BigShinyThing

Playing for the Raindance Short Film Award party, Addictive (who we have raved about before) performed their Laurel and Hardy (remixed as the original Ska act — you know it makes sense) and Sex Pistols mashups as well as some of their ‘greatest hits’ — the Italian Boj and Quentin Tarantino vs. Queen. A foray into the commercial world — the remixed trailer for Antonio Banderas’s ballroom dancing film Take The Lead – was also shown.

Visuals really do speak louder than words so check out their site, Samurai.fm and some ‘looks like it was shot on a phone’ footage on youtube.

Swarm of angels invites 50,000 “angels” to each pay £25 to fund a £1 million feature film. The Angels are being invited in batches — first 100, now 1,000, next 5,000, 25,000 and 50,000 — with the level of input being determined by the donation (£25 being the entry level). The first very privileged 100 places have now gone, but the 1,000 Swarm is still open (just about). The film –when it comes out — will be produced under Creative Commons so as hackable and remixable as it comes.

A Swarm of Angels reinvents the Hollywood model of filmmaking to create cult cinema for the Internet era. It’s all about making an artistic statement, making something you haven’t seen before. Why are we doing this? Because we are tired of films that are made simply to please film executives, sell popcorn, or tie-in with fastfood licensing deals.

We want to invent the future of film. Call it Cinema 2.0.
To do it we need your help.

VJ Collective The Kleptones have just signed up to do the soundtrack so you’ll be in good company. Via Protein feed. [See also our earlier post about Mod Films]

A bad artist imitates, a good artist steals.

Pablo Picasso’s quote is the mantra for production company MOD Films, who plan to hook remix culture into feature-film making. Hype or heat? We’re not sure. They’ve won funding from NESTA, The Australian Film Commission and others, and have their first film, Sanctuary — an SF short — due for release ‘real soon now’, according to their bloggy website. They’re saying all the right things, but will it fly? Handily, they’re presenting at a London geekfest later this month — we’ll be there and report back what we see. Stay tuned.

The ‘how to’ could be a manifesto for remix culture:

Upload your own video, photos and music; Explore shared content; Grab what you want.

First collection of clips ripe for remixing? Things on kittens. Of course. More seriously, this could be a very useful tool for communities-of-interest who have lots of individually-recorded footage of events, and who want to collaboratively edit it down to a single film — think weddings, club nights, street protests: welcome to group mash-ups. Last year we pointed at the Glastonbury Festival coverage on Flickr as a tipping point for photosharing. This year we’re predicting Glasto ’06 The Movie — assembled and edited in close-to-real-time on something like Jumpcut, from video and still images contributed by festival goers themselves via their videophones… sponsorhip opportunity, anyone?

Sourced (along with reviews of loads more sharing/remix sites) at Techcrunch.

As of today this is still up on the Chevy/Apprentice consumer-created ad site. The copy reads:

Like Snow? Beautiful landscapes? Be sure to take it all in now because…

Tomorrow this asshole’s SUV will change the world

Global warming isn’t a pretty SUV ad

It’s a frightening reality

ExxposeExxon.org

Tahoe — An American Revolution

Via AdPulp who also point out that this is now officially Out There — as soon as Chevy take it down it’ll be up on YouTube. April fools.

UPDATE: this is starting to spread with activist sites encouraging people to go to the site and make a statement — the results are piling up on YouTube as we type… We particularly like this one sent in by a BST reader — page down the YouTube link for handy hints on how to upload your version now that Chevy has blocked entries to the competition.

UPDATE: Chevy are now claiming that they *expected* this to happen.

A spokeswoman for Chevrolet, Melisa Tezanos, said the company did not plan to shut down the anti-S.U.V. ads [note they have blocked any more uploads to the comp]. “We anticipated that there would be critical submissions,” Ms. Tezanos said. “You do turn over your brand to the public, and we knew that we were going to get some bad with the good. But it’s part of playing in this space.”

To paraphrase Mandy Rice Davies: well, they would say that wouldn’t they?

