most of the cafes and taxis here in Jerusalem listen to Galatz Radio - this is the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) station. army service is a part of everyone's life here in Israel with teenagers having to serve after they finish high school. they have a Hebrew news services & play popular Israeli and International music.

hackety.org is a website for artful computer hacking. they're interested in how hacking weaves into life

The Economist has a report on digital nomads. since it looks like I'll be heading back to Australia, I'll no longer be one of these :) perhaps whilst on short trips. it's been great for the past 4 years though, but I've been missing home and friends so it'll be good to have a base again. it's amazing how long you can live without a fixed address though. moving from country to country - hotels and short term rental apartments. most of my life is now on the internet - might sound strange, but it's a good place to backup your files, as well as posting dvd backups back home. I read the first article about Nomad Cafe and this rings true. in many places I've been to cafes and there've been people logged in to their laptops.

I've just been reading articles on the human network blog by Mark Pesce. all have been interesting, particularly the Unevenly Distributed : Production Models for the 21st Century where he talks about the death of television and film industries in their current distribution method. also mentioned were the examples of Ronda Byrne's online / streaming version of The Secret and the success it has brought her. as well as the "League of Peers" movie Steal this Film - Part 1 which is a documentary about file sharing and the troubles faced by Sweden's leading BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay.

just read about this on the toplap list :
Clojure was developed by architect / programmer Rich Hickey who has worked on projects such as scheduling, automation, election displays, fingerprinting, audio analysis, machine listening.

"Clojure is a dynamic programming language that targets the Java Virtual Machine. It is designed to be a general-purpose language, combining the approachability and interactive development of a scripting language with an efficient and robust infrastructure for multithreaded programming. Clojure is a compiled language - it compiles directly to JVM bytecode, yet remains completely dynamic. Every feature supported by Clojure is supported at runtime. Clojure provides easy access to the Java frameworks, with optional type hints and type inference, to ensure that calls to Java can avoid reflection."

Wikiversity is an online education resource : " Wikiversity is a community for the creation of learning activities and development of free learning materials. Students and teachers are invited to join the project as collaborators in teaching, learning, and research. Wikiversity strives to be an open and vibrant community where you can explore and learn about your personal interests. Wikiversity hosts and develops free learning materials for all age groups. Please participate and help build collaborative learning projects and communities; at Wikiversity we learn by doing, we learn by editing. "

FracturedSpaces would like it to be known that it is looking to release its first CD within the next four months, To that end I am looking for quality established bands/artists with a recording already finished, and who have no label as yet, to submit demos/samples with a view to possible release. I am
looking for works within the following genres only please, at least initially:

Drone
Drone doom metal
Dark ambient
Experimental
Noise
Industrial/Death Industrial

For fuller details please email:
simonjay704 AT hotmail.com

I look forward to hearing from potential collaborators!

Regards

Simon Marshall-Jones|FracturedSpacesRecords

DREAMLAND RECORDINGS
www.dreamlandrecordings.com

STRING THEORY guitar compilation available now. AUD $16.00

All other releases AUD $11.00 Postage Paid. Pay Pal available.

** NEW THURSDAY CLUBS: CHANGES and UPDATES **

Supported by the Goldsmiths DIGITAL STUDIOS and the Goldsmiths GRADUATE
SCHOOL

6pm until 8pm, Seminar Rooms at Ben Pimlott Building (Ground Floor,
right), Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross, SE14 6NW

FREE, ALL ARE WELCOME

** PLEASE NOTE THAT THE DATE FOR ELENA COLOGNI'S CLUB SESSION HAS BEEN
CHANGED FROM THE 28th of FEBRUARY TO THE 6th of MARCH **

--

*28 FEBRUARY with RAYMOND HARMON
:
Painting in Light: Experimental Film and the Advent of Improvisational
Cinema*

The traditional model for cinematic expression is as a controlled
environment moving forward in a linear direction. From its inception the
art of filmmaking has been dominated by a single form of chronological
development. Each film exists as a series of frames that are static at the
start of the film.

Improvisation, a language largely defined within the practice of music, is

a video by Nam June Paik (RIP) - this would be fairly easy to do using isadora these days. though a different story if you consider how he made it!

