Documenting the research and production of interactive network based media. By David Wolf
Guess The Google is a flash game which shows you a grid of 20 images from a Google image search for a particular word. You have 20 seconds to correctly identify the search word.
Its very neat and quite addictive but I’d love to see a version which searches flickr or a video sharing site. Also I’d like to see it search for a larger range of words (it seemed to repeat when I replayed).
Recently Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails released a song from his latest album as a free downlooad in the Apple GarageBand file format. This has allowed anyone with that program (I believe it comes as a standard install on recent Macs) to easily remix, rework and generally play around with the song as though they were in his recording studio. The vocals, drums, guitars etc are discrete tracks which may be arranged with new or existing sounds, sped up or slowed down etc.
This is not the first time an artist on a major record label has made it easy for listeners to remix on of their tracks (for example Jay-Z released an a cappella version of his Black Album which famously led to a mix with The Beatles’ White Album by DJ Dangermouse to create The Grey Album), but it is notable for the fact that it includes the contents of the complete original ProTools session in a format which is both highly accessible and highly malleable. The user, in a kind of collaboration with the band (and one could argue with GarageBand and its developers) may produce an endless series of ‘versions’ of the song. The song itself shifts from being a set text which may be read or played, to a cybertext which may be read from, or played with.
via Boing Boing: NIN’s Trent Reznor releases song as GarageBand file
Naoism - interfearence is a very slickly produced flash interactive video work (Jessica Helfand would label its typographic style a disciple of the ‘cult of the scratchy’ a la Seven). The work has a a simple branching structure presenting the user with a short video loop sourced from US archival footage and two choices, “join the party” or “escape from it all”. Each choice triggers the next loop and two more choices. The sound design is perhaps the best aspect of the work, providing a nice distraction from the stop - start nature of the interactivity. Fragments of voices jumble randomly over a beat as the work waits for the user to make their choice.
The Shynola session at ACMI the other night was excellent. All four members of the UK animation crew spoke about and screened a collection of music video clips and short films from their student days through to their most recent video for Beck. I had seen most of the clips beforehand, either on rage or online but it was great to see so many, the session went for almost three hours. Audience members were free to ask questions in between the clips which worked well. Questions ranged from the technical, through to how they work together, how they started, and what they’re up to now.
Some highlights:
“what software and hardware do they use?” - I think the person who asked this was expecting to hear about custom written software and render farms but they actually use fairly standard off the shelf software such as Maya, Photoshop, AfterEffects etc, with no special plugins and regular computers.
Looking at their 3d work with this in mind it is interesting to note their use of very simple wireframe graphics and scenes with fairly low polygon counts, which wouldn’t take too long to render. These elements are often treated as layers and mixed together with other imagery to produce a look that is quite different to the stereotypical, clean 3d look. In clips such as Pyramid Song for Radiohead and Eye For An Eye for UNKLE some of the layers have been intentionally compressed with highly lossy compression to produce an almost painterly effect.
“how they work together / how did they start out?” - they met at uni, shared a house and have been working together ever since. They all work on every project and have similar skills in each area.
I can’t wait to see and hear the SHYNOLA folks speaking at acmi tomorrow night. The UK based animation and illustration collective have produced some of the most amazing beautiful animations in the form of music videos, ads and ‘blipverts’. They are currently working on the feature film “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” with Hammer and Tongs (be sure to check out ‘Tongsville’ too).
Another very handy little Cocoa program I came across recently is CocoaMySQL. Its basically a graphical user interface (GUI) for accessing MySQL databases. I recently installed WordPress (which stores user account information and more in MySQL) locally on my laptop as an experiment and CocoaMySQL helped demystify the installation process completely. Initially I didn’t really know how such a database worked but after examining it using this program it all started to make sense.
I’m a big fan of these applications which make UNIXy command line processes accessible to the lay-person.
OK, since my last post (eep, just before christmas) I’ve:
Over the last couple of months I’ve found heaps of good information and links (which I’ll start to post now) and the whole online video / videoblogging / podcasting / playlisting thing has developed extremely rapidly and is growing in popularity faster than ever.
Time to start catching up.
del.icio.us is a free social bookmarking site which lets you log in, post a URL, a brief description and use ‘tags’ to organise and categorise your links and browse those submitted by others. It even generates RSS feeds of bookmarks for each user. On its own this is very cool, and a good way to keep track of bookmarks across multiple computers / operating systems / locations.
If you happen to be using Mac OS X, Cocoal.icio.us allows you to access and manage your del.icio.us bookmarks, descriptions and tags without having to use a web browser by talking directly to the del.icio.us API (once you’ve told it your username and password). It also features a built in browser preview window, so you can click on a bookmark and to check that you got the URL right etc.
Ok, this version (Vidget 3.5) follows on from previous versions:
Vidget 1
Flickr Image Viewer (Vidget 2), and
Vidget 3
Vidget 3.5 is an experimental interactive audiovisual performance device which allows the user to manipulate video in real time online. As well as mixing a number of video clips together, the user may search for still images from the Flickr photo sharing site and mix them together. For a instructions on usage see previous versions above.
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