From tomorrow until sunday I have the honor to do a guestblogging session at the great german language blog Das Kraftfuttermischwerk. There will be something very cool happening which I am not very inclined to disclose just yet - only that it will be visual so even the english speaking crowd can head over. I will update this post with links to the articles. Thanks ronny for the opertunity.
HTML5 Video - Introduction and Commentary on Video Codecs
There is a raging discussion out there on the web about the upcoming HTML5 standard and the inclusion of the video tag. Not about the tag itself but about the codec used by videos played inside that tag.
There is a firestorm by free software advocates that want the only codec to be used inside this tag to be the -largely- patent free open source Theora Codec - the other side wants the ubiquitously used high quality H264 video codec. I think I can weigh into that debate. If you don´t want to or know already about codecs, containers and its history jump below to "my take on the codec war".
I am a content producer have been following video on the web since the very very beginning, have advised firms how to handle video on the web, have struggled countless of hours trying to find the best solution to put video on the web and have so far refused to use flash to display video on the web. I always believed that the web should be fundamentally free of technology that is owned by one company that then can take the whole web hostage to their world domination plans. I have hoped that the video tag would be introduced much earlier in the game and have looked with horror to youtube & co. how they made adobe - a company who has basically stopped innovating 10 years ago - a ruler of the web when it comes to moving pixels.
Now this is finally about to change - or at least that is the intention by google, apple, mozilla and others who are pretty fed up with flash for very obvious reasons (its slow, development sucks, its proprietary, the source code of the creations is always closed, its slow, its slow as fuck, it eats energy from the processors like nothing else). It never really made any sense to put a container inside a container inside a container to display a video - the second most powerhungry thing you as a consumer can do on your computer (the first would be 3d/gaming).
Yet a video is not a video. A video to fit through the net needs to be compressed - heavely. Compression technology is nothing new but it evolves over years and years. Its always a tradeoff between size, quality and processing power. The "Video" codec by apple - probably the first "commercial" codec available to a wider audience looks rubbish but is insanely fast (it utilizes almost no processor on a modern machine) and the file size is pretty alright. It was capable to run video on an 8 Mhz processor mind you.
Over the years lots and lots of codecs have sprung up - some geared toward postproduction and some towards media delivery - there is a fine line - for the postproduction codecs you need full quality and try to save a bit of storage. Its videos that still need work and you want to work with a mostly uncompressed or losslessly compressed video. Processing power for decrompression is an issue because you need to scrub through the video - also compression porcessing power (to make the video) you don´t want to take ages because you like to work in realtime and not wait for your computer to re-encode a video just because you clicked on a pixel.
The other codecs are the "end of line" codecs - delivery codecs - made to compress the crap out of the video while "visually" loosing the least amount of quality and having the smallest possible file sizes. Here it doesn´t matter how long the compression side takes as long as the decompression is fast enough to work on low end computers to reach the largest available audience.
While production codecs are fairly fluid - people change as soon as a better becomes available - takes less then 5 month to have a new codec established (recently apple released the ProRes4444 codec - most postproduction companies are already using it (those that don´t use single pictures - but that a whole different story) - the delivery codecs are here to stay for a very very long time because in the time of the web people just don´t reencode their stuff and reupload it - if its there its there.
Now before I go into the format war and my take on it there is one more concept I need to explain shortly - containers. Flash is a container for a video with a certain codec displayed in it. So is quicktime, so is windows media so is Real Media. It gets confusing because MP4 can be a container and a codec at the same time. A container just hold the video and adds some metadata to the video itself - but the raw video could be ripped out of the container and put into another without re-encoding. This is what apple is doing with youtube on the iPhone. Adobes last "great" innovation (or best market move ever) was to enable the Flash container to play h264 (a codec) encoded videos. Since Apple (among everybody else who isn´t a flashy designer) thinks that flash sucks they pull out the video from inside the flash container and put it into the (now equally bad) quicktime container and so you can enjoy flash free youtube on your iPhone.
Now with the technicalities out of the way whats all the fuss about?
HTML5 promises - ones it becomes a standard - to advance the web into a media rich one without bolted on add ons and plugins that differ from platform to platform and browser to browser - its a pretty awesome development or most people ever developing anything on the web. Part of the process to make this the new standard is to involve everybody who has something to say and is a shaker and mover on the web to give the direction this standard is going. Its a tough rough ride - everybody and their mother wants to put in their tech their knowledge their thinking - I really would not want to be the decision maker in this process if you gave me a trillion.
The biggest and most awesome change in HTML5 - and the one the most abvious to the end user - will be the inclusion of media content without a freaking container that needs a plugin to display that content that only half or less of the internet population have. To make this happen at least all the big browser makers need to approve what can be played inside the new tags (video & audio).
This is where the debate heats up. I really don´t understand why audio doesn´t spurn the same debate publicly as does video - but its probably because google is involved with the video debate and can change the direction completely on their merit with whatever they choose to support on youtube.
The two competing codecs are Ogg Theora and H264. Now I am less familiar with the Ogg codec (but have tried it) but first a small history of H264. Back around 2000-2001 a company called Sorenson developed the first video codec that was actually usable on the web - there where different ones before but they all sucked balls in one of the departments for a great delivery codec. Sorenson made a lot of video people who wanted to present their work on the web very happy. Apple bought in and shipped quicktime with the Sorenson codec and the ability to encode (make) the video with this codec - albeit with a catch. To really get the full quality of Sorenson you had to buy a pro version - which costs a lot of money - the version that Apple included could play Sorenson (pro or non pro) just fine but the encoder was crippled to one pass encoding only. The real beauty and innovation was with two pass encoding - basically the computer looks at the video first and decides where it can get away with more compression and where with less.
Apple and the users where not really happy with this situation at all. So for a long time (in web terms) there was no real alternative to that codec. The situation was even worse because to play Sorenson you had to have Quicktime installed - before the advent of the iPod a loosing prospect - I think they had 15% installed user base on the web. It was the days of the video format wars - Microsoft hit with Winows Media (which sucked balls quality wise but had a huge installed user base) and on top Real Media (which was the only real viable solution for streaming video back then).
In the meantime another phenomenom happened on the audio side - mp3 became the defacto standard - a high quality one at that (back then) in the audio field. We the video people looked over with envy. When producing audio you could just encode it in mp3 pretty much for free on shareware apps and upload it to the web and everybody could listen to it. There was nothing even close happening on the video side. The irony is of course that its MPG1 layer3 (mp3) - part of a video codec - but the video codec side of MPG1 sucked really really really really bad. Quality shit, Size not really small only processor use was alrightish but not great.
Jumping forward a couple of years (and jumping over the creation of MPG2 - the codec used for media delivery on DVDs - totally unsuitable for web delivery) the Motion Picture Expert Group - a consortium of industry Companies and experts that developed (and bought in) MPEG1 and MPEG2 decided to do something for cross platform standard video delivery and created the MPEG4 standard (overjumping MPEG3 for various reasons - mostly because of the confusion with MP3 (MPEG1 layer 3). MPEG4 is a container format - mostly - but it had a possibility for reference codecs and the first one of these was H263 - this already was quality wise on par with Sorenson yet in a container that was playable by Quicktime and Windows Media - the two last standing titans of media playback (by this time Real Media mostly had already lost any format war). Great you think - well not quite - Microsoft wasn´t enourmously happy and created its own standard (as they do) based on MPG4 H263 called VC1 (I am not really familiar with this side of the story so I leave you to wikipedia to look that up yourself if you are so inclined). Web-video delivery was still not cross platform sadly and the format war became a codec war but there was now a standard underlying all of this and the quality - oh my the quality was getting good. Then the MPEGroup enhanced the h263 codec and called it h264 and oh my this codec with a pure godsend in the media delivery world - it was great looking scaled up to huge resolution could be used online, streaming and on HighDefDVDs and in the beginning it all was pretty much for free.
