http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIp1H9D4SGE

Various Photos – VCA Dance Transmutation CLICK HERE to see the full set

The story behind my most recent light sculpture, begins with my second year lighting class at the Victorian College of the Arts. Rachael Bourke, a prominent and award winning Melbourne lighting design was our guest lecturer for a series of 8 classes, replacing our resident lighting lecturer, John Comeadow. Rachael’s most famous work, is the award winning architectural lighting design of the Victorian Arts Centre’s, Hamer Hall. She also has a very long list of stage and other credits to her name.

“Pink out of a corner – To Jasper Johns 1963″ by Dan Flavin

“Untitled (to Paddy)” by Dan Flavin

During our work with Rachel we were guided through what she believed are the main elements of light and lighting design. One of these elements encouraged us to look at artists that used light or lighting to create or make some form of art. The scope was broad and included many photographers and sculpture artists. She presented a series of artists that shaped her work, one of which included Dan Flavin, a light artist who’s work included only commercially available fluroscent lighting fixtures. I was immediately taken by his work due to its ability to make light a beautiful object, and to play with the viewers idea of light, especially fluorescent lighting. From these examples we were encouraged to design a work that took elements from these artists’ designs. My original work is shown below.

Untitled -1, by Geordie Barker  – The Shed, August 2007.

This work was took elements from two of Dan Flavins works, “Pink out of a corner – To Jasper Johns”, and “Untitled (to Paddy)”, both featured above. My fascination for this mans work revolves around his use of such a difficult fixture, and his linear focus. My work as displayed uses two fluorescent tubes, one blue and one white and is similar to one of Flavin’s pieces,  “Untitled, (to Paddy)” which features one 6ft fluro tube with a smaller one strapped to it, leaning against a wall. The reason I chose to alter the location of the tube (into a corner) was due to my belief that this would enhance the texture on the environment around the light source. I chose to use two of the same sized tubes to keep some symmetry.

Flavin’s use of only fluorescent fixtures was unusual, due to the limited control capabilities of these lights. He took a usual, predictable, practical everyday light fixture and played with its parameters. One of these was position, a key component in his work, as shown in every piece he ever made. Other aspects include colour, line, reflection, lighting as object, lighting on object, shape, pattens and space.

I hope to create works in the future that push the boundries of lighting sculpture and make people think twice about normal light fittings. For more of my past work please CLICK HERE!

Now as some of you may know, i have purchased a Mac Mini to act as a Home Theatre PC in my loungeroom, it handles my TV viewing, recording as well as my music playback, photo playback and movie playback! Beats the crap out of Tivo or Foxtel IQ. Now i plan to do a nice in depth review of this system and let you all know some awesome tips and such, but for the more experienced out there, i finally found REAL FRONT ROW INTEGRATION!!!!!

See http://forums.elgato.com/viewtopic.php?f=96&t=1360

Go to terminal and copy “defaults write com.elgato.eyetv “apple remote menu button behavior” -int 1″ into it (without the quotations of course! It essentially makes the quick click of the menu button on the apple remote the menu for the TV, and the long click front row. It also adds front row as a link in the more part of the menu! GENIUS!!!!!!!!!!!!! I have been searching for this for a while!

Thank you elgato forums and user MacPlus! I am a happy chappy!

“Smorgon heir puts money into green service stations” “At a tiny service station in High Street, Prahran, under the brand name Conservo, Mr Edwards and his business partners will start selling E10 (unleaded petrol blended with 10 per cent ethanol), B20 (diesel blended with 20 per cent biodiesel) and B100 (100 per cent biodiesel) to the public. E10 is suitable for use in all petrol vehicles and both the B20 and the B100 can be used in standard diesel engines. The fuels all have claimed lower carbon emissions than standard petrol and diesel.”

