Offf 2009 Oeiras : Ambient Reel from Designflux : Devoted to Motion on Vimeo.

Design Flux and Mark Webster send along this lovely documentary film they’ve done of the Offf festival last month in Oeiras, Portugal. It’s fun to go back to that aesthetic world. It’s difficult to describe the Offf experience: there were sometimes hard-to-hear talks in the cavernous concrete steel mill, crowds of young, able-bodied designer boys and girls from Portugal, Spain, and around Europe packing into lines as if for a rock concert, and an even slightly chaotic sense. At the same time, there was an infectious energy of creativity and enthusiasm - one that clearly should and will be felt more strongly in more events around the world.

The music is spot-on: Byetone’s Death of a Typographer. (Byetone’s label, the uber-hip “designer” music of Raster-Noton, was the musical anchor of Offf, and has since done showcases in Montreal for MUTEK and now SONAR in Barcelona.)

I think we can all agree that there’s really no reason we should be sitting in classrooms and cold corporate conference centers listening to vendor sales pitches thinly disguised as a talk. Culture and technology (and technology as culture) should be, well, a party. It’s doubly comforting now as certain trade show-style institutions are under economic pressure to think that we could all invest in something better.

Now, I’m going to shut up and go edit this huge stack of interview videos and audios I’ve got, which is stuff you wouldn’t have seen even had you been at these events.

Apple unveiled QuickTime X at the WWDC keynote. Here are their bullet point slides:

• Modern foundation
• Hardware Acceleration
• ColorSync
• HTTP Streaming

I’m actually quite keen to know how the new QuickTime X works. What will it mean for live visualists? What does it mean for developers, not only on Mac but Windows? What does it mean for open source projects built on QuickTime, projects vital to music and visual applications and innovation?

Here’s the problem: we’re not allowed to talk about that. Apple didn’t talk much about what’s in QuickTime at their public WWDC keynote. Now, they’ll start explaining all the details at sessions at WWDC. Some of our readers are at those sessions, but because the entire conference is under a non-disclosure agreement, they can’t talk about them. In fact, in the past, I’ve contacted PR to try to get information based on a report and was told by upset Apple PR representatives that I should not even be asking the question, and that it was a real problem that someone had told me what they had heard in a session. Even more surreal, Apple has told me that I’m not allowed to know about things that are printed in descriptions of sessions from WWDC posted on their website. Apple will happily charge you a couple grand to go to California to their session, but they won’t share information with the press.

What’s the message to the press?

Repeat our hype and our PR. Ignore the technical details. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

Memo’s ongoing quest to get his application MSARemote on the iTunes App Store has hit what is hopefully its last rejection today, this time because one of the screens “infringes an Apple trademark image.”

This is a reasonably well documented failure mode, so hopefully this is the final invisible, electrified hurdle they expect Memo to sense and clear before MSA Remote is made available.

In the meantime, Memo has published a new video displaying the app controlling VDMX [on CDMo] and Ableton Live [on CDMo, on CDMu], and showcasing its velocity sensitive keyboard.

MSA Remote + VDMX + Ableton Live from Memo Akten on Vimeo.

Via: Twitter @memotv. The CDM account is @cdmblogs. I’m @jaymis, and Peter is @peterkirn.

MSA Remote for iPhone from Memo Akten on Vimeo.

Apple, apparently unclear on what multitouch clients actually are, have chosen to reject Memo Akten’s brilliant-looking MSA Remote client for the iPhone/iPod touch. The free(!) app could empower installations and performances with the standard multi-touch protocol TUIO, as used on the Reactable (and, thus, by Bjork, among many other folks).

This is, sadly, the kind of second-guessing developers Apple has been doing far too much. But it’s also clear that Apple is a company that listens - when people shout and complain and gripe. So in that spirit, I’m shouting and complaining and griping, on the more-trafficked music site:

Apple Rejects Free iPhone Tool For Artists Because of “Minimal User Functionality”

Please help us by spreading the word. Apple’s mobile device is too good to let it be crippled by bad judgment. And it’s equally important to say, loudly, vendor restrictions are not a feature. I hope that promising platforms like Google’s Android benefit from their comparative openness, because I believe it makes a different to art - not for philosophical reasons, but for concrete, practical ones. And this is a perfect example.

In which this humble author, with tongue sometimes planted in cheek:
1. Shares a how-to video on datamoshing.
2. Forbids the use of the word datamoshing in future.
3. Challenges obscenely-gifted motion artist David O’Reilly to a rumble.

Here’s the story so far: there’s a compression artefact created when videos are compressed improperly, which causes frames to melt into one another like wax. And so, among others, we recently saw on CDM the music video Evident Utensil, a video that intentionally (ironically?) overused that effect until you started seeing missing p-frames and i-frames in real life and/or threw something at your computer in disgust. The most interesting part of that story wound up being a guy with a few dozen YouTube views who posted videos with this effect like they were home movies, and he seemed to actually speak in a language made up of compression artefacts, and he showed up in comments and said, insightfully I thought:

drul pixel the. teh pix pi pi aph afgh. $$$342agph. fafpht. :D :D :D !!!! teh. teh teh!!!!1 fteh ftehapple.>>>>VLC<<<< wmv &&&scrub vidcodec. mma ek :D S:D sence video. :D ghsg :) VLC VCKL :( wmv wmv ##raghg drool pixels<<<>>>_>baby. :D crazy like a fox. :P :D :D :D !!!! $$# ragha arugh pi pii pi squeez VLC%%%charflit, flarhfit. ckharlift. :( :( bad babyb, bad band. teh teh teh!!!! the

This is, of course, what baby boomlet parents fear will become the lingua franca of their children, as kids text nonsense to one another rather than paying attention to Pre-Algebra class. I think that probably doesn’t matter, because by the time those kids are grown up they’ll be jacked into the Matrix anyway, and to save money, the Matrix will be full of compression artefacts.

You probably think I post everything without remorse. You probably think I’m a hipster, lounging on a bed of PBR cans and spouting nonsense words for occasional blips of Boing Boing fame, that tomorrow I’ll have my own brand of steampunk datamosh. But believe it or not, thoughts do flash through my brain as I’m writing - well, at least some of the time. On those occasions, conflicting sentiments blink like so many p-frames in the frontal lobe of my brain: