"Rheem" is Japanese for expensive.

Now all I have to do is get the kitchen fixed up and … anyway. Bigot. So I met with LTM over in Belgium and the plan is now to box up Bigot with a couple of other LPs – Stretcher, Bigot, Bad Mood Guy and Rotund. In each case I have to revert to the original track listing and none of this modernity stuff. OK.

This is most difficult with Bad Mood Guy because I have the digital masters, but not the analogue tapes that Robert then hand spliced from those masters. Robert transferred some tracks to open reel tape and then used sticky tape to make edididididididits. That open reel tape was then duplicated to have vinyl cut (the Nettwerk LP was a dub of a dub). When I remade the CDs, I thought that the edidididididididits weren’t as important as working from the original sources. Well think again buster. LTM want it just like it was in 1928.

This was a puzzle indeed, because there wasn’t much chance that the tape still existed in which case you have to use a transcription from the vinyl which is more poetry than fidelity. To my surprise there had been a PCM digital copy made back in the 80s, and I still have the PCM recorder that could read it. Score 1 me. Getting good playback is a bit tricky (it’s on videotape) but I now have a decent rough of the whole album.

Next problem is that the analogue tracks have a different sound to the digital ones. They have gone from PCM tape through a mixer to 1/4″ tape then through a mixer to PCM and that through a mixer to my Pro Tools A-D. First, get rid of the 50Hz hum. A tiny bit of exciter rebuilds the treble. The bass is a whole different problem – it undulates very slowly, gaining and losing strength over a period of seconds which I think has to do with the way PCM used to work. There’s not really a way to fix this and so it’s just another factor in the patchwork that of this accursed album. Hell, the mix was made both at my studio and at CBS in 2 days flat. No two tracks are quite the same already. Let it be.

We haven’t decided on how the box set will be packaged. James asked me and I asked Stewart and he said he wanted it to sit nicely with all his other CDs. What do you think? A box? Jewel case? Hat box? Hollow out a goat? I’m a bit over CDs so I don’t feel that concerned.

It could come as many large boxes and a woman that took the CDs out for you when you wanted to play them. Although that would be creepy because she would stare at you while you had the headphones on.

Like this except with Captain Kirk crossed out and Severed Heads written on it in texta. Actually leave Kirk in, so long as he is the bad Kirk from the parallel universe that’s pretty accurate.

This Pentangle Box would be a good CD box if you smoked cigars. You could buy the Bigot Box and tip the CDs out and put cigars in it instead.

Maybe you have a better idea for a CD box set? If you have an idea that we can use we’ll credit you as executive box consultant or something.

The soundtrack has been edited to hide my thinking aloud about my favourite painting for this year – revealed at the end.

BDM Photomedia found some space in the Rumpus Room, level 1 square house. White walls, finer than gold, purer than uranium, white walls are the economy of art.

Print making took me a bit by surprise – they made do with red walls, which to my eye was not a bad deal, when a wall, any wall is worth killing a man. Never can you have enough walls. Corridor outside the Rumpus Room. They seem reasonably content.

Down in the main circle the yurt is surrounded by air fresheners. A forest of in-jokes.

At last the drawing walls are dry … well not quite dry … expensive footsteps are spreading outwards. Upstairs in the Fine Art area, Roundhouse.

This is today. Must be, the air fresheners are re-aligned north south and there’s a Teddy Bear made of money. 100 black balloons hang down from a lighting bar, but no lighting can be made until all the sculpture is completed … slow, very slow. One of my video screens is ready. Tonight I had better finish the videos.

Design are setting up in the catwalk. They want no help, a field army that unpack out of shopping trolleys. I find it unnerving myself, as I have little idea what they have planned and if it goes wrong I will have to learn fast. There were problems but I will gloss over them here. 45 emails. Phone is now filled up.

Painting walls are dry … so slow … but I keep telling myself there were less walls last year. Less. Walls. Having them built was cheaper than having them delivered, but you have to be so patient.

Rumpus Room is starting to fill up. I thought it was going to be an island but it’s going to end up Times Square. I am sorry everyone that I moved without asking. Sorry, I have to pack in more.

Video art at 6pm Wednesday, probably the best time for it. We almost moved this guy about 4 times… almost almost almost almost … oh hell we’ll leave you right here.

