Amusing as the U.S. election is to watch on news channels, or terrifying if you’re watching it via the Comedy Channel’s Daily Show, just sometimes, you don’t feel like having a herd of cattle flying overhead, dumping manure on you from great heights. A few abstract video antidotes then, to counteract the visual political overload of late.

Abre Ojos
Scott Baker, aka Abre Ojos, graced Melbourne Plug N Play recently with a fine audiovisual set, blending together well richly textured drones of ebb of flow with ethereal video footage, and appropriately stylised live animations. Walking into the venue though, one of the first things noticed was his rig, as he tends to use a range custom analogue equipment, and on this occasion had an impressive modular synthesiser embedded in a suitcase, spaghetti patchwork of cables arcing out of it everywhere, flanked by a range of controllers and a laptop for controlling video. A desk microphone let him use his voice to provide raw sound for filtering, processing into a swell of buzzing insects, mid ocean waves or a distant rumbling volcano. All the while letting slow and atmospheric video drift by on screen ( or into the screen in the case of road journeys into a floating cloud of mist ), or smoothly shifting animated light patterns over time.

Nice stuff, and he has a DVD out, a compilation of 4 AV tracks – all tracks are improvised, vision and sound recorded in a single pass, no overdubs, then minimal mixing/mastering / compressing / EQ etc. Visually, he works by taking photos and video with a consumer grade digital still camera ( the growing video quality on cheap still cameras continues to amaze and surprise me ), manipulating them in photoshop / after effects / motion and then layering these with quartz composer animations that are audio responsive and midi controllable. His work is also creative commons licenced, so you can both view and remix it over at abreojos.net.

Big Square Eye
Received this impressively realised DVD compilation in the mail recently, it having been produced for the Brisbane Festival 2008 at the tail end of workshops with 15 young Queenslanders given access to a range of gear, mentors and two things that help most projects – a deadline and a budget. The end result is surprisingly sophisticated, in both conceptual and aesthetic realms, and well supported by the DVD packaging and menu interface. The clips range from shimmery plays of light to stop-motion political critique, clip art animations, absurdist puppetry and abstraced visual effects. There are few visual cliches scattered amongst it all, but on the whole an impressive effort, and more so for the ways it is being distributed and displayed across many parts of regional Queensland in various non-gallery contexts like retail displays. Clips, artist information and related essays viewable online.

Digital Fringe
Happens in Melbourne soon ( Sep 24 – Oct 12 – digitalfringe.com.au ), bringing together a range of events, a mobile projection unit ( van with projectors, solar-charged batteries, online laptops, projector and video camera ) which travels around projecting onto Melbourne walls and sends the resulting footage onto the web in real-time. Anyone wanting to have their work projected with this, and on many screens all around Melbourne during the festival, can upload video at the Digital Fringe site ( you can also view / download other submissions for remixing ).

Today’s headlines routinely borrow from the sci-fi pages of yesteryear. Once upon a time an author probably chuckled as he wrote about genetic engineered tapeworms that would allow gourmet food lovers in the far future to gorge as much as they want. Out to prove this wasn’t hare-brained speculation, are the Melbourne based biotechnology firm, Roboguts. ( Full product range available at www.roboguts.com)

I’m curious – how do the Robogut tapeworms ‘work’ ?
In simple terms, one Robogut pill taken with a meal will neutralise any weight gain. Enjoy the taste without the calories!! And if you can’t choose between the lamb roast and the beef lasagne, why not have both and let Roboguts take care of it for you?

But how do Roboguts ‘take care of it’?
Wonderfully! Our tapeworms are genetically designed with a very limited life span, which usually means when they have finished your meal, they switch off, or are rendered benign.

What does it feel like to eat with Roboguts in your stomach?
The consumer wouldn’t feel anything different from their usual meal. Except of course they will be just as hungry at the end of the meal as they were at the start. Which means you can double the fun for your tastebuds, or fit that extra dessert in without any worries.

20 million Africans face the worst famine in a decade (see www.plan.org.au). How can you justify developing Roboguts when so many have no food at all?
The miracle of biotechnology will end mass starvation in our lifetime, I kid you not. The benefits of projects like ours will eventually trickle down to those in need, and everybody will have abundant food to explore the delights of.

Aren’t you afraid people will be too squirmish to go for Roboguts?
Not at all. Why put up with petty limits? Our market research for Roboguts showed us that people are ready to take body modification to the next level, and will pay top dollar for biotechnology enhancements that put them more in control of their feelings, emotions and body processes. You know, people used to ‘see’ witches in the sky, but now they ‘see’ machines. I think we need to be aware of our attitudes to machines, accept their existence, and make them work for us. Who do you want to be today?