I drove across to Prahran today to get a haircut. For me, a normal trip to Prahran would be via public transport, as that side of town is congested, busy and has little parking. But i remembered this morning that my car, a 1994 Toyota 4Runner (3.2lt 4 cylinder diesel) was low on petrol, so i made the decision to drive and select one of the two diesel fuels on offer at Conservo. The two fuels on offer were B20 (20% bio diesel, and 80% petrol diesel) which i have used before, and B100 (100% bio diesel) which i had planned to try this morning and ‘bite the bullet’ so to speak.

My car had previously run quite well on B20, and had cured ‘Jack’ (my car) of an idling problem that previously required constant adjustment of the choke. I believe the reason it cured the car of this problem was due to its thinner liquid content. Now for those of you who are unfamiliar with this new service station, it is an entirely new concept, and the coming together of some great people, a few businessman, a few environmentalists, a marketing manager and a lawyer. Who would have thought? The service station is owned by the Victor Smorgan Groups biofuel company Energetix, and incorporates the selling of biofuels with an environmental ideas shop, an organic cafe, carshare facilities, and a car park (for increase revenue).

I had done a great deal of research on bio fuels, sourcing information from both sides of the debate. Currently there are three main service stations offering a complete package of biofuel options. See here for more information. Once immersed in biofuel information, i soon found out that both sides of this complex debate have their extreme activists and critics. I spoke to a generator hire company owner who essentially told me that i was a “f**kwit” if i chose to put that “f**king c**p” in my car engine. I also spoke to a bio fuel producer, who currently runs his car on homemade biodiesel and claims that cars were really designed for use with biofuels, but that there was a conspiracy run by a few rich men who owned oil companies. The amount of information available on the internet is vast and most of it is reliable. There are forum and homepage sites for most states and territories in Australia. A simple Google search will open up the information floodgates!

From Conservo Homepage (today) July 8th 2008…

“The Conservo pilot at 118 High St, Prahran was a resounding success. We are now on the lookout for a new, long term, site.”

Thats right, i turn up at Conservo, feeling all warm and fuzzy inside to think that my car can run virtually carbon neutral for a week or so, and am confronted with a barren, stripped petrol station for lease. No cafe, no petrol pumps, no rain water tanks, no carshare spots, no carpark, no organic snacks, no biofuel, and no conservo. Now my detective skills tell me that that message on the conservo website was placed there as long ago as June 29th (thank you google caching), but what i want to know is…

What went wrong?

The course this year is home to 5 puppeteers, Sabrina D’Angelo, Gai Anderson, Rachel Guy, Lisa Foote and Iris Radovic. The 5 puppeteers are an extremely diverse group of people with a wide range of backgrounds, a very large age range and varying interests. My work on the project was as Sound Designer for Sabrina D’Angelo’s and Gai Anderson’s pieces.

Sabrina D’Angelo

Introduction
Sabrina’s piece told the story of a lonely character dropped into an unfamiliar world, and his search for companionship and happiness. It involved the creation of a strange barren, alien landscape incorporating a wide range of different objects, ranging from tin cans to used condoms. The piece had an important flow as a story, it started with adventure, then moved to fun with a companion, then to obsession, then a character building affection, then intimate interaction, which ultimately led to murder and the remorse felt after committing such an act.

Working with Sabrina
One of the first things that Sabrina and I worked on in the piece was the way in which we wanted the audience to feel. We studied the difference in emotions of the different scenes and agreed that each scene needed to be to the point and naturalistic.We both felt that we needed to introduce the audience into the world that Fin (the main character) had been dropped into. As Sabrina and I had broken down the piece into sections and allocated each section an emotion, I set to work to source the different tracks we would use. Sabrina has already decided on her final track, a song by Damien Rice called Cold Cold Water. It featured strong lyrics
and a stirring musical accompaniment. For this reason I chose not to use spoken work in any other section of the piece.

