments

VDMXX 4.0 Review

A baby has been conceived after two contestants had sex on the Danish version of Big Brother. Presumably this kid will be effected by TV ratings as much as the astrological heavens. And obviously it’s only a matter of time before someone is conceived during a VJ mix. But what software for such an occasion? A leading contender would have to be VDMXX 4.0, video mixing software from vidvox.net, with an intuitive, versatile interface and fluid rhythm control.

What is VDMXX?
Advanced video mixing software that allows you to mix movies from your hard drive together, blend in live camera input, add effects and use a variety of tools (such as audio analysis ) to control the playback and style of your video. Essentially it delivers 3 windows on the top of your computer screen, with the middle window representing your mix, and what is being fed out to the projector, the left and right windows representing the sources being mixed. Below each window are a range of controls for effecting / transforming the clips.

Versatility
As soon as the new VDMXX interface loads up, you can begin to smell it’s flexibility. Smooth and well-refined, the interface is broken up into several components, each of which can be shown or hidden as needed. The components come in 4 flavours:

Sources – movie players, live camera input, font, gradient & noise generators
Processors – FX buses, mixer controls ( eg cut, blend, layer modes ), & recording buffers
Outputs – preview windows, record to disk & full screen output controls
Controllers – audio analysis, motion tracking, master clock, sequencer ( vidi-yo break-beat anyone?) , shuttle pro, waveform oscillators, midi, mouse control of x,y axis

VDMXX also includes a matrixx router, which is a way of connecting the above items together, or sequencing the order they connect in. Different matrixx settings let you approach and optimise your video differently. How do you want to play today?

Fluidity
VDMXX manages a great blend of automated and manual controls – meaning you can slave certain effects and processes to auto-responsive controls such as audio analysis, the tempo or a range of event triggers within the program, and still manually fine tune other elements as you go. All of the effects, mixer and timing controls have manual controls – ie knobs or sliders on the screen – but a strength of the program is that any of these parameters can also be connected to and controlled by other elements. Almost anything clickable within the interface has a popup menu which allows you to control the parameter values by bpm, by oscillating waves, or by frequency of bass, mid or high notes. Rather than simply turning on a motion blur filter, you can have a clip which blurs in time with the music, or gets more or less blurry as slow or fast as you want. All of the effects also have wet and dry mixes ( which can also be controlled in many ways ). Time-based controls allow you to automate chop and change arrangements of a clip such as cutting to a random location within the clip every quarter of a bar, or stuttering slightly forwards then backwards every eight of a bar, or changing clip speed every 2 bars.

Udder Features
Live camera input can be used as one mixing source, and includes a nice time delay function for playing with live camera feeds. A gradient synthesiser creates dynamic gradients for blending on the fly, and the font synth cycles through text – which when using dingbats can create great masks or layers.
The audio analysis is quite advanced and lets you fine tune each frequency so you can isolate say particular kick drums and use them as triggers. Video analysis looks at one particular source and generates values based on it, which you can use elsewhere. And you can assign any of the onscreen commands to either midi or keys on your computer, customising the way you would like to trigger the program.

Performance
VDMXX comes with an exxtensive manual, including a large section on optimising your computer to deal with such an intensive video processing load. Amongst it’s recommendations are to use 320×240 clips (though it can play full res if you have the speed), using a ram disk rather than running clips from the hard drive, and to use a compression codec which doesn’t need to be heavily decompressed for playback such as photojpeg or motion jpeg. Bearing this in mind, VDMXX seems to crank on a 1 ghz machine even using heavily compressed sorenson clips. At times of peak load it can prioritise the output screen over the interface etc so that the output video is as smooth as possible. This can also be monitored within the interface, showing how many frames per second you are outputting, and how much processor load is being taken up, allowing you to cut FX when they are taking up too much. Another nice touch is a ‘tweening’ function, where if the frame rate slips low, VDMXX can blur and blend between frames rather than having jerky stop start motion.

