8 am Caught a train from Birmingham to Sheffield.

10 am Arrived in Sheffield. Sought out the Millenium Gallery to see Rose Butler’s 3-screen video installation Tent. The work is based on Muslim ideas of pottery design, apparently, which seemed to my mind to play out as a kind of mirroring and inverted mirroring effect. Sometimes the central screen had a mirror line down the middle, and the video stretched over the left one and a half screens was repeated on the right. Sometimes the left screen and the right screen showed the same thing but the middle was mirrored, sometimes the three screens showed video staggered in time; and variations on the above. In all shots though a tent appears, adorned with brightly-coloured paintings, posters, and bits of colour.. the idea seems to be that the tent formed some kind of base of operations for the filming process, connecting the bits of otherwise fairly random landscape photography together.

The footage was taken from what seemed to be a camera on some kind of rotating mount that took footage stop-motion style, and there was quite often some kind of interaction with people in the image. In one particular shot, which seemed to be taken from a countryside scene somewhere, there was a small girl who ran with glee around the camera while it was filming, and this coupled with the splitting/mirroring that was going on lent a very nice feel to the whole thing, as though it was just a machine for play… I like playfulness in art, it’s something I’m trying to work towards myself. Another shot that sticks in my mind involved the tent on a beach, with interested cyclists moving around and sometimes stopping in front.

11 am Walked around trying to find the location for Single Shot. When I finally found where it was supposed to be I realised I’d got the dates wrong by three days, and the place I was looking for was closed. Oh well – had a good walk around Sheffield nonetheless.

12:30 am Went right back to where I started to find another place where Single Shot was showing. Some of the films were great, thought not always the ones I’d expected. They’re all viewable online:

• George Barber’s Automotive Action involved upturning buckets of coloured paint onto a motorway and then watching as cars drove through them: the whole thing appeared candid and possibly of dubious legality – awesome.
• Vanished Point by Christian Krupa was quite nice.
• Ben Dodd’s Surprise was technically very interesting, if not so narratively..
• Mike Marshall’s Birdcatcher was pleasantly serene.
• Dust was far too long and made little sense.

1:30pm Lunch. Fruit on a patch of grass. Noice.

2:30pm We Grew Our Own Medialab (and this is what happened), which was a talk (documentary video available on the link) by various open-source-based medialabs on what they’re doing, and how they’re doing it… the Grow Your Own Medialab project was initiated by Sheffield’s Access Space, a medialab that uses FLOSS software on donated and recycled hardware. They’ve formalised some of the work involved in setting up such a facility, and this talk was a chance for people who’ve gone down this path to tell other people about it. Present and presenting were James from Access Space, some folks from Folly, Mongrel/MediaShed who do neat things for free, eg sniffing WiFi CCTV systems to get free video content to then make movies (their logo is someone reaching in to a rubbish bin so there’s certainly a freegan element going on there..), and lastly Newcastle’s Polytechnic.

4:30pm Group discussion on free vs open (documentary video available on the link): looking at free and open source ideas of software and how they might be and can be applied to art and life. We passed through some very interesting territory, including differences between the currently prevailing world view of art as the creation of private and personal cultural objects (cf intellectual property laws), vs art as shared cultural heritage (cf the GNU foundation and FLOSS). The interesting thing about the discussion is that it brought people of vastly different social classes together, from an ex-features editor of the Face magazine right through to someone who has been on the unemployment benefit his whole life and was able to relate stories of single mothers trying to survive on the dole back into the sometimes utopian and rich-middle-class-priveliged perspective that sometimes comes along with the open source rhetoric… great stuff anyway. I had some fascinating if brief chats with Adnan Hadzi afterwards, who is part of the Deptford.tv project to document the redevelopment of the Deptford area of London in an open-source/creative commons way.

6pm-10pm Biosphere does Does Music Affect Plants? Beautiful Biosphere ambience in a large indoor greenhouse. Really lovely. I could’ve stayed there all night.

8pm Haswell & Hecker diffuse a composition they made with the Xenakis‘ image-based UPIC Music Composing System. With Lasers! and Strobe Lighting! This was not really so interesting, all things considered. The music suffered from something that electroacoustic/acousmatic music often does suffer from – namely, to my ears at least, a lack of direction, too much length with not enough music. Often you’ll find it conceptually fits together and makes sense, but musically this conceptual coherence cannot be felt, and the result is what starts to feel like monotony and unnecessary repetition. There were certainly some moments within it but overall I don’t think it worked quite as well as it could. And the lasers ended up being a little bit of a gimmick – save for a few moments there wasn’t really much relationship between what you were hearing and what you were seeing, except (again) from a conceptual point of view, which sadly didn’t play out in the actual experience.