The Sound Design
The first track was called “About Fun” by Psapp, a track that required heavy editing to take out all of the lyrics. It featured a great bopping beat with toy sound effects over the top. Sabrina enjoyed playing with the characters in that track and happily described it as almost sounding like a Hello Kitty Orgy. The Second track was also by Psapp and called Always in my head. This
track also required heavy editing to take out the lyrics, but featured a very flowing obsessive drumbeat alongside an electronic gurgle. It perfectly represented the scene where the character is drawn to a dummy like object thet he receives pleasure from. This tracks drum beat was faded out when the other girl character entered, but the electronic gurgle remained as a lingering reminder of the dummy.

The gurgle discretely faded into the intimacy of a track called Upstairs, also by Psapp. This track used Foley of creaking floors and footsteps to create the beat alongside a toy xylophone and a wallowing trumpet. This track was also stripped of its vocals. This section of the piece was the most important part as it led to the confusion of the main character and ultimately him losing control. At the end of the song, he gets carried away and is pushed back by his girl companion, this is where I included the use of static to create disorientation and drama. The track was played through an FM transmitted and tuned out on a standard FM radio, the output of which was recorded by a computer. This created an effective and realistic tuning out of the sound. The static was deliberately the loudest sound in the whole piece. This was included for two reasons; the first was that it was arguably the most important part of the piece, and second to give even more emphasis to the silence that followed it. The reason for the use of silence was to allow the character to connect with the audience and have the realisation of what he has done.

I believe that a stories most important part is its ending. The ending of a story usually provides a moral, a meaning or a resolution. Thus the use of our final track Cold, Cold Water, by Damien Rice. Not only is the dialogue in that song literal, as the character is surrounded by cold water, but the song tells the story of loss and isolation. The last track was edited to end on the sound of swelling chanting and an echo of inaudible words.

Gai Anderson (Click here to listen to final sound design)

Introduction
During the pre-production period Gai’s piece went through many changes, but the general premise never changed. Her piece told the story of a family, who had been happily living in a forest, until the introduction of the city, and the complications of money and possessions. This impacted on the family and as the environment changed, so did their daily lives. It followed the family’s son, and his relationship with his friend, the bird. With narration, and cute subtext the piece was very much a performed fairy tale or folk story, and with this came the challenge of creating a Soundscape that allowed for some imagination.

Working with Gai
It was decided that the piece would begin and end with ambient bird sounds, this was to put the audience in the scene of the piece and to give closure on the story. For this I used a combination of BBC Sound Library tracks and a track recorded by the puppeteer on her home
property. Ambient noise also played a large part in the body of the piece with the traffic sounds being layered over the top of each other. The music sourced for the piece was deliberately of a non emotive genre. The puppeteer originally described it as Gypsy music, but we narrowed that down to music that used no electronic instruments and that was instrumental.

The Sound Design
A Melbourne based band called The Band Who Knew Too Much were an ideal candidate due to their use of piano accordion, woodwind instruments and basic drum beats. Two of their tracks were used in the piece, Gypsy M.F. and Spinning Round and Round. The Spinning Round and Round track was editing to include only one introductory verse, and no chorus. This was due to the length of the music, and its importance in the piece.

Another prominent sound in the piece was the factory bell. The bell was designed to be the only electronically generated noise in the design so that it would stand out from the rest of the Soundscape. It was panned hard to the left of the speaker system to create an effect of distance. I created the track by generating a tone and then applying a series of delay and echo effects to it. It was designed to sound more like a fire alarm than a factory whistle.

The piece was designed to feature only two sections of silence. The first was the start of the narration, and this was intended to bring the audiences focus into the playing space after the environment ambience. The second is when the bird doesn’t return, and this is due to the importance of this scene as a catalyst for the boy to make the forest return. We return to the forest sounds including the bird whistle which is now included in the whole sound, not just from the side of stage.

Summary
Overall, the piece created worked very well with the sound design. It was a dangerous piece to design due to the relative ease of cheesy and over literal sound opportunities, but I believe the sound helped to tell the story and helped to connect the audience to the actions onstage.

The view from the sound room in the bio box is stunning! Tim Ross is the lighting designer. Taken in Grant Street Theatre, as part of the VCA Production Puppetry Solos 2008. I am one of the sound designers for this production.