It looked like an Apple comeback in the webvideo delivery because Quicktime was for a while the only container that could play H264 without problems. Around that time flash started to include a function in its webplugin to play video - interestingly enough they choosed to include sorenson video as the only supported codec - word on the street was that Sorenson was very unhappy with Apples decision to ditch them as codec of choice and instead pushed H263/H264. Now the story could have ended with Apple winning the format war right there and all computers would have quicktime installed by default but it didn´t because out of nowhere Youtube emerged and Youtube used flash and Youtube scaled big time and made it - for the first time ever - really easy for Joe the Plumber and anybody else to upload a video to the web and share it with the rest of the world family. It changed the landscape in less then 6 month (I watched it it was crazy). Now you had a really good codec finally as a content producer to upload video in very good quality but the world choosed the worse quality inside a player that sucked up 90% processing power with the codec of choise needing another 90% and all that came out was shit looking video that everybody was happy to be over - but the user experience of hitting an upload button and have everybody watch your video was just unbeatable. Eventually just when people realised how bad these videos looked compared to some Hollywood trailers that still used quicktime and H264 Adobe included H264 into flash and prolonged their death by doing so again (without innovating at all it must be said).
Now fast forward to now - again a group of clever people, big companies and such have sat down to bring us HTML5 and the video tag. That tag as said is going to rid us from any plugins and containers and instead just plays pure video as fast as possible right inside the browser that supports HTML5. Now the problem is that people can not agree on the codec to be used. Why you ask if H264 is so great? Because H264 was developed by a for profit group of people and they want to make money and they have freaking patents on it - not that this has hampered web video to this day in any way - but for the future standard it seems lots of people have taking offense to that. There is in fact a whole ecosystem of alternative codecs (audio and video) in the open source world and the most prominent is Ogg and its video incarnation Theora. They are mostly patent free because the company who originally developed these codecs gave the patents to the open source community (yet its still not clear if that covers the whole codec). Now what happens when patents enter the WorldWideWeb could be seen with GIFs. The GIF graphics (moving or non moving) where once a cornerstone of the web - a more popular choice for graphics then anything else (small could be read by anything blahblah) then a company found out that they had the patents on that (luckily just shortly before they run out) and sued a lot of big websites for patent infringement and wanted to have royalties of $5000 from every website that used GIFs - they would have killed the web with that move (and they where in the right - law wise) if the big companies they sued first would have dragged out the court case until the patents run out - now the GIF file format is in public domain.
Now its understandable that this lesson should be learned BUT and here is
my take on the codec war:
Flash is a MUCH bigger threat then patents on the codecs used. Because not only does it use the patent infringed codec inside its container but the container is totally owned by one company and a company that has shown often (PDF) that it will do everything to take control of anybody using their technology - even if it is the whole world.
Now 95% of all web videos are delivered by flash these days and to change that a lot of things need to happen. First google needs to drop it on youtube - they just announced a beta which does just that - but even with googles might its just not enough - content producers need to hop on board as well. And here is where the chain breaks for the "free and open codecs of OGG". See from the history above H264 has been the industry standard on a wide range of devices including the web for years now. The whole backend has settled on this and there are really good workflows to create H264 video. With the video tag - Youtube is less relevant then it was at its beginning because all of the sudden its easy to incorporate video into your webpage. Now if google where to say "we use Theora only" high quality content producers would just say "fuck you" and post their videos on their own sites in a much better quality without the hassle to find any workflow to produce theora videos (for the non terminal using people there just isn´t an easy way to do that still that can be used in a professional non frickly environment - we like to create not code for a delivery sorry).
But thats not enough - almost ALL consumer cameras released over the last 2 years including the hot shit DSLRs with video functionality produce H264 that can be "just" uploaded to the web without reencoding - thats saves Youtube and vimeo a lot of processing capabilities - and with their lossy revenues they sure don´t want to add another server farm just to reencode every and all video they have to a codec that has worse quality. You know 90% of all videos on the web are already encoded in H264 as of now (and Theora maybe has 0.2% of the other 10% that are left over). Its uneconomical and not sensible to re-encode all of that any way you look at it - especially since the quality is not surpassed by any other codec out there - patent free or not.
I would say go H264 now and have a new consortioum of browser developers and other companies develop a new codec (or build upon theora) from scratch that is patent free AND high quality AND has a good workflow (means is supported by hardware vendors and OS vendors across the board). That can then take over H264 (just like PNG took over GIF in less then 2 years following the patent threat). Leave the codec question open for now and let the web sort it out for itself (for the moment) - like in the img tag - doesn´t matter if you put PNGs, GIFs or JPGs in it (or any of the other plethora of IMG formats) as long as the browsers support it its watchable and so far has shaken out a good road to take (see the switch to PNG with transparencies that also helped a lot to bring down IE5 in my opinion which didn´t fully support that - so the market sorted it out quickly (as in 5 years quickly)).
BTW the only browser that just does not want to go down that route (and rather wants to cripple itself with Flash in the meantime) is the oh so open minded Firefox. Sorry I fail to see your point dear Mozilla developers - you are not gonna make a lot of friends that way outside of the very very small open source community (and even here your approach is not liked universally by those who can not install a flash plugin for example because flash is not supported on their platform (ppc linux f.e.).
Get rid of Flash first then get rid of H264 later when you have something equally good on all accounts. Going backward with technology is just never the way forward - open source or not.
PTEX&OpenCL - or How Steve Jobs Companies Are Changing 3D
Something amazing came through my ticker today something that is a game changer and together with another technology will change the way I work and make much more enjoyable.
First some basics to understand what I am talking about for those that have no clue about it all. There are basically the following six steps to get to a final 3d picture.
1. Modelling: Multiple Approaches get you to a mesh model that consists of - in the end mostly - polygons. You can scan you can push little points in 3d space you can use mathematical formulas to create substract or add simple forms or other formulas to make edges round revolve lines or extrude other lines. The end product is mostly always a polygon mesh with x amount of polygons - the more the higher the resolution of the model the closer you can look at it. About ten years ago a really nice way to model high resolution meshes came into existence called SubDivision Surfaces which lets you model a corse resolution model which is much easier to understand and alter and then generate a highres model out of it - that was the first real game changer in the 3d industry and the reason why character modelling became so "easy" and so many people doing so many great models.
2. UV Preperation: Now a model out of triangels looks less then realistic of course so you need to tell the programm what kind of material is on the model - here a lot of option are available - but especially for film work and characters you want something that is realistic and you do that by getting something realistic - like a photo - and alter it in such a way that it fits on your model - or you paint from scratch - now that such a picture can be put onto the model you need to flatten out the model into a two dimensional surface. You can imagine this like taking a dead animal and skinning it then make the skin of the animal flat. Like so:
(there is actually a programm that stretches the "hides" pretty similar to this very analog process). Its a very dull process to do this on a complex model - mostly you have to take your nice model apart and do all kinds of voodoo to get it artifact free. No fun and certainly not really creative.
3. Texturing: Ones you have your nice model with a more or less nice UV map you start to apply your texture - photo or programatic or a mixture of that. Here is a lot of "fun" to be had as you add little bumps, tell the software how shiny the model will be how reflective how refractive and lots of other things I don´t really want to go into - but its a nice step in general. +
4. Light & Camera: Without light there wouldn´t be anything visible. So you set up some virtual lights which act and react just like different kind of light sources you find in reality + some more other tricks that aren´t in reality but can add to a realistic picture. You also set up a camera or your virtual eye - which again acts just like a photographic camera in real life (almost). Both a creative and fun process.
5. Animation: Then you animate your model - push objects around, apply physics, deform your model. You can either do that by hand or get some animation data from MotionCaputure - like you might have seen these people with a black suit and pingpong balls attaced to them - or faces with dots all over them for example. This step is both fun and frustrating - with hand made or captured data. The human eye is so susceptible to small problems in movement that to get it realistically convincing not even a certain 500 Mio. Dollar production can fully perfect this step.
6. Render: Then comes the process that is mostly free of human intervention but not free of hassles and frustration. The rendering. Can take up to 50 hours per frame in Avatar on a stock normal computer. 24-25 frames per seconds (or in case of 3d double that) and you get an idea how much processing power is needed. And if you do a mistake - render it all over again. Also rendering is a complex mathematical problem and there are bound to be errors in software so prepare for the worst here.
