March 31, 2005
Homage to Creative Commons
As an answer to Michaels first post yesterday I would like to point out that I only have a 100% non other source philosophy when doing my normal VJ gigs. This is because I think to develop an own style you have to create all things yourself - like a director of a movie. What seems to got out wrong is that I am all for copyrights. Actually I hate the way the copyright system works right now and have always supported creative ways to bring the system to fall.
All blogs on prototypen.com inclusive this one are subject to creative common licenses and my code releases are under GNU so I think to make a counter argument I want to pay homage to Creative Commons .
Music from the the WIRED CD: Rip. Sample. Mash. Share.
performed by Beastie Boys song called now get busy.
Losing Who We Are
from michael again:
One of the most important cases being heard before the supreme court at the moment is MGM vs Grokster. Twenty-eight of the world's largest entertainment companies brought the lawsuit against the makers of the Morpheus, Grokster, and KaZaA software products, aiming to set a precedent to use against other technology companies (P2P and otherwise). In honor thereof, i took animated some text in VDMX from an article on Salon.com by Andrew Leonard:
The deeper we get into the digital age, the more we will be defined not by our relationships with physical objects but with the data that we have accumulated in our journeys through life. If we lose the right to own that data and do what we want with it, if the power of the computer, and the Net, is taken from us, we're at risk of losing a lot more than a few files -- we stand at risk of losing the evidence that tells us who we are.
The track is "Run The Crowd" by The Shapeshifters taken from the SXSW music festival performing artist bittorrent.
re:vlogging#1 .|. hidden political messages
Yesterday Michael and I had the same idea at the same time without knowing that we each had the idea. We both wanted to do a loop or remix from other video bloggers videos. The synchronity is mirrored in a synchronous two entry release (we wanted to do it in one entry but then the ANT does not recognize the second entry).
Watching a lot of Video Blogs through the artificial eye it seemed that a political message was sticking out all the time. I took some video blog entries and molded them into a political statement. Bullemhead gave the overall theme with his entry Koyannisqatsi. Dylan lend her pair of eyes and the great "empire" typography from her dylan show #2. The thinking head that appears shortly is from Raymond M. Kristiansen´s dltg.vlog the entry is called boris and also the car crashes are from his joyride remix. The very great punchy moving head is from Scratch´s entry that is called Punch.
The ultimate destruction of the world comes through the one eye to stop it you have to lick it. Jay from Momentshowing provided the tongue and his girl the the eye.
The great commentary and the robo hand that takes over the world is from the ultimate video blogging professional Human Dog Productions and I took apart the entry#65 and the robohand entry#62.
Whicked collapsed civilization music by DJ Jóse (prototypen) again...
re:vlogging#1 .|. a homage to Annie
michael writes:
Annie says on the sidebar of her videoblog, "I'm 19, and live in a suburb of Los Angeles. I love my Mac and I'm incredibly geeky/dorky." As a true testament to her dorkiness and what she claims is her "lack of coordination" she graced the world with a post of her dancing in her new jeans. Unfortunately for her, i dont think she's a dork, i think shes damn hot (love those glasses). Alas, she's a continent away from me, so the only way i can flirt with her is with a re-vlog mix of her original post with some nice ice cream pastel color and streak fx with a bit of rgb delay -- to spice up the stark whiteness of what appears to be her living room -- all added with real time sound synch to her original track using GRIDPRO. Any other videobloggers you think should be re-vlogged here at artificial eye? drop me a mail at exiledsurfer@onemail.at
March 30, 2005
Guest Entry#1: Copyleft.|.Copyright
Today is only 4 Minutes old but it starts very lovely with the first entry from a guest VJ. I got a mail from Michael yesterday and thought he is very intelligent and in the know. It turnes out after chatting a little that he is dead funny as well. His loops will feel home here our thoughts are somehow close yet far away. So here it goes and expect an answer from me soon...
Falk and i subscribe to different schools of thought as far as content origin are concerned, and i consider myself a copyleftist 
and believe that once things are released into the public domain, that they are there for us to reinterpret as artists... and essentially that is what enables public dialog. So what better way to set us two apart here on the blog than to remix the copyleft logo with some of my other favorite footage, including a classic demoreel animation clip from niels jansson that he put up on the web in 2000. This is a live mix created in GRIDPRO from vidvox, using the sequencer, with all added color, motion fx and transitions created by synchronizing the modules to the audiotrack in the built in audioplayer. The track is called "copy copy", including the great line "super terror, copy, NOW", from a japanese band way too far ahead of their time, The Plastics which was released as a single on Rough Trade in 1979.
any musicians out there who want to contribute tracks for a mix to be posted on this site can mail me at exiledsurfer at onemail dot at
cheers, exiledsurfer.
