Monthly Archives: June 2012

Saloon and Sales

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This is interesting: http://www.salon.com/2012/06/20/steal_this_album_what_happens_if_no_one_pays_for_music/singleton/

Mostly because it’s being debated with a little more intelligence than the usual ‘all musicians are lazy and rich therefore FYGM’. Salon is a funny website. Sometimes you feel so damn relieved to be reading above the usual YouTube moron level. But sometimes the USA Progressive rhetoric is clumsy and shallow. I love the old socialist banter that went with the 70′s post punk bands, but I’m well aware that it didn’t get far past the first record contract. It seems that many of the Salon writers have yet to see it in practice and still have high abstract hopes. Bless them for wanting good for all, that’s a rare thing.

Back to paid music: Curiously the switch from CD to DRM-free download has gone well for me. Sevcom shop has almost reached the point where BandCamp will take a lesser cut, and this on material that has been out and about for years. But the audience are generally sticking with what they know.

It’s good to have statistics, actually it’s disillusioning – both negative and positive meanings of that combined. Biggest seller is City Slab Horror. Biggest download is Return To Barbara Island, although it had already done over 1,000 downloads from MediaFire in the old store. Free stuff will always win. But it emboldens me to make a another new thing and give it away. I have about 9000 free downloads banked up.

In the last two months looks like I’ve had a lot of new customers show up. Again, City Slab Horror, Bigot … one thing is that not everyone buys the entire Adenoids set. True, most of the tracks are in the first package. I just thought they’d be completists.

Now, where do they come from? About half direct dial BandCamp, which shows the virtue of this site. A fifth went to sevcom.com first; would be better if I was more active there. A tenth came from FaceBook; I have no presence there. ALMOST NO SALES COME FROM YOUTUBE. Having people post my music on YouTube does not assist me in any statistically valid way. So fuck that argument. Let’s have the image…

Love it.

BandCamp allows me to download everyone’s email addresses as a spreadsheet. If I was a good marketer I’d use that to push info at people, but I think I am a better friend to people by not doing that kind of thing. At some point I’ll just send them all a present.

What about iTunes? Well I don’t get too deep into those statistics but it’s basically about a thousand bucks of Dead Eyes Opened every time I get a payment. Yay… zzzzzzzzzz. iTunes is like when you buy a greasy kebab on the way home from the pub… being Dead Eyes.

This week I have to pop down to the Australian Broadcasting Corp. to talk hosting of [H.H]. I don’t think they’ll notice the hit but sensible men want to check bandwidth. I guess if you had a couple of hundred people bashing away at it on opening night and they all tried the same tape recorder it could be nasty, but shit, it’s the ABC.

Not much development on Cavalcade so far. Looks like we don’t have the Mandala systems we thought we did. Anyone got an old Amiga Live card lying around?

For Capra, I’m trying to 3D render a night time city flyover. All those little bright windows are causing the worst Moire pattern, wasted days on that.

As for Opmitter, don’t ask. I just switched over from Jitter to Derivative TouchDesigner. The desperate move of a drowning man!

Lion is a dog

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All my pleading and threats can’t stop the roll out of OSX Loin at work. New machines must be deployed and they come locked to the system. I cry for the disaster that is about to descend upon us. Hundreds of students are about to start using tools that continuously overwrite their documents without warning.

I’ve been trying Loin since it was available, trying to find ways to avoid the latest ‘magical’ and ‘amazing’ idea from Apple. Third party tools can save you by allowing you to save your work but they’ll eventually follow the trend. Perhaps by then we’ll all learn to urgently duplicate every document the moment it becomes visible or suffer the consequences.

Let me illustrate the problem. Today I’ve been marking. The students have submitted PDF documents. I open one and it has a scan in it I need to rotate to read. OK cool, rotate and read it, so I shut the document and up comes a warning that goes like this:

JUST THOUGHT I’D WARN YOU THAT I’VE BEEN OVERWRITING THE ORIGINAL PDF WITHOUT TELLING YOU. IT’S ON A NETWORK SO IF YOU EVER WANTED TO REVERT IT YOU’D BE SHIT OUT OF LUCK. BUT BECAUSE I’M FEELING GENEROUS I’LL GIVE YOU ONCE CHANCE TO UNDO IT. YOURS, TIM COOK.
YES         NO

What the? I didn’t want to edit the damn original! That’s a time stamped submission of an assignment! NOOO! NO! -click-

Having escaped this idiocy, I double click another PDF. Up that comes as well as the last one I looked at … because double clicking one document means you want to open several at once right?

Or how about when I experimented with a lecture in Keynote. I want to try out a few ideas… nah this whole train of thought is bad I’ll just quit. Which of course did the opposite of what I wanted. Reverting huge documents full of video is really efficient, right?