Now why I am telling you all this? Well one step it seems has just been eliminated. Progress in the field of visual effects is very eratic - you have 2-4 years no progress at all and then all of the sudden a floodgate opens and something dramatically changes or multiple things. I would say we had a quit period the last 2-4 years - mostly because the development of the real cool stuff was "inhouse" meaning - that really smart programmer people where hired by the big VFX companies to program them certain things for certain needs and problems - a lot of problems in the above pipeline are already solved I think but have never seen the light of the broader world and instead stayed and sometimes even died within certain companies. Its really frustrating as the software companies struggled with the most basic problems (plagued by slow sales and a bad economy) and then you see Pirates of the Caribbean for example and they completely figure out how to motion capture live actors (record their movement) on set with no real special equipment - that technology is still only available behind the looked doors of Industrial Light & Magic. For me as an artist that is a valuable tool that has been created and I could do cool stuff with it but I can´t get my hands on because of corporate policies.
So its REALLY amazing to see that Disney - the intellectual property hoarding company for whom the copyright law has been rewritten at least ones - is releasing a software/API/Filestandard as open source as of today. Code that no less promises to completely eliminate step two of my list above. In their own words they have already produced one short animation and are in the process of one full feature animation completely without doing any UV mapping. I can only try to explain to you the joy that this brings to me. UV mapping has been my biggest hurdle to date - I never really mastered it - I hated it. Its such a painstaking long tedious process. I normally used every workaround that I could find to avoid doing UV mapping. Its crazy to think they finally have figured out a way to get there without it and I think this will drop like a bomb into every 3d app and supporting 3d app there is on the market within a year (a wishfull thinking here) - at least I can hope it does and I hope that Blender, Autodesk, sideFX are listening very closely.
Combine that with the recent advancement of render technology by using OpenCL (developed and released as part of SnowLeopard by Apple and made an Open Standard with ports for Linux and Windows now available) and render partially on the graphic card (GPU) - which speeds up rendering up to 50 times. That means that a frame from avatar takes only one hour to render instead of 50 - or in a more realistic case - current rendertime for an HD shot takes here 2-5 minutes an average to render - thats cut down to 10sec - 1min and would actually make rendering a fun part of the process.
Now we all know who is behind both companies releasing and opening that up: The mighty Steve Jobs. You could almost say there is an agenda behind it to make 3d a way more pleasurable creative work then it currently is - maybe Mr. Jobs wants us all to model and render amazing virtual worlds to inhabit where he can play god ;)
Good times indeed.
Whats left? Well animation is still not worked out completely but with muscle simulation and easy face and bone setups it has become easier over the past years - still hidousely tidious process to make it look right - don´t know if there ever is a solution for it that is as revolutionary as PTEX. Motion sensors might help a bit in the short future also some techniques that make the models physically acurate so that things can´t get into each other and gravity is automatically apllied. High quality texture maps that hold up to very very close scrunity are still memory hogs and burn down the most powerfull workstations. The rest will get better with faster bigger better computers as always (like all the nice lighting models that are almost unusable in production to date because they render too long). Generally we are so much further with UV mapping and rendering problems out of the picture I might get back into 3d much much more.
Disclaimer: I have been doing 3d since 1992 when I rendered a 320x240 scene of two lamps on an Amiga 2000 with raytracing - it took 2 days to render. My first animation in 1993 took a month to render. Then I switched to Macintosh (exclusively) in 1995 and did 3d on them for a while. It was so frustrating that I did not make a serious efford to get really good at it ever - now I am still doing it alongside Compositing / VFX Supervision but rather as add on & for previz then main work.
The congress for the crazy ones the wild ones the good ones the ones defending freedom and digital liberties keep the information flowing unhindered without borders the last of their kind - the real dragons. Those who share and know will meet and talk and copy and paste and for so much knowledge brought to a boil the outcome is unknown.
There be Dragons! Dragons Everywhere. I will be one and so should you.
And on the 28th around 23:00 in the smokers lounge the dragons will undertake a special journey through time: Indian Timetravels - an audiovisual performance by Das Kraftfuttermischwerk & protobeamaz:fALK (hey thats me ;)
Heute senden wir unsere erste Live Radio Show aus unserem dreiteiligen Weihnachtsdubstepspezial. Nach längerer Pause die sowohl durch technische Schwierigkeiten als auch durch Zeitmangel bedingt war eröffnen wir damit eine neue Radio Prototypen Saison. Wir sind sehr glücklich das die Jungs und Mädels von Xenim.de ihr verteiltes Streamingnetzwerk zur Verfügung stellen.
Wir haben heute auch einen Studiogast - Saetchmo (myspace) wird uns über die Feinheiten des Dub und Dubstep aufklären und uns dann mit einem Creative Commons Dubset beglücken.
A long personal journey through the evolution of music
I can barely contain myself - for the first time since 15 years I am excited like a little kid again. The reason is music - music for the clubs but also music for the home - a kind of music that fits strangely into any mood and continues to make me smile almost every day. To give you the right mood first a soundtrack to the journey I am taking you on:
When I was reading Gibsons Neuromancer some long years back I stumbled over the scene of the space Rastafari listening to dub in the lower cramped confines of a space station. Up to that point I loved the story and was totally immersed - I am having really vivid head films when I read so as long as the story seems believable I am in a different universe actually seeing it all in detail. Yet this scene somehow didn´t stick - it ripped me right out. It just didn´t fully fit into a space station - even so it was a funny idea of the author. It was the dirty analog feeling and the beach images and the old rastafaris making dub. My mind just wouldn´t believe they would roll their spliffs to that lowtech music on a hightech space ship - no matter how run down it would have been.
I have always listened to any kind of music you can imagine and didn´t really develop a taste for music that you can call taste until pretty late in my life. MC Hammer, Depeche Mode, ACDC, Kraftwerk, Genesis (yes Phil Collins - please beat me to death) where my early "favorites". With the fall of the wall things took an unexpected turn.
The reunited Berlin - it was like a new huge playground that waited to be explored and exploited. For me it mainly offered one thing - an absolute uncontrolled club scene that I was attending and getting involved with at a very young age. Of course that influenced my music taste quite a bit - I was going fully electronic for a long while - it didn´t really matter what but of course it being Berlin it was mostly that specific powerful housy style in the beginning that really got me. Some parties where so insanely energetic its hard to describe it in words.
Over the years then I got introduced to drum and bass and really fell in love with the slower more dreamy songs that genre implied. Somehow at that time magically Dub appeared in my life - I thought really hard where it actually came from - I don´t know - probably a song heard somewhere then getting into it more. Lee Perry, Mad Professor, Burning Spear - I bought tons of CDs with about any kind of Dub you can imagine and I loved it - but somehow it was dead music it was at a standstill there wasn´t anything really excitingly new coming out. Eventually I got bored and moved on - still playing it now and then.
11 years ago I started VJing. Playing visuals in clubs puts you in a very unique - if not always comfortable position. Standing there behind your laptop like a geek you have to listen and coldly analyze the music all night long - you listen to the breaks but also for the mood and the energy of the tunes. You also try to sense the energy of the room and either go with it against it amplify it calm it - whatever you think is appropriate. I have played by my last count 270+ gigs. Most of them all nighter - meaning 10+ hours for 270 nights same style of music. The styles changed - lots of electronic house music but also Jazz, Reggie, Rock, HipHop & some Punk - but mostly electronic in any form. After all its what I grew up with learned to love and where I had the most amazing experiences. Yet slowly but surely things started to get boring - I attributed it to me being in the clubs all the time and having to work. Then about three years ago I stopped the weekly gig sessions concentrated on other things and just went out for the fun of it (mostly). It sucked. I know people who came with me disagreed with me back then but really the spirit was out of the rooms. I debated with myself and friends what the reason for this could be. The music hadn´t changed much their where still fresh clubs in warehouses popping up - regardless it just wasn´t the same anymore. Some parties had on the surface a good vibe until you figured out that 100% of the people where totally and utterly wasted. You always had the drugs in the clubs of course but it was only adding to an athmosphere that was already nice and powerful - its totally different if people just take the drugs to get going at all and this is what I witnessed more and more.
After a while I got it - it must have been the music - I was utterly bored of it and subconsciously I think most of the people in the clubs are. Yes "minimal" is still heralded as the end of all music in the cooler clubs of Berlin - but its always the same same same and same in different shades of same. Its predictable boring without surprises and if the suspense in that music would be reenacted in a movie you would fall asleep after only 2 minutes.
