American Psycho Interview

Near chewed my fingernails clean off waiting for the interview. Been waiting for six months, then finally a window of opportunity. Meant chatting on the solarium intercom, and half an hour tanning my precious ass, but(t) it was a price worth paying to snare this scoop for 3D.

How did you get started?
A lot of hard work, blood sweat and tears, but who needs sob stories? Get over it already. You want the golden rule of getting where I am today? Them that has the gold makes the rules. Fucking buy the ladder instead of climbing it.

How have you become such a successful bedroom producer?
Most people are quite surprised to say the least, when they see the array of modern technology I have in my bedroom. I find having it all within easy reach, really opens up the possibilities for creatively generating extreme sounds.

What technology are you using at the moment?
The new black and decker range is impressive, continuing their attention to detail and precision control mechanisms. And cordless power drills just keep getting smaller, but too slowly – can you believe it? I’m still waiting for a model that’ll finally fit in your goddamn pocket, you’d think it was the 17th century or something sometimes. I might get my secretary to research the size of Japanese models actually.

What do you think about virtualisation, and the continued shift from hardware to software?
Some mobile data devices ares quite good. For example, the extendable metallic aerials on the older nokia mobile phones are very handy. And fuck the anti-cancer zealots. Anyone who can’t afford a decent tumour removalist deserves the pain.

Your thoughts on the emerging ‘visuals’ scene?
Visualisation has always played a strong part in my work. I’m really starting to savour methodical processes and the way things are done rather than the end result, and it pleases me greatly to visualise each step of these processes in exquisite detail.

Other artists you’d love to collaborate with?
I think it would be difficult for me to collaborate with somebody else, I have very strong ideas which I like to execute in very, very, very particular ways. Some people might find that anally obsessive, but when I get properly engaged with my work, I don’t think anyone would understand my reactions to their interferences. People have no idea how goddamn hard it is to be an artist with misunderstood ideas. But I have faith the world will recognise my work and my special abilities sooner or later, I just know I’m gonna have my fifteen minutes in the goddamn spotlight.

Music of late?
Apparently the Huey Lewis & The News twelve inch remixes are a must, I’ve ordered them all. I quite like twelve inches, and that these are on an obscure white label is also a bonus. Sets me apart from the other plebs in the office. Some people have no idea how to buy fashion.

Your thoughts on the OZ electronic arts scene?
It’s not the states or even the UK, so who gives a shit? A legal colleague told me at a cocktail party he was bidding for Michael Hutchence’s belt on ebay. Thought that was kinda cool, but I told him he was full of shit.

You haven’t heard of Bloody Fist?
Who the fuck are they? Sound like some sort of pornographic boxing film makers.

Any plans for Australian tours?
I don’t visit countries with leaders under 6ft. That’s a joke. Seriously though, do you have to have a leader with Hitler moustaches for eyebrows? I mean, what sort of impression does that give to other trading nations? For christsake – if you can’t import a decent goddamn French or Italian image consultant, how can you expect to run a whole goddamn country? Why the fuck don’t all your CEO’s get together and vote someone else in?

Sidebars:
www.rtmark.com
Nice place to catch an American psycho with their pants down. Well, if satirical George Bush sites are your cuppa tea, you’ll find much to amuse here anyway.

www.bloodyfist.com.au
Newcastle’s finest pornographic boxing film makers, complete with mp3 downloads.

www.bodymechanics.net/welcome2.htm
Survival in the city wearing you down? DNA imcompatible with GST and SMS? Enjoy some downtime, with these massage techniques designed to relax and sooth even the hypersensitives and itchy triggered. Be who you want to be.

by Sean Healy, July 5, 2003 0 comments

Rewiring Extinction

This week, no small task – rewiring the greatest delete key of them all. An attempted reanimation of debates about extinction. And in the face of such a large beast swooping down on us, all we can hope for today is a work in progress, but at least, let us hope, this can be a kind of rewritable excursion. An extinction list then, of beings, machines and hybrid combinations.

tas tiger

Cute & Pretty Animals
These are actually called ’emblem species’ by some scientists, referring to the ways eco-lobbyists use cuties to appeal to the general public’s heart strings whilst aiming to conserve larger ecologies. This means that while koalas and dolphins are hanging in there ok ( well not all dolphins), plenty of uglier animals with their own important roles to play within the eco-system, are getting shafted. Sometimes the handsome ones have to take it on the chin too, such as the last Tasmanian tiger, who died alone in captivity in 1936. There’s a preserved tassie tiger foetus in the Hobart museum, and they’re hoping to recreate one by 2010 with DNA samples. While such Jurassic Park schemes are fascinating, The WWF ( not the wrestlers) put it bluntly: “At present rates of extinction , as many as 20% of the world’s 7-15 million species could be gone in the next 30 years.”