Nam June Paik - Ryuichi Sakamoto; Replica, for keyboard Composed by Ryuichi Sakamoto

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkjxG_k0VDo

http://www.spoems.com/tag_paik.html has a collection of his video works

Videodefunct is an experimental research project that focuses on inventing a hybrid vlog. A number of work-in-progress prototypes are being developed in the open source blog publishing system WordPress. A key objective is to design an interactive interface that explores the presentation of online video from a poetic perspective. Videodefunct is being developed by the collective of Keith Deverell, Seth Keen and David Wolf in the School of Applied Communication at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia.

info from the Videodefunct About page @ http://www.videodefunct.net/

Seth Keen from Videovortex explained the system on the videoblogging group mail list

Thanks Jay for the post on the videodefunct project.

a collection of audio recordings, field recordings and sound walks I've done over the years. most of these are on minidiscs or files not uploaded yet, so this is a work in progress as it's probably about time I sorted them out and uploaded some. not sure if they're of interest to anyone else, but they help recall memories for me.

The Digital Artists Handbook is an up to date, reliable and accessible source of information that introduces you to different tools, resources and ways of working related to digital art. The goal of the Handbook is to be a signpost, a source of practical information and content that bridges the gap between new users and the platforms and resources that are available, but not always very accessible. The Handbook will be slowly filled with articles written by invited artists and specialists, talking about their tools and ways of working. Some articles are introductions to tools, others are descriptions of methodologies, concepts and technologies. When discussing software, the focus of this Handbook is on Free/Libre Open Source Software. The Handbook aims to give artists information about the available tools but also about the practicalities related to Free Software and Open Content, such as collaborative development and licenses. All this to facilitate exchange between artists, to take away some of the fears when it comes to open content licenses, sharing code, and to give a perspective on various ways of working and collaborating. -- info via the DAH index page

Watch the video

I saw "South Coast" a documentary about Brighton (UK)'s hip hop community by Will Jewell last saturday night at the Jerusalem Cinematheque as part of the British Film Festival. I thought the film was a great balance of original roots of hip hop, respecting the US origins, whilst highlighting the original crews from the local Brighton community and featuring some of the up & coming artists also. a great snap shot into Brighton hip hop. it feels similar to Australian hip hop in some ways.

I wrote some names during the film so I could find out about them later. (hard to read my writing so hopefully I have these right!)

- poets vs MC night / battle
- young joe
- koaste - great beats and words about local issues / life
- cassiah (?) and danny - the park scene in the film
- deliverance
- brighton graf jam
- monkey sons
- remark
- slip jam - regular venue for around 5.5 years
- mc jam
- buzz
- brighton hip hop festival
- req 1

from what I can gather, their community is really healthy. they seem to have a few crews / people who are organising regular gigs & festivals. having a regular venue helps build a community I think, so they're lucky in that regard. and it seemed like a friendlier atmosphere as compared to london - people in the film commented on this as well. more laid back / beach town and being a smaller city I suppose.

after the film I asked Will if he could say something to the Australians as I'd upload it to show some of them so there's a message from him (the director) at the end.

there's a couple of minutes of the film shot whilst viewing it - sorry about the quality & fact this is pirated. there's hebrew subtitles overlayed.

mp4 video file : http://blip.tv/file/get/AliaK-SouthCoastBrightonUKHipHopDocumentaryByWil...

flash video file : http://blip.tv/file/get/AliaK-SouthCoastBrightonUKHipHopDocumentaryByWil...

or the blip post to play in a webpage : http://blip.tv/file/622825

---

http://southcoastthemovie.co.uk is the film's website - they have videos/articles etc there.

---

I recorded the directors talk after the film also - sorry about the audio quality - this is recorded on my phone camera. I recorded video but the zoom/quality is pretty bad so I just extracted the audio.

http://blip.tv/file/get/AliaK-WillJewellDirectorsTalkAfterSouthCoastShow...
or to play in a webpage : http://blip.tv/file/622851

---
19/08/2008

Jerusalem Cinematheque - British Film Festival screening of Will Jewell's documentary on Brighton (UK) hip hop community - South Coast

TechGnosis maillist website
“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
-Philip K. Dick-
VISIT TECHGNOSIS AT: http://techgnosis.info
SUBSCRIBE to TechGnosis List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TechGnosis/join

http://www.maybelogic.org
http://www.maybelogic.net

http://edge.org/

http://www.techgnosis.com - Erik Davis' site

http://www.undergrowth.org

http://www.barrelfullofmonkeys.org

http://www.entheo.net/ - entheogenesis Australia 2007 conference

http://www.docquan.com/lib_dead.html - an online collection / library of interesting books

Expand - Collapse

What is Scion City is a futuristic interactive machinima video movie series made in Second Life. the website has 6 episodes and links to different formats, an FAQ and a submit link where viewers can upload more episodes or related material (photos, documents, movies, etc) discovered about the series and Scion City. visit http://whatisscioncity.com/ for more details and to watch the films.