Now its not sooo much different then what was on 15 years ago - what has changed then? Times have changed. As I have written in my VJ theory already I can repeat that here too - time has speed up, things have become more complex and to invoke any feelings you have to add a whole 'nother level of energy to it. A simpler example for anybody to see what I mean - look at an average horror movie from 1970, 1990, 1995, 2000 and now. It says all - the gore is multiplying 100 fold over each time period just to invoke any kind of reaction in people. While in 1970 you have maybe 3 cuts per minute you sometimes have 3 edits per second nowadays. Why would it be any different for music?
Bored with the house music I sidetracked myself with going back in time (not to phil collins ;) and generally just opening up to any kind of music again - as wide range as possible.
Through the local DJ around here (Jóse and mogreens) I was introduced to Brokn Beatz and electronic Jazz. I hated it at first. I still can´t totally say that I ever liked it. The nice thing about this kind of music was that it was not boring. It has always been a total challange to vj to that music - trying to see the breaks coming up and reading the ever changing mood is very hard. For the normal listener who doesn´t want to get deeply involved with the music its very hard to draw energy out of that music - while in the boring department its far beyond any other style listed so far - I just never couldn´t fully get into it and I really tried.
Just recently I found some temporary shelter with some local Punk bands. Why did it drive me to punk? Energy - raw freaking energy - energy that was still powerful enough to move people. God there is something about screaming singers and guitarr riffs that is unbeatable in the energy department.
The story could end here and I would still be looking for my hail mary pass to music heaven. Why? The problem with Punk as with pretty much any handmade music I have ever listened to is that after 10-20 minutes I get bored - it seems the same. Yes the music lovers can tell me there are nuances in there and I just have to listen closely and then it won´t be boring. I am there to get my energy pushed inside a group that gets the same energy pushed. Its the ritual why you go in the first place - a convection of energy in the room can lift your spirit for days on end and give you an evening worth remembering - whats the fun in taking the music apart - so you can be cool and talk about it? Unless you are doing music yourself I don´t see the point. So Punk - nice distraction and I still like to go - but still there must be something advancing coming up please no?
It did - less then a year ago I started to stumble over something that I first took for an advancement of Drum and Bass - it sounded different then drum and bass - but on some level familiar to me. It wasn´t really revolutionary yet here was a whole force of new music called freaking Dubstep. I was skeptical. I had been listening to more dub recently again as there seemed to be some movement in root dub to get electronic but its wasn´t the Dubstep thingy by far. The early Dubstep that I listened too was just so close to some jungle tracks in the early 90s. I almost thought ok thats it with music from now on we are going in circles back to the past and forward again - it seemed all music styles had been mixed with each other and advanced to a point where just the music nerds could figure out that it was new. Its really been about five years since I really could discern a certain radically new style - since then - silencio. Yet here was this really heavy drum n bass coming around the corner that somehow grooved slowly. I listened hundreds of hours of dubstep internet radio channels. It was good - very powerfull - yet stil there was something missing - it was too dark to heavy to monotonous still. While it gave me 2 hour bursts of energy I had to turn it off after a while it just didn´t stick - I was again getting a bit sad about it - as they used dub - my old time favorite in the name and if that didn´t evolve that was probably dubs last chance or so I thought.
Then something happened that changed it all. It got diverse it morphed with the electronic dub we had been playing in our podcasts. There it was dubs soul together with raw energy and speed of drum n bass mastered as if it was an electro song and even inside one song more diverse then a whole night of minimal techno. It wasn´t to be the only song in that direction. More and more I heard here and there and then I had my first Dubstep party with this "new" kind of dubstep - the dub step with more dub in it - in a Punk bar in Potsdam. There is something about "special" parties that is hard to describe - its the vibe the connection with the other people in there. This party - even so extremely small - was like that - no chemicals - but a lofty vibe with smily persons who just can´t stop to groove.
In the last two month since then its exploding - Dubstep has gotten so diverse that its eating up about any and all music styles in its path - dub was always playful with samples but what is happening at the moment is on a whole new level and not only that its rarely really cheesy its mostly really fun and uplifting and powerfull - heck it can even be played live and still invoke all its positive things as I was allowed to witness last weekend. Its music girls enjoy and even people who normally hate ANYthing electronic like it and dance to it. And even after 10 hours constant listening it just doesn´t get boring (good DJ or mix is still essential of course).
There was once long ago a party in the Berlin Pfefferberg where 9teen and gregoa played under the name "chill at will" - it was in retrospect one of the top 10 parties I have ever been too - even so it was the chill out room. The concept of the duo was to mix very chilled music with danceble and energetic music - people freaked out. Dubstep - like I have experienced it lately - is exactly "copying" that concept but its much smoother as its all based on the same rythmic concept and flows together like water. Going slow then ultra fast (think gabba fast) in less then 2 minutes with basses that push your stomach inward and it all feels natural. I am totally obsessed - in my view its a new beginning for music. The boundaries have not been reached - its very exiting. The last time I witnessed something like that was in 1993 - the early days of Techno. And with it goes an early scene without pretentious people just like the early days. People scream again tick out just to then talk to each other on a slower bit of music - raw feelings in the room no hiding no "checking out". Ultra lovely.
So to vindicate Mr Gibson - he was maybe right when he said the Rastafaris of the future listen to dub in the space station - he just forgot to add "step" to it. If I would read the book again that scene would not get me out of my film anymore. Needless to say I am very very happy and feel really lucky that I see this much exciting music development in my lifetime - to all you dubstep producers out there pushing the boundaries - YOU ROCK.
Some links: dubstep-berlin.de Dubstep Forum for Berlin Badda Boom Sound Reaggy Ragga Dancehall Dub and Dubstep from Potsdam soundcloud/dub-zone Wide variety of different dub tracks braintheft.org Whicked live played dubstep from Berlin Spoke DJane playing and producing wonderfull dubstep
Ever since I heard of augmented reality games and subsequently read William Gibsons "Spook Country" I have been mesmerized by the idea of augmented reality and location based art. I have long come to the conclusion that the natural evolution of the web is to get its foothold into the real world. Since "Spook Country" I have gained quite a clear understanding of how that might come to happen. For those not having read the book - besides the forgettable story of some secret container and a group of random people locating the book talks at length about a network of artists who use mapping data from the world and put virtual artistic pieces into it.
The big problem is that you have to wear some quite sophisticated hardware to see these artwork (some is fictional some is documentary - like a reenactment of a dead famous person laying where he actually died - its gibson and he is "noir" ;) also the location information is quite difficult to generate.
Now in the last 2-3 years things have changed considerably to make this happen faster then I thought ever possible. I guess it all started with the Wii gaming console and its motion sensors and at the same time the ubiquity of GPS receivers arriving in mom & pops cars. Both created a mass market for sensors that are absolutely vital for AR. Each one on its own is already fun and powerfull - the one "sees" where you pointing the other tells you and your machine where you are. Its not a stretch that when you combine both a machine nows where you are and where you point/look put in a compass and you have hardware wise an almost perfect system (there are some quirks with the motion sensors and earths gravity not beeing stable etc pp but its only a matter of time (and how many sensors) to get this ironed out to perfection - WiiMotionPlus anyone?).
Now then came the iPhone - I know - a big yawn. But what the iPhone did was put a motion sensor and gps in one device. That was surpased by some Android phone which also put the compass in (now the iPhone has that too). Now the iPhone had a the problem that the APIs to get to the raw camera data are locked up behind bars so the attention for AR shifted completely to the Android platform (thanks god) for now where there are multiple projects that want to give you a platform to create AR content.
This is where it becomes extraordinarely interesting. What kind of content could that be. If you just think about it for a split second you mind will explode. A good working fluid AR system can give you all the content we have and put it in reality.
Fiction, Documentary, Games, Concerts, Guides are just a few examples. It can be linear (as in a soundwalk) or nonlinear (as in a game). It all happens in reality it can involve one person or 100 of person. Imagine for the sake of it a "Lara Croft" kinda multiplayer game one person in one city pulls an artificial lever and the other person in another city sees in realtime a door opening. Ugh wait - there is something wrong here. Yes the one shortcoming there still is - the interaction is all inside the "virtual" world while that might be overlayed in a cool way to the real world - fictional stories, historic documents etc pp. The thing that would break all dams is if the machines could "see and react" to the interaction in the real world. That would mean a) very good camera tracking b) object recognition c) reason. It will come but until then there is a lot of possibilities to explore. Its very exciting to see this happening - its a new media born and I am actually alive and old enough for once to see it from the very beginning and maybe even take part in it.
or "Wo bleibt die Revolution?" was a the best demo poster I have seen at the "Freedom not Fear" demonstration 11 day ago. Later I found out that the poster was made by the "famous" german blogger fefe.