I would love to invite everyone along, but it is invite only, so please contact me to book tickets if you are interested!

Cheers!

The Apple of your iMac

The Bondi Blue iMac G3 was unveiled ten years ago today on May 6, 1998. It was launched by Steve Jobs who had returned to Apple the year before after almost a decade in the wilderness. And it marked the beginning of Apple’s golden era.

The following article was published in the SMH on May 16, 1998.

A little retro may go a long way for this new Mac model. David Flynn reports.

In this year of retro marketing – the new Volkswagen, dance remixes of classic disco hits, a GST – Apple’s funky re-entry into the home heartland, announced last week, shares the spirit of the original 1984 model Macintosh and the later, much-loved, Mac Classic.

It’s called iMac. The “i”, so the pony-tailed marketing types tell us, stands for “Internet, Individual, Instruct, Inform and Inspire”. With a translucent plastic cover and matching peek-a-boo panels on the contoured keyboard and mouse, this deep green and white wedge has undeniable appeal. This is geek chic – George Jetson meets Giorgio Armani. Apple has suddenly remembered how to use style as a weapon to distinguish itself from PCs. Clearly the most personal Macintosh in Apple’s predominantly business family line-up, the iMac could easily have been tagged MyMac.

“The primary market for the iMac is the personal user, either at home or school,” says Di Ryall, the managing director of Apple Australia. “The iMac will sit in any fashion conscious home, yet it’s robust enough in design, with great features like built-in networking and infra-red, for the classroom.”

However, these notoriously price-sensitive markets may have trouble coming to grips with the estimated $2,500 price tag when iMac arrives in Australia in August. Exactly what will they get for the money? Beneath the iMac’s aqua case beats a PowerPC G3 chip, 233MHz with 512Kb level 2 cache. This doesn’t directly compare with a 233MHz Pentium, owing to the different architecture of the two chips. Intel chips make calculations and issue commands using Complex Instruction Set Computing (CISC) techniques, while Apple is hitched to the Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC) wagon. The names themselves belie a degree of prejudice. Even someone who wouldn’t know RISC from a biscuit would volunteer that “complex” is bad, so “reduced” must be good. Doubly so in the world of computing where complex means slow; therefore simple means fast. In this instance they’d be right. The G3 can out-gallop even a 400MHz Pentium II, according to the boffins. With a 4Gb hard drive, 32Mb of main memory and 2Mb of graphics RAM (both upgradable), 15-inch colour screen, 24 speed CD-ROM and built-in stereo speakers, the iMac is certainly no slouch.

It will ship with built-in networking (great if this was a built-for-business bMac or a network computer nMac, but a curious inclusion for homes and quite a slab of the educational market). You also get a 33.6Kbps “soft” modem created by the CPU and software, rather than relying on a separate piece of hardware, plus an infra-red port for beaming data to notebook and hand-held devices.

Yet, as with beauty, the iMac’s appeal somewhat fades under the skin. Expandability, for instance: the iMac has no internal slots into which cards can be fitted to increase its capabilities, although it’s true that a lot of people don’t add to their PC if it comes multimedia- and Internet-ready out of the box. There’s no SCSI, inside or out. This has for years been the standard way to hook any device to a Mac. Nor does the iMac have any sockets for connecting external devices, bar a pair of Universal Serial Bus ports (you can read a primer on USB on page 8 of this issue). That the iMac can use the same USB devices as Windows will be a boon for manufacturers, retailers and shoppers, once the USB drought breaks. At the moment there’s nothing but a handful of scanners, mice and digital cameras sporting USB connections. Apple is clearly hoping the USB wave will break with the release of the USB-ready Windows 98 in June.

Also missing are serial ports (iMac owners can forget about using a PalmPilot or other hand-held which requires a serial desktop connection) and a printer port. To print from your iMac you’ll need to find a USB printer (don’t bother looking, right now there are none), buy a printer with infra-red capabilities (limiting your choice to a handful of models), be connected to a network (at home? yeah, right) or e-mail your work to someone who’s got a printer.

