Suckaphishing

Suckaphish P. JonezBoasting many an award for most subtropical aliases, ever-eclectic Brisbanite MC, beat-producer and gallery curator Suckaphish P Jonez ( aka the Little Plastic Thugdoll, aka the Aquatarian Invader, aka DJ Love Handles, aka MC Lost My Wallet etc ), be a bizzi boi in March:

Curating more ‘White House’ exhibitions in Brisbane, building a ‘White House’ installation at the Next Wave Festival in Melbourne ( both with W.H. co-curators Madeline King & Mad Alien-Cawte – pictured with Chopper Read), and while south – hi-jacking every available beat-backed microphone in town. ( plug n play thu 23~! )

Beats & Rhymes : Galleryisms : Next Wave in March :

>>What inspired The White House Gallery?
Chopper Read & The White House GirlsThe directors of the Farm asked if we were interested in taking over their lease / developing our own project – a happy accident, we’ve somehow let loose on the rest of Brisbane. The White House let’s us give a venue to the more bizarre, unclassifiable art forms thriving in Brisbane’s underbelly, with exhibitions, gigs, film screenings and less classifiable events. With plenty of artist run spaces doing professional, clean cut shows, we wanted to do something a little less polished – where boundaries between the art world, music, design and street culture could fluidly vomit on one another and make bastard little babies.
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by Sean Healy, March 8, 2006 0 comments

March Melb Madness~!

What with her Royal corgi-ness and flocks of steroid-moulded post-humans coming to town, how could this month be anything but spectacular? Highlights of the Melbourne Graffiti Games include ‘Most Elaborate Stencil Piece’, ‘Best Caricature of the Mayor or other City of Melbourne Councillor’ and ‘Most Seditious Piece’. The Stolenwealth Games promise a large gathering of Indigenous peoples from throughout the continent ( the Queen has been welcomed for tea at the campsite. See also the Black GST ), and the Next Wave Festival program is again bumper with gazillions of provocative events, this time the program bump.d with Cape Town collectives, Glasgow galleries and Kiwi co-operatives, to sit alongside all the visiting athletes. Nice looking African hip-hop selection amongst it, and a live re-scoring of Metropolis by Adelaide crew The New Pollutants.

by Sean Healy, March 8, 2006 2 Comments

Holy Trinity of Music Video Directors

Various news predictably shows, they’re keeping busy :

Michel Gondry : Trailer for his next directed : ‘Dave Chappelles Block Party’
The Science of Sleep‘ marks Michel’s screen feature writing debut.
& News via Fantagraphics blog, that Michel will direct a script by Daniel Clowes based around a Rudy Rucker sci-fi novel, Master of Space And Time, set to star Jack Black.

Spike Jonze : Directing a live-action movie adaptation of the children’s classic ‘Where the Wild Things Are‘, co-scripted with Dave Eggers ( McSweeney’s Journal & more ). Reportedly, original author Maurice Sendak is down with the co-script:
“I am in love with it. If Spike and Dave do not do this movie now, I would just as soon not see any version of it ever get made.””

Chris Cunningham : Occasional live video for Aphex Twin ( see clip from Italian festival ), Working on a long-player with Squarepusher, but definitely not making previously planned adaptations of ‘William Gibson’s ‘Neuromancer’, Italian punk comic ‘RanXerox’ or Philip K Dick’s ‘A Scanner Darkly’.

by Sean Healy, March 3, 2006 0 comments

Portable Libraries

Two sample varieties >>
a) “‘Encyclopodia’ is a free software project that brings the Wikipedia, which is one of the largest encyclopedias on the world, on the Apple iPod MP3-Player. It has been successfully tested on a third-generation iPod and on an iPod mini, but it should also work on other iPod generations.”

wikipedia on ipod

b) http://librariesaustralia.nla.gov.au :
“Libraries Australia lets you discover what’s in Australian libraries. You can find it, borrow it, copy it or buy it.”
Now if I’m understanding this recent launch right, it should mean there are truckfuls of books zipping between libraries around the country soon, as rare titles find themselves in the hands of keen readers.

( ps. shout-out to ‘Portable Kommunity’ the Japanese electronic music producer I met in 2002, no doubt still causing a ruckus somewhere, I just thought it was the cutest name ever when he told me. )

by Sean Healy, March 1, 2006 0 comments

VJ Blogs & VJ Software

Hypertext artist and now VJ, Mark Amerika has started a ‘Professor VJ‘ blog, pointing recently to an interesting ‘self-distribution manifesto‘ by the director of the SEX ADDICT, Caveh Zahedi:

“..we make the world our own by altering it, by leaving our own imprint on it, by reshaping it in our own image. This is the crux of my argument for self-distribution. It’s less alienating. It’s more organic. And it’s more human.”

Via AccentFeed, I discovered the Barcelona VJs ‘No Domain TV‘ who use only vector based illustration software to make live video. Check out how slickly they manage this at a Kid Koala show.

Via VJ Yroyto’s blog, comes notice of one of the best looking all-in-one video viewing applications yet – ‘Democracy‘ – which boasts lots of smart features, can subscribe to podcasts, video blogs and bit torrent feeds and much more.

“>’glitch creator’ stand-alone made with Max/MSP & Jitter ( the video add-on for Max ).

Via Writing My Name in Water, Brush, a free tool also made in max which plays simply and effectively with video camera input, decay and feedback.

Freeframe is a plug-in architecture for VJ software worth looking at, a standard much as VST plug-ins work on most audio applications… – the ( mostly free ) plugins on offer work in applications like After Effects as well..

Max / MSP is a patch based application, meaning it is a modular graphic environment where different components can be joined or linked together to produce highly customisable software for manipulating audio and/or video. An free and open source alternative ( also by the founder of MAX, Miller Puckette ) is Pure Data, which has recently released some updates for mac, windows and linux. And gaining popularity is ‘Processing‘ another free open source programming language / environment for manipulating image and sound. Branches within, link to using processing with mobile phone projects and other forms of hardware.

Quartz Composer is a light-weight patcher compared to these, bundled free with mac os X 10.4, but it is still a complex toolkit for building your own custom VJ application with fast frame rates ( thanks to it’s use of the on-board graphics processor, rather than the CPU ). ‘Quartonian Mixer‘ is the best example built to date, and remains free alongside other quartz composer patches by Roger Eskaton- such as ‘Quartonian VSM‘ which manipulates folders of photos on the fly.

Also building free Quartz Composer patches, is Momo the Monster, maintainer of the Lavaflow VJ blog from Los Angeles. His patches include a tool for making seamless video loops, and a quicktime movie which will allow live camera input into it ( thereby gaining live camera ability in VJ applications without that function ) and
. Also discovered Daisyrust.com’s patch to automatically produce an adjustable reflection from an image, text or video input from Lavaflow.

by Sean Healy, March 1, 2006 1 Comment