Now we have elections next sunday and I want to take my own little internet space to reflect my thoughts on it in a bit longer way then the 140 letter in twitter permit me doing. If you think this is a nice peacefull reflection I can only guard you out the room nicely now before you get too disappointed, it might get rough.
Let me start with a nonlinear timeline of happenings that actually got us to where we are now.
As in all western countries September 11 2001 marked the day the powerfull elite found an excuse to hammer through a series of laws that would allow them subsequently to gain more control over the ever growing population that got poorer as a whole as the class divide got wider. It seems clear that if you get more and more people that get poorer while you get fewer and fewer people that get unproportionally richer there might be some a time this explodes so it makes only sense to curb that as soon as possible.
So laws got hammered through that allowed the ruling elite to spy on the people (and I think contrary to popular believe not to get one or two or a group of rogue people but to get a general sentiment of the population to actually react at a moment before it all starts boiling over). Now this might have already been sufficient - coupled with some distractions like wars and still enough games and mind-numbing entertainment around to keep the balance of the powers like the last 3000 years .
Only one thing they missed and I think that can be attributed that in that elite those who actually have a say are - well - too old. That in the past 3000 wasn´t a problem in itself but time has speed up considerably in the last 100 years or so. There are nice studies of how our perception of time changed with the advent of trains, airplanes and so forth - but since about 40 years a extremely disruptive technology entered the life of about anybody in this world - the internet. It supercharged our perception of time because now you didn´t have to take a long ride on a horse, a trainride or even an airplane to get to the middle east or china or to the other side of the world - you are there all the time - it only takes milliseconds to talk to somebody somewhere else. Now our poor elites just couldn´t grasp that concept as they have been growing up in a time when airplanes where all the rage so they missed the other disrupting factor in all that - limitless realtime communication. I have been on the internets for quite a while now (1996) and the limitless freedom of the early days was almost scary - nobody cared nobody was watched all was well.
I think the first real eyeopener for the powerfull came with Napster. All of the sudden an industry that is actually vital for distracting the public with meaningless shit lost complete control over their distribution channels - and that happened in less then a year. The pure panic that followed was almost a joy to watch because the net had become so indestructible by then that whenever there was a "fire" put out on one corner 200 more fires where started everywhere. Gosh they freaking build the net to be indestructible in case of a global nuclear holocaust do they think a few puppets of politians can actually make a dent - especially then that it had grown global?
So even with napster politics didn´t grasp the full extend of nets impact and resorted to 20th century scare and distract tactics. Well that worked for a big part of the population that also didn´t grasp the net yet. But there where the few and far between that saw the dangers of the laws that where forced upon all of us. Some of those where very confident in the net. While the mainstream was kept dumb with mindnumbing media 1.0 that is totally controlled - the few that grasped the full extend of what is going on started to act. Groups formed, a communication was happening outside the mainstream media totally uncontrolled. The blogs and forums started to get viewerships in the hundreds then thousands then millions - then they got noticed. Another Napster was happening while the first Napster was getting bigger and bigger. This time the controllers not only lost the venue of distraction they lost the venue of mind control. People got a second opinion and a lot started to find that refreshing - it started to make them think. On top a whole new generation was starting to disconnect from the old ways and what they got was a multitude of opinions that allowed them to form an opinion of their own that was pretty untainted (I am of the believe that if you read much opposing opinions - which the internet is full of - it actually allows us to become smarter and make more rational decisions).
Now besides lossing their distractive advantage the elite started to figure out that they also loose any opinion control - over not so long enough people are informed enough to question the system as a whole. Now it gets a bid muddy.
Because to think they are dumb is the wrong thinking - they are not and they have the tools (money) to get some brightness in their thinking. I am sure I saw an influx of "conservative" bloggers in the US around 2003 where I think that might actually have been an organized (at least in "hey we need to do something" chainletter style) counter move - the funny thing is that it only adds more opinions and makes people smarter by considering more viewpoints and finding the weaknesses.
Yet this trend has accelerated where traditional media - that by definition can only give the opinions of a few - is fast replaced by "democratic" the "anarchic" the uncontrolled - the blogs.
Now thats the point when the politicians really woke up (just eons too late) so here in Germany we all of the sudden get these laws that point to one thing: censorship - a beautifull 20th century concept that has worked when the publication of opinions was actually a hard thing to do. More surveillance extending to the net (at least they want to get a feeling of the cooking pot to see when its boiling over) and some more drastic things because they feel that the control might be lost in a mental "peacefull" way and that the only way to get the control back might be through force - I am getting there in a second.
The censorship law from our family minister (to protect the internet from watching child porn of course - what else can make an impact in this world otherwise anymore then anything that is absolutely shocking to the max) had one problem - it was dumb (stopsign coupled with dns routers) and transparent (we keep "secret lists"). I think the dumbness not necessarily comes from the fact that the people making it are actually dumb - I think they have not much choice otherwise to censor the web in any meaningfull way other then that - and at least - keep the mass of people from forming their own opinion at least a little while longer. What I think was their real dumbness was the fact that they didn´t see that they couldn´t hide the fact that it was about censorship in a big way. What they also still did not seem to have learned is the speedup of time.
That speedup of time got even a little more speedier with the advent of Twitter. I have to get into Twitter(or any other microblogging service) for a paragraph here. There is an inherent beauty in Twitter that makes it possible for our carbon based brains that need a couple of generations to actually adapt to actually process the huge amount of information on the web in near realtime. Basically making the speedup in time I talked about earlier available to us without taking away the chaotic nature of the web where you might click on something that you never intended to click on and that all of the sudden wides your horizons in ways that you never thought possible.
Twitter made it possible to spread the word about the censorship debate around the country in mere minutes. I watched it and it was a-m-a-z-i-n-g how the debate was shaped in less then a week. The petition against the law garnered 120.000 signatures in mere weeks - this all the while the politicians tried to discredit the movement and stuck to their - already weak and disproven - talking points. Needless to say that this backfired.
But this is the netactivism to that point. Where the ruling had been smarter in my opinion is to get things through on a totally different level that escapes the ordinary netizen.
I am still sure the banking collapse of 2008 was fabricated to a certain extend - orchastrated starting 2001. I know until now I have to not gotten into any kind of conspiracy theory in a big way but I think looking at who actually profited from the collapse and drawing the path backward and forward it my line of thought might become a bit more clear. To keep people happy in the years after 2001 there had to be some kind of prosperity - easy credit everywhere (yes also here in germany) was the answer. Then you fabricate a collapse of a big bank and the easy credit dies up - you end up with slaves that loose anything and will be nice little slaves trying to get to status they had been before (big houses + cars + tvs for everybody). This means you have desperate people - desperate people are easily controlled as long as they don´t have the time to think and question the overall concepts of life.
What also happened - especially here in germany - is police control. I don´t know if the number of policemen actually grew massively in the last 4-6 years but sure as hell am I feeling a bit opressed already. The amount of times I personally have been randomly stopped pulled over ask for ID etc is mindboggling if you consider that there was about 10 years of my life where I had zip zero contact with the police (I am only talking about stuff not provoked totally random stuff). And not only that - they are getting more and more aggressive - kind of talk from above hand on gun etc pp. Yes they made me already a tiny bit afraid of them. The culminated in the "Freedom not Fear" demonstration that I was very closely observing (thats what I like to do best ;) - the police was aggressive, demonstrators where fearfull. The whole demonstration had been closed up totally (anybody else noticed that) and then of course the police started beating some protestors. My view is that this was a concerted effort and not a single case of mad policeman. There might have been "nice policeman" on the street that day but there was a HUGE amount of extremely aggressive provoking riot squats around.