The Military Industrial Entertainment Complex
Presumably CDs & DVDs will be eventually relegated to the dustbins of history, given tech+media acceleration of late. Maybe they’ll find some retro respect and delayed redundance, who knows? A more interesting query: how long will the current systems set up to distribute these discs last, before caving in on themselves? Is Mp3 really the new radio? DivX the new cinema? Does this mean our grandkids’ll ask – what’s a record company? What’s a video rental store? There’s too much money in them there hills, for the data networks to miss out on developing, so although the methods of distribution and pie-slicing are in the midst of giant transitions, and change inevitable, there’ll undoubtedly remain pie slicers of some sort for the foreseeable future.

Even More Species
5 -10 million African elephants existed in 1930. Around half a million remained when they were added to the international list of the most endangered species in 1989. 1900 saw about 100,000 cheetah worldwide – present estimates place their number at 10,000 -15,000 with about one tenth of those living in captivity. Of the dozens of species of rhino that once roamed the earth, only 5 now exist. Where there were once over 100,000 black rhinos on the plains of Africa, there are now only 2,707 on the entire continent. Many more number games available online of course, but they all boil down to the same thing : we are wiping out more species than any time since the dinosaurs disappeared, neither a healthy or smart practice.

Music Containing Distorted Guitars
Is unlikely to disappear anytime before the mass media regime collapses, but there are other more interesting considerations for the guitar. Reanimating the exquisitely quirky corpse of everybody’s secretly favourite band, might be possible if we can say, somehow extract juice from recordings the Pixies have left behind. Some future maths head after anally analysing these discs, could concoct a series of algorhythms for producing endless genetic variations of music the Pixies might’ve made. Presumably with a lame filter to dramatically reduce it’s quality after 10 albums. For now, we can only face the music – the Pixies are gone. Kaput. Vamoosh. Extinguished. No more chances to witness live, Frank Black croon/ creak / rasp / threaten like a sad punk :

“I smeehhll smoooke that comes from a gun named extinction”.

Of course, where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

Fanning the Flames
As members of the species most effectively extinguishing others, it’s a mighty ripe time for behaviour modifcation. Scientists and technologists can also save us. All they have to do to turn back the tide of extinction, is invent a machine which stops crucial habitat destruction, limits human population growth, evens out our distribution of goods and foods, our wealth, and curbs human greed. The internet can be the loudspeaker on such a machine.

Arm wrestling with ghost limbs
Ghost limbs are what you get, when say an Afghanistani landmine claims one of yours and a lingering sensation sometimes convinces you that you really still have all limbs, really you do. This phenomenon really exists too, really it does. Some nervous system cache perhaps? At any rate, arm wrestling with ghost limbs is yet to exist, and thus is at no risk of going extinct. Never mind.

Humans?

by Sean Healy, June 27, 2003 0 comments

Cinematic Orchestra DVD

If DVDs were migratory birds, then we should reasonably expect there’d be all manner of experimental audiovisual discs gliding across the skies by now, showing no respect to national borders and glistening in and out of our lives. Why isn’t this the case? Leaving aside the horrendous distribution splicing of the globe into ‘regions’, which stops DVDs from one region playing in another, there seems to be a lack of creative harnessing of the DVD’s technical potential. For the most part we get feature films with added behind the scene commentaries, but thankfully the likes of the Cinematic Orchestra are slowly swelling the alt.dvd shelf.

Orchestral Manouevres in the Dark
The ever-stealthy Ninja Tune cats have long been enamoured by the flickering of lights. Knowing the label was founded by av pioneers ColdCut probably explains their enthusiasm for shifting the territory of album releases to include films with soundtracks, much audiovisual clippery, and even software to splice it up. Neotropic, Funky Porcini & Hexstatic have all delivered tasty av in recent years, and you can now add The Cinematic Orchestra to that list – with their just released ‘Man with a Movie Camera’ DeeVeeDee.