Etsy.com is a community driven online store that people making handmade goods can sell their products - their motto is "Your place to buy and sell all things handmade". there's a zine called Storque, and you can read about some of the success stories highlighting successful Etsy storeholders. some storeholders have been able to give up their day jobs to sell their works fulltime via Etsy, whilst others are part-time sellers.

Customers can browse by colours and find something to buy that matches that colour. or they can search one of the 105000 stores for one in their local area should they wish to buy local. there are a couple of Time Machines where customers can browse recently and past listed random items, ordered by posting time. Etsy also supports the buy handmade challenge for the holiday season.

"Guerrilla knitting" has a couple of meanings in the knitting community - to some, it merely means knitting in public, while to others, it means creating public art by knitted means.

Rose White from yarnivore spoke at The History of Guerilla Knitting session at the 24th Chaos Communication Congress in 2007 in Berlin on day 3 - 29/12/2007. a torrent video can be downloaded of the session. (open the video in VLC if you don't have another video player that can play the .mkv video file). The Chaos Communication Congress is organised by the Chaos Computer Club, Europe's largest hacker group, founded in 1981.

Rose gave a brief history of knitting, and some of the myths held over the years about the foundations and age of knitting. She compares knitting with computer hacking referring to proprietary knowledge, pattern making, knitting guilds. Also about the commercialisation and control of patterns prior to 1960s and subsequently by Knitting pattern books and yarn companies who controlled the market

Elizabeth Zimmermann who in the 1960s generated generic pattern books which broke out of the usual mold of patterns requiring a yarn makers yarn to make the pattern correctly. Effectively she made knitting open source again! She had a TV show in the USA which brought her style of knitting to the public, and she ran knitting camps to teach others.

Rose also mentioned KnitML, the knitting XML code specification which is being introduced to standardise knitting patterns and terminology.

"The KnitML Project's main goal is to develop and promote adoption of a standard content model for knitting patterns. By developing a community-supported specification (KnitML) and providing basic rendering and transformation tools, the KnitML Project aims to make KnitML easy to use and valuable to the knitter."

Questions were raised also about knitting (patterns) and Creative Commons licencing. many patterns are not available to be used as they are still covered by US copyright so are still unavailable to the public.

Rose talks about giving back the creative power to the knitter - to allow them to modify the patterns, or not make the project exactly as per the pattern. even changing the colours used in an accompanying photo of a finished pattern is a stretch for some knitters!

Rose says, "over the past 30 years or so, there have been different individuals who have contributed to this geekier, more hands on approach to knitting - wresting it out of the control of commercial enterprises. this leads us to guerilla knitting in the end."

Barbara Walker - Rose referred to her as "a knitting engineer". "she wrote 4 books of stitch patterns, where she knitted swatches, and dissected them and included written instructions on how to knit them - stitch by stitch. and she also developed a charting system, so that next to the swatch there would be a grid showing you how to do it in pictures, so that, you didn't even have to speak her language to do it. so that many of these knitting patterns were available, not just to English speakers, but to anyone who could pick them up and look at them. so this enormous dissemination of knowledge occurred when she started doing that."

Debbie New - who creates "labyrinth knitting" and wrote a book called Unexpected Knitting, which includes experimental knitting patterns including her swirl, sculptural, free-form, swatchless, labyrinth, cellular automaton, virtual and ouroborus knitting techniques.

also featured was Dave Cole and his knitted lead teddy bears and giant outdoor knitting using cranes and telephone poles as knitting needles to knit the American Flag at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.

the Simply Crafted website also lists some of these knitting pioneers as well as some freeform fibre (knitting & crocheting) artists such as Prudence Mapstone

also mentioned was the new Ravelry site - a social networking site for crafters, knitters and fibre artists, where they can "Organize projects, stash, needles, and more" & "Show off your work. Share your ideas and techniques." & "discover. Find new designs & yarns. Make friends. Try new things." the site is only open in beta stages at the moment. aso of today, they send out 500 - 800 invitations daily and there are currently 6,193 people waiting for their invites, so the site is in demand!