Instilling fear - not with bad terrorists but with its own police - making people (financially) weak - its all tactics to control a crowd and I think the powers might be even happy the "active" people are distracted with net rights at the moment - meanwhile they can just employ their 20th century control strategies - the magical tipping point where a considerable mass of people can be reached through the net will not be reached for another 5-10 years (looking at the only 25.000 people at the freedom not fear demonstration). Until then there is plenty of time to disrupt this movement and attack from points where it seems very vulnerable and blind.
Vulnerable because nobody of the up coming generation wants violence - so a violent revolution will not happen in my life time - that might have to do with the peacefull fall of the wall and generally people living in a lot of comfort and are thinking they are too intelligent to actually pick up arms and fight it out.
Blind because they are missing the social aspect of it all - as long as the current system stands as it is there is a lot leverage through money - draw it away and give it only in doses where it makes you dependent has worked for a very very long time - the german Pirate Party being completely void of the social aspect makes that totally apparent that its the big blind spot - what good does it do if you have freedom of speech when you are a slave to the system? Slaves could also speak out openly among themself in their quarters - it has not gotten them anywhere. They still where surpressed by fear, violence and scarcity.
Now I am the last person who wants any violent conflict ever. But the appeasement the protest movement of the netizens with the powers that are is pissing me off. Its an opertunity to do something grand to actually overthrow a powerbalance that has enslaved human kind since close to 3000 years and has quite obviously done the planet nothing good in return bringing it to a point of total collapse - to a point where it might look like mars or venus another 100 years onward.
The Pirate Party - as the visible public formation of that protest movement - is trying everything it can not to upset the powers too much because it could be seen negatively, it pussyfoots around issues of larger impact then a censorship law (the system is broken not a couple of laws) and the only tool it can use to actively protest outside of violence - the words - are "carefully democratically drafted".
I can only respond - nice try - its not how revolutions are made. Change the system or loose the war. If you don´t give the powers a big "FUCK YOU" and actually resist them it will not work. Its sad that the movement is the master of the biggest word spreading tool in history and just fails to use it radically enough to make an impact.
Maybe it has to get a lot less worse before that thinking sets in - my only fear is that the longer it takes the further we get a way to resolve that in a peacefull way. There will be a time the control mechanisms are of the ruling are strong enough to surpress any movement - and this time arrives pretty fast (give it another 4 years of current policies).
In the meantime I think some of the concepts of the Pirate Party are good for after a revolution - like the "zukunft ministerium" and such and its probably not lost work that is done there but for the near future I don´t see any winning strategy in the way this goes.
This is a cutup of small examples of the impact the tron figure made in overall culture. Its really nice almost vj remix like wide diversity of things - and yes homer makes it in there too.
There I was unsuspectingly checking the proto.lab yesterday - expecting to see two lonely artist trying to to save our exhebition tomorrow working their butts off. What I was greeted with was an enthusiastic crowd of 10 artists rocking the house, transforming the boring white walls of our lab into an installation many magnitudes bigger then what I was ever expecting. Not only were they creative they were on the case organizing things writing down what had to be done til the opening and generally there was a so much energy in the room - I could hardly believe it. Needless to say that that made me very happy - as the proto.lab is like most of our projects a prototype - a test balloon trying to sail in the 21st century society and trying to set a positive statement. I was expecting a long drawn out process of trying to get people involved and trying to stick to projects that are somewhat vague and on first look don´t really have a reason for existing. Yet from the start on two month ago people started to show up and started to work on multiple things. When master Deli came up with the idea of making a streetart exhibition it was immediately clear to me that it would be a good idea because that would make the boring white room a bit more creative looking. Never would I have thought at that point what great feedback we would get from the local young (street)art community and how transformative the process would be for the room and the group in whole.
Tommorrow now is the big day of the opening but I can not thank everybody involved enough already - because no matter how many people show up or how well the event will be recieved by our local politicians and residents (who tend to be not quite exactly the target group for a street art exhebition - if you have been around here you know what I am talking about) - it is already a huge success - for all of us because we have shown that we can come together and rock the boat.
I am greatly touched and inspired by the big unified artwork you have created and I look forward to celebrate that with everybody who has helped or is generally interested of what the artists of the south Berlin suburbs have been up to in the last 20 years after the wall came down. So come by tomorrow 3 p.m. at Kleinmachnow Meiereifeld 33.
Everybody is invited to extend the exhebition with their unique piece either by bringing it along - creating it on the spot or sending it to us via lab(at)prototypen.com for print out.
I am invited to hold the keynote speech at the Live Cinema Festival INiT Live in Toronto Canada as well as showcase Kalkin:Revelation. While I am over there I am also holding a talk at the Canadian Film Center about Live Cinema.
More Information can also be found on the proto.beamaz site.
There will be live twittering from the event under the #init09 tag.
Over at Spreeblick there is a good summary in english of where the current debate over censorship in germany is headed and what childpornography has to do with it.
Since there is a current and hot debate over a new law that’s about to be passed in Germany and a highly successful online petition against that law, I thought it might be a good idea to do a summary in english for non-german bloggers and journalists.
If you live in germany I encourage you to sign the petition (some fundamental german language skills are required to do so) - it has already helped to garner almost 80.000 signees and provided the german press with a reason to report about it instead of just printing the talking points of the clueless politicians - it actually feels like it is making a difference.
This is about the freedom of speech not a call to support child pornography - there are better ways to combat this then activating ineffective filters and monitoring the whole internet population and - worst of all - give the BKA (german CIA or equivalent to former Staatssicherheit (Stasi) in east germany) the power to censor and block all websites without public oversight (if the law passes it would be a crime to posses and distribute the list of blocked internet site).
Update: Over 100.000 people have signed the petition by now creating a media storm and shifting the debate. As some commenters pointed out - even if you are not a german citizen you still can sign the petition - still some german language skills might be required to get through the petition signup form.
Please sign and help the german internet community get a respected voice.
Commenter M.A. has the following help to offer for non german speakers:
Hey everyone, you may knowing, that there is an online petition going on in Germany against this law. I just want to point out (or try to with my bad English) that EVERYONE in the whole world is allowed to support this petition, because german constitution grands everyone to write petitions to the german parliament (or any other public institution of germany). This right has the totality of a human right in germany (some might say, because we are a nation of complainers ;-)) - Even childern, foreigner ... may. Everyone means everyone. If you can read German, in this thread of the discussion site of the online-petition, you can read exactly the laws that grand you these rights: https://epetitionen.bundestag.de/index.php?topic=1564.0 (starts with a discussion to fill out the registration correctly - later that foreigners are allowed to sign the petition also) So - why should foreigners sign a petition - THIS petetion - in germany:
1.) Even if you are a visitor in Germany, you have the right (again granted by german constitution) to get information by every (legal) public source you like - without censoring. Of course child porn illegal. But the mechanisms to block this content can easily exended to every content - and there are no general control mechanisms - the BKA (german FBI) decides by itself which sites should be blocked - the perfect mechanism for censoring.
2.) If you are in germany, and let’s say, go to an internet cáfe or use the connection of your hotel - and you reach a blocked website with bad luck, your IP is stored by the BKA. And the BKA has then officially thinks you are searching for cild porn - and because you are using internet not from home - there is the danger that it is not possible to find you the very next day. It might be not nice, if the police awaits you in the lobby of your hotel - only because some spambot or cyber-worm “helps” you to find illegal sites.
3.) The lists of blocked sites are secret. If you are not using a german provider, you will never know if YOUR homepage, blog, commercial website, ect. is blocked.
4.) This is an infrastructure for censoring - and we all know, if its installed, it will be used and extended. Do anyone in the world wants to have the germany Nation to be uninformed, wrong informed, censored? - AGAIN. History shows - we can do this quite effective and with uncontrolable consequences. sign the e-petition to show, that even foreigners don’t want Germany to be censored again.
1.) make an account on the petition portal of the german parliament: https://epetitionen.bundestag.de/index.php?action=register email (repeat email), password (repeat password) And then your name and adress: Frau/Mann = Mrs./Mr. Name = sirname Vorname = first name organisation = institution, company… (optional) Titel = academic title if any (optional) Straße und Hausnummer = street and house number Postleitzahl = postual code/zip code Wohnort = place of residence/city Land = country Bundesland = federal state of germany/foreign countries - choose the last one (AUSLAND) if you are not living in germany Telefonnummer = telefon-number (optional) then activate option “Ich bin einverstanden” - which says, you are ok with the privacy-policy of the portal. At last prove, not to be a bot with: “Visuelle Verifizierung” - type in the letters you see in the picture on the bottom of the site, Then push “Registrien”-Button. Your username is generated automatically: “NutzerXXX” - XXX is a number.
