Crankthesteza.org is a new brisbane Net / independent label in Brisbane. I am looking for the unusual, usual, weird and bizarre forms of music. Check it out and drop us your tracks on the drop box..

We also hire P.A's and production gear with a community approach. Will soon have a production library and memberships are coming soon.

Drop by and have a look.. any feedback would be greatly appreciated..

Thanks Stoicdee

peas :)

ENZYME 8 - Friday January 30th 2009 @ Blue Velvet - 60 Smith Street Collingwood featuring EYE / DJ Citizen (Canberra), sig.int, Manticle, BasticH, Cassandra's Myth, DJ Infectious Unease.
EYE are releasing the long-delayed "Propaganda Machine Vol.1" CD "Post-Industrial Music for an Information-Age" on the night! read more or visit ENZYME website for more details

Expanded Cinema is an online platform for experimental film, early video, and sound-based, durational work. All of the material is being curated from available media online, emphasizing an overlooked facet of the archival function of new media. The site has collated videos of Derek Bailey, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Mark Leckey's "Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999)" - a video exploration of subcultures, iconography and dancing with footage from 70s-90s in UK. plus many more. visit http://expandedcinema.blogspot.com for more details

Watch the video

this is some video I took with my old camera as I drove into Brisbane from Sydney for the final visit prior to leaving for the UK. you can't see much detail - but the lights are colourful and I can tell each step along the way - probably have a story for most of the spots driven past. I can't remember how many times I've driven through the city and valley over the years when I lived there. the valley looked alot different - new business, brighter lights. it brings back lots of nice memories of the fun times in brisbane!

Watch the video
the drive to Canberra to see Tab & Andrew while she's pregnant. shaky footage as I was driving! I took a couple of the brown signed tourist drives and ended up on a 75 km unsealed dirt mountain track on the way to Wombeyan Caves. I had to beep the horn going round the blind corners and the tyres were sliding a bit some of the time so it was a bit scary. it took me a couple of hours as I was driving so slowly! luckily I didn't come across too many cars coming the other way. finally I made it to the bottom of the hill where the park is leading to the Caves. by this time it was 3:30pm and I thought I might have to do another 75k to get back to the highway, so I didn't actually make it to the caves - the shortest trip was a 1.5 hr guided walk which involved climbing inside the caves also. I did get to see lots of kangaroos though and the park was a nice oasis after the hairy drive through the mountains. luckily there was a 5 km road with about 1 km unsealed, but easier gradient road leading out of the park heading towards Golburn / Canberra, so the trip back was much quicker and safer! great to see Tab & Andrew before they have the baby, so it was worth the trip!!!

There's a couple of conferences coming up which I wouldn't mind checking out.. don't think I'll have a chance in person as I'm still in Delhi for work, but I think they'll have video / audio recordings of them so I can check out later.

Vloggercon 2006 is being held in San Francisco this year. Here's the blurb from their site:
"VLOGGERCON 2006 is the intersection between media-makers and technology. A space for dialog and interaction. Of creation and collaboration. A media village born on the internet, and making camp for one weekend in San Francisco.

In the past year, videoblogging has grown into a myriad of forms with a worldwide voice. And your voice is needed at Vloggercon– after all, the media is being made by you so it’s your voice that we want to hear! Vloggercon is a two-day collection of roundtable discussions about the emergence and the future of this new medium; not a series of lec-tures. This conference is created for meeting and learning from each other, so be ready to share your thoughts!

Vloggercon 2006 will be held June 10 & 11 at the Swedish American Hall, 2174 Market Street, San Francisco CA 94114. "
http://www.vloggercon.com/ - tickets are available online.

Where 2.0
This one's about locative and GIS / Google Earth, Second Life / Electric Sheep & similar web apps. Would be good to see what's happening on this front at the moment. Here's the blurb from their site :

" Everything happens somewhere. With open source and free web mapping tools like Ka-Map and Google Maps, we finally have a way to display location information. At last year's Where 2.0, we put the spotlight on the grassroots developers building mash-ups on platforms from Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Google. This year we'll look at the latest developments in those platforms as well as the latest startups, civic projects, and labs experiments built on them.