Tomorrow, lights go up and panic sets in.

Sculptures appearing in main hall.

The false walls are behind schedule. We had a problem with the wrong sized panels being delivered, so the set builders are re-cutting the frames to fit the new size. We’ve had to pull all the paintings out from the ‘safe room’ and get them out into the corridors, because we’re not sure when the set builders will suddenly burst in nail guns blazing.

Canvas on the move

Builders on the prowl

140 spotlights have arrived – with the wrong bulbs. Replacements by Wednesday.

It’s SNAFU not FUBAR so I am not yet spewing fire. But yes, the first time you set up 300 people over 4 floors it’s a bit of a thrill. I’m sitting down on the floor of the main hall somewhere near wireless and a power outlet. It’s early evening, all day I’ve carried plinths, directed people to their rooms, worked out power sources, that sort of thing. In the morning a whole bunch of staff arrived and left disappointed that there’s not much for them to do, not until walls and paintings collide about 10am tomorrow. All the computers locked away. I’m going to have a quick check around all the floors and see if the builders are going to do an all-nighter.

Live Events in 2011:

Video retrospective:
NEW YORK 8TH MARCH
NP Contemporary Art Center 131 Chrystie Street

Playing with Gary Numan:
BRISBANE THU 12TH MAY. TIVOLI
SYDNEY FRI 13TH. ENMORE THEATRE (ALL AGES)
MELBOURNE SAT 14TH. FORUM
ADELAIDE MON 16TH MAY. HQ

Concert performance:
SYDNEY 22ND OCTOBER.
THE JOAN SUTHERLAND PERFORMING ARTS CENTRE

“Overlord” DECEMBER still to be confirmed.

{I don’t think this retirement idea is working out. Or is this how it works out, declare that you have died and they take an interest? Seems backwards but anyway. Note that Overlord is still in embargo and will be for a few months more I’d say. Anyone with the slightest military history would have guessed it.}

Just to explain that the concert is the main event of the year – e.g. it will be the first time I’ve performed Gashing The Old Mae West in 27 years!

Other thing is that I have moved most of the albums over to BandCamp because Mr. Phantom Circuit said that was where ‘they’ were hiding. I feel kind of bad about that, because independence is a rare thing, but people buying FLAC and getting it straight away is better than what I was offering. And now anyone can inbreed our stuff on their FaceBook thing without having to steal it. Oh they will anyway but still.

It means I leaped onto SoundCloud for no good reason but I’ll find one. Maybe (shock horror!) new music? Where to leap next? Do I join FaceBook? Has it come to this?

I have completed all the cassettes, so the banner here will have to change. Didn’t get much clamor for Pidgin Little Red Riding Hood, looks like Allegron For Your Pensioners is what you will get next. Sucks to you.

3D animation was once a dog that walked on hind legs. Didn’t matter if it it was done well, just that it could be done at all. My first render – 1987 – was the infamous reflective sphere on a checker board. Fuck you, it was amazing to see that take shape over 6 hours or something.

Not mine. Somebody made this in 2010.

Heart of the Party 1994. Rendered on an Amiga running Imagine. Was it two Amigas? I think so. One went at 24MHz I recall, which makes the average current PC about 92 times faster – wait – with hyper threading about double that.

Oh look, reflective sphere. Pity you didn’t actually have a damn sky so half the thing is pitch black. So make a wedge shaped box and tile the artwork over it. Then roll the ball around. Brilliant. I think I had about a month before a show to do this… oh yeah that’s right – I played the passes onto SuperVHS and then we edited it on Mic Gruchy’s AVID system, which had a 2 Gigabyte hard drive or something. 64 colours on screen all at once. There are analogue tape drop outs all the way through this horror which adds injury to insult to mockery to satire.

Heart of the Party 2003. Somebody has bought a copy of Poser! Even the Poser guy looks crestfallen.

What is this ... skullcap?!

I recall this had a hell of lot of work involved. The background, the lady, the gent and titles were all animated layers that had to be passed through a composite before being placed on the back plane. Oh yeah and those score wheels are all separate cylinders with modeled numbers. It’s not the amount of work it’s the lack of art direction. And really huge cocktail glasses.