Finally, for the oddest of reasons, the iMac has no floppy drive. In eschewing what is a $5 component, Apple has robbed users of any way to back up their work and swap documents with friends, unless all your mates are on e-mail.

The iMac is certainly going to turn the heads of shoppers. Sales reps will make a beeline for schools and even small businesses, where the in-built networking makes plenty of sense. It’ll be good for the Internet, provided the soft modem is bumped up to 56Kbps – and this model will blitz the latest games.

But in every one of these equations buyers will come back to the lack of removable storage, the USB-only connectivity, the limited amount of software offered on the Mac platform compared with Windows 95, and, chiefly, the price.

Macintosh fans will bite this apple, but the company may have a harder time tempting first-time buyers away from the PC path or getting existing Windows users to change their religion.

A sign of the times…. I just loved it!

I have just finished uploading a heap of new flickr photos, so please have a look @ www.flickr.com/geordieb

Cheers

After discovering the amazing world of podcasts (see the Wiki), and using my whole download usage in just a few short nights, I stumbled across the equally wonderful, and perhaps more functional and useful world of ‘podtours’. Now for those not so technically minded i might explain what these strange words mean.

A podcast is an audio or video file, much like a track off a cd, or a short film, that is available for download from the internet or one of the many podcast directories, like iTunes. Podcasts can take many shapes and forms and cover infinite topics. There are cooking video podcasts sponsored by oven companies, underground hacking videos distributed by secretive internet users, and episodes of the hit series Summer Heights High, distributed by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. As well as viewing them on your computer, podcasts can also be transferred and viewed on portable devices like iPods, Mobile Phones and PDAs. Podcast downloads are on the increase with some videos quoting download numbers in the millions.

A podtour is an inventive twist on the podcast. You still download it from the internet, and can still transfer it to your portable device, but it usually comes with a set of written instructions and/or a map. Some more advanced podtours use the video element to give you instructions/directions. Once a user has transfered the video or audio file to their device they are then navigated via the instructions to a start location and instructed to press play on the file. The file then takes you to a number of positions and discloses information relating to those positions. Essentially you have a pre-recorded tour guide in your ears, in most cases, for free.

This brings me to the point of this article; my discovery of a set of podtours developed by the Melbourne ABC in association with The University of Melbourne’s Cultural Heritage Unit. You have the choice of three different tours, “Eat, Drink Melbourne“, “Showbiz, Sexy Spectacles and Sideshows” and “Death, Dirt and Disease“. I downloaded “Showbiz, Sexy Spectacles and Sideshows”, copied the map to my iPhoto and subsequently to my iPod, (because i would just loose the print out if i didnt have it in digital form), and jumped on the tram into the city.

I arrived at the starting point, Federation Square and had a quick look at the map. Melbourne is my hometown, so i was familiar with the path the tour would take me on. I popped my headphones on and started the track. The track was very well produced with lead in music, sound effects, and spoken by some of the more popular 774 ABC Melbourne Team alongside some guests. I won’t ruin any of the tour for those of you who are going to attempt it, but I will cover the route and some interesting things i experienced.

From Fed Square, it took me up to the Arts Centre, under St Kilda Road (through an underpass i never knew existed), over the Yarra, up to Collins Street to the Regent Theatre. Then I headed up Little Lonsdale Street and ended up the Princess Theatre. The tour track runs for a little over 51 minutes, but that does allow for some walking time, and even fills some of that with stories from the city and surrounding areas. I found that i only had to pause the track 2-3 times, to walk from location to location. Overall the tour took me just over an hour. The track gives you great directions, and I can safely say that if I was a tourist in Melbourne, I wouldn’t have got lost.