In addition you'll find source mapping tools, open standards for data and location web services, and sensors for obtaining location data. We'll learn how the established geo industry is reacting to the first businesses making money from their grassroots geospatial projects. There's no better place to meet the people behind the mash-ups, the people behind the platforms, and the people looking ahead to the future of geospatial. "
http://conferences.oreillynet.com/where2006/

Vade's blog has max patches and tutorials for creating glitch videos and other cool stuff.

here's a photo of my new purchase - finally went to a mac! now I just have to get used to using the apple key instead of the ctrl key in windows / on my old laptop.

have been reading about Boot camp - it's all over the mail lists and blogosphere at the moment - MACs running Windows XP. even macs with infamous BlueScreenOfDeath (BSOD). interesting times ahead.

Today I'm meant to be packing up my things as it's my last weekend in Auckland. One more week of work here then I'm on holidays for about 5 weeks - 10 days in Sydney (more packing!) then flying back to NZ to drive around the South Island.

I bought a few DVDs last year and haven't had a chance to watch them yet. This one's amazing - they're all having such fun. It's been around for a while and the film has played at many of the film festivals and there's been live gigs in Los Angeles.

Buy a copy!!

KEEPINTIME - A LIVE RECORDING

here's the trailer from the Mochilla website
http://www.mochilla.com/keepintime/

http://www.mochilla.com/keepintime/trailers.htm

click on the image to goto the video player page

This is a reply to a post on Stealth board listing the software I'm using most often these days.

http://www.stealthmag.com/board/viewthread.php?tid=6461

yeah gimp is good. the interface isn't as nice as photoshop but it's free / open source and has many of the same features for image editing & conversion. if u were a graphic designer u'd probably go with photoshop cs or similar but for simple resizing/cropping and converting gimp does the same job.
http://www.gimp.org

here's a list of my fav s/w atm (at least what I'm using most these days). I've been playing with a bit of videoblogging so a lot of this is video related. (not in any order)

isadora : http://www.troikatronix.com/isadora.html
it's really cool for realtime video processing. so u could spend hours using it. even if u don't have a camera yourself, just download some quicktime movies from one of the videoblogging sites and do a cutup remix or something. the demo version (which I'm still using) only lets u save 5sec, so to make anything longer, u can just save 5sec at a time then past e them altogether in quicktime or another editing tool. some of the effects are similar to jitter (the video add on to max/msp) but they're all prebuilt so u don't have to write the code. just connect the patch cords.
http://www.troikatronix.com/isadora.html

max/msp http://www.cycling74.com
- it's great for writing realtime music. generally used in art / sound art installations or universities and experimental performances. jitter is the video processing as mentioned above. easy to spend hours using it. though the learning curve is a bit steep until u get the hang of it. I did a course which was helpful. has a 30 day demo. I bought the student price which is $59 for 9months licence so handy if you're doing a project.
http://www.cycling74.com

quicktime pro - www.apple.com/quicktime
if u pay the $30 to upgrade to quicktime pro u can then do video editing in quicktime. it does interactive video as well. and you can add text tracks, html links, link the whole video movie.
www.apple.com/quicktime

freemind mind mapping software
http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
- this is great for writing all those ideas down and collecting your thoughts & brainstorming
http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

drupal - www.drupal.org
- I use this every day. it's a CMS (content management system) and has features such as blog, rss, chat, forums, user access, stories, project management, images, videoblogging & podcasting support, + a heap more. basically it creates your website then you can start posting information up and sorting/catergorising it
www.drupal.org

if u don't have a website, setup a blogger.com account (free) and start posting info and your creations and let us know the links.

