Ellard

Children gather around - do you know why a PC is called a PC? It’s a Personal Computer. It means that once upon a time we used ‘dumb terminals’ connected to a server, and that’s where the applications were stored. You would ‘time share’ on the ‘mainframe’. We got rid of that shit. It was called the ‘personal computer revolution’. Children, do you hear them talking about ‘cloud computing’? Do you hear them say that some new revolution is coming, where we connect our machines to some mainframe at Google and do our work there? Do you say, but didn’t we get rid of that just 20 years ago, why are we going back to the old system again?

Because there are people that have decided they will make money by doing this, and they have convinced tools of the media that ‘old ways’ must go. And they want to dip into your private data.

But big, complicated operating systems such as Microsoft’s latest, Vista, aren’t necessary in the Web Age, where applications are delivered for free and on demand — often without users even being aware of it.

No, I do not want to write my documents on Google. No, I don’t want my health records kept by Google. No, I do not want them to have my CV, a photograph of my house, my shopping habits. I do not Google searching my photographs on my desktop or anywhere else. I do not see why my work should be sent on a round trip between the USA and my house, wasting time and resources.

I do not want any company having anything to do with me ‘without even being aware of it’.

And that’s the problem. As more and more of what Windows does moves up into the cloud-into Google’s always-on, give-’em-whatever-they-want-for-free servers-what becomes of the company that Gates built? The smartest move Gates could make right now is to get out of the way.

When a journalist uses a phrase like ‘moves up into the cloud’ to mean ‘data mined on a large corporation’s mainframe’, they should not be allowed to write on any matter of current technological culture. They are a tool, not only in their dull metallic clunk, but in their moronic enthusiasm to soft sell some matter of corporate warfare as a fluffy puppy shaped cloud.

He says ‘the Web Age’, completely mindless of how, like ‘the Space Age’, this kind of dog’s froth is the sad soiled remnant of some dead end fantasy, soon to be parodied. Try it yourself: say ‘A Space Age Product!’. Now say ‘A Web Age Product!’ and feel the mirth.

The smartest move this journalist could make right now is to get the fuck out of the way.

Joel Stein at Time.com wrote:

Skwerl, 27, is in a punk band and used to work for Universal Music. Now he works for a Web marketing company. “Among my friends, I’m the guy known for getting things no one can get,” he says. “I’m just that rabid for information.” Skwerls are the people who make the Internet useful. To everyone but record companies.

The article is about stealing an album by Axl Rose, about whom I have no warm feelings but that’s not the point. Stein downloads music from an album that has taken 14 years of drunken indecision to make. He makes much of how it only took ten minutes to download. People like Stein make a lot of numbers like years and minutes - they always get excited about storage size and bandwidth, because that’s how they measure things - I have 30,000 songs on my iPod, I have 3 cars, they cost me this much, my wife is D cup. A consumer, basically. That’s it, nothing more.We are being written at by a consumer.

But the figure I am most interested in is the mythical Skwerl, who is in a punk band and used to work for Universal. The funny thing is how, as you add details to this character, they become increasingly shallow. They have have a funny name, they think they are ‘punk’ some 30 years too late, they used to clean the kitchen at a record label, so they are ‘in the industry’ and now they send out spam about a club night, so they’re into web marketing. Perhaps this myth is Joel Stein’s idea of ‘cool’ and that’s very possible seeing as these are the kinds of things that consumers list as being ‘cool’. But I think Skwerl exists, because I have met his innumerable clones. These are the cliches that have slowly but surely dragged everything beautiful, exotic and artistic down into an animated flash banner with a hip hop loop. They are the people that ’share’ other people’s work and think they are adding something to the world. They are the people that use words like ‘punk’ with no fucking idea of what it once meant and why. They are people that never take a dump - they ‘blog about toilet culture’.

I just want to make sure that both of these people know the utter depths of my contempt for them, their ideas, and what they stand for.

Note. Use the 774A form for classical or operatic performer.
Visual arts requires form 775.

Before completing this form ensure that you are describing a musical performer currently under contract to an approved international musical label and/or publisher.
Attach original copies of supportive evidence to the form as appropriate.

It was great to see insert name of Australian performer or group here* rocking down at name of venue** the other night to an ecstatic crowd of locals, delirious at their return from international touring. And name of performer didn’t disappoint, knocking out a tight and sweaty set of numbers from their hit album name of album or use plural ‘albums’ without title listing - see guidelines sheet b attached.

* For female solo acts provide first name only.
** Standard abbreviations such as Ent.Cent., Enm., Met. apply.