Have you heard about those giant worms in the tropics that grow up to a metre long inside you, then tunnel through your flesh to get out?
Yes, but our tapeworms are genetically programmed never to exceed a certain size, and really – they are more truthfully thought of as little robots.

Do you think that Roboguts might contribute to creating a divide between skinny=rich and obese=poor people?
That divide already exists. Those with a low income tend to have low nutrient diets high in fat and sugar – the standard fare of most burger franchises. Roboguts simply allows those with discerning tastebuds to enjoy even more of their good taste.

Inevitably the public will encounter some unusual side-effects. How do you see future of Roboguts?
Really, what we are doing isn’t that radical or dangerous, it’s simple science applied for the benefit of the consumer. We are confident about the safety of our products and hope to expand our Robogut weight-loss range in the near future.

Bon Appetit bunnies~!

(( doh-ski~! this was an interview done in ye olde times, transferred to skynoise just now and forgot to datestamp it in the prehistories… ))

(( + what a difference 2008 makes, as soon as it’s posted, the weightloss spam comes in… pingback on your post #425 “Robo-Guts”URI : http://blahblah….dailytidbit.com/weight-loss/robo-guts/ ))

Google, as part of fanfare for their new open source web browser, Google Chrome, released a comic to explain it, detailing their views on the problems with browsers to date, and their take on solutions. Radly, the comic was made by everyone’s favourite instructional comic maker, Scott McCloud ( why are his instructional comics about how to make comics so great, and his actual comics not so? ), who reliably manages to distil the complexities of web technology into an easily comprehensible visual form. It’s a 38 pager and includes a host of new features ( eg separate processes per tab so if one tab crashes the whole browser doesn’t ) and underlying technologies that aim to improve the overall browser experience, and let’s face it, maximise uptake of google technologies. After reading through it though, and having had to deal with teaching HTML workarounds to students because of Internet Explorer’s refusal to adhere to International Web Standards, gotta say the Google Overlord approach seems much more beneficial to everyone than that of the Microsoft Overlords.

The Google Chrome browser itself is due out in a few days. ( Like that logo too!)

See also, Francis Bear’s comic-book take on Scott’s latest book, Making Comics.

UPDATE : Says Franz, ‘for those too lazy to click through the comic you can download it as an ebook PDF here‘. Or check the 4-Chan-ned remixes.

“There needs to be a word for technological ennui, the state we exist in where anything is technically possible and the only thing that holds us back is our imagination. No sooner can you imagine a new application of an existing technology than someone has actually done it, posting details of their hack around the world.”

via things magazine ( although they weren’t writing about firefox, but an iphone ‘lighter-in-the-air-at-concerts’ app.. )

Firefox 3 Extension Wishlist
Firefox 3 is a great improvement, feels the fastest of any browser I’ve used, cleverly extends the URL auto-suggest idea to include parts of words in the description of a site as well ( more useful than it sounds, if you’ve been anywhere, this’ll help find it again really easily ). Not all extensions have been updated to be compatible with this new release though, but going by the above iphone-lighter principle, where things are being made somewhere else as soon as you think of them, we should be able to list a few desired features for a browser and find that in fact, they are already there. Let’s see.

• Custom modify a browser and easily import those modifications to a browser on any machine?
  Ok, so ‘Firefox Environment Backup Extension’ supposedly takes care of that, backing up all your extensions and enabling you to wander to any computer with Firefox, install just that one extension, and then easily adjust the browser to the extension-packed way you prefer it. Except the OS X version is still playing catch-up.

• Start up your favourite / most needed sites in different tabs in one go?
  Can do this by setting a folder in your toolbar, bookmarking into it, and choosing ‘open all in tabs’, but Morning Coffee adds a few variants to this – allowing sets of bookmarks to be stored for particular days. One click to add a site to a list, one click to open your faves.

• Play a whole bunch of old nintendo games inside the browser?
  That’d be FireNes – www.firenes.com.ar .

• Bookmark things so they can be read on any computer, and browse/subscribe to collective bookmarks on your favourite topics?
  The delicious bookmarks extension is your very, very good friend.

• Get rid of ads on certain regularly used pages?
  Mmmm, Ad Block Plus.

• Block annoying flash apps on a page by page or domain by domain basis?
  Easy enough.

• Post about pages viewed to a blog?
  Many ways to do this, Scribefire does it well, allowing “users to easily drag and drop formatted text from the Web into their blog(s), post entries, take notes, and optimize their ad inventory, directly through the Firefox browser.”

• Save longgg, awkward URLs as short ones, with a simple rightclick?
  TinyURL, isn’t it?

