Print On Demand | info + invitation from OpenMute

I attended Openmute's workshop at the DIY media festival at the dana centre today.
They've spent a lot of money + time on this FLOSS project and "are happy to share the acquired knowledge with partners in the spirit for the lesser known and ethically orientated copyleft license."

So, I learnt a whole host of great practicalities:

+ Print on Demand
PDF files can be transformed into a bound publication with colour cover / b+w insides in 15 days.

This digital printing method using 3M+similar machines has been in the corporate sector and MIT-land for a while: now web services have made it affordable.

It's great: 1 - 1000+ copies at £1.34.

Use Lightning Source to do this.
Fixed costs turn into variable costs (pay as u sell), Amazon automatically stock, PayPal automatically works.

+ Networked distribution

A warped version of NGO strategies: civiCRM.

Using an online database system first introduced in the 2004 US elections (customer relationship management > constituent relationship management > contact relationship management) nice people can distribute nice things at nice places. The niceness gets rewarded with sales percentage. What a nice way of doing things, and WHSmiths is nowhere to be seen!

+ Web to POD printing

Drupal CMS tools enable articles to be clustered / uploaded / printed.
It's all happening at a place called the POD park.

Expect this to be in our faces 'Fall' 2006 courtesy of Google / Amazon via iTunes for books.

Good Shoes | We are not the same.

Good Shoes are playing the metro tonight. The sound system is shitty, but I have many good memories of that place. I think they are promoting their new single, which also has a video. I helped Laurie out by drawing a ginkgo biloba tree, which he turned into a forest. He then made this whole shadow puppet animation the old fashioned way - waving about paper stencils on sticks. Wow. Apparently it's showing on MTV now.

I lost approx. 2000 songs today.

I finally upgraded to iTunes 6. Without noticing I was skipping 5 (I've had an unreliable connection for a while). Fool!
Anyway, so today I open up the thing, and it tells me my files are damaged and now I have a lump in my chest.

Apparently this is how I can fix it. I lose all metadata but I'm sure last.fm's got that covered.

1.) Move all the MP3s into one location outside the iTunes folder
2.) Delete all the MP3s from within iTunes (it'll delete all the meta-data without deleting the files themselves because they're no longer where they're expected to be).
3.) Make sure the "keep my tunes organized" option is checked
4.) Drag the folder you put the MP3s into in step 1 onto iTunes, it will happily churn across every MP3 in there and re-add it into your library.

Phew.

Now I can work in peace, thanks to Jeremy Zawodny getting stressed at Thanksgiving.

Alva Noto | AV.06

View this clip on Vimeo

Things this week:

Wim Wenders is the guest of Tania Ketenjian
Sight Unseen
Resonance FM
Tuesday 28 / 03 13:00 - 13:30



Melanie Manchot at Fred gallery, Vyner Street.
Wednesday 29 / 03 18:30 - 20:30 ( to 07 / 05)
Melanie went to Ibiza and befriended the superclubs' security guards. Then got them to undress for her. Now it's a video installation.

"His skin would seem to burst over such a mass of muscle. Buried in his clumsy movements is that sense of sadness of an over bred species, caught in his own monstrous body. He is a paradoxical creature: built to please, to be looked at, yet how can such an absurd body engage in sex, other than with itself......"

Translated from an essay on Ibiza titled "Around the clock, always on the edge" by Dirk Peitz.

Takeaway festival: DIY media
Dana Centre, Science Museum.
Wednesday 29 / 03 - 31 / 03

Looks like a lot of great talking / listening / making / doing. And MAzine are involved, so that's good.

(Here's them on Ryoji Ikeda the other night. And I thought the 2nd half was data-slapstick...)





SUM(1,4,6)
Area10, Peckham Square.
Node closing party. Looks busy.

"Starting in the early afternoon and into the night the programme will host meetings, concerts, digital shorts, installations, performances, VJs and DJs, laptop musicos, cyber-wrestlers, CCTV hackers and circuit benders + much more."

You can choose your cyber-wrestling champion and receive free support items here. Yeah I'm going for the girl.

LCC lunchtime | Salo o le 120 giornate di Sodoma

In my break today, I had mushroom soup and watched underage girls bathing in faeces, having their nipples burnt and their eyes cut out. I'd got there just in time for the Circle of Blood.

LCC's Sound Art people were making noise alongside Pasolini's film, and have been digitally improvising in the atrium for the past few days. This atrium links the media block to the graphic design block to the central foyer. You could hear the glitch 4 floors up: it's a great working environment.

