Remixing Neighbours

Hook in the ceiling is for a mirrorball, you can tell the landlady. A miniature camera behind every mirrored panel for an artwork in progress you’ve dubbed ‘disco kama sutra’. Should keep her off your trail. Give you some space to reflect on the human condition, your condition, the diseases in the air (conditioning), and the chemicals in your hair (conditioner). The contemplation will do you good. Like that vhs tape someone slipped under your door last week, there’s a clue.

The cast of neighbours deconstructed, refried. Staccato cut and paste rhythms, with dialogue spliced and diced, mood music that gangs up on itself, emotional glitch splicings and Craig McLachlan getting a beer from the fridge in his speedos, looped outta control. U can almost smell the ghost of art skool on the edit decks, but somehow the storytelling by fragments and glitches reveals more than you
d expect, transforming Ramsey streets polka dot-atmospherics in ways that reveal the urban decay everyone knows itched underneath the surface.

When a characters motions become mechanised to the point where you wonder where the humanity is, then interesting things occur. There’s a few homoerotic glances between the boys in neighbours that get amplified by repeated looping, and a few melodramatic moments that reveal absurity at the hands of these editors. As the sun comes up, a closer inspectoin of the tape reveals the editors to be ‘Drew & Seddon from Perth’. And there is an email address: bloodhead01@hotmail.com (where peeps interested in the vidi-yo should contact Sailor Seddon) A few questions get these replies:

….Hey sorry about the lateness of this i hope i haven’t caused grief. more soon.
FUCk thepolice >>>>sed

What inspired the neighbours remix?
Those moments when television just fucks up on its own. Television is so controlled and contrived like all mainstream media but sometimes the codes and conventions work against themselves uncovering something whose meaning is out of their control.

Any favourite moments where u just wet your pants?
When the boys just can’t stop laughin. (Craig McLachlan & Jason Donovan caught in loop hysterics).

How long did it take to make, and what was involved?
It took us about two months on and off. We had to search through about 7 episodes finding the choice moments. Some scenes were obviously gold, some moments took a bit more digging. Then we strung them together is some kind of structure.

What would you say to Craig McLachlan if he walked up to you in a bar and said he was upset at how he was portrayed in your video?
I’d tell him he’s very lucky we didn’t remix “Hey Mona”

And your reply to Kylie Minogue, wondering why she wasn’t in it?
Kylie is her own phenomena. She’s sort of transcended her neighbours days. But I have a secret Kylie/ neighbours video which involves Kylie in bed with a sweaty forehead having a nightmare about Scott cheating on her, so she did get something.

What video work / artists have impressed u lately, ‘&’ why?
Spanky’s smearing head video which was screened at Cinema Concrete for its potent and beautiful strangeness. Gary Hill’s tall ships at agnsw.

Any differences between the West & East coast electronic arts scenes?
I think they’re both equally developed, but the East has access to international work which just doesn’t come to Perth. There seems to be more things going on in the East due to the population and the dialogue with other cities/ countries.

Perth is the most isolated city in the world – has this meant artists have embraced the net over there?
Many have. Many just embrace isolation.

Any plans for further neighbours remixing?
It’s neVER OVER.

www.cartelcommunique.co.uk
Cut paste beg blag steal borrow blur destroy deface vandalise corrupt subvert inspire pervert respect recycle invent – sez the site, and u can see some great remixed vids including kid606 and globalisation footage, posh spice, Pat ‘n’ Peg and more.

www.rroom.org
With a mantra of record, rewind, and reassemble, this site aims at reconfiguring commercials, billboards and other corporate messages into more positive and/or hunourous forms, taking swipes at the soft drink industry, fast food and mcdonalds as they go. A few movies worth a peek here.

www.killyourtv.com
Picked this one for the url more than its relevance to neighbours remixing, but a good range of links and a good list of current affairs articles.

by Sean Healy, May 14, 2002 0 comments

Ogg Vorbis Vs. MP3

This week in Codec Sports World, we’re gonna look at improving your swing, George Bush’s pretzel-cam, some people doing things with balls while other people watch, plastic-wrapping your internal organs for better steroid use, and of course, the latest in codecs and file compression for all your music and data needs.