There wasn’t a still body in the house as vocalist or name of performer lit up the venue with the classic name of track from first recording within the first five minutes; just the start of wall to wall hits from the many years/months that the band/performer has been together/leapt from the small screen to the stage. I caught name of Australian actor currently employed overseas and his current squeeze first name of female partner amongst the revellers*. No surprise - given the synergy between their careers in global entertainment.

* Provide only names of married or engaged couples.
To mention significant others follow the annexed guidelines 774B/g

Only name of ballad or duet could calm the fevered masses, springing forth a fantasy of lighter flames and mobile phone screens. This quiet moment proved yet again the mastery that name of performer has over style of music or musical era designated by decade*, and a quick survey of the audience reinforced that musical era designated by decade* was by no means dead - at least for this evening. I even saw a lady wearing name of female clothing item that acts as cliché for particular musical era. Now that’s authentic!

* You should first consult 774B/e for suitable substitutions for this and the following sections. E.g. for ‘Jet’ the suitable substitutions include ’60s’ and ‘Beatles’. ‘Wolfmother’ links to ‘Led Zeppelin’ and ’70s’. Using section e will ensure faster approval of the review.

These guys/she are inch by inch the equal of acts like list names of performers from particular musical era that are not Australian performers. But with that special easy charm that only true Aussies can bring to the stage.

And do I need to mention the sheer brilliance that is name of solo instrument performer’s instrument?

All around the world right now, Aussie bands such as select names of Australian performers from schedule 43 of AUSTRADE booklet attached are winging around the world, showing the planet that we can pump out the hits with the best of them! And right up there in the greatest of the great is name of performer, on their way to carving their name across the world.

This form is suitable for use at any publication owned by News Limited or Fairfax. If not owned by either please check list of approved publications.

It’s 1AM and these thoughts have to go somewhere before I forget.

Item: I am hearing about mechanisms for storage which is all very good, but what we need is a mechanism for retrieval. We already have people busy storing. Squirrels. Nuts. Buy all the hard drives you want guys - that’s half the problem. Something stored and not retrieved is lost, so all your museums are only half the story. OK, artistic goal: develop retrieval mechanism which is curatorial.

“curator.” Online Etymology Dictionary. Douglas Harper, Historian. 14 Jun. 2008.

“1362, from L. curator “overseer, guardian,” from curare Originally of minors, lunatics, etc.; meaning “officer in charge of a museum, library, etc.” is from 1661.”

(Originally of minors and lunatics - fantastic. Robocurator, the Iron Man of the Nut House.)

Greater minds than mine have prepared the ground. MPEG7 is a schema for describing the content of multimedia. The recipe was ready in 2001. Some early efforts - IBM in 2002. Dead. Some Japanese efforts up to 2005 also dead. A java version that can provide ‘low level descriptors’ for audio is available at Sourceforge which seems to be an effort from The University of Wollongong electrical engineering Whisper team. Low level descriptors are not very useful, it’s like storing the waveform in an Excel spreadsheet. That strand of MPEG7 investigation seems to have hit a wall. Note that the UOW team are now onto MPEG21 (DRM for the ISO) which will be more lucrative. Not of interest to me.

Good work over at JOANNEUM RESEARCH in Austria (it’s their capitals not mine). Dr. Helmut Neuschmied seems to be the big man on campus for media tagging - he’s currently in a team setting up automated search for religious symbols in motion pictures using what I guess is partly his own “Semantic video annotation suite”. The device has scanty documentation but after about an hour of fluffing around I managed to have it process The Great Curry House Collapse video (henceforth the GCHC) and recognise the Ch9 reporter in a few scenes. Note to self: the GCHC will be my official test video for this whole project. So, Dr. Neuschmied and JR company willing, we have a way to generate MPEG7.

Also BOEMIE (Bootstrapping Ontology Evolution with Multimedia Information Extraction) have just laid a prototype MPEG7 editor. Doesn’t look like it’s as advanced as the SVAS, but more likely I can get my greasy mitts on it.

Plan:

• Collect a test suite of video (including of course the GCHC video)
• Practice generating MPEG-7 XML from these. What information do we need?
• Translate the XML into a friendly database format (I vote Filemaker)
• Draft an interface that allows a useful overview of the data, so it’s easy to find video scenes
• Part one done - offer this to video museum guys
• Develop a compositional mechanism for rearranging the data
• So far so easy… here’s the hard bit…
• How to have the visual data rearrange to match the composition? That is, how to re edit multiple videos into new output according to a XML file?
• hunch - it’s a VJ thing - generate play list from the tags
• another hunch can we convert an MPEG7 XML into a Final Cut EDL? There should be a way
• Part two done - this becomes the basis of the umami project

OK

I laid my thesis. As in, version 1.0. Like the very ending of Portnoy’s Complaint, the psychiatrist says, ‘now we can begin’.