9pm Yasunao Tone does 495.63. Chinese calligraphy drawn on a graphics tablet, projected on a wall and converted into loud, crunchy, glitchy noise, in a darkened library, at 9pm at night. Awesome!

10:30pm Train back to Birmingham, to arrive at midnight.

Wow, that was novel…

Along with the actual events I managed to get details of a whole bunch of people including the Polytechnic people from Sheffield (Dominic and .. Jake I think? very friendly lads), Adnan Hadzi who worked on the Deptford.tv project (studying for PhD in media communications and with a strong interest in free and open as they apply to the creation of shared cultural heritage), and the Access Space folks, who I will hopefully be visiting to do a residency with… excellent.

I love Sutekh. He has a wonderfully disrespectful and flippant approach to the world, especially the world of business, its mundanity and its stupidity… there’s a track on his album Fell called Recession Clouds that starts with a sample of some boring middle-management type giving the most stunningly dull speech. It’s awesome.

Tell me, is this not the most awesomest thing ever?

Allegedly, though, Ikari’s animation was also the vector that carried “Dragostea din Tei” to a nineteen-year-old kid named Gary Brolsma in Saddle Brook, New Jersey. He liked the song; he made a video of himself sitting in his chair in front of his computer, dancing to “Dragostea din Tei,” and posted it as a Flash video to a site called Newgrounds on December 6, 2004. He called it “Numa Numa Dance.”

Brolsma’s video singlehandedly justifies the existence of webcams. His squarish head and shoulders are in the center of the shot. He’s got a short haircut, glasses that are slightly too small for him and reflect his computer’s monitor, and cheap headphones; he’s sitting in a dismal-looking suburban room. And he is going for it: rolling his eyes back in his head, shaking his face, shooting his hands into the air with the beat, saluting along with the word salut, gesturing grandly, lip-synching the whole thing with his grand opera of a mouth, flirting with the camera, utterly given over to the music. It’s a movie of someone who is having the time of his life, wants to share his joy with everyone, and doesn’t care what anyone else thinks. In other words, it’s a movie of a total geek.

The social scene in this country, always heavily involved in drugs of the legal kind (ie alcohol) has taken an interesting twist in the last few years with the introduction of ‘party pills,’ or ‘herbal highs’ or just ‘herbals,’ most of them based on the chemical N-benzylpiperazine or BZP which has stimulant effects. These are basically drugs that are legal, cheaper than ‘real’ drugs, and available without having to duck down dodgy alleyways or risk being chased by mobsters and/or their dogs.

The latest one it seems is a drug called Ease which was being commercially trialled as a replacement for Ecstacy. Looking at the research behind it is interesting:

Like ecstasy (MDMA), methylone works by triggering serotonin release in the brain. Unlike ecstasy, it is selective and does not release the monoamines dopamine and noradrenalin, which are responsible for the amphetamine-like effects of ecstasy.

In practical terms, the effect is one of elevated mood, empathy and sociability, without the out-of-it-ness of ecstasy, the intensity of physical effect, or the hangover. As a friend of mine put it, “ecstasy for grownups”. There are quite a number of experience reports at Erowid. (To answer the obvious questions: yes, I have tried Ease and I am not the only journalist to have done so, and, yes, I found it highly effective.)

But the monoamine dump triggered by ecstasy is also linked to its neurotoxicity: depending on dosage, frequency and recovery time, ecstasy really can hurt your brain. With its more selective effect, methylone would seem to lack ecstasy’s neurotoxic effects, even at high doses. This is the argument Bowden made in the ministerial advisory, also suggesting that it lacked the mechanisms to cause addiction or acute hyperthermia, which is the main cause of (very rare) ecstasy deaths.

So what you’ve basically got is a drug that delivers the niceness of E without the mess.

The trial’s been pulled because the officials at the Ministry of Health who made the decisions have made an about-face, so it seems. They approved the trial last year, but now they have changed their minds. The question becomes, which decision was the right one?

This whole saga makes me very sad. Our bodies are our own, and our minds are our own, and what we do with them and to them should be our business. There are other drugs that are far more socially and bodily damaging — alcohol, something I’ve already blogged about, to name New Zealand’s worse culprit. Why not look properly at the health risks of that?

Interesting observation. There are a whole huge pile of netlabels devoted to electronic music, many of them releasing quality quality stuff; but there’s sod all for any other genre of music. Any idea why this might be? If you want pop or guitar based stuff MySpace seems to be the way to go. I’m not really into pop but if I was I’d have no shortage of pretty cool stuff.

I’m sure this isn’t new, but — Limewire are joking, right?

And while I’m here, Busted Tees are very clever. If I was rich, I’d give them money.