Hands up who’d even heard of MP3s 5 years ago? The adoption of this audio codec has been so successful, so widespread, that one might be confused into thinking it is the only method of compressing a music file into a smaller size. And while it’s good at what it does, good is the enemy of great, as we like to say in our 3D motivational meetings.

In the silver corner, wearing a tartan skirt and star trek top, is the Ogg Vorbis project, hoping to shrink your files further, and deliver better sound quality. If ever something was named by role-playing computer science students, then Ogg Vorbis surely is it. Marketing savvy aside, it turns out they’re nifty at what they do, and have deeper motivations.

The Ogg Project
Designed to create a fully open multimedia system, the Ogg project is being developed by the Xiph.org Foundation, a non-profit software development group with the goal of ‘protecting essential tenets of Internet multimedia from corporate hostage-taking’.

Xiph.org is also the home of the popular Icecast streaming media server, as well as many other important open source projects, indeed they believe ‘Open Source is the net’s greatest tool to keep everyone honest’. The Ogg Project will eventually include other codecs, like Tarkin (for video) and Squish (for lossless audio). At the moment though, OggVorbis is the only functional part of the Ogg project .

Free Software & Open Source
Free Software refers to software distributed in source form which can be freely modified and redistributed, or freely modifiable and redistributable software. It does not refers to zero-cost software. “Open Source” also refers to source code free to modify and to reuse, however there are many debates about these definitions once profit motives and control of the software comes into it. Either way, a community of developers collaborate and use their combined skills to develop software with these methods.

Did Someone Say Ogg Vorbis?
Ogg Vorbis is a completely open, patent-free, professional audio encoding and streaming
technology, developed with Open Source. Vorbis is the name for the specific audio compression scheme used to create OggVorbis files. Vorbis files have the extension .ogg.

Ogg Vorbis unlike MP3 and other formats is truly an open standard. MP3 relies on a patented compression algorithm, its German owners Fraunhofer, sending a now famous letter in 1998 claiming royalty payments on several MP3 encoders. More recently they have stepped forward again claiming (their right) to royalties from streaming MP3s and royalties from musicians selling MP3s. Enter the Star Trek fans.

Audio Loss
MP3 is what is known as a “lossy” format. Thus, much of the sound data is removed when MP3 files are created. This results in a file with inferior sound quality to a CD. Vorbis is also a “lossy” format, but uses superior acoustic models to reduce the damage. Thus, music released in Vorbis will sound better than a comparably sized MP3 file.

Vorbis Audio Quality
Vorbis sounds much better than mp3. Two files encoded at the same bitrate, will always be the same size, if they are both encoded with constant bitrate. Vorbis encodes files in variable bitrate which can produce smaller files with better quality, since it doesn’t have to waste data for audio that is easy to encode. The current Vorbis encoder also supports much wider encoder bitrates than mp3 encoders: 64-500kbps stereo and 32-256kbps mono (at 44.1kHz sampling rate).

Streams of Vorbis
While it sounds like a cheap sci-fi novel, streaming is also an important component of Vorbis. The format has been designed from the ground-up to be easily streamable, the designers working alongside Icecast streaming media to make Icecast Vorbis-compatible. Streaming Ogg files from the web will be supported by the player plugins at the 1.0 Vorbis release.

Players & Encoders
Wide variety available. Download a player / encoder for Ogg Vorbis files, or a plugin for a player you already have. eg Winamp, Sound Forge, Windows Media Player etc

Ogg Vorbis Futures
To it’s credit, Vorbis already sounds like the product of some phutcha pharmacy, but does it really have a future given the spread of mp3s, and the billion dollar corporate interests in Microsoft, RealNetworks and other proprietary digital audio standards? Linux advocates would think so, and who knows what might happen in a shapeshifting cyber-year? If they keep improving quality and reducing file size, who’s to say they won’t nab the market?