2.) sign in with the username and your password.
3.) Sign the e-petition: You find the right one at: https://epetitionen.bundestag.de/index.php?action=petition;sa=details;petition=3860 click on: “Petition mitzeichnen” - sign petition Its in the field “Anzahl Mitzeichnungen” (number of signings) - the forth blue box. Congratulations: You have signed a e-petition to the german parliament - against censoring the internet. greetings, M.A.
Wenn Ihr das lest, habt Ihr den harten Winter überstanden, wir auch. Wir starten wieder die Podcastsaison, welche viel zulange Winter schlief. Mit ein paar Freeknews (freekulturnews) heizt der Laubsägendrucker durchs Botanik Bücheregal, gefolgt von den protojektupdates mit Skinheadmusik, Kutiman und einem Fefitest. Labor, Schulgarten und Raum-E werden näher beleuchtet.
Prototypen teams with E-Gruppe & Visual Berlin for Raum E - Open Air 1st of May
We are proud to finally announce that we have teamed up with the E-Gruppe Berlin to deliver a fantastic crazy Berlin style open air event this Friday May 1st.
Raum - E originally an indoor event featuring a massive display of moving visual art and Berlin electronic music is now moving outdoors to bring you even more moving visual art under the summer sky of Berlin. The location - Die Sysiphos Hallen - is an absolutely crazy abandoned factory and has this Berlin underground flair that has been missing from the shiny sterile clubs of the city center. The party itself reflects this feeling with a lot of the people who grew up with in the scene and have since become artists supporting a lifestyle and a message that reflects that community feeling that had been predominant before the investors took over the party folks.
The E-Gruppe has been involved in making visuals and decoration and also organizing parties since 14 years and is celebrating its birthday. Prototypen has made a splash with the first massive open air at the abandoned russian military airport "Altes Lager" with its 1995 Planet Port and has since also supplied visuals, music and organization to a multitude of parties in and around Berlin and is this year celebrating its 15th birthday. Visual Berlin has grouped all the VJs and motion visual artists of Berlin and gave them a voice an a message - together with the help of friends and artist from the city we are bound to give everybody a great audiovisual feast into May.
If you have been helping the Prototypen in the past in any kind of project we would like to take this moment to thank you - please get in touch with us we will provide you with a free ticket. If that does not apply to you - we will give out 2x2 free tickets to the first people who follow us @prototypen on twitter.
The Event is located at Berlin/Germany Hauptstrasse 15. Nearest S-Bahn Station is Ostkreuz from there you take the shuttle or walk 15 minutes south (direction of the big chimneys with the blinking lights).
So bring some good spirit and we will see you all on Friday.
Audio LineUp:
area 1 - listening / aber auch beats:
22:00 - 23:00 uhr: Mex Schlüpfer - live
23:00 - 00:30 uhr: MoGreens
00:30 - 02:00 uhr: Das Kraftfuttermischwerk - live
02:00 - 03:30 uhr: Paskal
03:30 - 05:00 uhr: The Marx Trukker - live
05:00 - 07:00 uhr: ED 2000 + Vela
07:00 - 09:00 uhr: Gaya Kloud + MoGreens
area 2 - dancefloor:
22:00 - 00:00 uhr: Georg Wedel
00:00 - 01:00 uhr: Der Monotone Rauschzustand - live
01:00 - 02:00 uhr: Jaxson
02:00 - 03:00 uhr: Shackelton + Sin C.T. - live
03:00 - 04:00 uhr: Deph
04:00 - 05:00 uhr: Der Arzt
05:00 - 06:00 uhr: Sebastian Wolff
06:00 - 07:00 uhr: Morte
07:00 - 08:00 uhr: Johannes Palissa
08:00 - 09:00 uhr: Conocybe
I love original ideas to circumvent the traditional structures and if you do it with style and message I am ALL out behind it.
There is this screenwriter who seems very fed up with Hollywood and "The Industry" and wants to do his own movie. To finance his endeavor he sells self made Lemonade with a great "disclaimer" text on the label that explains what he wants to do and how much he hates corporate Hollywood structure.
THANK YOU FOR INVESTING IN MY MOVIE!
My name is Matthew and I am one of the best screenwriters in Hollywood. Unfortunately, the television networks and movie studios don't know that yet. As it stands, the decision of which films get produced are left in the hands of emotionally-immature, substance-abusing ex-lawyers who live in dread paranoia that everyone in the universe is out to get them. They spend the bulk of their time spying on their fellow executives, composing nasty counter-intelligence rumors and spreading them through their network of FA-BU-LOUS, yet cunning assistants.
Much of the actual work, like "reading" is left to a gaggle of twenty-something interns who are all the product of George W. Bush's "No Child Left Behind" policy. To these bimbos, nothing in the world existed before 1995, and the most reading they've done has been through text messages. They believe that good writing is something that fits into 160 characters, all performed with the thumbs. :)LOL!
Needless to say, I'm making my own damn movie and you just helped! All of the profits from this amazingly refreshing drink are going into my independent film. Why? Because I believe in the spirit of America - CONSUME AND DESTROY! POOR=BAD/RICH=GOOD! WAR IS PEACE! YOU-ESS-AY! YOU-ESS-AY! YEE-HAW!
Any-hoo, if you work in "THE INDUSTRY" as a common below-the-line slob and would like to work on my film for less than you're worth for no other reason but to satisfy my giant ego, send your resume to: malibu.monkey@verizon.net.
If you're a producer with a distribution deal, somewhat sober, and capable of actually reading a screenplay by yourself, shoot an email to me as well. I'll be happy to send a script to you along with your stupid submission release agreement boilerplate wank-rag.
If you are an actor, congratulations on making it this far. It's a lot of words. Who's a good boy? You! And you are very special. Plus, you serve specials at the restaurant. Special food served by special people to special people. Okay, I admit it. I'm just jealous because you are better looking than me and get all the hotties. Girls who go for me are all smart 'n' junk. Plus, they sag. And you're in SAG. Isn't that special?!
Agents, entertainment lawyers, managers and all other Pimps of The Antichrist can do us all a favor by simply killing yourselves. If you can, try to attempt a single moment of original, creative thought by finding an entertaining way to do it. Like performing seppuku with a champagne flute during the lunch rush at The Ivy. Or hang yourself from one of "O's" in the Hollywood sign with a noose made from your Kabbalah strings and rubber cancer-awareness bracelets. Either way, die bloodsucker! Die!
Cheers!
His lemonade is made up of the following:
A REFRESHING BLEND OF WATER, CERTIFIED ORGANIC LIMES, CERTIFIED ORGANIC CANE SUGAR, AND CERTIFIED ORGANIC BASIL.
sounds delicious. You can by a 1-quart bottle for $5 or a 10 bottle crate for $30.
@malibumonkey.
Vivace portable music studio - Most Awesome Controller Interface
The search for midi/osc controllers knows no limits around the world as everybody is struggling to get some manual control to the thousands of virtuals knobs and sliders and buttons. There are lots of wild tries to cram as many buttons in as portable rigs as possible. I think that most people would agree that there is nothing out there that is perfect. A step closer (until Apple frees us from the controller nightmare with a fully dual multitouch display or such) come the designers Young-Shin Lee & Hae-Jin Jung. They simply made a whole new computer that is just designed to be a musical instrument. I actually think they have something - if it would be ultra cheap and could be used as just a controller. I know that VJs would probably love it - imaging having a second screen with you loops and some nifty controller and some multitouch action and a keyboard in addition to your usual setup.
As a matter of silent protest I post hereby the alternative STOPP sign to protest against the censorship of the german internet by Germanys four biggest providers, Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone/Arcor, Hansenet/Alice, Telefonica/O2 and Kabel Deutschland. I will also cancel my contract with Vodaphone/Arcor at the next possible date. I detest the idea that 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of East German governmental suppression this country is going along the same path again and there seems to be no big public outcry - especially since the involved politicians are susceptible of misusing such tools to push their own personal religious right-wing agenda.