• Allow yourself to have a gazillion tabs open, and have more control about how these are used or quickly navigated between?
  TabMix Plus, which is usually my first extension installed on a fresh firefox on another computer…

• Manage these gazillion must-read-soon tabs?
  Read It Later – “eliminates cluttering of bookmarks with sites that are merely of a one-time interest. ”

• Download all the media related photos, sounds, videoclips on a given page in one go?
  http://www.downthemall.net

• Copy all the URLs and titles of these tabs in one go?
  Haven’t been able to find something to do this in version 3 – theoretically someone should have already built it, it’s my fault for not having found it.

All of which of course, are drab, banal expectations of a browser which stem from thinking within the browser’s traditional limits for too long. I’m sorry. Let me know when Firefox 3 extensions are ready for :

• Finding my keys, wallet, mobile phone, remembering my pin number?

• Blocking certain celebrities from ever appearing in any media consumed, inviting others over for BBQs, creative collaborations, island getaways.

• Going beyond net neutrality and taxing the bandwidth of anyone browsing media that involves certain celebrities and re-distributing that bandwidth to people watching ‘better stuff’.

• Keeping the cats fed but not overfed, when late-night rooftops need climbing over, islands need to be got away to.

• Auto-disseminating a whiff of extra tree seeds to farmlands and forest floors during every hour spent unnecessarily hooked up to the big smoky grid behind the browser.

• Auto-finding a yoga class in your neighbourhood, at a timeslot that suits, and giving you 20 minutes warning of your internet cutting off, to be resumed 20 minutes after the class finishes.

If there’s one thing the latest wave of webbery does well, it’s keeping track of sites that keep track of sites that keep track of…

Back in the Day
Used to be simple enough – find some curious brained folk who spend too much time wandering the web, and drop into their blog from time to time. The rise of RSS readers to easily subscribe to material like this, made it a snack to quickly gather a huge range of hand-picked curators and connoiseurs to keep you in touch with news in any number of esoteric topics. And then, when it happened that there were too many curators walking the earth, along came the re-blog (software that facilitates the process of filtering and republishing relevant content from many RSS feeds – reblog.org), enabling a new breed of curators to pick out the best .. curators, which was grand for a while, apart from the problem of still being limited to the perspective of that particular curator. More brains were needed, and that’s where things get messy.

And Then
Expanding on the web curation idea, slashdot.org launched on the premise of allowing it’s readers to nominate stories, with a constantly rotating team of editors filtering these submissions and presenting the best on their frontpage. The shift to many brains was spectacularly successful, and then the founders of digg.com tried to expand on this idea by letting the audience not only nominate stories, but also become the editors themselves – by voting on the stories, the stories with the most votes being shifted to the frontpage, in turn meaning avalanches of traffic for the sites being profiled. newsvine.com and reddit.com are amongst those following the same path, both aiming to provide customised stories for you, based on what you’ve submitted or voted for over time. Popularity alone of course, isn’t necessarily a measure of quality, and acknowledging that is the latest iteration in the field, polymeme.

Sayeth Polymeme:

“We have a database of about 25,000 leading blogs covering specific topics — economics, architecture, media, and so on. Every few hours our unique buzz-detection system analyzes each topical cluster and determines what are some of the “hottest” articles — be they from the traditional media or other blogs — discussed by the blogs in our cluster. We then republish the most interesting of them on Polymeme.com, displaying the sources that are talking about each “hot” news article or blog post. We believe that relying on this “wisdom of clusters” and not just “wisdom of crowds” provides for superior buzz detection than most regular buzz-aggregators, which usually give preference to most popular stories across all topics, and not most interesting ones in specific areas.”

Sample Polymemes?
The Poly-feed offers about 50 headlines or so a day, eg ‘the decline of the american empire’ which offers an article about recent economic, financial and geopolitical events that suggest the above, but also shows how this theme is something that has been recently covered by many people and offers all the links to these. The extra contextualisation is really nice, and so for the time being am enjoying the feed quite well.

Face is The Place
Of course, the ease of publishing and reading links – and importantly, having access to a more direct group of peers ( for both reading and writing ), inside the walled garden that is Facebook, means many people are now filtering their web through their facebook account. Within most groups of friends, are a few who take with glee to the chance to spread the word about what they’ve been reading / viewing / listening to / thinking, and for a particular few, this extends to the compressing as much links, juice or wit into their ‘account status’ messages as possible. Which is exactly the premise and promise ( or threat ) behind the popular twitter.com service. While Twitter sounds maddening to many, the core idea of being able to send a short SMS sized message from phone or computer at any time, and have this be published on a site, be picked up by others subscribing, and responded to, is obviously compelling for many.

Too many accounts, too little time? Ping.fm updates your facebook, myspace, twitter etc etc accounts in one go. Tubemogul.com publishes your video to many different accounts at once ( youtube, blip.tv etc etc ) and Friendfeed.com gathers your updates, comments, bookmarks etc from a large range of sites in one place, and allows subscribing to the collected updates of friends – which actually provides a pretty useful service – being able to comment on and develop conversations with friends about their broader web travels, all from the one location.