Sidebars:
www.vorbis.com
Worth a click if only to check out their wonderful corporate logos featuring creatures from other worlds.

www.free-soft.org
This site presents alot of good history and links about free software and open source, though nothing on recent debates between the two camps.

MP3s ‘R’ Evil
http://mondodesigno.com/music/ogg.html
And you thought Bert was evil. Bit evangelstic mayb, but interesting articleanyway: about computers and content creation, copyright, music and your good self.

by Sean Healy, May 14, 2002 0 comments

Arkaos Vidi-Yo Sampler Review

Paper waves cluttered the riverbanx like endless unfolding origami. A last goodbye, and she stepped into the paper boat. Then photoreal in the waves of paper, she grew giant like, or maybe I found where my zoom lens’d bean hiding. Asked if I was coming too, and we were sailing before I could explain our destination wasn’t coastal. Was it mere coincidence Belgians make some of the world’s best chocolate *and* video triggering software? Taste buds of Jean Poole this week you see, be checkin’ out da Arkaos VJ sophtwarez.

While most of us are used to hard and software that allows audio choppin’ N changin’, manipulatin’ N mutatin’, sequencin’, distortin’, and scratchin’ – in realtime y’hear, it’s only in recent years that tools have become more widely available which allow the same treatment to vidi-yo. Of the code-based pixel-tweekers, VJ by Arkaos now stands as the best dual platform piece of realtime vidi-yo software, havin’ bean recently ported from mac to PC.

The Basic Concepts
Ye bee turnin’ yer putah into a vidi-yo / imagery sampler with this software, to be sure to be sure. With a databank of quicktime movs for mac, avis for PC, and jpegs for both, you can use yer silicon chipped beasty to trigger and effect clips or pictures in real-time. This works by assigning your samples to particular keys on screenshots of your computer or MIDI keyboard, a simple drag and drop operation from your VJ library. You can save 128 sets of these keyboards or patches, within what they call a synth, and have up to 5 synths open at a time. Ram and computer speed may limit how much you stretch this, but performance is then as simple as selecting your patches and pressing keys in sequence. This is then outputted to another monitor or directly to your vcr / projector.

Real-Time FX
VJ FX can also be assigned to each key, either on the same key as a sample meaning the sample will be loaded pre-effected, or on a separate key, meaning you can use that key as say a blur effect on whatever sample is currently loaded on screen. Response time is surprisingly fast on the mac, utilising it’s built-in quicktime effects, and the effects range from downright tacky through to dat=delicious. Each of the effects can be double clicked on and it’s parameters altered, and the effects can be layered on top of each other as well, so let it be said >> this baby can customise your clips on the fly, with style.

Beat Detection & MIDI Input
VJ allows audio input or MIDI based beat detection to trigger events, sample or effects automatically, and with a MIDI keyboard you can control sample parameters such as the transparency of images by how hard you hit your MIDI keys. The arkaos engine is integratable with any MIDI sequencer, which can be run internally on your computer, on another, or on an external MIDI keyboard.

Udder Features
Neet option numero uno, is the recording of your key presses, which you can then process as a movie file, meaning you can mash up some of your files, save as a movie, then reload this newly created and remixed movie into the program and keep playing with this process to create visuals as multi layered or abstract as you like. You can also record your key commands as files which can be used within the free arkaos MP3 visual plug-in available from their site, which plugs zap bang into various MP3 players.

Pros: Quick responsive sample loading and effects. Simple to use and very adaptable, especially with access to a MIDI keyboard. Pretty stable too.

Cons: Some effects are quite tacky. Doesn’t have a simple ability to scroll through, pause / restart clips or control their speed in real-time. Unsurprisingly slow with 640 x 480 clips. 320 x 240 clips work fine though a projector though.