Anyway, I haven't seen images like this in a long time. Not hearing the dialogue or the screams or the squealches or the gun shots made the hyper-bleak visuals even more stylised. I could eat a bit of ciabatta during the ritualistic slaughter with ease. This feeling reminded me of Holy Mountain.

(Barthes on this stripped glance: Sade-Pasolini.)

Later in the afternoon on my way out I passed through the atrium again, and was asked if I'd like to stop and look at the art work on the wall with a free beer. There were several screen printed posters around, all saying the same thing: Sorry, No Image Available. I declined. I'm too tired for this kind of thing.

Serpentine Pavilion 02 | Balmond / Bosia's animated algorithm.

It's old news, it was based on an algorithm of spiralling squares that came from subdivisions of boxes connecting.
But look, when it's animated:

Sesame Street | Born to Add.

Look out for: the 4th policeman springing out of the shadows, and Clarence's sax solo. (Take it away Clarence):



This kind of thing totally inspired 1992's "Digital Clock". (creative commons license pending)

Related:
Malcolm Gladwell on the sticky birth of Oscar the grouch.

There's a german version of Rubber Ducky, called Quietscheentchen.

Illustration at the Tab Centre.

Monday 20/03 18:00 - 21:00
Nice things on walls, Hackney Road.

Manfred Mohr and cubes and hypercubes.

Before the cube:

1969. The elements are horizontal, vertical, 45 degree lines, square waves, zig-zags, and probabilities for line widths and lengths. Within a defined area, the algorithm chooses from the alphebet to create a random walk.

After the cube:

1975. "visual equations", plotter drawing ink on paper

Since 1972 Manfred has been emotionally detaching himself from any aesthetic decisions via computers.

He had dates with a big weather-predicting machine in Paris in the early hours of the morning in order to make these drawings. Once he stopped the national grid.

First he concerned himself with the 12 lines of the cube: the cube as a fixed system with which to make new signs. Like sentences of music he said the other weekend it runs forever and ever. It's now 2006 and he's currently on the 11D hypercube.

Some things he said that I liked:

On computers:
Precision is freedom is clarity in mind.

On artists:
There's always something missing. They take a logical thought and don't follow it to the end.

To Golan Levin:
Is it so easy for you from the arts to meet the computer science people?

And my favourite:
If I don't want to be logical, I'll go to the beach.

NODE.London | it's March already.

Lucky I have nice people around me to remind me of the date. Anyway, I digress.. Node - it's great, it's free, it's all-encompassing and a little too much to digest. This is what I like the look of:

Day-to-Day Data
to 23/04
Danielle Arnaud gallery, Kennington.

Day-to-Day Data is a national touring Exhibition, Publication and Web-based Exhibition. Newly commissioned work by 20 artists, an extensive survey of imaginative methods of data visualisation, through different media.

They have an extract of Perec's Infra-ordinary on the site, so I am impressed.

Dorkfest
18 / 03 - 19/03
Limehouse Town Hall.

They say: a weekend gathering at the edge of art, science and uselessness. A showcase of inventions and explorations into electricity and it's (stranger) uses. I say: there are worse things to be doing on Saturday afternoons.

A la recherche du temps perdu / In Search Of Lost Time
20 / 03
the Triangle, Mare Street, Hackney.

This is a little too wow-some to paraphrase, so:

The performance “A la recherche du temps perdu” takes the code literally. We are reading the machine-code version of Marcel Proust’s novel. During the eight hours of a working day the human performers are playing computer. From the analog to the digital and back again: The sequence of events of the performance is described in this manual. Starting from the ASCII-Version of Marcel Proust's novel “A la recherche du temps perdu” it is then re-coded into its underlying zeros and ones and then read by two performers alternately (one is reading the zeros, the other one the ones). The third person is CPU (the Central Processing Unit): She interprets the zeros and ones with the aid of an ASCII allocation table, cuts out the corresponding letter from the prepared sheets and turns it over to Display, who sticks it onto the wall panel. After eight hours of performance about 250 characters can be processed. During the act of reading, interpreting and presenting the work of art emerges, posing questions about the nature of the digital and the analogue, of work and art, time and beauty.

In The Field, Location-based Sonic Art Projects discussion
19:00 16 / 03 Resonance FM.

Focussing on location-based sonic art and site-specific, community orientated projects. Using radio and other public means of aural distribution, these projects involve and depend on community members in the process of creation. The discussion will be moderated by Tom Wallace.