Why would you do this? Sure I can retrain myself and everyone else, given time. But why? What is the clear advantage?

Apple treats their users as stupid. They think we can’t be trusted to save a document, or choose a scratch disc or organise our directory structure … and maybe that’s true for many consumers. But a workplace has its own culture to which a machine should be able to adapt. Not vice versa.

Already they’re talking about a new version called OSX Mounting Loin.
Notification Bubbles? I’m not using a bloody telephone.

The looming Windows 8 has its own dilemmas. The Metro interface assumes that the most important thing on screen is your social life and shopping. Maybe it is – but not while trying to finish a thesis. Some people see the dual environment of Metro/Explorer as a liability, but to me it makes sense to have multiple metaphors available for your needs – Metro for casual computing and Explorer for work. We’ll have to see if people can deal with the horror of having more choice.

Andy Warhol’s Mother’s Mother.

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Following on from the post previous I waddled down to VIVID: A FESTIVAL OF LIGHT, MUSIC AND IDEAS. As well as to see the projections, there was a meeting about IDEAS for next year’s VIVID. Hmmmm, I thought, I will take my ideas about ‘the inscrutable’ and run it up the flagpole. There may be free piss.

You may recall that I was not that thrilled with VIVID when it first got going. After Eno they tried Lou Reed if I remember correctly. Then they ran out of people in somebody’s old vinyl collection and appointed Modular People (after doing Sydney Festival with them I take blame for telling their events guys, ‘you really should concentrate on corporate and festivals’). At least we had an Australian running it, even if the bands were seemingly all from Modular. This year I think they did it all internally or at least there’s no attempt at a figurehead. With Eno’s 77 Million Bad Paintings as the starting point it’s all up.

So anyway I get to the Museum of Modern Art and into the IDEAS room, and to cut the story short, three people with good intentions talked a bunch of depressing shit. IDEAS means graphs and charts of demographics, outcomes, viewings, FaceBook hits and I guess the prime moment was a chart that showed how VIVID had in four years started to make more money than SXSW in Austin. Fist bump! I was a bit sad to see how many ‘artists’ in the room were capturing this on their iThings as they planned their own prominence.

No free piss. I packed up my ‘inscrutable’ and was about to tiptoe out the door when An Organiser caught me. First I was bundled up to meet with the Main Curator. The last time we’d met was 100 years ago when he and I did an shit-faced drunk ‘interview’ which  ended up in the Sydney Morning Herald and had us both banned from The Performance Space for life (or a new director whichever came first). Since then he’d designed the opening nights of Olympics and other events where 1000 people all dressed as koalas ride bicycles around a stadium and he really didn’t want to meet with somebody from a past he’d managed to surpass. Friendly but please go away. I redoubled my attempt to escape via the balcony but was caught and taken back the Mingle room.

In the Mingle room I got a stern talking to from Alessio from ACMI who combined hypnotic eye blasts with speech tone and aligned me with the realities of Major Art Events which Did Not Come That Often. Spiralling around in a hypno-coma I was eventually rescued by Iain Reed from 3200 Lighting. Iain is part of the old crew and understands the head space where I come from, back when a very small group of people did all this new media shit and no one else gave a damn. Now they were running it as The Creative Industry. The point was, he said, that things are not quite as controlled as they seem. Why not get a bunch of people together with the DIY spirit? Put on a show with ancient wonders, but put the video up on the sides of buildings. Inscrutable and Overt. Inside and Outside he said.

The next day Stephen R Jones barged into my office, as if called by the siren of Antique Knobbery. I don’t see Stephen often and most of it was chit chat but I told him about IDEAS and he expressed his opinion about that in rather crude terms. But we got to talking about people and things and he was agreeable about being in on the prank. He also mentioned a whole bunch of young equipment makers that should be involved to make it an all ages boffin event. That sold me.

I said – do you think you could get the old video synthesiser up again? He said – well actually I may have parts to make more SuperNova machines.

Click to big

Now the SuperNova-12 was the last machine that Stephen built for a buyer that heavily publicised it, which is a good thing, but then apparently loaned the service manual to another organisation that developed and sold their own video synthesisers. To what extent they ‘found the schematics useful’ we don’t know but it discouraged Stephen from making any more. Every now and then we talk about getting it started again but now we have a plausible event at which the original machine could be reborn.

It will of course be called the SuperNova-13.

So we have a POSSIBLE event, and at that event a POSSIBLE launch of a machine! Chance of failure usually leads to my using a project codename like opmitter and H.H, in this case I want to get more people involved and so I’m spilling more beans than usual. The project name is Cavalcade. We can try.