“Where are we when on the phone?”

On a rooftop it turns out. International no-budget short film made around 2003, based on the idea that if a few people around the world were able to film themselves doing something with a phone on a rooftop, this might be a fruitful plot device, or at least provide some kind of continuity and fun for editing later on. And so, a request was sent out through the networks, that pretty much said :

“Can you make 30 seconds of video that starts with you answering a phone, and ends with you dialling a call?”

Many months later ( imagine – a time before youtube! ), had compiled a diverse range of contributions from Sadie Plant, Neotropic, Scanner, Howard Bloom, a Colombian rooftop party, Rebecca Cannon, Captain Frodo, Anna Sagaponic and many more – and massaged these together into one ‘continuous’ tale linked by rooftop phone action.

Ended up on a Neopoetry DVD compilation, and subsequently screened at Straight Out Of Brisbane, Electrofringe & other festivals and exhibitions internationally. Came with a companion essay. And in the endless Melb-Winter-Of_Productivity 2008, it’s finally online.

.. one might think, lurks a Turkish Batwoman. Turkish Batman has been found. However, despite my best attempts before, during and after 6 months in Istanbul last year, Turkish Batwoman remains elusive. Batboy in the comments of a previous post about this search, located the internet movie database listing for Turkish Batwoman, but these aren’t the only steps closer…

Was aware of Mexican Batwoman ( pic above), (La Mujer Murcielago aka Batwoman ( 1968, Mexico ) : “pretty ambitious for what is in essence a Mexican wrestling film” ), but recently discovered a torrent download for that and The Wild World of Batwoman (1966 US), as well as learning the existence of Batwoman and Robin (1972, Philippines), and Batwoman and Robin Meet the Queen of the Vampires (1972, Philippines), Super Mario Nazi Batman, and then … Bathman dal pianeta Eros ( Bathman On The Planet Of Pleasure – 1982 Italy ) :
“Sexually-obsessed Bathman (Mark Shannon) and Klito-Bell arrive from the planet Eros and fight perverted criminals on Earth, such as prostitutes and rapists, in this outrageous Batman spoof. Holy lawsuit!”

The Turkish remakes keep popping out of the woodwork too – Turkish Bruce Lee, Turkish Zorro, Turkish Conan, and even Turkish Mad Max, but for now, Turkish Batwoman remains on the prowl…

Broadcast media organisations are slowly adapting to the idea that their audiences can produce and distribute media too, shifting the top down one-to-many model of media to one of many-to-many. Representing part of an adaptive strategy over at the ABC, pool.org.au is about to launch, a site where anyone can upload and publish material – or remix some of what is there already. John Jacobs ( Video Subvertigo, Indymedia, ABC’s Night Air ) was happy to be interviewed about the site’s aims.

The pool site is about to launch – what would you like to imagine it being in 2010?
By 2010 I’d hope that media professionals and consumers had used the live web to blur each others boundaries and used spaces like Pool to build the new public media forms and platforms. So maybe Pool 2010 is some kind of aggregated media tagzine.

To what extent are ABC radio and TV archives available now, and what kind of plans are there for increased future availability?
Opening up the ABC archives is an important goal for many people.  Like the BBC, the ABC recognizes the huge potential of digital access to its back catalogue. There’s a balancing act to be played out between intellectual property rights and public interest. Public media is shifting roles from broadcasting media units to hosting a digital connection cloud. Right now ABC TV’s iView (abc.net.au/tv/iview ) is one avenue for directly accessing popular current productions. I can see a future where less high profile ABC output is delivered to the pubic domain directly. Pool is modeling this with its use of Creative Commons licensing.

What ABC media would you especially enjoy seeing remixed by it’s audience?
In the night garden it’s one of my favorite shows. Like Telly Tubbies and Mr Squiggle before that, kids programming always has the most open agenda and abstract language that naturally welcomes remix or re interpretation. Just add a bit of ABC news actuality and you are in VJ heaven.

What contributions have surprised you so far?
I liked hearing Holy’s story of her squat but it was so great hearing Dan turn it into a song!

What limitations of current Pool system are you looking to transcend?
Pool is a space to rethink public media, there are plenty of limitations but also many possibilities. I invite you all to log in and start to co-create. Once media objects are free of ownership many options open up.

Examples of forward-thinking broadcast media projects online?
Engagemedia.org is a great homegrown example of direct video publishing. And viddler.com okay it’s like just another You tube competitor but check out it’s time line annotation feature. Soon social media will aggregate tags like “silly” into a channel and then I will have found a home.
 
Other video remix sites that inspire?
The “Related to” side bar on Youtube, I love browsing have you watched http://play.blogger.com?