avid free DV - http://www.avid.com/freedv/index.asp
- it's a cutdown version of avid's non-linear editing software. perfect for home use. has the same interface as the versions used in professional video editing houses so good to learn if u hope to work in that field one day.
http://www.avid.com/freedv/index.asp

skype - www.skype.com
- for chatting to your friends for free. good for collaborative projects also.
www.skype.com

eZediaQTI - http://www.ezedia.com/products/eZediaQTI/
- for creating quicktime videos / videoblog movies. easy to do text and tracks and interactivity if you don't want to do it manually in quicktime. demo version limited to 5 objects but that's usually ok for small projects
http://www.ezedia.com/products/eZediaQTI/

itunes - www.apple.com/itunes
- for listening to music and podcasts. ipodder/lemon also good
www.apple.com/itunes

audacity - http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
- for audio recording and basic processing. u could do a track for the stealth remix thread in this!
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

hiphopstarz - www.hiphopstarz.com
- free, basic sequencer for creating beats. it's a very simple interface. looks a bit dodgy but works ok for beginner level stuff. doesn't have all the features of cuebase etc, but it's free. if anyone has another good free /opensource replacement, let us know!
www.hiphopstarz.com

fireant - http://fireant.tv/download
- great videoblog aggregator / viewer. you can also use itunes or just view in the web pages, but this is a separate app which does it also. they usually recommend some good videos to watch / subscribe to.
http://fireant.tv/download

if I had a mac I'd be using quartz composer for video also. but I don't so I can't :(

ourmedia - ourmedia.org + Internet Archive - www.archive.org
- I use this to upload video and audio to IA. it's also a blogging site similar to blogger but looks different. if u need hosting space, this could be an option for original works ie don't upload your mp3 collection or u'll be banned. but if u make a track or a video they'd love u to upload it (free)
www.ourmedia.org

some of the producers here could possibly recommend better audio software. but have a play with video - it's fun. combines everything!

microsoft visual c# - www.microsoft.com
- if you want to try programming, c# is probably good to start with. it's a bit like c and java, but you can use the IDE and create windows/web apps pretty easily.
www.microsoft.com

flickr - www.flickr.com
- upload all your photos. it's social software, so you can add friends and tags, and see when your friends upload new pics, and they see when u do. also good for hosting your images. u can get a free account or upgrade to a paid account if u have lots of pics
www.flickr.com

I've been thinking about different publishing & distribution methods and as it often happens the conversation appears on a site or mail list around the same time. early in feb, the node-l (node-London) promo emails starting making the rounds of the net lists. it sounds like a great collective of grassroots, funded & professional new media organisations based in London. (read through the list of projects on their site!) initially I was thinking this would be great to have internationally or at least in Australia / New Zealand as well - node-b (brisbane), node-s (sydney), node-m (melbourne), node-a (auckland) or node-au (australia) & node-nz (new zealand). another section of their promo which caught my eye was the POD - print on demand. I followed the links and discovered the mute site is based on CiviCRM which is an offshoot of Drupal (basically it's Drupal with a nice installer and some extra custom themes). Drupal's my favourite CMS as anyone who knows me would know - this site is done in drupal. (finally upgraded to latest version, but haven't had time to add more features yet). anyway, the POD concept is quite cool. people could make their own custom pdfs. researchers could pdf their reference articles for research. endless possibilities. I might try out the 'save to pdf' feature. on the Stealth message board I frequent, Mark was talking about new concepts & suggestions for Stealth mag, so I posted the below message. there's heaps of other options but not sure if he's wanting to go the online publishing method. I think it would work well in conjunction with the print mag and he seems quite busy these days & it sounds like he has to do most of the work which would be quite a lot of work.

I've been reading some of the notes on the Notes about Notes blog (written by a guy who works for Eastgate who make Tinderbox and the site is made using Tinderbox, so perhaps a touch biased? but interesting anyway). The note about commonplace books touched base with me.

Ever been on a drive where the countryside is so beautiful it's hard to pick the most beautiful part of it. I took some video - the collage doesn't do the day justice but perhaps gives some idea. There was so much to look at I had to choose some of the finer details to concentrate on.