Some attempt at a story line, which was a serious waste of time given it was for the Big Day Out. Anyway – nice to see Posette getting a cameo although they’re still using her in Scientific American today, so I’m not that crap.

Got to love the way the textured stars are bleeding down the front of the skirting. And that algorithmic wood grain. Woo-wee that’s a sweetie! By far the worst thing here is the single infinite light source, washing it all out. So OK, maybe multiple lights were computationally expensive, but surely I could have used two lights? And some shadows? Look there’s motion blur, that’s something. Again this is the impossible gig deadline at work, I can’t excuse but I can explain it might take 12 hours a scene.

This is the sort of thing you just walk away from and deny you ever did. Too bad that I have to make another one for this upcoming show.

Top half of Heart of the Party Will Not Die 2011 although this is not quite the finished version. This time I paid money for someone else’s basic model and found it was really horribly basic. I mean my pop bumpers were better in 1994. Spent about a week replacing almost everything or adding detail, laying out the decals and painting the wood. As you can see it’s got more than one light source. Now I have to set up the animated materials to make the lights flash.

It’s funny that there are now pinball games that look as good in real time, it’s just that I can’t freely animate the camera on those. Probably would end up taking just as long.

This is the tragedy of autodidacticism. When I were a lad, I went to university to learn computer art and they gave me punched cards. Art on computers was your own problem. Couple that with having to do it in public and I have a trail of very bad art that I will never live down. Now we have an art college filled with this stuff … but I wonder what some kid out there is now figuring out on their own?

Anyway just had a retrospective video showing confirmed – 8th of March in New York City. So many bad old videos to sort through to find the decent bits, while accepting that I have to show at least something from the 90′s! So get your bus tickets and get along! I better get back to finishing this bloody pinball machine.

The COFA Annual exhibition is up, this year around 350 exhibits filling up Carriageworks for a week. We survived the two opening nights and for me it was a lot of stringing cables, swearing at computers, getting projectors to power up etc. The usual panic & digital slavery.

In the past I just put together the media for Showcase night, but this year stupidly suggested setting up four user controlled viewing kiosks running off Blu Ray. That means that the kids can dial up their own film when they come visit. With nearly sixty short films filling nearly four hours submitted we’ve really hit a high – but that means authoring four Blu Rays where every little setting has to be checked over sixty times or the discs play wrong. Each fix/rebuild takes about 2 hours, and as of about 4pm yesterday I was screaming death at the burner, running out of time to get the kiosks up for doors open…

They were up for doors open.

Of course there was yet one more tiny error on disc 4 which means I’m back authoring it again around 11pm. A mystery stop after two hours (finally found a stop command attached to a chapter, overriding the end action of the time line. Arse.)

Funny addendum to the post about ‘end of the world’ films: at one point all four screens had one playing. It really is striking how many variations on doom scape we had this year – rapture, virus, atomic war, time collapse and of course zombies. Another thing we’re noticing – music boxes.

Once these are under control it’s time to get the Showcase built and THERE CAN BE NO ERRORS. Been no errors since I started doing this, and it’s not going to start in 2010. The showcase is ticket only but the films are showing all week and entry is free. As soon as the artists start posting their films to YouTube I’ll link them.

Gravity from Brian Zou on Vimeo.

VFX Showreel 2010 from Daniel Ward on Vimeo.

Here’s the story:

The original clip is 720p25. That is, PAL frame rate. I placed that into Adobe Media Encoder, cranked it up to 50fps and let ‘er rip. Success – but the quality was poor until I made it take 2 passes. The first pass warns the encoder about rough patches and means that very difficult sections are still decently handled. Build the BD and wacko.

OK, so now for NTSC land. Time stretch the video to 59.94fps. Load that into AME, let ‘er rip. End result – as before, quality could be better. Switch to 2 pass, and Encore doesn’t accept it as a useable file. Arse. So I let Encore do the transcode directly. Fails – the file lacks ‘SEI timing’. I try a different encoder. Fails. You need to multiply each stage of this by 8 hours to feel the annoyance. Yes, after a while I started to do little sections and the results are in – 2 pass means fail if you are using a converted NTSC source.