A new subsection of this site will carry the journey onwards. Because, having done it, I now know what I want to do.

Comedy. They had sent me an email saying there was severe penalties for handing it in after 10AM on a certain day. I was sitting there with my three suitcases at 9AM, waiting. No one showed up to pick it up. Finally another student rang around. The research officer was away on holidays.

Must always remember that it’s all nonsense. Must always remember that it’s all nonsense. Must always remember that it’s all nonsense. Must always remember that it’s all nonsense. Must always remember that it’s all nonsense. Must always remember that it’s all nonsense. Must always remember that it’s all nonsense.

Television, drug of the nation… the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy once sang in less complex times. Obviously television is BAD because powerful people control it and it only works one way, they make it and you watch it. It is electronic methadone, it makes you sleepy and it makes you passive and it makes you agree with The Man. Taken to happy extremes, television caused good Aryans to be blinded to the World Jewish Conspiracy in John Carpenter’s They Live, while in Cronenberg’s Videodrome it could make you into a large meaty VHS player. Bad stuff that cathode ray.

Which is why we all sighed a collective and interconnected sigh of relief in the early days of Internet. Now it seemed that every small voice would be heard in a world wide web of animated GIFs, blinking bold italic text and star field backdrops. If you had skull candles to sell you were on par with all the corporations that might try dominate the skull candle market. The Internet went two ways, not one, and that meant look out Conspiracy!

As one of the first people to have a web site, I do have fond memories of those days. Everybody was equally ugly in Netscape. Nobody knew you were a dog. There were only dweebs and their admirers back then, before LonelyGirl15 had to add a number to not be one of the other 14 lonely girls. It wasn’t hard to meet people - just put up a website with a bit of script and you’d get an email from Marc Canter saying howdy. A small town, a bit sheltered but the people were friendly.

Essentially that’s still the case - the signal still goes both ways. You can still sell your skull candles, but the small market you used to attend has gone now, replaced by a large store with PAYPAL in blue neon. It’s across the highway from the tower marked AMAZON, both dwarfed by the big black monolith at dead centre, 1000 stories high, with GOOGLE marked out in childish coloured lettering. The town is a city and it has a crime problem…

But we’ve conquered that old power relationship that went with TV. I mean things are better now aren’t they? You’d think so but, when you look at it, it doesn’t seem like things are any more equitable since the CRT went in the dumpster. Actually, it seems like business as usual. The Space Nazis are still there, beaming their sleepy signal.

Now, I admit that I found the majority of the social and political theorising at university to be one step removed from bible study. It pissed me off and from the marking I got, I pissed it off. Mutual hate, except it is the status quo so I lost. There were one or two bits though that were really interesting, and here I think we can see a principle at work. If I am saying something said better elsewhere, then please indulge my naivety.

In the good old days, there would be a ruler. A king. He was the state. Like TV, you would simply be beamed his wishes. Numerous philosophers thought that was a good deal, so long as the king was enlightened. Same thing for TV, so long as it was the BBC/ABC/CBC/PBS and enlightened, it was OK.

But autocracy fell into disrepute. After some battles we end up with what’s been called the ‘neo-liberal’ state (read Pierre Bourdieu if you really want the full Scripture). Alongside a radical belief in liberalism - that everybody with a broadband connection is equal - you get the manufacture of expertise. Rather than the autocrat setting out the rules - he draws upon the wisdom of ‘experts’, that provide support for ‘policies’ that politicians can then implement, with the assurance that these are best ideas that come up from the society itself. So for example, a Health Minister sets out a survey for Doctors of what to do about Children At Risk, or a Defence Minister asks for advice from Terrorism Experts - assuming of course that these Children and these Terrorists are real in the first place. They certainly are by the time the questions are answered - and so a category of thought is manufactured.

We have in Web2.0. a very simplistic, childish and yet just as effective version of this expertise. Company A is standardising consumption - what do you think? This news item about a criminal - do you think he’s mad or bad? What’s your vote on the uniforms we’ll wear to world war three? The authorities ask you to decide which flavour of their Truth you would prefer, not whether there is such Truth. Endless surveys of the web community allow the consumers to feel empowered at a time where they are simply being streamlined into faster sales. Each product is provided with a bulletin board where the customers can bitch slap over their ‘favourite features’. It’s a bit like sheep haggling over who will make the best cut of lamb.

Facebook went a little too far when it tried to have customers hawking each other soft drink. But they simply retreated a little and started slipping in the mind cage from a different direction.