We ventured outside of our Zone 3 safety zone this week to see Addictive TV present their cinema project Eye of the Pilot at the Waterman’s Art Centre. Before the main feature they treated us to a compilation of their greatest hits as well as Optronica shorts.

See their stuff for yourself (lo res) at Samurai.fm.

Addictive are next playing in London on April 5th at The Garage with German electro punks Warren Suicide. Go. See.

Computer scientist and educational technologist Alan Kay is famous for two things: his exhortation that

The best way to predict the future, is to invent it.

and his stunning success in doing just that — during his time with Xerox in the early 1970s, Kay and his team developed not just the computer interface as we know it — with windows, icons, mice and pointers, but also, in 1972, conceived of the Dynabook: a radical portable device somewhere between a laptop and a tablet PC, unbuildable for another 30 years.

We’ve been reading some of those early papers, and were interested to see what he had to say, in 1972, about what people would do with such tools:

The ability to make copies easily and to ‘own’ one’s information will probably not debilitate existing markets, just as xerography has enhanced publishing (rather than hurting it, as some predicted), and as tapes have not damaged the LP record business but have provided a way to organize one’s own music. Most people are not interested in acting as a source or bootlegger; rather, they like to permute and play with what they own. [our emphasis]

and

A combination of this ‘carry anywhere’ device and a global information utility such as the ARPA network or two-way cable TV, will bring the libraries and schools [not to mention stores and billboards] of the world to the home. One can imagine one of the first programs an owner will write is a filter to eliminate advertising. [our emphasis]

The BBC reports that royalty collection agency PPL has quietly introduced a new levy on anyone playing downloaded music in public venues. Never adverse to making a quick buck at the expense of long-term gain, the music industry has decided to sting digital DJs a whopping £200 (+VAT) a year for the right to perform using downloaded tracks — on top of the margin the industry has already negotiated with online retailers, and the existing license fees paid by venues playing any kind of recorded music for punters. Double-dipping? Sounds like it to us. Unreasonable? PPL disagrees:

Business affairs director Peter Leathem told Radio 1′s Newsbeat: “Rather than saying stop it, don’t do it, we’ve actually tried to embrace what people want to do and come up with a licence to be able to do that.” He said the £200 charge was “reasonable”, adding: “You don’t actually have to DJ using a laptop. You can use vinyl, you can use CD, so we’re saying that if it’s not worth your while spending £200 then don’t do it.”

We think they’re missing the point of media convergence, cramping creative style, and being greedy — they’ve already been paid! Besides, £200 is a lot of money for most DJs, and after all, who is it who does most of the work in getting new music in front of the punters?

Also an interesting treatise on the nature of copyright law:

Can I Get An Amen? is an audio installation that unfolds a critical perspective on perhaps the most sampled drum [loop] in the history of recorded music, the Amen Break. It begins with the pop track Amen Brother by 60′s soul band The Winstons, and traces the transformation of their drum solo from its original context as part of a ‘B’ side vinyl single into its use as a key aural ingredient in contemporary cultural expression. The work attempts to bring into scrutiny the techno-utopian notion that ‘information wants to be free’- it questions its effectiveness as a democratizing agent. This as well as other issues are foregrounded through a history of the Amen Break and its peculiar relationship to current copyright law.

Listen and learn. On a similar theme, check out leftfield hiphop DJ Edan’s Sounds of the Funky Drummer project: a 60-minute mix of 80s rap records all of which sampled James Brown’s Funky Drummer breakbeat.

The ‘Floating Logos’ project says that it ” is inspired by signs perched high atop very tall poles in order for people to view them from a long distance away. Often these poles are so tall that the signs on top of them loom over us, ominously broadcasting their message. The digital elimination of the poles not only illustrates this effect further but also serves to disconnect the signs from the ground and reality. Often the ground is purposefully left out of these images in order to emphasize the disconnect, but hints of terra firma are included in the form of trees, wires, light poles, buildings and other land-based objects.”

Big thanks to Reuben for this.