This video was created in eZedia QTI for Windows. I'm trying out the software - you can add interactive components but for this example I didn't. I just left it simple. There's a limit to 5 objects on the trial version as well so I couldn't fit any more objects in without going over save/export limit! The only thing I don't like about it is that I need to host the videos locally (at least all together on another site of mine) instead of using a remote site such as archive.org. Which means if I use this technique again, I'll need to use smaller video files and loop them. Hopefully this doesn't make my site go over bandwidth - it's only a very small webspace. Oh well. See how it goes.

Also, I didn't add a controller to the movie so it'll play continuously until you close the page. The larger video screen will take a little while to load - it's about 15Mb. next thing to practice is different codecs / compression

The song is by The Orb - it's 10 seconds looped a couple of times. I love this song and it suits the scenery really well. I've just made a late change - added the audio to the small movie so at least there's something to listen to whilst the larger movie loads.

hrmm.. it seems IE doesn't like the movie file. and even firefox is sometimes not displaying the images but using a black background instead. will have to look into this further... seemed to work ok on my work pc so perhaps my home pc has a weird caching issue.

click on the image to goto the video player page

There's been lots of discussion on the vlogtheory yahoogroups list about videoblogging - debates over content, medium etc. I've done up a quick mind map (using sourceforge freemind) to try to collect my thoughts. it may not be completely in line with the ideas of the group, but could be useful as a starting point to capture thoughts, for me at least. I haven't included everything yet, but it's a start.

current version :
( see http://www.aliak.com/files/videoblog_v02.mm attached )

Expand - Collapse

here's another email sent to vlogtheory yahoogroups list on some thoughts and conversations I've been having today.

thanks for the replies guys.I find observing and loosely analysing communities really interesting. human behaviour in groups I guess. online behaviour is a particular interest.

(likely another non topic message, so delete now if not interested)

ok, it's a really hot sat afternoon here now (Auckland) and I've just returned from lunch and taking photos of street art & graf so have turned on the aircon and am emailing to cool down. at lunch I mentioned videoblogging to my friend, who hadn't really heard of it or realised it had a name. but one of the conversations was the difference between personal blogs and personal videoblogs. the main differentiation I see, is that written blogs (or even books), is really the little voice in your head speaking - letting it have a voice, whereas video diary entries are more real as you see the persons expressions and location not just descriptions of it. so you (the viewer) can connect differently to it. ie almost real vs imaginary, though not imaginary in the context of made up, but rather descriptive / virtual reality open to interpretation - the reality inside your mind compared to reality that you see. (prob not explaining this properly, perhaps I should have had the camera running at the time of the conversation as it was more coherent then).

I sent this email to the vlogtheory yahoogroups list, posting here to keep track of it.

Hi everyone, to change the topic slightly, and I'm not sure if it's really videoblogging theory or related per se, but one thing I like to notice is the changing moods and behaviours of when different technologies or interests are taken up. I've never done actual studies on it, so my thoughts are purely from observations, but I've seen it happen across many fields. do you know what academic studies there might be on these things?

reading more saria website articles. from what I can tell whilst reading the Ibarat 01 publication, life in the colony follows different rules than in the cities. local communities are tight-knit. lanes and streets become named after the locals, businesses who inhabit them or are even based on a purely descriptive nature. I suppose this is how early settlement streets in Australian cities were named also - that's why there are so many church streets with churches, railway parades next to the railways, bridge streets with bridges, hill lanes with hills etc. the Indian stories remind me of the City of God / City of Men movie/series where the kids go about creating a map of the favela they live in and the dramas and ego flattering they go through to offer naming rights to prominent community members.

it'd be interesting to see the work Sarai is doing whilst in country if I get the chance. they have a range of projects with visiting contributors as well as in-house fellows working in different areas.

it looks like my next work project is in Delhi, India so I've been reading more of the sarai website contributions. the Cybermohalla scratchbook is quite interesting - a collection of writings, thoughts, images and texts from the members contributing at the Compughar. many of the people are from the villages and settlements. it's interesting to read their thoughts and observations of the spaces they live in.