I love this idea and I know that I am going to spend a lot of time searching the internet trying to find podtours of overseas cities to add to my collection, for my overseas trip next year. The collaboration between informed sources, the internet and new media is a really great thing. It is also good to know that the information relayed to you is from a university department, so the validity is quite ensured.

So thanks to the ABC and Uni Melb for expanding my knowledge for free. I think I will pop off now to do one of the other two… It’s near dinner time so maybe the Eat, Drink Melbourne.

Links: (look for the scroll bar, in the text box on the pages below to find the download links)

Eat, Drink Melbourne Podtour
Death, Dirt and Disease Podtour
Showbiz, Sexy Spectacles and Sideshows Podtour

Except…

I was sitting here today and my mouse stopped working. I have a bluetooth wireless mouse and it is very pretty, but it simply stopped. When i took control of the mouse pad i navigated up to the bluetooth menu and was greeted with a cross through the bluetooth symbol. When i clicked on it, it stated “Bluetooth unavailable”.

I searched a few forums and eventually gave up. I spent an hour or so using the normal mouse and then decided to try something. I restarted the computer.

And BANG! it was fixed…..

Greatest computer fixing advice ever… Restart you machine!

Late this afternoon I stumbled upon an article by Adam Lusher in Melbourne’s The Age Newspaper (direct link) entitled “Google’s Free Beer and Big Ass Barbies”. Essentially Google founders Sergey Brim and Larry Page, employed chef Charlie Ayers to provide free food to all its employees. The idea was to encourage the workforce to come in early and stay back late, by filling their stomaches with freshly prepared, and more importantly, free food. This was in 1998 and Ayers distinctly remembers them saying ‘we are not going to charge for food here ever’. Ayers was faced with a challenging mission, he had a captive audience and something to build on. The greatest part of the story is that Ayers didn’t just provide canteen style food free of charge, he developed a menu that encouraged workers to get a kick start in the morning, kept them energized after lunch and gradually moved them from a diet of fast food to salads and weekly lobster. He has released a book entitled “Eat Yourself Smart”, and has since sold a portion of his estimated 28.8 million of Google Shares, to buy a home. He has also left the company, and when he did, they renamed the canteen, Charlie’s.

Google aren’t the only ones realising that an empowered and happy staff base work better. Earlier in the year i had seen a short segment on the new National Australia Bank Headquarters in the Docklands, Melbourne. (There is also an Age Article here) The bank has redirected its corporate governance, by building a four energy star rated low rise building that features open play spaces, a large central sun lit atrium, large walkways above the atrium, a saw tooth roof which allows sunlight to replace electrical lighting sources and small bay windowed offices that poke out into the public space. NAB haven’t gone quite as far as say Microsoft, with free massages or on site pool or recreation facilities, but this is mainly to do with stockholders concerns. The move to a more environmentally friendly, more welcoming open plan workplace shows the emphasis on not only employees but on people in general.

In my opinion and from my direct observations, it isn’t essential to have a company sign onto some of the innovative and very modern schemes i have just discussed. It is more about the focus of the company, and the way it handles its workers. Workers need to be motivated to want to do work, or even want to show up. I believe working for a company should be a give and take. I believe each worker should discuss with their employer where they want to be in 1, 2 or 5 years. In my industry, the theatre industry, it is simple things such as staff training that will encourage employees to wholeheartedly commit to a company. For an employer to organize staff professional development is an effective and efficient way of not only building the skills of your staff, but investing in their future with the company. In the theatre industry there are a huge number of extra qualifications that you can obtain; scissor lift license, riggers ticket, truck license, fork lift license, occupational health and safety assessor and more. The costs associated with this are minimal. You cover the wages of the workers for that day, and pay a trainer to come onsite, which usually generates a significant discount.

In the end you need to motivate your employees and make them feel empowered within a company, it doesn’t matter what kind of initiative brings this about, the importance is the focus on your employees as you biggest asset.

Its all thanks to my beautiful new Nikon D80 Digital SLR, purchased off a great aussie site called Discount Digital Photographics, www.d-d-photographics.com.au