What You’ll Be Needin’
A pentium II with windoze98 as minimum, preferably win2000 with quicktime 4 installed, or a mac Power PC with 32mb of ram, though they recommend a g3/64. And moola, US$299 of it in fact, though there’s a free demo for download at arkaos.net which is fully functional but keeps arkaos written in one corner of the screen. All in all, it’s one of the best overall vidi-yo real-time manipulation programs currently available, and so the demo’s well worth a download for vid-peeples, even just to have a peek.

Pros: Quick responsive sample loading and effects. Simple to use and very adaptable, especially with access to a MIDI keyboard. Pretty stable too.

Cons: Some effects are quite tacky. Doesn’t have a simple ability to scroll through, pause / restart clips or control their speed in real-time. Unsurprisingly slow with 640 x 480 clips. 320 x 240 clips work fine though a projector though.

Other ideas for development?
Chroma keying! 🙂
Being able to turn fx on and off with one button? fadeable? ie fade fx in or out..?
Being able to switch between image sizes, so a full screen video could shrink to half and quarter size and be centred, left or top according to key presses?
Text on screen?
Importing gifs so u can have transparent backgrounds, and be able to import strange shapes and silhouettes… guess chroma keying’d fix this…

sidebars:
www.arkaos.net
Download a demo of VJ / VMP for mac or PC and see what it be made of.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/eyecandy
Biggest list of people discussing video triggering software, with a range of apps for mac, PC, atari & even Linux!

www.audiovisualizers.com
Da biggestestest list of vidi-yo triggerin’ und manipulatin’ software der is.

by Sean Healy, May 14, 2002 0 comments

Sadie Plant & Mobile Phones

sadie plantNostradamus nearly became the most popular boy at school last year, accordian to search engine google. Wonder whether he would’ve predicted that we’d suffer burst eardrums in 2002, from fearsome flocks of birds evolved to whistle mobile phone ring tunes together?
Alas, probably not. Sadie Plant on the other hand, has the sort of juicy mind that may have predicted such an occurrence. And she spoke on the fone, about fones for 3D.

And I’ll tell you why she’s worth a read too, why excited little me sat recording her voice on a dodgy kitchen table answering machine. Wasn’t b.cos she was commissioned by a phone company to produce a paper on the social and cultural implications of the mobile phone, though that’s how I snared the interview. Sadie Plant is also the juicily electric author of ‘A Most Radical Gesture‘, ‘Zeros & Ones‘ – the hidden history of women’s role in the development of communications technologies, and most recently ‘Writing on Drugs‘.

“It was a straightforward commission – would I be interested in doing some research?,” said Sadie across the wires, and so began her ‘opportunity to focus on the mobile phone’.

What did you learn from your research?
It made me realise how quickly the mobile has gone from a yuppie toy to being so widely available in so many parts of world.

What do you think of the digital divide and that half the world’s never made a fone call?
Well the mobile is making a big difference – obviously that’s by no means happened yet… but it’s the first piece of technology with the potential to do that… and increasingly mobiles can be used for accessing other information such as the net. In the UK it’s bringing change to people who had been cut off from all kinds of useful information and economic information actually. In a future Afghanistan, it’ll never be easy to put in telephone lines, but mobile phones can bring telephony and net to remote places like that. (Sadie spent 4 months in Pakistan on the Afghan border b4 s11).

Have u had any phone dreams?
God what a question, I don’t think I say I have – though that would be a good sign of how well mobile phones are integrated into our everyday lives.

What are some of the politics of the mobile?
There are some very imaginative and politically interesting ways of using sms, and sms is almost the most interesting thing about mobiles. People seemed to find that capacity by themselves and it’s been marketed to them later. Text messaging adds to their capacity to communicate with people around the world. The technology of communication is only one side of a broader thing happening – increasing mobility. People get spread but networks of friends survive in ways they never would have before. We have a new culture of mobility, of working on the road, with huge movements of migrants etc…

Reading of Late?
All sorts – 19th Century novels – Joseph Conrad, lots about Afghanistan, this Swiss playwright, Friedrich Durrenmatt… who is becoming more popular now that he has had a book filmed (‘The Pledge’, directed by Sean Penn).