Dziga Dziga Dziga
While that sorta reads like someone transcribing an early scratch record, it does in fact allude to the infamous director behind the 1929 Soviet celluloid classic, The Man with a Movie Camera, a film which uses radical editing techniques and cinematic pyrotechnics to portray a typical day in Moscow from dawn to dusk. Dziga Vertov was part of the Kino Eye movement of Soviet film-makers who wanted to create cinema different to literature or theatre, an artform that transformed our perspectives of the everyday with the unique capacity of the camera and technique to show us the world anew. To create a cinema that had its own “rhythm, one lifted from nowhere else, and we find it in the movements of things.” And Dziga Dziga Dziga ( whok whok whoooook ) especially loved to explore the ways technology and the mechanical enhanced our lives, extending our vision by strapping his camera in all manner of weird places to take our eyes where they had not been before – such as the underside of moving trains etc etc.

Red Curtains Then
In late 1999, Ol Cinematic J Swinscoe was asked by the Portuguese festival organisers if the band wanted to score a soundtrack to Dziga Dziga’s movie, and the seeds were sown for a 21st century soundtrack to what has become a landmark film. Quite an undertaking, and one with a certain responsibility to do it justice. Where perhaps in the spirit of Dziga Dziga zigzag, we might expect the soundtrackers to explore the use of machines to take our ears someplace new. And indeed, the laid back jazzy swerve of the Cinematic Rock Opera is imbued with a restrained amount of machinic manipulated sound. They’ve been performing it live in cinemas to rave reviews everywhere, and the disc also includes a few snippets of these performances which look and sound a treat indeed. the Disc is great value though – bringing a classic film with soundtrack worth listening to by itself, interviews, edited remixes of the movie, various live grabs, super8 versions and biographies etc. Check it out thru ninjatune.net

by Sean Healy, June 19, 2003 0 comments

Slum Theme Parks

Technological abundance in modern cities often deludes us into thinking that surely everywhere, people have enough food and shelter. And yet even within the same city living conditions can vary dramatically, and in an even more pronounced way between countries. By 2050 it looks like we’ll have 9 billion people breathing, three people for every two breathing now. Bear in mind most of those will live in cities, while checking the urban thermometers below.

Part I : New York City
“The ‘Broken Window’ theory states that unapprised disorder is a sign that noone cares and actually invites both further disorder and more serious crime, and has been a cornerstone of the New York City Mayor’s governing and crime fighting strategies. ”

Is the window actually broken? Though stylised hip-hop graffiti has flowed the world over, NYC remains as a kind of centre of gravity for it all. In 2003 graffiti almost seems a natural part of the urban landscape, and mostly unthinkable as a punishable crime, let even considered a ‘broken window’ or ugliness / vandalism. In their book ‘Broken Windows’ – documenting the history of NYC graffiti, authors James & Karla Murray have taken the time to extensively map it’s rise and development, exploring aesthetic techniques, social / cultural histories and society’s changing perceptions of graf. Text is juggled of course, alongside 180 full colour, wide-style pages which offer a heavily saturated panoramic (and often fold-out) excursion into the artform draped all over the walls, subways and trains of NYC.

Most of the book’s words belong to graf writers themselves, chunky quotes resonating beside spreads of the graf pieces themselves. This lends a friendly, community feel to the book, with the collective voices echoing each other’s passion, excitement, and perspectives. The anecdotes also trace the edges of an ongoing battle between authorities and artists about the legitimacy of graf, and the legalities of art, property & public space. With page after page of quotes and spreads, it’s hard not to be swept away, caught in the fever of adding colour to the everyday, of transforming urban decay, the play of the spray.

‘Broken Windows’ is out now thru gingkopress.com ( oz distro – bookwise.com.au )

Part II : The Rest of The World
On a more literal tip, Habitat for Humanity International have created an actual ‘Slum theme park’ ( see www.habitat.org ), with the aim of showing tourists a look at the world’s worst slums. Habitat are a US based Christian ministry dedicated to eliminating poverty housing, with it’s founder Millard Fuller keen to expose Americans to the problems in other countries as well as environmentally and culturally appropriate housing solutions. What’s it like to visit?
“You’ll come out of the (Habitat) center and walk right into a slum. You’ll see the kind of pitiful living conditions so many people in the world have.” After touring mock slums from Africa, Asia and Central America, visitors to the Global Village will see examples of the modest homes Habitat builds in those regions.
“You see what a steep improvement acceptable housing makes in someone’s life. We think we’ll recruit a lot of volunteers this way,” Fuller said.