March 29, 2005
Robo Sapiens
The World Fair in Japan gets a lot of buzzing lately and most publications reporting from it point out the extraordinary advances in roboter design on display in Tokyo. So Roboter are such an easy topic for an entry here that I had to do it.
* faz.de (german newspaper) reports
* technology review reports
Lovely brokn future music by our local elektronic music hero DJ Jóse (prototypen).
AVIT VJ conferences Birmingham
First little apology for not posting in frequent manner. I was a little sick the last days and had to recover. Now I am back with full force.
Back on topic.
The AVIT VJ conferences return to their hometurf – the good old United Kingdom. This time they are in Birmingham. I thought what would make a better entry then this? Not much. So here the AVIT entry.
Whicked Creative Commons music by Dr. Colossus song called Criticial Beatdown
March 22, 2005
Vampire bats run like horses
Yesterday was mute day. Not much going on. Today I found something on the fifth click that I think is amusing and gives the vj eye much potential to try the short loop in less time. The movie is so ovious self explaining. Yes its for real.
#Der Gemeine Vampir galoppiert Telepolis (german)
#Original Nature.com Report
#The original movie
The tune is from nixx.ch and the song is called HorseFactor.
March 20, 2005
Entry #1
The first entry is the first test. The test took me to long. About 3 hours. This had to do with conceptional problems and program crashes. So in the end its too long for all the topics to be covered in any detail. So I call this a bulletin mix. Something I will do when I have enough time and too much to show. Short bulletins of a couple of topics:
topics
• USA used tricks to get allies against North Korea
• Wisconsin Researchers Create Nano-Bio-Circuits
• W3D printer to churn out copies of itself
• Revolution in the Digital Rights Management Age - Code v.2
• wave vessel: audio visualization
• Iran Has 12 Strategic Cruise Missiles
• Announcment of vjtorrents.com
• bicycle wheel with persintent of vision and message
audio provided by
the sunny sunday afternoon track that I found through the creative commons site for todays entry comes from
Incidental Fusion and is called groovin-afternoon.
Whats a true VJ blog?
When I looked at the statistiks of my own blog one day I saw that quite a few of my readers came to me through the search term "vj blog" on google. By now I am the first entry for "vj blog" on englisch google. That is quite cool though my main blog has "vj" only as a side topic and the term vj blog does not show up at all. So I ask myself what would people looking for a "vj blog" expect. And I figured that a true vj blog would have movies. You can get normal video blogs around the net that is nothing so new. The kind of movies I have in mind are more like vj loops. Made from everyday life material online and offline. The cool thing is that you can aggregate them into a vj set.
So the idea "life through an artificial eye" was born as a true VJ blog in addition to my normal "written words" blog.
The idea is to collect visual information through the day and post a short vj loop that incorporates personal interesting pictures and movies from the day. A longer cut up of all the week in vj loops will come on weekends.
So I have a couple of constrains. Firstly I want to make it as less time consuming as possible. I don´t want to ftp each short daily to the server and then manually put in the code to link it. The combination of the perl script in movable type and my internet providers scrip execution time allow me only to upload 2MB. This seems not much but I think its a nice constrain to work with. Put all days moving pictures in less then 2 MB together with audio. That imposes that the loops are short - very short. I will need to do some tests to tell how short and what compression. So do not expect HDTV quality vj loops off the site. The low quality is quite a common feature of todays news (be it print or tv) as news are rushed out as fast and cheap as possible to reach the broadest mass of people. Giving that thought the low resolution bad compression is a stylistic element for now.
The other constrain is obviously music. I do not want to break any copyright laws and therefore have to find "free" music. One option is to use music by enclosed audio projects. The other is to use creative commons audio sources. I will try to do both. When the local music heros provide me with good tunes then I will use those preferably - until then I will use songs found creative common share alike feasable as I am not going to get any money out of the blog.
After some testing the format will look something like this:
individual dailies
length: 5-30 seconds
Format: MPG4 ISMA (H.264 later)
Resolution: 320x240 QVGA
Data-Rate: 384 kbits/sec (Multipass w/ H.264)
Frame-Rate: 25 fps
Keyframe: every 24 frames
Audio Setting: 64kbps, 44,1kHz stereo AAC-LC
For now I have to use MPEG4 ISMA profile for encoding as there is not enough H.264 support out there. My test show that the quality will greatly improve once H.264 is out in the wild (through Quicktime 7). I will change to this codec as soon as possible as the size/quality ratio is phenomenal. I personally see this blog as something of the future and so I use the video codec of the future (at least for the next five to ten years ).
I already know that I can never fill this blog with enough content on my own to make it overly interesting. So if VJs are interested in posting their own vj blog snippets on here (with the above contrains) drop me a line!