Requirements:
$250 US, which is around 366.54 AUD
G4 Processor – MacOS X 10.2.4+, QuickTime 6, 512+ MB RAM

Verdict
It’s da bomb, and now that it’s stable on OSX, and includes capacity for 3rd party plugins, should only continue to improve in leaps and pixel bounds.

by Sean Healy, December 20, 2003 4 Comments

Under the Resfest Bonnet

“Just got in from Tokyo and still suffering jet lag”. Like all good film festival directors though, Jonathan Wells still managed time to zap across an update about Resfest, the upcoming short film fest @ ACMI in Melbourne, Dec 4 – 8. More details (and well worth your bookmarking) at www.resfest.com, where you’ll catch a quite cool and expansive range of short films, articles and DVDs.

How many short films do you watch a year?
2000… I have a pretty good idea if a film will work for RESFEST in the first couple minutes. It has probably made we weary of sitting through festival screenings of 2 hour shorts programs if the overall work is not strong, usually you discover one or two great films but it can be hard to get to them.

The last time a short film made you drop your jaw?
It happens every year… This year it was Perfect Human: Cartoon, last year it was Terminal Bar.

Which of this years crop especially strike a personal chord with you?
Too many to mention in the music video category… The Michel Gondry program as a whole is mindblowing (though I love La Tour de Pise because it was an early French piece that hadn’t been seen elsewhere). Some favorite shorts: David Ellis’ Letter to the President, Virgil Widrich’s FAST FILM, The Winner of RESFEST 2003 by Johan Kramer (OK I was a sucker for this one), The Japanese Tradition: Relationships by Junji Kojima and Kentaroh Kobayashi, Treevil / dir: Christer Lindstrom, Aino Ovaskainen, Aiju Salminen, The Other Final / dir: Johan Kramer.

Any favourite DIY submissions?
In 1996, Eric Henry worked at Kinko’s (a photocopy shop) to earn money to buy his first Mac – a Powermac 6100, barely capable of video. Yet he turned out an amazing film ‘Wood Technology’ that we premiered at RESFEST 1997 and it went on to win multiple awards at various festivals.

What have been disappointing patterns amongst your submissions?
Imitation – one year it was Blair Witch another it was Tarantino. Actually we’ve had no such obvious trends in the last 2 years.

Australian works you’ve included during any of the Resfestz?
From the top of my head: Gregory More & Mathan Ratinam’s ‘THUMPA’ in the By Design program this year. Peter McDonald’s ‘Harvey’ in 2001, ‘Are you normal enough?’ by Richard Grant in 2000.

The limitations of music video as a form, and who is stretching them?
Someone is paying for the bill, some of these people don’t think a music video should be a piece of art rather just a commercial to sell their artist. Michel Gondry, Chris Cunningham, Spike Jonze, Jonathan Glazer, Mike Mills… The usual suspects.

I thought the Daft Punk feature film : INTERSTELLA 5555 was really lame – why’d you choose it?
Electronic music video has always been a popular and key component of RESFEST. We’ve also show anime works at the festival over the years. However successful or unsuccessful it was we want to encourage experimentation in filmmaking. This film had its detractors but also hit a chord with a good deal of our audience.

Your thoughts on the regional encoding scheme for DVDs? ( I noticed Resfest dvds are all region )
I think it is rubbish. Which is why I bought a multi-region DVD player that can play PAL or NTSC DVDs. I can view a website anywhere in the world, listen to a CD purchased anywhere in the world, read a book purchased anywhere in the world… Studios need to catch up with reality and do simultaneous release.

What do you think of ‘Micropayment’s, an often suggested way of satisfying artists and online audiences?
I like it and obviously many are imitating Apple’s ITunes store. We need to continue to think of new solutions that reward artists for their work.

What are the challenges of DVD distribution & how are your titles going?
It is a challenge to market short film compilations. The DVDs are most often purchased at the festival itself. They also have been very popular in Asia, where I think shops and buyers can be more open minded about innovative products.

Why the lack of short films to watch on the Resfest site?
We over short QuickTime samples of films from previous years fests, and will add them soon for 2003 programs. Mostly we want people to view the films on the large screen at the fest or on our DVD compilations where the quality can be top notch.