So *where* are we when we’re on the phone?
Er Birmingham..(laffs) I have no idea. You and I are in our own little space that somehow involves you, me, our telephones, Brisbane and Birmingham. So many people just say now – I’m on the mobile…?

What’s next?
I’m trying to write a novel, not exactly a novel but something a bit more fictional. I spent some time recently in Islamic countries – and I hope this book will somehow draw on those experiences.

Sadie Plant Stuff:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sadie_Plant

www.phonebashing.com
Some people dislike public mobile fone usage so much, they wear giant mobile phone suits and go around stealing and smashing stranger’s fones. Conveniently, they videotape these moments so u can see them too.

www.phonelosers.org
Page title: “This page makes me want to cream on myself”
Frontpage quote : “I wish I was black. Then I could have a white girlfriend.”
Like you’re not already there.

Big Cancerous Things
http://members.ozemail.com.au/~arundell/bigthing.htm ( now dead )
There seems so many pages with ‘scientific’ reports with postive or negative things to say about cancer’s relationship to mobile phone usage. You can always try telepathy, or maybe soothe yourself by these pictures of oz-icons from the big prawn to the big peanut.

by Sean Healy, May 14, 2002 1 Comment

(VJ) Honeygun Labs

Slender gloved hands in my mouth, complimentary shades to undazzle the dentist lights, a healthy stream of nitrous oxide, and fish swimming in the convenient, overhead TV. Floating with tha fishes, I could wish that the stateside kru from www.honeygunlabs.com were in control of the television.

Describe your current act, honeygun labs?
Honeygun Labs is a collaborative live video experiment. The group consists of Bec Stupak (me), Carl Mok and Fabian Tejada. Our material is made in 3D Studio Max, Maya, After Effects, etc. We create loops in our machines, output them to miniDV and DVD, then mix them live at large raves and concerts.

What gear do u use and why do u like it?
All our material is in MiniDV format. The basic set-up includes MiniDV players, a Roland V-5 video mixer, an Alesis midi drum-machine (to interface with the mixer using midi) and 40-50 tapes. For longer, more elaborate shows we’ll add another Roland mixer, a few more miniDV decks, a spy camera, a couple DVD players and a switcher. Its a good setup because it can be very small and compact or infinitely elaborate.

What would u like to use?
We’re looking to move our setup onto DVD and stand-alone digital hard-disc recorders. Its slow going but the technology is coming around. We’re hesitant to convert everything to computers, because they’re unstable and could crash at any time.

What are the crucial elements for good visuals?
Anything that looks good – strong concept, design, that sort of thing. Sometimes we’ll go with abstract narrative, other times pure design. Lots of color, lots of excitement and energy. We also try to change our imagery frequently so it doesn’t become stale.

How does your creative audiovisual jamming / creating processes work?
Mostly in our studio, preparing and editing clips. We’ll shoot video, import it, tweak it, loop it, then output it to tape/DVD. The fun part happens when we get to go to the parties, combine it with good music and see how people react.

How much live flexibility do u have as an AV act?
We can bend and stretch all of our material the same way a DJ can. We have a lot of footage that can be grouped in different ways so we’re always finding new juxtapositions of our material. The mixers also contain some basic effects that can be used in moderation to change things up a bit.

Do u sell many of your VHS tapes?
We sell a few online. There’s always a really positive response to the tapes we send out – I think people enjoy having something like that they can chill with in their house and check out closely.

Favourite live moments?
A show in Saskatoon, Canada. Whenever I put a new piece of footage on the screen, the kids in the front row would bug out. It was really funny. They were watching it like TV. I’d switch tapes really quickly just to see how they’d react and they’d always bug!

What do u do to rest your eyeballs?
Sleep. If we’re not sleeping, we’re usually working on video stuff. Or working to earn money to make video stuff.

by Sean Healy, May 14, 2002 2 Comments