This weekend I've been trying to catch up on some of the MLA courses. the PKD course has finished. Rushkoff's Technologies of Persuasion finishes this weekend. I've enrolled in another self-study class called Tales of the Tribe - by Robert Anton Wilson (RAW) who has since passed away.

there was a class chat for Persuasion last night. I spoke to a fellow classmate earlier and they mentioned irc. I've been slack and hadn't used irc for ages - maybe over a year, and he mentioned chatzilla for firefox which comes with firefox. so I tried it out and went back to irc.deoxy.org. the channels have shifted slightly, but I found people I know in #gii, #bom, #chat has replaced #deoxy, GM made a new one #maybe for MLA (hopefully). so I spent the night chatting to otter, brains and glandmaster - hadn't spoken to the former for ages!

Psymbiensis is still running - though I had problems connecting last night. maybe this port is blocked by the isp I'm using atm. GM sent me a few links to things to read on deoxy - some are related to the courses, others things we were talking about.

on deoxy I also came across some lost PKD audio interviews : play them as an mp3 playlist in itunes or similar

new terms
a member of the Johnson family
-- from The Adding Machine - Collected Essays by William S Burroughs
-- http://deoxy.org/wiki/The_Johnson_Family

"the Johnson Family took shape as a code of conduct. To say someone is a Johnson means he keeps his word and honors his obligations. He's a good man to do business with and a good man to have on your team. He is not a malicious, snooping, interfering self-righteous trouble making person."

"A Johnson minds his own business. But he will help when help is needed. He doesn't stand by while someone is drowning or trapped in a wrecked car."

"The Johnson family formulates a Manichean position when good and evil are in conflict. It is not an eternal conflict since one or the other must win a final victory."

[Burroughs :] "I recollect Brion Gysin, Ian Sommerville and your reporter were drinking an espresso on the terrace of a little cafe on the Calle de Vigne in Tangier... after lunch a dead empty space... Then this Spaniard walks by. He is about 50 or older, shabby, obviously very poor carrying something wrapped in brown paper. And our mouths fell open as we exclaimed in unison

'My God that's a harmless looking person!'

He passed and I never saw him again, his passing portentous as a comet reminding us how rare it is to see a harmless looking person, a man who minds his own business and gets along as best he can in a world largely populated by people of a very different persuasion, kept alive by the hope of harming someone, on the way to the Commissaria to denounce a neighbor or a business rival leaving squiggles and mutterings of malevolence in their wake like ugly little spirits.

New Aeon Magic
http://deoxy.org/wiki/New_Aeon_Magic

I don't know much about magic or magick, so GM sent me this link. he'd done one of the MLA courses on it. the RAW course mentions it a bit but I'm a little behind in my reading assignments. below is an extract of a book called Liber Null and Pyschonaut by Peter J Carroll - there's a preview of this book on google books.

"The beginnings of the new psychic awareness have acquired a definitive subversive flavor. Magic is aligning itself against oppressive forms of order in many fields. magic is opposed to a psychiatry and medicine designed to patch up the damaged automaton and plug him back into the system. Instead it would rather that individuals learn to handle their own mental self-defense and treat their bodies with gentler remedies such as herbs. Magic rejects politics as no more than some peoples perverse desire to dominate others. It does well to dissociate itself from this monkey squabble and advocates instead personal enlightenment and emancipation which are the only real safeguards to freedom. Magic is anti-ideological because the main products of ideological solutions are repression and corpses. Magic is profoundly opposed to religion. Although a religion may appear benign when it is in decline, at least half of the madness and violent deaths of history have been caused by the superstition that the world is wholly material and that mens actions are not intimately interwoven with the psychic sphere."

"To oppose repressive forms of order which often impose themselves by evil means, magic aligns itself to a vision of chaotic good. Magics commitment to the good is reflected in its concern with individual freedom and consciousness and its interests in all other life forms on the planet. At the highest level this manifests as some unspecifiable feeling for the 'vibes' generated by human thought and action."

Comparative Religion Made Easy
http://deoxy.org/wiki/Comparative_Religion_Made_Easy
this page links to books by some of the deoxy forums members. haven't gone through this yet..

Reality Sandwich is a web magazine for this time of intense transformation. Their subjects run the gamut from sustainability to shamanism, alternate realities to alternative energy, remixing media to re-imagining community, holistic healing techniques to the promise and perils of new technologies. They hope to spark debate and engagement by offering a forum for voices ranging from the ecologically pragmatic to the wildly visionary (which, to our delight, sometimes turn out to be the one and the same). Counteracting the doom-and-gloom of the daily news, Reality Sandwich is a platform for voices conveying a different vision of the transformations we face. Their goal is to inspire psychic evolution and a kind of earth alchemy.

-- info adapted from the reality sandwich about page