There certainly is a two way signal path, but unless you are easily misled you must have noticed that it has a much stronger signal coming AT you than FROM you. The people on this side of the fence (the eloi) are splashing around in a fantasy of LOLcats, celebrity photoshop and MP3 torrents. The people on the other side (the morlocks) are harvesting organs. Meanwhile, where are the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy when we need them? Who will come out and say that Google is most definitely not your friend any more than a cat loves a mouse?

Given a binary choice I guess I prefer the autocracy of ‘quality broadcasting’. Openly, brazenly unfair. But better still we can step outside the whole mentality of convincing SexyGirl57 that this air freshener works better than other air fresheners - and begin to think - I don’t need a bloody air freshener - I need fresh air.

Crazed scenes in the House of Disorder as a crate of Adenoids arrives at the same time as metal cased Albums lie about in various states of construction. Imagine two record fairs mounted on the backs of trucks colliding at speed. I don’t think there’s been this many LPs in this house in decades. The guy at the post office rolled out my shipment on a trolley, “are you going to carry this yourself?” (No, I’ll just usher in my native bearers).

Huh, how heavy can it be? Answer, what the hell is in here? Anvils?

I finally get to see how it all hangs together - the pillow cases are hilarious - the boxes go inside, like they were left by Santa at Christmas. Good move by Frank. And I get to see how my design looks on paper… some good news some bad news. The actual sleeves came out great, as did the labels. The booklet not so good, some of the PDF files have gone awry and there’s one point where a character has dropped out leaving a mess. Main thing is that the booklet font is huge… as if for impaired eyesight. Shit. This is what happens when you try visualise a 12 inch square print job scaled down on an A4 preview.

The records are ridiculously thick. I grew up in an age where records were quite thin, extremely flexible, it was promoted as being advanced technology for some reason, but obviously the tide has turned to ‘quantity is king’. The sound is good - for vinyl. (You have to trust me, I worked on this thing for about six months and I know how it sounds on the original recordings. Vinyl is not warm, it’s muddy.) These pressings are better than most of the ones we got back in the day.

And the records have patterns on them made by the grooves… I could cry… this is what I was trying to do with the LP in Album, but obviously it depends on the era of the lathe - the lathe has to manage the groove distance to get the effect I wanted. I also think that acetates just don’t have the same sound quality as pressed vinyl. OK, so we learn. We learn.

At least I am going to get the damn booklet right. Went out and got a Hewlett Packard A3+ printer (cheapest), 250 sheets of German high finish paper, and I’m going to print the damn things myself this time. Kinkos can bind it, but there’s no way I’m letting this one go wrong.

We now have three printers set up here. Getting silly. The HP, being an A3+ is of course an utter pain in the arse and will spew out errors if looked at the wrong way.

—

Can’t wait for the academic session to be over. I know that sounds a bit harsh but I miss being able to do my own shit. The paradox - you are employed because you are an artist, as soon as you are employed you have no time to be an artist. I have a strong work ethic - this leaves me feeling like a charlatan.

The main line of investigation in academia seems to be how to minimise contact hours. We already lopped a few weeks off the session, shut down our winter school - now we’re working on moving courses partly online. If you had asked me a few years ago I would have said bollocks, but I start to get the point - instead of me racing through a blur of films it’s going to make more sense to let students watch full titles at their own pace.

And frankly if they are going to play with their laptops in lectures, they deserve to see me via streaming video.

Not all wonderful. I distrust peer assessment - it’s OK for people to compare notes but I don’t agree students should judge each other. Maybe they could just judge each other and save the HECS fees. What are we offering? Equipment? So what. Experience? Any young hot head artist is not going to give a shit what I think, and that’s pretty much been the case this year. A degree? Is that the whole point? I thought there was something more than that.

A big shift is needed in the whole idea of a university. I learned by apprenticeship. I teach best via apprenticeship. With 100 students at a time, the relationship breaks down. How do we provide personal inspiration? Online?

And did you really come here expecting a measured and considered opinion on the future of digital media and society? Or did you perhaps suspect, as I do, the test of efficacy is long past - thousands upon thousands of massively parallel Internet drones have pounded their keys in a cloud of reasonable, sensible, argued and commented (oh yes commented) crap - if that crap was going to lead anywhere it would have done so by now? Stupidity! All of this is pulling in the wrong direction. All these opinions are reflecting each other in a polite little flower arrangement. The walls of a cage, they’re marking boundaries on your mind. Smash them.