(the last one will only make sense if you’ve played Oregon Trail, which I did, for many hours, back when all the computers I could get access to were Macintosh Colour Classics, and I was too geeky to have anything else to do)

If the commercial interests get their way, doing what this guy has done would be not only illegal but actually impossible: the hardware simply would not allow it to be done.

Read Free Culture. Make art that confronts IP laws head-on. Share it with Creative Commons. We need to permeate this stuff so deep into our society that any attempt to legalise it will be clearly absurd. Don’t let the fuckers win.

This is what can happen when you have a society hung up so deeply on sex. Those interested in exploring the ideas run off out and do what they do, believing they are free to do so. And, of course, you get a deep conservative rejection of the whole movement, and a subsequent massive social stima attached to any kinds of expressions of sexual deviance, or of even just questioning the ideas around sex itself. At this stage I wish I knew more about the history of attitudes to sexuality, especially in the late 19th century — as I understand it, they were then at a vaguely similar point in the apparently cyclic progression of societal attitudes to sex as we are at now.

The significance of this to me is that Rachel has lost custody of her child because of her art. The supposedly most free society on the planet has demonstrated that its freedom comes with limits — as of course all freedom fundamentally does.

I went last night to see Me and You and Everyone We Know, a film by Miranda July, who is also a performance artist and an amazing one at that. This film is very, very beautiful, and you should see it. It has a soundtrack by Michael Andrews who also provided the music for Donnie Darko. He appears to like lo-fi; this is Good.

Spooky’s aim was to bring the basic idea of remixing, as it can be used to make music, to video: take two or more sources, modify them only slightly, and recombine them. The new meaning, the artistic merit, is supposed to come from the combination itself.

The show itself was very unassuming, trying (and succeeding) to be as unpretentious as possible. There was no curtain, and at the start of the show Spooky came on stage and explained what he was doing in very simple terms. If the aim was to break the barrier between performer and audience, then I think it worked.

As for the actual show, it was interesting, and at some parts moving (mainly due to the music — I was quite impressed by much of that). It’s very difficult to be objective about it because I work with live video and/or audio software on a daily basis, so I know what’s possible. Spooky had gone down the avenue of just plain playing the video, doing very little to no processing on the spot. Some of the clips were altered, with the addition of images of circuitry overlaying the actors, and boxes and ovals following them round on screen. But it was very much what it set out to be: the application of DJ techniques, as in, playing to records at once and crossfading, to film.

Commentary on the film itself — the KKK propaganda film, Birth of the Nation (which was the first film to be screened in the White House apparently) — was handled mainly by the music, although even then there was a feeling that Spooky was trying to let the film speak for itself. The racial element was fairly absurd to our eyes, and as such I don’t think it really needed much help to be critical of itself.

Broadband jump-started Napster. Acquiring files at 56k is just too damn slow except to do on a whim. But back in 2000, only college students and early adopters had high speed connections. Now seemingly everybody does.

…

But, after downloading iTunes and listening to music on your computer, suddenly you don’t want the disc. It’s as superfluous as those CDs that software companies used to distribute their programs on. Why now you just download files from the Web.

So, all around, things are bleak for the record labels. They’re selling tunes in an obsolete format and the thunder comes from a completely different kind of entertainment medium. Looking to protect their old business model, they’re trying to sue into submission customers who have adopted new ways of acquisition they’ll never give up and are trying to monetize and protect elements of band promotion that are hindering the breaking of acts.

…

The hardest thing to do is get someone EXPOSED to an act’s music. To hold them back from it, to limit the possibility of exposure, makes no sense. Certainly not for companies like NBC. Whose “Lazy Sunday” SNL skit injected new life into a tired show via ubiquitous distribution on the Web. NBC reacted by sending a cease and desist letter to youtube and then putting the video on THEIR SITE ONLY! As if nbc.com was a regular stop on the surfer’s rounds. No, you’ve got to put the product where people AGGREGATE IT, presently youtube and google video.

The product was originally at Napster. ALL of it. But then the labels parceled it out to many sites, none of which have any significant traction other than iTunes. The key is to create BEHEMOTHS, one stop shopping, not a bunch of out of the way loser 7-11s. Maybe there’s only room for one online store, but by insisting on copy protection and sale at a high price the labels have given the power to Apple, Apple hasn’t taken it. The end run would be to authorize another way of acquisition, one without copy protection, that would allow people to have a lot of material at a low price.

And they must do this quickly. Before their businesses are decimated. The longer they refuse to play by Net rules, and allow consumption of mass quantities by everybody, the more they fall behind the curve, ceding the territory to all-in-one bands who DON’T MIND giving their music away for free. THAT’S what the major labels are doing, marginalizing THEMSELVES!

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