What’s the Resfest criteria & selection process ? ( & When is your deadline for 2004?)
Early deadline is April 30th. Criteria – produced in the last 12 months and ideally something very creative, innovative with a great story. Selections are made by the editorial staff of RES Magazine.

What sort of Resfest events can Melbournians look forward to outside of screenings?
There’s a filmmaker brunch planned, but I’m hoping to have some locals show me the town (last night we had an amazing closing party for RESFEST Tokyo in a shoebox sized bar with 100 chandeliers and 4 mooseheads). We hope to return next year with a multi-media extravaganza in Federation Square itself.

by Sean Healy, December 8, 2003 Comments Off on Under the Resfest Bonnet

People Like Us, George Soros & Love Bytes

Let’s throw collage artist Vicki Bennett, philanthropist billionaire George Soros and a Sheffield UK new_media festival together in a hot-tub. Aside from the suds, what do they have in common? They believes, I believe, in the phrase ‘To give is to receive’.

George Vs George
74-year-old George Soros has an estimated $7 billion up his sleeve, accumulated through a controversial career of International investments, and has authored eight books dealing with democracy, globalisation and contemporary society. He also likes to give away lots of his money to various causes. His latest cause? Dethroning the current US President in next year’s elections. So far he’s given $5 million to MoveOn.org, a left-wing group dedicated to combating the US President’s policies, and $US10 million to America Coming Together, a new group aiming to “defeat George W. Bush and elect progressive candidates all across America”. Believing that Bush was “leading the US and the world toward a vicious circle of escalating violence”, he declares the 2004 presidential vote is “a matter of life and death.” (www.soros.org ) On a similar tip, a couple of Swedish activists have launched Democracy Aid 2004 – noting that ‘not only US citizens should have a say in the election of the ruler of the entire globe’ ( http://hem.passagen.se/democracyaid ).

People Like Us
Vicki Bennett aka PLU, has just offered her entire back catalogue for free download. This includes a gorgeous live album with matmos & wobbly, and several short films ( also available through the fantastic free movie archives at www.moviearchive.org ). All of her content is governed by a Creative Commons licence which means it’s also open to re-use and sampling.

Files here: http://www.peoplelikeus.org/
Reasons for giving here:

“We strongly believe in the power of profit through free distribution, and the publicity that comes along with that – so we are putting our money where our mouse is. Often people have never heard of an artist because they aren’t being distributed through as many channels as they should be, due to the very poor state of music/media distribution for non-major label music coupled with ignorance of the way that avant garde art forms infiltrate mainstream culture. Also many prints of a work are allowed to go out of circulation or are deleted for no reason other than cost effectiveness by a label/publisher. This makes perfect sense financially, but no sense whatsoever that a year’s work by an artist should also disappear for such reasons. So get all of this while you can, and we completely endorse getting one’s work out there, no matter what. If you don’t share, your profit is limited.”

Volatile Media
Giving it up for Sheffield, the Lovebytes crew have been organising annual new media festivals since 1994. Most recently they’ve started releasing companion DVD’s to go with the festival, and if you find yourself with the 2002 edition, ‘Volatile Media’, you might come across the following enticers:
‘We Edit Life’ – a funny and charming 10 minute digital video collage by People Like Us – the DVD’s highlight, ‘Freefactory’ – an audiovisual improvisational tool that combines the talents of Freeform ( Simon Pyke ) & The Designer’s Republic, ‘There was a girl / There was a boy’ – gender put under the microscope of Terre Thaemlitz, and an interesting video music composition by Alex Peverett – ‘Soft Ocean Hotel’. There’s also a selection of videos showcasing / documenting the festival itself, some DVD Rom animated action, and a few other video works. It’s an intriguing collection, if maybe a bit disappointing given the calibre of artists commissioned to produce work for it. Or perhaps the works just don’t hang together that well. Still, an enjoyable release and hopefully repeated next year. Copies and more info available ear: www.lovebytes.org.uk.

Give it up~!

by Sean Healy, November 19, 2003 0 comments