But if I take my 2-pass file and mux it with open source software it plays as a BD just fine and it looks great. There’s just NO WAY to have Encore accept it as a real source. No Encore means no menus and so on.

Help from the Adobe forum was – the error is probably a confusion between a progressive and an interlaced frame. That is, somewhere in the standards conversion it’s (something like) creating a single field and Encore can’t figure out the field dominance. But there’s no way to find that one 60th of a second in 60 minutes of video – 216,000 images. I also can’t really trust this explanation because I’m using all kinds of test footage now with the same outcome.

The writer has advised me – use MPEG-2 instead. OK, so I just did a minute of 2-pass M2v and it works. I am going to have to crank the bit rate up much higher, and that means dropping some of the other stuff on the disc… maybe just one thing. Oh shit, hang on a second I didn’t test something

… OK it does build. Phew!

Choices: (a) make it 24 fps. Looks nice but songs are slow. I don’t like. (b) Single pass M4V. No, it craps out when it hits some sections. (c) Go with 50fps. Would love to do that but I doubt it would work. (d) Buy some other software. Sure the University would love that after I hounded them for this. (e) Do what the guy says. I’ll do what the guy says.

I’m hating this.

I am also particularly pissed off about the federal election. No need for analysis as every journalist has already had a twit and a wipe over it. But I had to see John fucking Howard again. I had 10 years of that prick and I thought it had been dumped down a well and the well cemented over. Anyone who had a hand in bringing John Howard back to political life is a criminal. Christ wasn’t over TEN YEARS of John Howard enough? And I saw him on the street the other day it was just horrible. Enough.

Labor, for fucks sake get yourselves together. It wasn’t a wipe out, but how did you go from most popular prime minister to feather duster in one year? Get your Bolshie back on. Look at the Greens, totally useless but adorable. Get some of that action. Sure, Rudd was a wind up toy, but you could have taught him how to speak English as well as his native Mandarin. You didn’t have to put him in hospital. No, get Latham and put him in a sack, add some bricks, sort it out. Now get Julia off the women’s mags, and get her a crow bar. She’s a fighting woman not a damn pillow.

Do I have to tell you everything?

As it is there’s the distinct chance our next prime minister is a man unsure whether someone is his son without a DNA test.

You’re looking at 120 dollars worth of Blu Ray discs. Man, these things are expensive. Two spindles of 25 cost 240 bucks and then they delivered them to the wrong address. But that’s par for this project – it’s fought me every step of the way. I suspect that’s a very good sign.

Look at this:

The disc is held by a double sided foam square, which is holding the sleeve closed. The sleeve is card held by the photo media guides. I printed off about 20 or so before I got the look I wanted. I had only used a mock up until tonight, the theory seems to be working. Throwing the compact around, it seems to be holding. Until I mail it, I won’t know for sure. There’s balloons and metal confetti inside!

Now here’s the numbering system!

52 playing cards which mark 52 original Showbags! You can’t see the design on the back of the card but it’s … rather unique. You’ll know you have an original copy once you see it. If we go past 52 copies then I’ll make something similar.

OK so here’s some bad news.

The first batch will be Australian/European PAL. I am sorry but tests show that there is still a big difference between PAL and NTSC playback even on HD systems. I cannot be sure that USA televisions will work with the videos as they are. But I will make sure that some of the first 52 WILL BE NTSC format. As soon as possible these will be available.

If you intend to run the disc on a computer drive, then you can use the PAL version anywhere. Computers don’t care. Televisions do. If you are in the USA and choose the PAL version I will double check that you understand. The American NTSC version will run at 24 frames per second. This means that the HD video will be 4 percent SLOWER than real time, with the sound pitch corrected. Running the HD video slower is cleaner than converting to 29.97 fps. The standard definition clips will be at 29.97. I am trying the main video at 59.97fps.

I will soon mail have mailed off a free copy to a lucky person. When I do that the Post Office will be able to tell me how much this is going to cost. IT IS HEAVY, and although I swear that I will sell it for damn near cost, the postage will likely be is expensive. So as soon as I have the postage I will make these available for order. PAL is now shipping.

Right now I am drinking champagne sent to me by Government House, well deserved, and frankly making up for a rather horrible week or so.

Tonight is garbage night. MY NIGHT.