Archive for the 'friends' Category

Great stuff about SONY/BMG’s MusicPass scheme/scam

Published by boz at January 9, 2008 in blogs, friends, opinion and the biznez. 0 Comments

My mate Jon, put me onto this great post from John Scalzi’s Whatever blog. Killer stuff.

Sony BMG spokesperson: We’re pleased to announce we are the final major music corporation to release electronic tracks without that pesky DRM! All you have to do is leave your house, go to a selected retail outlet, buy a special card there, go back to your house, scratch off the back of the card to find a code, go to our special MusicPass Web site, enter said code, and download one the 37 titles we have available, from Celine Dion to the Backstreet Boys!

Kid #1: Or, in the time it takes me to jump through all those hoops, I could just download all 37 of those albums off of Pirate Bay.

Kid #2: Or, I could just scratch off the back at the store, record the pin number, go home and download the album through a Tor connection, so you can’t trace my IP number.

Kid #1: Also, what’s with this first slate of artists? Celine Dion? Backstreet Boys? Kenny Chesney? Barry Manilow? Are you high?

Sony BMG dude: They appeal to the sort of mainstream consumer who will see the convenience of our revolutionary music cards!

Kid #2: Like my mom? Dude, she’s not going to buy a card. She’s going to buy a CD. Because she’s at the CD store. Where she can buy CDs.

Sony BMG dude: They also make lovely gifts!

Kid #1: If she gets one as a gift, all she’s going to do is ask me how the heck she’s supposed to use it. And then she’s going ask me to get the download for her. Like I’m not busy. And you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to return the card for cash, and then I’m going to download the album off of Pirate Bay, because you’ve confused and upset my mom. And annoyed me.

Sony BMG dude: Uh.

Kid #2: So to recap, what you’ve got here is a system that makes people leave their house in order to download music at their house, and makes them go to a store to get music that they could get at the store, somewhere else.

Sony BMG dude: Er.

Kid #1: Why don’t you just sell non-DRM’d MP3s off Amazon, like every other major music corporation?

Sony BMG dude: Well.

Kid #2: You don’t actually want to sell unprotected MP3s, do you? You want to be able to say you’re doing it, but really, you want to make it so ridiculously inconvenient that people keep just keep buying CDs and DRM’d tracks off iTunes. Just admit it, bro.

Sony BMG dude (pointing): Look! It’s Celine Dion! And Barry Manilow! (runs away as kids avert their eyes in terror)

Poor, stupid deluded Sony BMG.

This MusicPass thing: six months at the outside.

Jon also sent me this gold - Vinyl Sleeve Heads

all the pretty boys

Published by boz at July 10, 2007 in friends, gigs and sound. 0 Comments

Busy working on Liquid Architecture this week. Here’s the line-up

Also on Sunday night is the Pretty Boy Crossover launch @ LOOP in Melbourne

PRETTY BOY CROSSOVER launch their new album
‘A Different Handwriting’ (Sensory Projects/Inertia)
with their first gig in Melbourne in over 2 years!!
on SUNDAY 15 JULY
at Loop Bar.

‘A Different Handwriting’ is the sixth album by Pretty Boy Crossover and their second release for Sensory Projects (Hood, International Karate, Pivot, MONO, Shearwater, Eluvium). For the uninitiated, Pretty Boy Crossover are: Jason Sweeney and Cailan Burns, two music obsessives who met in Adelaide in 1998, now based back in Melbourne. Since they began recording music as Pretty Boy Crossover, the duo have seldom remained stagnant even when they found themselves thousands of miles from one another, most recently when Burns lived in Japan and Sweeney was busy working around the world. Along with their releases on Sensory Projects, Pretty Boy Crossover have also worked with a number of other labels including Surgery, Clan Analogue, and Cocosolidciti (Canada/UK). For the latter they collaborated on a CD/DVD project with New York based visual artist Julio Soto. That release, ‘We Are All Drifting’ was released in 2006 to international acclaim, winning a New Media art prize in Spain.

Pretty Boy Crossover
Sunday 15 July
@ Loop Bar
23 Meyers Place, Melbourne
7pm till late. Entry by gold coin donation.

With special appearances by:
QUA || AI YAMAMOTO || DJ TOUPEE

http://www.prettyboycrossover.com
http://www.myspace.com/sensoryprojects

Cool video technique demonstration

Published by boz at June 24, 2007 in blogs, film, friends, gear and opinion. 0 Comments

This popped up on boingboing yesterday.