Mediamatic presents a 2-day workshop on social tagging, or MOBTAGGING. Mobtagging is what happens when users freely apply and exchange labels (metadata) to online information. This non-hierarchical method of structuring information is rapidly spreading over the web, with Flickr.com, Del.icio.us and Technorati as most famous examples. It gives users the possibility to specify, index and search information on their own terms. During this workshop we will analyse the inner workings and the social effects of mobtagging. How is social tagging changing the structure of (online) information, and our relation to it? For which usergroups and what type of information is Mobtagging rewarding? What roles does Mobtagging play next to more traditional ways of indexing information? This workshop is designed for bloggers, webmasters, artists and theorists; people with a practical as well as a theoretical interest in Mobtagging. Four cutting-edge speakers (see below) introduce various concepts and practises of social tagging, and assist the participants with the (re)design and evaluation of their own Mobtagging scenario's or applications. Visit www.mediamatic.net/mobtagging for more details

Finding my old bookmark files has made me nostalgic for the early computing days when everything was new and exciting and full of possibilities. One of my favourite magazines back in the early 90s was Mondo 2000. It was hard to get - only a few places in Brisbane stocked it, actually only two that I recall and even then it was occasional. By the time I got round to subscribing to the magazine it had finished being published and I lost my subscription renewal to the cause so to speak. At the time, it was cutting edge and the full gloss images and interviews with leading thinkers made it a great read. R.U. Sirius who was the editor of the mag has a podcast these days and can be found around mondoglobo.net. Here's a collection of links to mondo 2000 stuff:

mondo articles from the well (link updated : original link broken 25/09/2008 : http://www.well.com:70/1/Publications/MONDO )

I've been looking at some old files on my backup hard drive and came across my old bookmark files.

08/12/1998 bookmarks

15/12/1999 bookmarks

12/07/2000 bookmarks

+ address book

Blogging has become very popular over the last few years as I'm sure most people are aware. here's one possibly for the record books - an Indian blog entry received a comment 4,827 words long! almost like writing a paper..

not sure if you've seen this already, but I think it's important for 2 reasons..

1. because of the DRM issue and music protection some artists and music labels are introducing, and

2. because it came through via Boing Boing which is the Technorati "#1 ranked blog site". poular blogs are measured & given a technorati ranking based on "The biggest blogs in the blogosphere, as measured by unique links in the last six months." http://www.technorati.com/pop/blogs/

so, this entry just went out to thousands of other sites where other people are linking it and commenting on it - great way to get OZ hip hop out there.. perhaps some of the people out there will check out the bands/artists mentioned in the article. (as I like looking at stats, it'd be interesting to see if their website hits or sales adjusted partly due to this)

original blog entry @ http://intermaweb.net/2005/12/09/open-letter-hilltop-hoods/

Boing Boing blog entry:

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/12/08/fan_to_hilltop_hoods.html

Hilltop Hoods respond to the letter @ http://intermaweb.net/2005/12/10/suffas-reply-open-letter-hilltop-hoods/ and sound very reasonable.

Personally, I like the creative commons form of licensing & the ability to remix/remux existing works but I don't make my living from my art/music so come from a different perspective to an artist who does.

I think that having the songs available for download helps people try before they buy. and if someone downloads it and doesn't like it they probably weren't one of your customers anyway so you didn't lose any money from it, but perhaps one of their friends will hear it and like it and buy it then you'll gain a customer.

DRM is an issue which more & more artists will be having to deal with in the future though, a tough one for sure.

notes about studying methods:

http://e-courses.cqu.edu.au/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab=courses&url=...

SQRRR METHOD OF READING

There is a method of reading that all of our students will benefit from; it is called the SQ3R. Let me describe how to use the SQRRR method (Believe me it is wonderfully efficient).