Deptford TV
Communal documentation of the regeneration process of Deptford, with footage to be distributed over an Open Content License on Deptford.tv and exhibited outside the beautiful Laban centre on a boat on Deptford Creek.

PORTA2030
15 / 03
Broadway Market.

This looks like it'll be funny to watch:

"Towards building a portable, sustainable and responsive social network by year 2030, PORTA2030 will perform a mobile network project. PORTA2030 deploys the porta-pack, a data sensing-storage-transmission portable unit that allows intervention via its urgent signal relay network system. PORTA2030 takes into account any given urgency scenario and mobilizes porters to propagate and activate a collective response through visual and sonic manifestation."

Differentiated Structures in Nature and Design | AA Symposium

Friday 17th March, 10 AM.
It's a free for all at the Architectural Association!

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe says:
The symposium presents a novel approach to architectural design and sustainability, based on the differentiation of the material systems that make up the built environment towards an enhanced performance capacity. This approach is embedded within a biological paradigm that offers new insights into higher-level functionality of living nature.

I've paraphrased the day's breakdown:

The first session: learning from biology: the interdisciplinary approach of biomimetic engineering - examining natural structures and systems and deriving engineering principles from them. Higher-level functionality is the aim.

The second session: recent engineering and computational advances in evolving and assessing differentiated structures.

The third session: current approaches to differentiated and multi-performative systems in the intersection between designing, engineering and making.

I've called them up, and you don't even have to be a member. Really? Yes. Really? Really. Ok.

A few notes on touring:

+
It's really cold up North. I used to live there when I can't remember, but wow. The snow seems to justify it.

+
4 books in bag = 10 sets of laughter = literary tom props.
We forgot we needed something between our drums and the floor. Ha! Calvino's now covered in wine, but it's ok.

+
Contact mikes are gold dust.

+
Don't tell anyone how you think it went until they tell you.

+
The words "you were amazing" mean absolutely nothing to me. I'm not ungrateful, just don't see the relevancy in over-emphatic tones. 3 things I don't mind: great, good and thumbs. Shifty eyes are also ok.

+
After one day, we discovered that none of us really knew why we were wearing black veils. Any which way, mesh = fun.

+
Keeping merch tallies is better than watching sport.

+
Christina's the best driver I've ever driven with. She gets lost in style when I think I know where I'm going, and sings along to her tapes too. (Tape highlight = 2 Morro Morro Land off Hypermagic Mountain. Reminded me I haven't given it enough time)

+
Finding a place to sleep isn't as hard as it would at first seem.
Finish the set with "And does anyone have space for 4 girls?" and you end up with people who hang paper skeletons in their corridors. Saul had to wake up his housemate: "If I don't, he won't believe me in the morning when you're gone."

+
The Liars use GPS and listen to + broadcast their ipod a lot. Aymie says Bon Jovi = tour bus hit. (Apparently their next album's going metal). I had to flick through (can't help being curious). Remember gaps more than anything: there's no 'electronica' on there. No Wolf Eyes / Black Dice either. Lots of Eno though, and they played Dizzee Rascal's I Luv U remix a lot.

+
The Liars say that Leopard Leg are "the best thing to happen to us."

+
Being able to hear oneself = overrated = impossible = the best thing that ever happened to us.

+
If we could, we'd play in the dark every time.

Making planes.

Kieslowski at the NFT.

Lots of screenings of his films and others that influenced him. What a great way of doing things. Bit disappointed about the presumed lack of stamina though - Decalogue's being shown in 5 installments!

Watched Three Colours Red again a few months ago to see what might have happened in the 10 years inbetween. Still holds up. All good things came in trilogies when I was smaller: Karate Kid, Back to the Future and the Three Colours. (One day I'll draw a line through them, oh the correlations to be found.)

My only non-trilogy favourite at this time, was Louis Malle's Au revoir, les enfants. Every child should have to watch it. And it's on the list.

Bucky | Total Thinking, 1963

Man has been lacking in comphrensive disciplines and the developed ability to synthesise essentially because of the bewildering arrays of complex behaviour items of natural phenomena.

Man shows synergetic re-genius inferior to nature's regeneration.

Consciously or unsconsciously life is systematically pulsive.

The heart pulses without conscious authority. It ceases without recourse to man's assumed objective authority. It propogates.

Bucky | Prime Design, 1960

For all time man has sub consciously co ordinated himself with universal evolution. He does not consciously push each of his millions of hairs out through his scalp at man-preferred rates or selected patterns and colours.