For all german internet users there is now a free open DNS server run by foebud.org without censorship which can be reached under: 85.214.73.63 (thanks @murdelta)
There have been two noteworthy content additions to the internet yesterday that portray a story that I have been battling with for the last year and a bit. The big question these days for numerous people and whole industries is: How do you make money by creating novel content for the internet?
There is the newspaper industry mentioned in the last blog post, there is the tv industry, the bloggers, the musicians, the online-vjs, the painters, the photographers, the illustrators - about each and every person in the creative business has this big question mark over their head. For me I always thought that at least some have no big problem because they have big enough a brand that money just flows in no matter what they do. Such was my thinking with the NineInchNails (NIN) who have had such a huge meme going by untether
them-self from the grasp of a big music company and self publish their heralded music under a creative common license with a "pay what you want" model that included "pay nothing". As far as I heard they had millions of downloads and the whole thing was a huge success. Now I hear this really long substantial indepth interview with Trent Reznor - lead of NIN in the Digg Dialog Series (Digg users ask questions).
I encourage anyone making content on the internet and trying to make money to watch it. He explains a lot of the inside of the grant experiment with the internet and while he is - like many of us - absolutely enthralled by the possibilities of reaching out to millions of people and spreading his art to places that a generation before us could have never dreamed of - he makes it very clear - not even for a big brand like his is it possible to easily generate money and they barely made a profit with merchandise - donation and pay what you like has in his eyes completely failed - that means the 1000 fans rule that has been talked about is really not that true because NIN has definately more then 1000 fans. (yes they scrape by and probably better then most other musicians on the net judging from the massive amount of hardware in the background but he says twice that they are barely making a profit and I believe it 100%). Now he is reiterating what I thought when it comes to advertisement - there is so many and its not really that usefull for generating money and you loose people who are just sick and tired of seeing pages full of ads with a tiny bit of content in the middle - I will get back to that point in a second.
The most revealing thing he said for musicians out there is that its simply almost impossible to try to sell the music itself as music is comprised of bits and bytes there is certainly always a copy floating around the net for free and people prefer free over anything - the iTunes store does not help this situation at all - contrary to what the big press tries to spread. Very insightful interview an absolute must watch.
Some now might say "oh there are so many sites that are advertisment supported and seem to make a good living". I thought so too but another article from yesterday seems to absolutely ridicule that line of thought and makes you wonder if money and the net goes together in any kind of form or shape. The same article also supports another theory of mine - namely that you shouldn´t spend hours on for profit social media sites because they can go boom any minute and then all your content goes boom with it - all the time spend is then lost - you get nothing and you didn´t even do anything wrong (other then giving your time to a big company that is).
I am talking of nothing smaller then YouTube. The article in question is called "YouTube is Doomed". First I wanted to shrug it off as somebody seeking attention with such a headline but the reasoning is sound as it is scary, clear and probably quite right.
YouTube - and I hope you are tied to your seat - made a loss in revenue of roughly $500 million. That is after 3 years in googles hand. Not even Google can sustain such a lossleader for a very long time - no matter how much they paid for it in the first place. I completely agree with the article on that. Then the article does some real good investigative reporting by trying to see if YouTube could ever be profitable - and the clear answer is no. There is no math that would support this even if Google would plaster adverts over any and all videos and charge 3 times as much as they do today they would still loose money - especially with their operating costs multiplying as their catalog of dogs on skateboard movies grows.
Now if Google can´t make money on the internet with content that they don´t even need to pay for - how in the world would a content creator earn any money?
I mean its probably possible to survive but these two anecdotes by what is perceived the most successful in their niche on the net just show to me that there is no sound business model. Still all content comes to the net with full force. I would conclude that the internet and capitalism as it is right now just don´t go together and probably never will. Bits are free. You can´t cage them because then nobody sees them and then nobody knows that they exist. If you send them around with a cage around them somebody will find a way to help them be free - that is their nature and there is nothing that can be done about it except for caging the people them self.
There is a fantastic rant / fictitious speech from Jeff Jarvis on what the Masters of the News have done wrong in the last 15-20 years and how they completely and utterly destroyed their businesses by failing to see the reality of the internet unfold in front of their eyes and failing to act accordingly. He calls the angry white old man out for their inability to adapt from a content economy to a link economy to the short sighted view that google should pay for aggregated headlines never mentioning that its also google that generates 1/3rd of the traffic to these sites.
If you are even remotely interested why its going downhill so fast and strong for the newspaper business that is the article to read and understand why.
Oh and this is how the article ends:
It's simply too late. The best thing some of you can do is get out of the way and make room for the next generation of net natives who understand this new economy and society and care about news and will reinvent it, building what comes after you from the ground up. There's huge opportunity there, for them.
VRML was once to be said the future of the web - everyone who ever tried that out back in the good days will agree with me that it was deemed to failure right from the beginning on. It went under and was never seen again with the second generation browsers. Modern browsers had other stuff to worry about - like passing acidic tests and such so 3d was not a main concern ever. Now word from the Game Developer Conference hits the street that the Kronos group is working together with the Mozilla foundation to bring accelerated 3d graphics inside the browser window. The Kronos group is responsible for OpenGL and OpenGL ES (iPhone is all I say here) and Mozilla of course for the Firefox. They formed an "accelerated 3d on the web working group" that will create a roalty free standard for browser makers to implement and webdevelopers to use. Hallejulia - now it might take some eons for a) a standard to form b) browser to adopt the standard c) 3d program letting you export stuff in the right format but the prospects for real 3d in the browser in a 3-5 year time frame are exiting to say the least. Personally for me this is bigger then vector (as it includes vector hopefully) - the possibilities are endless and truly exiting. Be sure to hear back from me if there is the earliest inclination of any beta or even alpha warez to try this out.
TASER International teams with EVIDENCE.com to create the AXON a secure police recording system that is fully portable and strapped on the head. Now there is multiple things going on here why this is noteworthy. For one it sends (streams?) the data directly to the servers of evidence.com in an encrypted secure way. That means nobody (also not the cops themself) can temper the footage. That means it could be an effective tool to watch the watchers and make them accountable for "mistakes" that might happen when an arrest or house search or such is being made. That of course would mean that evidence.com makes the videos available to the public at large but I think this might be even a business model for them so I actually do seem to think this is likely. Now there needs to be a law that prohibits the nice policemen from turning these things of in the heat - make it a felony punishable with a prison sentence or immediate suspension from the job to avoid the "oh I forgot to turn it back on" kind of moments that these fellow friends would likely have at times.
Now that this is covered I would like to raise a voice that this whole system needs to make it to the general market for everyone and the next best VJ to wear all day. Imagine not having to worry about how long the memory stick in your pocket has capacity but instead you can record you whole day onto a server of your choosing (probably your own home server for the more intimate moments) all wirelessly and you wear just a black blob over your ear - no fugly sunglasses or baseballcaps or fake eyes or such - yes that clearly means I WANT ONE :) but I am sure the bright people at Taser int. have figured that out already and present us a mass market version (probably sans encryption so to give back big brother what has been taken from him).
Linux Libertine - Free the Times and make it better
Free fonts are such thing, most are ugly or just plain copies or incomplete or in the end have the same copyright restrictments as the for pay high quality fonts (mostly because the authors didn´t apply a alternative copyright to them) so its nice to see that there are more and more fonts coming to the table that have less restrictive copyright or are free in the whole sense. Even better it is when said fonts are of high quality - or if they are copying an already available font - make it even better quality. That happened to the Times New Roman - the most controversial font of modern time (or so some say). Blessed with an open source linux compatible license the creators made Linux Libertine even better then the original (and maybe even usable at all?). Everyone can grab a copy for free. Its in the OpenType format and spans all characters that you would ever need in a font and a regular, italic, bold, bolditalic, small caps and - hold you breath - a Organic Grotesk (non-linear sans-serif) version.
Things that used to cost around a million and one buck just a very short time ago seem to be available for almost nothing these days - especially if you roll your own. Such the case with 3d scanners it seems - while only 5 years ago its was inconcievable to even dream about owning a 3d printer - things started to get interesting 2 years ago when the prices dropped into the sub $5000 range and the first efforts of DIY open source 3d scanners appeared on the ether. Now we drop into the sub $300 range with a laser 3d scanner made out of the Lego NXT system. Oh good are the times.