One of his projects, Let Them Sing It for You, allows the user to type in a word or a phrase and then have it sung back via clips from pop music. He does other, much more tortuous things, such as freezing Lou Reed’s vocals on ‘Heroin’ into one droning loop.

Found on BoingBoing.

The full film is on the weirdhat site. It demonstrates beautifully the formula of Lucas’s films: “In a galaxy, far, far away …etc.” Or as Mr Weirdhat writes:

Okay, holy crap. This is awesome. I think it justifies the whole thing, and I’m only four minutes into it. The first appearance of Palpatine in TPM and AOTC is ON THE SAME FRAME. And at the same time in ROTJ, Vader is telling Moff Jerjerrod that the Emperor is coming.

Link via the djmonstermo.blogspot.

Featuring as part of a special project for Black Book magazine, Enright’s digital montage is entitled ‘I just returned from a forest full of thieves’ and is billed as an ‘artist’s reinterpretation, with apologies to Vincent Van Gogh’. In it, the furniture of Van Gogh’s Room at Arles has been re-arranged as if after a wild party. Enright is more well known for his ‘designer kidnappings’ where he extracted thousands of pounds from ‘have it all’ manhattanites who wanted to experience ‘safe fear’. He has an exhibition opening in London at the Vilma Gold gallery today.

Almost 100 clips, from shows such as Walking With Beasts and Tomorrow’s World, are for the UK public to use for free in their own creative works. BBC Radio 1 launched the scheme with a competition to produce a music video.

The clips, mostly a few minutes long, range from animals to landscapes and art. The Creative Archive licence under which the clips have been released says they must not be used in commercial or campaigning ways and must not be used to defame other people. The British Film Institute, Channel 4, Open University and Teachers’ TV are also set to make more material available.

More information is available via the BBC website.

More about the 150-odd events running outside this summer are available on the Watch This Space 2005 site. The Addictive TV VJ event was part of the Optronica festival (featured in What Goes On 20th to 24th July 2005).

The Addictive TV site says:

Voting them number one in their 2004 Worldwide VJ poll, DJ Magazine said of London based Addictive TV, “If there ever was a truly ground-breaking bunch of guys in the VJ world, it’s certainly this lot.”

The group of VJs, DJs and producers have been championing the art of the VJ and pushing it into mainstream media for a decade now; performing, producing TV shows such as their seminal DJ:VJ music series Mixmasters for ITV1 in the UK and releasing DVDs (Addictive TV set-up what’s acknowledged as the first VJ-oriented DVD label back in 1999), releases have included Audiovisualize, the Mixmasters compilation series and DVD cult classic Transambient.

Teaming up with the UK’s The National Theatre to launch the Watch This Space outdoor strand, Optronica presented Addictive TV performing their AV show The Eye of the Pilot live on the fly-tower of the National Theatre building. With giant projections visible across the River Thames and an original soundtrack from Addictive TV featuring live guitar from Alejandro de Valera, the aerial travelogue remixes the incredible 8mm colour archive of French airline pilot Raymond Lamy, filmed during his global travels back in the 1950s.

The following night at the Optronica club night, Addictive TV performed a special short live AV set, where The Streets meet Elvis and The Italian Job gets completely remixed.

The images shown are about the height of a double decker bus and were projected onto the side of the National Theatre facing Embankment.

Ah, the big questions of life — ‘Why are we here’, ‘Is there a Higher Power’, and most importantly for those of us working in media: ‘What is the future of TV’. But what is ‘TV’? Is it that thing you lug home from Currys? Or is it something experiential ? If TV once meant Sunday 7pm+living room+sofa+family+ugly-box-in-corner, does flatscreen+bed+timeshifted Sky+ count? What about HDTV-quality video+surround sound all downloaded over the Internet and watched via an Xbox? ‘TV’ is a porous, mutable concept. By the time we’re finished asking what it is, it will have become something else (c.f. ‘the record album‘). Perhaps at the moment there are simply too many possible futures of TV to even sensibly ask the question.

So let’s ignore TV for a bit, and think about the future of something a little more tangible — channels. Whatever TV is, channels have long been a part of it. Just as brands retain value as waypoints through a landscape of atomised experience, channels (and channel brands) help us navigate our way through increasingly diverse content.

