trees are people too

I need to learn how to knit.

Enough said, really.

Pointed out to me on the weekend, a young man in israel has spent three months remixing youtube. No mean feat.

Being a huge fan of remix culture spawned from the evolution of the web, this becomes even more impressive when you realise no effects have been added (besides a heady amount of splicing and syncing) and all of the videos used are essentially home made, many recorded with devices available to many of us in our own lives, homes, dens, burroughs etc.

Some are better than others, but all are spectacular. He makes it look too easy.

I haven’t really dug the presets all that much until now, but this song makes me want to cut loose on the dancefloor of my kitchen. Come to think of it, I haven’t really been all that into peering at half naked kids dancing before, but then came so you think you can dance. This, I feel, combines the best of both.

Shame about the rest of the album :sigh:

enjoy.

I have seen Edgar Mueller’s work before, but this takes the cake. Made all the more lovely by the splendid timelapse.

The crevasse

I’ve been busy, I’m sorry. new job, preceded by training for new job, followed by celebration of new job. it’s exhausting, this working business. Then to top it off we have had such a hot summer, culminating in the worst peace-time-disaster-bushfires this country has ever experienced. The pictures have been heartbreaking, and the city remains cloaked in an eerie blanket of hazy ash while everything smells faintly of smoke. It is a summer we won’t forget.

But I have found some sweet distraction in a few things… On a small scale there was this, taking rockabilly and bikers to a whole new level.

Download Title

On a slightly longer level, we enjoyed completing season 3 of Dexter , and also finally got around to watching The Wackness.

What a fabulous film, fabulous soundtrack, featuring the fabulous Ben Kingsley… It’s directed by a Jonathan Levine, (he also wrote it) and it’s beautifully done. Although I haven’t heard of any of his prior films, he definitely looks like one to watch. Keep an eye out…

And while you are, enjoy this gorgeous online comic, My Cardboard life by Philippa Rice… So very nice. As always, more to come.

Sometimes I feel like cardboard. Pulpy when wet, crisp when dry and slightly corregated. Easy to fold and recycle. nom nom nom.

Last night, at 2am as I lay awake in bed, I rewrote my script for the machinima. It was beautiful, (as things tend to be at 2am in the morning). Of course, upon awakening I couldn’t remember it, but this is my reworking from what I recall. I am trying to create a more poetic feel, a bit more evocative and moving, as I have such a short space of time to say it in.

“the city was noisy for such a lonely place.
thousands of people clustered together, strangers living just metres from each other. Once, someone abandoned their bike in my street where it sat for months, rusting sadly, until it was collected by the garbage men.

the wiki has been somewhat challenging.

I thought it would be a more natural, ‘organic’ process, one that took on a life of its own, allowing for a freer creative practice, but I am finding our group (well, myself predominantly) are still approaching it in relatively formal and structured style. We have even discussed the formality of language, which I thought (just based on the nature of the wiki) would be quite relaxed and informal.

We need more tangents, more going on hunches, more go with the flow. Less structure, less consideration even (perhaps) and less concern for the directions we are going on. Our group meetings are affording us the basic outline, now we need to break out from them. It’s coming along, but slower than I thought. After lamenting about how wild the wiki was, how I wanted to control it, I am now realising more than ever that we need to let go, let it steer us somewhat, or else we risk simply transposing an essay into online format. I think we are all realising this, so we are certainly making advances. It is a start! I like the concept of it needing just to maintain a ‘soft focus’ around our subject, as Adrian mentioned. Sounds lovely and fuzzy to me.

On that point, however, can the wiki go too far off track?

An interesting example of the wiki taking on a life of its own is the case of circular references:

An anonymous user added information to Wikipedia’s entry on Sacha Baron Cohen three days before the now-referenced external article was written. The Independent wrote the referenced article apparently using Wikipedia as the source establishing his ‘Goldman Sachs’ career. Now Wikipedia uses as a references the article that came after the initial modification to Wikipedia itself.

So something incorrect is added to a wiki article, before being used as a primary source in an article. The wiki entry itself then goes on to reference the article, essentially making the incorrect fact in wikipedia now true, as it is referenced externally. Argh, makes your brain hurt, but interesting to see how the information evolves (and, as is mentioned, how fluid it actually is).

The concept of wikis and other ucg sites and the quality of information they provide fascinates me. Hope to write more on it soon.

a little trickier than I first thought.

After Adrian must have said a million times that the rhizome.mov file and the rhizome.xml file needed to stay together, I still managed to forget this.
So, note to self: this is probably what you are doing wrong.

A quick recap:

download rhizome template
choose two videos (.mov files) and upload to server
open rhizome.xml file in textwrangler (or alternative text reader sans formatting)
input the url location of two vids, save (nb must remain titled ‘rhizome1.xml’)
upload rhizome1.xml file and accompanying rhizome.mov file (which can be renamed) These must be in the same folder as each other (and I have placed them in the same folder as the videos also)
copy and paste the ‘rhizome.mov’ file url into media player
don’t forget a poster image ….
et voila! (hopefully).

A few issues – first the video aspect ratio was way out (i.e stretched upwards as I had the dimensions 640×480 when it should be 640×240).
I changed this accordingly, but when I returned to my blog it wouldn’t play at all and said I needed additional plugins to play this file.
Uh, whatever computer. I mucked around a bit to no avail, but when I got home it was mysteriously working. Everything worked fine. Hmm. O, Why do you defy me, confuser?

I’ll do more tests on this later this week.

kudos to Danny for helping me out with installing this.

After seamlessly installing Vpip, I was having much difficulty getting this plugin to work. Having installed it and activated it, all seemed to be in order…but the plugin just didn’t appear on my ‘write a post’ page. Turns out there are numerous quicktime embed/embed quicktime posts that are available for download, but I had managed to chose the wrong one.

After installing another version (this embed quicktime rather than any other versions) all seems to be working fine. churs!