In the 6-acre attraction, guests travel to the Habitat homes of 15 countries in Africa, Asia and Central America and participate in hands-on activities such as brick and tile making. Hosts and guides describe the lives and customs of families around the world and re-create scenes with guests that include tribal welcomes in Ghana or villager meetings in Fiji. Demonstration Habitat homes include a hurricane-resistant stone home in Haiti, a Guatemalan house of concrete and steel, a pressed-earth brick home in Kenya and a wood home on stilts in Papua, New Guinea. The village eventually will expand to 35 houses, including those from poor European and South American regions, all with different building styles that demonstrate housing solutions. Since 1976 with its affiliates in 3,000-plus communities and 87 nations, Habitat has built more than 125,000 homes with partner families with no-profit, zero-interest mortgages.

by Sean Healy, June 19, 2003 0 comments

MIAF 2003 : Lindsay Cox + Victor Holder Interview

scrash
Homegrown digital animation is becoming easier and easier to implement – from using flash to create Southpark style cut-out animation, through to the home computer’s growing range of image manipulation & VJ tools. See for yourself at the showcase of computer assisted animations within the Melbourne International Animation Festival (Jun 24-29 ) ( later repeated in Sydney). Or tear up the screen, throw out the traditional rule book, and animate some of your own ideas – like Lindsay Cox, who with Victor Holder, co-directed ‘S-Crash’ – an Australian hi-light of the M.I.A.F.:

Your animation in a nutshell, Lindsay ?
An ambitious DJ plays loud beats to the annoyance of his irritable neighbors : let the battles commence – the DJ uses sampling technology to mix his neighbours complaints into an ever louder and aggressive soundtrack. Co-directors – Lindsay Cox & Victor Holder. Sound by Marco Biasion, Lindsay & Victor.

What processes did you go through to make it?
S-crash began as a white gloves entry – meaning it was planned, and shot in one weekend. That deadline forced us to think of ways to convey a story using the simplest and quickest of animation techniques. Using 16mm and Black & White reversal film with an intervalometer advancing the frame every 2 seconds we were able to improvise in very slow motion much of the action. We’d stop the camera often to talk of the next section but many times we’d talk about what was happening as we did it. Using our pixillated silhouettes allowed for a margin of error also – although we had no monitor we’d look often look sideways to make sure the image was clear enough. After telecine transfer (thanks Iloura!) the film was tailor cut for the Berlin Short Film festival section called ‘3 minute quickies’ to the theme of ‘neighbors’. The sound was recorded and the images tweaked in After Effects to roughly fit the tracks. Foley was quickly added. Total production time was no more than 5 days. The name S-crash came via co-director Victor Holder, who suggested ‘Scratch’ but his Venezuelan accent made it sound more like ‘s-crash’. The distorted name suits the remix idea so it stuck. It was also 4am at the time.

Employment & the animator – do they mix well?
There are so many big players out there yet some people fall between the cracks. I mean there are many talented people out there working other jobs because they don’t fit the commercial profile. It’s a tough call to keep on at it.

What animation software interests you ?
I mainly use After Effects, Photoshop and Illustrator. I find the control over physical time and space within After Effects quite amazing. It’s a powerful tool that can help you beat TV at its own game.

Flash is lower down the list – I am not a 2D animator but it does have its uses for me (in conjunction with a million fonts). You can’t beat zero render time.

3D CG is still a black cave/hole that sucks your life in for me. Its better suited to team production than the forms of animation I follow at present. However, having used 3d Max in the past I know something about CG and would like to adapt those skills to Maya in the future if a project involving it comes up.

Your ideal animation set-up?
A large studio space with drive in access, high ceilings, blackout curtains, pro lighting systems, a high end digital still camera, G4 laptop, fast PC, green screen, fast internet connection, fully equipped workshop with all tools. Lots of the friendly kindly animators and friends that live in Melbourne and a great kitchen and lounge area to do nothing but eat and talk about animation in.

What intrigues about your next animation project?
It’s a puppet animation in which I will be using video assist for the first time (for a whole film) so I am expecting to learn so much more about stop motion animation as opposed to working ‘blind’. That and the use of dynamic animatics knocked up in After effects may speed things up about one microsecond.

What advice would you give to somebody starting animation today?
Be aware that concepts and ideas are like gold in the often jaded ‘industry’ – don’t give them away freely – my concept for a ultra short series for one Melbourne CG company is now past its 50th episode, without any credit.

The techniques used in animation production are many and varied and at times its easy to compare yourself unfavourably to ‘experts’ but content that makes people watch and react is what its all about. Follow what you love and the money will come.

S-Crash is being screened as part of the Melbourne International Animation Festival (’95 films from 24 countries, June 24?29 @ ACMI ) – and later at the Sydney equivalent. Other MIAF hi-lights include a Betty Boop retro, animated homages to painters, and a focus on Paul Driessen & Czech Republic animators.

by Sean Healy, June 19, 2003 0 comments