Since the dawn of TV, channels have been made and maintained for us. We’ve tuned in or out, or (heresy!) turned off, dependant on schedules, mood and time of day. Since Sky+, the PVR-gifted amongst us have been enabled to create our own, personalised channel-of-me through timeshifting linked to EPGs: the revolution is upon us.

But step back a bit, and that revolution looks already a little stale: my PVR-driven channels-of-me are only available at my house. Crave the brilliance of my content selection? You have to come on over. Contrast with the promiscuous accessibility of the ‘channel’s emerging in other media: syndicated blogs as newsfeeds of personally cherry-picked news and views, networked iTunes playlists as ‘radio stations’ in offices. Maybe TV — even time-shifted TV — needs to get up out of the sofa and live it up a bit in the world of social networks and smart mobs. Forget channel-of-me, isn’t it time for channels-of-we? Shouldn’t the future of channels be a bit more sociable?

And you know what? We aren’t going to care about the delivery mechanism — content from online, conventional studios, the BBC archives can all fight it out for our attention. Is it TV? Who cares! While the pedants worry about the ‘death of the album’, post-’pod, the rest of us tune into iTunes or Napster and create the soundtracks of our own lives. The future of TV? Who cares! Liberate content: dice, splice and link it up to make channels wherever, whenever we want, for an audience of one or for one million. Lets forget about TV for a bit. Let’s play with channels. Let’s have some fun.

Both Google and Yahoo have recently released online mapping services — given an address, they will show you the location, how to get there, and allow you to search for nearby businesses. Yahoo’s service covers just the US and Canada, whilst Google already has the UK online as well, with plans for global coverage. Want to find a curry in London E1? Easy.

So far, so dotcom — these services may look like Streetmap on steroids, but the business model is the same old same old — show some search results, and hook in some relevant ads as a revenue stream.

But shortly after the launch of Google Maps, something important happened. Hackers took the code apart, analysed how it worked, and started building their own services using Google’s data. We’re not talking just sending a friend the link to the map co-ordinates for a party, we’re talking fully-functional, complex applications based around the Google data and (gorgeous) Google Maps interface. Early efforts include Paul Rademacher’s housing map, which hooked into the Craigslist database of available rental properties across the US, and the (in)famous Chicago Crime Map, which is searchable down to individual police beats. A nice way to find a safe route home (or as a cynical acquaintance would have it, ‘a neat way to locate a dealer’).

Hackers have exploited online services in this way before — in the UK there has been a long-simmering dispute between Streetmaps and coders about the reappropriation of their data. Such repurposing has generally stripped out the ads which create Streetmap’s revenue stream. The understandable response of a traditional business to seeing its profits eroded? Call in the lawyers.

But Google and Yahoo did something altogether untraditional — impressed by the creative work being done without their permission, they formally published the programming interfaces to their mapping systems, and officially opened the system to hackers under reasonably accomodating free licenses. Crucially, they’ve done so in such a way that they can still place ads and make money from systems developed by others. It’s win-win: coders get to make cool new services, and Google and Yahoo still make a profit: a ‘very now’ business model.

But why are people so fired up about free access to good maps? In the UK at least, the answer is simple: maps cost money. Lots of it. The official UK map data is copyrighted and maintained by the Ordnance Survey. Commerical use of their data is expensive. As a reaction against such mapping monopolies, there is a worldwide movement for the development of copyright-free, grassroots-maintained cartographic data. Understandably, it’s a slow process. So the sudden availablility of excellent map data, with the bonus of complete working programming tools to harness it simply for all manner of new applications, is a godsend to developers. The only real concern is articulated by the ‘open maps’ activists: that Google and Yahoo are, after all, commercial services, and as such reserve the right to change the terms of service, or even pull them completely at any time. This is a powerful argument in favour of the grassroots approach, but for many developers, its a moot point: they have a cool idea and they want to do get it online today, not years from now when the openmappers have finished pacing out London street by street.