Cool video technique demonstration: “Mark Frauenfelder:

Picture 2-50
This is a cool video technique that uses time-delay to make bodies warp and twist. Link (Thanks, Fizzgig!)

(Via Boing Boing.)

This is similar to the technique that my good friend and partner in art crime, Daniel Crooks uses to generate much of his work. Dan has taken this technique in a bunch of different directions - from shooting off moving vehicles with one camera to shooting with up to 7 cameras at the same time. All use a post-production technique similar to the one mentioned above, which Dan likes to call “time-slicing”. One of his multi-camera shoots was blown out to the same number of plasma screens (all set in profile orientation) to make a gorgeous shifting and morphing 360º panorama of downtown Sydney. Dan has just completed a major exhibition of a whole range of these works (which he also renders as landscape style photo prints) at Sherman Galleries in Sydney.

Picture 2-50
Dan pretending to be busy at Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

I’m lucky enough to get to work with Dan on sound for these pieces and it’s always interesting to sit and talk with him about the ways we can render this technique in sound in a way that is as aesthetically and conceptually interesting as the visuals. Over the years we’ve tried a bunch of techniques and a mixed bag of results. One of our earlier attempts was for a train piece which you can see here.

If you ever get the chance to go and see these works, I’d recommend it. Not as a self-serving recommendation due to my involvement, but because I think Dan’s work is truly interesting and involving. His ability to envision a different way to see the environment around us and then render his ideas with such interest and detail is rare in video art. Too much video art requires high concept - reading a bunch of supporting text (usually bullshit), or being up to speed with the post-modern justifications (usually bullshit with flashing lights). The great thing about Dan’s work, is that you can walk right up to it and appreciate entirely on it’s own terms - no art school education required. However, if you wanna go and box it in with a bunch of words, then there is plenty there for you to get verbal about.

Dan’s Homepage with a still from the 7 camera work

Dan’s time-slice page

An example of his work at the Australia Center for the Moving Image

Dan’s profile at Sherman’s

strange and deep blog actions

Published by boz at June 20, 2007 in friends and webage. 1 Comment

So just now 2 people that I have not laid eyes on for some time, one who lives down in Tassie and another that lives in the UK, both happen upon this blog here pretty much simultaneously and let me know. The universe is totally awesome like that. Get into it while you still can people.

colour madness

Published by boz at June 14, 2007 in friends, technology and webage. 0 Comments

My good pal, man of the sweetest of sweet luck and all round digital cowboy Mr. Rhian Hinkley shot through this link of some mad colourization technology. Check it:

In our approach an artist only needs to annotate the image with a few color scribbles, and the indicated colors are automatically propagated in both space and time to produce a fully colorized image or sequence. We demonstrate that high quality colorizations of stills and movie clips may be obtained from a relatively modest amount of user input.

link

pateras/fox

Published by boz at May 14, 2007 in friends, gigs and music. 0 Comments

Just put some photos that I took during Fox and Pateras’ rehearsal and show last night up here. Both shows went really well and Anthony got a really great reception for his piece. When you look back at how much effort and organization it took to perform a ten minute work, it can generate a lot of mixed feelings. From my end of things it was at least a week or more of work to pull it all together, and tons time more for Anthony to write the work, copy the parts, etc, etc.

The show was also recorded and broadcast on ABC FM. I’ll be keen to have a listen back to it later and see how the reinforcement came across in the recording with the acoustic sound of the ensemble. I hope some of you were able to make it down, it was a great night and there should be more of it in Melbourne.

mixing the MSO

Published by boz at May 11, 2007 in friends, gigs, music and projects. 0 Comments

Just a quick note to let you all know that I’ll be mixing Anthony Pateras’ new work QQ with the Melbourne Symphony this weekend coming. (Both links have details on the concert).
The work is for 4 quartets (wind, strings, brass and percussion) with electronics (a MAX/MSP patch by Rob Fox to be precise). I’m sure this is going to be a great concert and it’s always cool to go and hear & see a symphony up close, as you can when the MSO play at the Malthouse. They like to pull out all the crazy instruments for the new music gigs as well….

Also Rob and Anthony will be playing their duo set on the same night in a separate little gig before the big show later. If you pay up for the big deal, you get the side order of art music free!