Web developer. Art/Tech hacker. I ♥ music, film, live video, art and the social web. 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.
This is the latest version of my Quicktime vj/image search app. It now works as two separate movies which talk to eachother. Click on each of the images above to load in Quicktime Player.
More details, instructions etc soon (i’ve gotta race to the library to return some very overdue books!).
I arrived in Brisbane this morning VERY early, caught the 6am flight from Melbourne which (due to regional time distortion fields) arrived around 7am local time even though it took just over two hours.
I’ve been battling with my latest revision vidget over the past few days and the saga continues. To get photos from flickr I use the site’s RSS feeds, only they keep changing on me! On Tuesday I had everything sorted, they started using the
On the plane I accidentally opened my LiveStage Pro project in an old version of the app (4.5 instead of the latest 4.5.4) and saved and now while the flickr search works – I can’t get it to load any movies. D’oh! I have, however got inter-movie communication working really well so that I have a separate movie for output and controls. This means I can resize the output to 640*480 really nicely to go to a second monitor.
BTW, I’m writing this from a very cool cafe called The Alibi Room on the corner of Brunswick St and Annie St in Bris-vegas. It has yummy food, good coffee and FREE WIFI!
HorizonZero is a Canadian online digital art and culture journal produced as a collaboration between The Banff Centre‘s New Media Institute and Culture.ca. This remix issue is from April/May 2003 and features a number of interesting articles.
On Bricolage by Anne-Marie Boisvert (translated by Timothy Barnard) is particularly interesting.
“The remix depends, above all, on the way the artist interacts with his or her machinery; on the “samples” chosen and the way they are related; and on the relationship between the work (which is always a work in progress) and the audience.”
The journal itself consists of both traditional, written articles and interactive flash pieces.
I recently came across a copy of Ben Hammersley’s presentation on the ‘Semantic Web’. I’d heard the term a few times but never really looked into it. This was an excellent introduction to the concept. Also impressive is the Quicktime movie itself which features a small view of Ben giving the presentation, along with a larger view of the slides he is referring to. Here is Ben’s comment on the presentation: The Sporting Gentleman’s Guide to the Semantic Web and other such Technological Marvels of the Modern Age – remixed. from Ben Hammersley’s Dangerous Precedent
And here is the file: Quicktime (38Mb)
Just found out my proposal was accepted and I’m presenting a session on Vidgets at the Straight Out of Brisbane Festival. I’ll be in the games-hacklab part of the festival, I can’t wait! It should be lots of fun, I hope I manage to get to lots of the other sessions.
From the site:
Straight Out of Brisbane
A festival of independent and emerging arts, culture and ideas
Brisbane, December 2nd – 12th, 2004 Presents: the hacklab and GAMEs selection ..in the words of allegra geller, legendary games designer and radical realist in cronenberg’s film eXistenZe, the world of games in in a trance. people are programmed to accept so little but the possibilities are so great.
the SOOB games and hacklab program invites you to workshops, event and a few rants, the odd frag fest and some retro delight – trance breaking a speciality!
For the past few months Tim Webster and I have been organising a monthly forum where VJs, video artists, experimental filmmakers and developers present their respective bodies of work and we all have a good chat. So far we have had an amazing line up of Melbourne based artists (follow the links or google the names for hours of interesting information):
jean p00le (Sean Healy) and Tim Parish
Dale Nason and John Power
Kirsten Bradley and Anna Helme
Kim Bounds and Steve Middleton
Marcus Lyall (interview) and Paul Rodgers
… and last night Tim and I spoke about our works and ideas.
This was the last …frame rate for this year but next year we plan to increase the promotion a bit and set up a dedicated site. We’ve been documenting the presentations and chats as we go so we currently have at least 16hrs of footage to watch through. I’d really like to produce some kind of online documentary with some of the content and imagery down the track.
As a follow up to the TV series “24″, Fox is releasing a series of one minute ‘Mobisodes’ dubbed “24: Conspiracy”. These new micro-episodes are to be distributed (sold?) to Vodafone customers’ phones. I didn’t really get into the show when it was on TV but I think the subject matter would be ideal for an alternate reality style game.
I think the key to making this cooler would be using the fact that the playback device is a phone. This means ‘Mobisodes’ could be broadcast at any time of day or night with a 100% chance the audience will see them (even if they check their messages the next day). Users/viewers could send information back to the producers and/or to each other to select a character or plot thread to follow or just to comment.
I doubt that this will happen, but still, its is an interesting move for a major studio to start producing content for 3G capable phones.
More info:
MSNBC – Fox to create TV series for cell phones
BBC NEWS | Entertainment | TV and Radio | 24 being made for mobile phones
24weblog.com – Vodafone lures 3G customers with 24-inspired drama
Yahoo! News – Fox to Create Series for Wireless Phones
via SG and Boing Boing
I recently completed work on an experimental internet radio program with Hannah Miller and Kate Eccles. Hannah and Kate are final year Media students at RMIT majoring in Radio and TV production. My role in the production was to take various pieces of audio, video, still images and text, and create an interface which would allow the user to mix and match the elements in an exploratory, non-linear way.
The result of this work is a program called “Inspiration”, which features interviews, live footage, sound recordings and lyrics from Reset://0 a Japanese influenced Melbourne band.
The program was authored in LiveStage Pro and is a Quicktime file that consists of a sprite track, several movie tracks and a text track which features lyrics. The above image shows the partially completed work as I was assigning sounds to various non-square shaped roll-over buttons. The idea was that rather than presenting the user with a list of options, or even a grid of non-labelled options, the work should encourage the user to explore the screen space with the cursor, almost like they are feeling their way in the dark. To give the users some feedback, and a little direction as to where may be a good place to explore, I used Hanna’s fire twirling image as a guide. I placed invisible sprites over the background image which reacted to the “MouseEnter” event, triggering sounds which played in specific movie tracks, and changing the sprite image for the background so that different parts of the fire twirling would be illuminated and hi-lighted.
You can view the completed work in context on the interadio site. Or, to go straight to Inspiration(requires Quicktime, a fairly recent computer and a decent broadband connection – 15Mb)
I found a link to this useful little video tutorial deep in an otherwise uninteresting thread on Slashdot
Stagecraft: Over/Under Cable Wrapping shows how to wrap cables like a roadie so they don’t tangle.
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