So far, there has been little sign of UK-specific applications built on Google’s or Yahoo’s systems. The UK is an epicentre of the open mapping movement, and many of the most impressive UK-based projects, such as Heath Bunting’s Skateboarders’ Map of Bristol are already built on free data. But as new developers get on the mapping bandwagon, that’s sure to change — ethical concerns aside, the newly licensed commerical services are easy to use, pretty to look at, and have already picked up impressive momentum.

Today you might not have access to a continuously-updated anti-gridlock site, or an at-a-glance map which will help you find an affordable property in a high-ranking school catchment, but don’t blink — give it a couple of months and the way we look at our city will probably have changed forever.

The BBC is to recruit 5,000 homes in the UK to participate in the first trial of its Interactive Media Player or iMP. The only stipulation will be that recipients have high speed internet access.

The corporation calls its service the ‘iTunes for the broadcast industry’ as it allows viewers to download any show from the previous week that they may have missed. Unlike PVRs like Sky+, viewers will not have to signal their chosen programmes in advance, allowing critically acclaimed shows to benefit retrospectively from favourable publicity or word of mouth.

Even more excitingly, the BBC is developing the service alongside the Creative Archive, which aims to make the corporation’s huge library of classic shows available for download. It will plans to keep costs down by taking advantage of peer to peer technology to distribute the content. Instead of storing the material itself, those who sign up will share the weight of the downloads among themselves. Inbuilt digital rights management software ensured that users cannot keep the programmes for longer than seven days, transfer them to disk or send them to friends. It remains to be seen how hacker-proof this will be.

The BBC’s interactive radio player is already live and adds millions to the radio division’s listening figures. Some shows, such as Radio 1′s Essential Selection, have as many ‘catch up’ listeners online as they do broadcast live.

The BBC was burned earlier this year by the trend for illegally downloading shows when the first episode of Doctor Who became available on Bittorrent. Conspiracy theorists suggest that the leak was a deliberate attempt to build hype and credibility for the show.

While live sporting events, popular reality tv shows (though clearly not Celebrity Love Island) and soaps still attract big audiences, broadcasters are expecting viewers to ‘time shift’ more and more programmes and watch them on demand.

There are currently over seven million UK homes with broadband whilst companies such as Microsoft are developing new devices that merge home computers with plasma screen TVs. This would solve the problem of viewers desiring HDTV versions of programming.

BBC executives are already terming the IMP service ‘martini media’ in that it gives the audience the opportunity to consume content ‘any time, any place, anywhere’. It is also perfectly fulfills the BBC’s remit as a public service broadcaster and may well see it yet survive in the age of media convergence.

Situationist graphic design collective CutUp feature in this week’s Design Week:

…CutUp, a group led by ‘J’, a recent graduate in graphic design from Camberwell College of Arts. Critical of the way advertising has come to dominate our visual space, this collective of four is attempting to disrupt and raise awareness of the ‘colonisation of public space’ by reconfiguring billboards.

By stealth of night, members of the group cut up large-scale outdoor posters, out of which they then create a new image, which they hope will give the public pause for thought about the nature of the images that are being imposed upon them.

CutUp searches hoardings, carefully selected for tonal values, a quiet location and low positioning, and then carefully removes the posters. These are then cut up into a patchwork of little squares, numbered and scanned into a computer. The squares are reworked into a new image, which is then secretly and painstakingly replaced on another billboard.

Of course, slicing up and reordering expensive advertising is illegal, and CutUp could face prosecution for criminal damage. The group is currently working on a series of four ‘reordered’ billboards in London’s Shoreditch, to co-incide with an exhibition of its work at the Kemistry Gallery.

CutUp’s first piece, in 2003, was a reordering of a Nicorette billboard, transformed by collage to show the haunting, shy smile of murdered child Damilola Taylor. ‘It is the power of the billboard rather than the brand that we are trying subvert,’ says ‘J’.

Cut Up Show runs from 5 April to 30 April at Kemistry Gallery, 43 Charlotte Road, Shoreditch, London EC2A