Ahh yes, lovely soft beaches . . . . made of pebbles.
Cue Mark E Smith singing “British people in hot weather“.
I’m nearly at my last stop on this global circumnavigation on this ‘cultural technology consultant world tour 2007’. Currently I’m in Brighton then on to London before spending 24 hours in a small seat in a long metal tube.
I’ve been in Cuba running some Web Dos workshops. One of the highlights of the trip was a visit to Santa Maria beach about 30 minutes outside Havana. We were working hard even at the beach making a sitemap in the sand. The actual site itself will be up here very soon.
The Amazing Rolo demonstrates a very nifty bit of Max/MSP programming connected to a Nintendo Wii controller to screw with and ‘perform’ his sample-driven beats.
(via Make)
Over at Fabchannel there is a recent-ish live show from Junior Boys. I rated their debut album Last Exit much more than their follow up So This Is Goodbye and here on this live show the skitter-y Timberland-inspired rhythms of the older tracks don’t really translate so well with the live drums. If you liked Violator-era Depeche Mode then you’ll love this stuff – I was more into New Order.
Probably what excites me more about this is the whole Fabchannel thing which gives you an entire live show with sound quality suitable for computer speakers and decent video. The Flash interface is nice with easy skipping tracks and fast forwarding. These are all recorded in Amsterdam’s Melkweg and Paradiso and stay online for however long they have been able to negotiate rights for. There is a list of ‘expired’ shows as well which is a really nice touch giving a transparency to the whole rights issue which for me almost highlights a ‘blacklist’ of artists.
If you check their archive of cleared stuff you’ll find some fun stuff including all sorts of indie pop and post rock like Wire, Stars, Do Make Say Think, The Wedding Present, and Najah Attabou (which first got me onto this site via Jace’s Mudd Up) buried amongst plenty of other things not so aligned to my taste.
I’m sitting at the dinner table writing up some reviews with headphones on. My wife is sitting on the couch watching Grey’s Anatomy.
Up wafts TV On The Radio’s ‘Playhouses’ which is obviously providing the backing to a particular scene. Except it goes for more than the usual 5 seconds. I get up to see what is going on – “why is this song keeping on going?” I think to myself. It has been 30 seconds now. And still it goes on. And the scenes change.
Then I realise my mistake.
No, music isn’t being used to underscore a ‘point’ in the narrative in the way has been used for decades. No, music isn’t being used to tweak emotions. It is simply being included to ‘shift more units’ and to ‘break bands to core audiences’ in the era of downloads.
Silly me. How naive of me.
I’m pretty sure the viewer is not supposed to realise that they are being ‘marketed’ to.
Down my way in South Newtown there is always some graf along the railway line near St Peters station. It varies in quality but form time to time there are some stunning pieces. Of course the buff squad comes along from time to time to clean it up – the impermanence of it is part of its charm.
GRL has been putting up some great documentations of work that sits on the border between sreet art and new media activism. Here’s some totally killer laser graf from Rotterdam.
Especially the paint drips . . . wow.
Watch and learn. Then download the instructions.
Wow.
Woebot’s second Woebot.TV videocast is wonderful. Is this the future of music blogging? I hope so.
Specialten is a pretty cool DVD magazine for somewhat interesting music and now they have finally released Specialten.TV. I even like the advertisements which tend to be indie film shorts.
These both make YouTube’s content look like the rubbish it is.
In between procrastinating, stalling and working on microchunks of things I should be doing megachunks of . . . I have been looking at simple online games. I could argue that this is research, and in many ways it is.
One of the best is Dicewars. Very similar to the classic Risk, Dicewars is basically a game where you try to conquer the lands of your other rivals. All players are at the mercy of the dice roll. Each piece of land can store up to 8 dice rolls and as the game progresses and it gets down to only a two or three remaining players it can all hinge on a single roll.