I don’t write piffle because I can’t think of something intelligent to say. I write piffle because only it will lead us out of the box. The more nonsense I write, the closer I feel to the exit. I am not interested in being shocking, that’s a young man’s game and besides, I can shock people around my neighbourhood by hanging out my washing - instant punk in a land of electric clothes dryers. Shock is a momentary device, what we need is long term.

Responding to a complaint made by the previous year’s student body at KUNST KAMP I scheduled a lecture around comedy. Last year they got not enough, this year I made sure they got too much. We had Buster Keaton, The Three Stooges, Abbott and Costello, Daffy Duck VS Hitler, Jerry Lewis, The Beverly Hillbillies, Spike Milligan’s The Bed Sitting Room, The Monkees, Dr. Strangelove, Terry Gilliam, some others fit in there before the bell rang. In between I felt compelled to say some scholarly things about film making until I recalled that student souls are predestined as saved or not saved. Those who are saved don’t need to me to explain. The Three Stooges will explain all they need to know. Those that need a different angle have Terry Gilliam. But if they sat through two hours of this and didn’t understand, then they were not to be redeemed by my ant like prowess.

Such it is with all people who would have me be more sensible.

Q: Do you feel your horizons growing or diminishing as this sewer of information pours into your mind? I saw more when I knew less.

The Chinese (I read in Wild Swans) have a tradition where, when a person is placed in an impossible position, they will drop work and go fishing. This is seen as a snub to the authority that placed them in that position. This blog refuses to acknowledge the authority of the so called blogosphere and will continue to fish.

I think I neglected to mention that Peter King is the finest man that ever lived in New Zealand for finishing my thesis records a full month ahead of schedule. Allow Peter King to have your money, copiously and with joy. Sad for me these cuts don’t support my compositional ideas - instead of the quality decreasing over the cut, it starts bad at the edge, with certain frequencies even wildly resonating the material of the disc. I think I know what went wrong and how to fix it. More later.

Sucking His Firm Bulging Meat!

Black on Top - Shedding Clothes!

Popping Momma!

Huge Ass video!

Busty Ginger Shows All!

She Likes It Hard!

Two Ladies Gobble Big Meat Outdoors!

Big Tit Chicks!

Foxy Lady Laps It Up!

There googlebot. Hope you got what you came looking for. Now take your adverts and piss off.

The other night my mate Dave treated me to a John Foxx gig. His partner (female) didn’t want to go. So we were out for a night of Underpants!

It wasn’t tiny really, it was that size where the audience calls it intimate and the promoter calls it quits. But they were male, oh god yes and they were very much the presets that you were expecting.

SINE - he is round and phat. He would be Billy Bunter except for that black T shirt with DEATH in crazy lettering - but on him it looks like D E A T H. He is surprisingly nimble and when he dances it’s like a bouncing castle with no kids. On the KVR list he can rip you apart with his rapier wit, in public he’s more like Pluto - no one is sure whether he’s a planet. About 30 percent were SINES.

SAWTOOTH - he’s warm when you first hear him but as the night wears on he starts to become grating. It’s that endless stroking stroking stroking motion. He’s the first to hand out the flattery but pretty soon you will notice a detuned note - it’s like you owe him something now, and like Strangers On A Train it’s all going to get rather Hitchcock before you know it. I KILLED HER I THOUGHT WE WERE BUDDIES. About a quarter were SAWTOOTHS.

SQUARE WAVE - back when he first used to listen to John Foxx all the other kids would beat him up. But now thick rimmed glasses are cool and a job at a design company means he can fill his cubicle with all the Smurfs he ever wanted. Being despised is a lot better than beaten up. And now he’s got Metamatic on CD and tonight it’s going to get autographed and placed in the Glory Box! Lots of these I lost count.

NOISE - it’s not Sisters of Mercy but the closest thing to Goth Night this month, and besides Foxx looks a bit like Dracula so it’ll do it’ll do. These guys dance around trailing their cape around. Swoosh, swoosh - look out you might get your drink spilled by a Child of The Night.

And of course THE BROWN NOTE - he’s the misunderstood genius that SHOULD be the one on stage! I am so much more talented than all you rabble and after I have had 100 more tins of VB I’ll treat you all to my profound wit! Blaaargh! Pfffrt! Damn, shat myself again.

Ok, so what about Mr. Foxx. Well, I didn’t mind the music, and I certainly enjoyed the films but their relationship was rather tenuous. In fact just about everything on screen was met with wash. Buildings = wash. People = wash. This guy is never going to get a gig at Song Zu.

The rock gig bit afterwards was fun enough. He played Underpants.

But two people on stage at the Metro with keyboards and pin lights, with a big video screen behind them. I dunno it feels like it’s been done already