The weekly downstreams

My weekly choice of streamed and downloadable media did not appear last week (I was at a conference in Stockholm) and was not put up on the web yesterday due to a very busy week. But now I thought I would put a few pieces for your weekend entertainment and education.

The film Open Skies, Open Minds is a four minute long journey that takes you from north to south and gives you a glimpse of contemporary life in Sweden. The film has just started being shown at The Second House of Sweden. the Swedish embassy in Second Life, where I work.

Kuupuu
The solo project of Jonna Karanka, one of the prime movers of the Finnish freak folk contingent (Avarus, Maniac's Dream, Anaksimandros, Herta Lussu Assa etc.), Kuupuu's legend has spread quite a bit thanks to the efforts of Dekorder Records, who've compiled tracks from her first four CDR releases across two compilation LP's, though this first release of hers traverses a bit different territory than the bulk of her releases that follows on from here, as the wispily warped and gauzily ephemeral detunage of her ghostly methodology originally possessed a bit more of an assertive edge, though relatively speaking, this is still a pretty gossamer affair, plinking and warbling away in inspired naif style.

Steampunk Magazine Issue #3
Before the age of homogenization and micro-machinery, before the tyrannous efficiency of internal combustion and the domestication of electricity, lived beautiful, monstrous machines that lived and breathed and exploded unexpectedly at inconvenient moments. It was a time where art and craft were united, where unique wonders were invented and forgotten, and punks roamed the streets, living in squats and fighting against despotic governance through wit, will and wile.

Total Recut
Total Recut provides online resources and social networking opportunities for fans and creators of video recuts, remixes and mash-ups. Users can watch videos or showcase their own work in the galleries, download copyright free source material to use in their own remix projects, learn about remix culture and copyright issues, undertake instructional video tutorials and enter contests to win prizes or just for fun.

Recombinant Poetics by Bill Seaman 2000
We are in the midst of profound technological changes that impact upon how people communicate, share knowledge and learn. Potentially, along with these technological changes comes a related change in poetics. Thus a techno-poetics is explored. Where once we focused on analogue media as the primary means of embodying our ideas through artifacts of thought, our understanding of reality is now interwoven (structurally coupled1) with an expanded linguistics of interpenetrated fields of meaning.2 Some would say this is not a techno-linguistics but an expanded computer-based environmental semiotics. Through Recombinant Poetics virtual space becomes a mutable field for evocative media-related exploration.

Computer-based environmental meaning is potentially explored through the authorship, inter-authorship, and operative experiential examination of a diverse set of media-elements and media-processes. The media that becomes evocative within this techo-poetic virtual environment is diverse. This media includes digital video, digital still images, 3D digital objects, 3D animations, digital spoken and written text, digital music/noise Ñ sound objects, and digital texture maps Ñ both still and time-based. Each media-element could be said to convey its own field of meaning. Varying combinations of these fields of meaning are experienced through fleeting electronic environmental perceptual stimulation's. The mind-set of the participant represents another active field. The vuser (viewer/user)3 becomes dynamically involved in the construction of meaning. It is through the combination and recombination of these evocative digital fields of meaning, as experienced by an engaged participant, that a new form of poetics can emerge Ñ Recombinant Poetics.


Salamander Jim, Sydney 1984
Live to Air for Salamander Jim from 2MBS on 1st August 1984.

The Mark of Cain (Mp3s and Videos)
One of the most underrated bands from Australia, barely known outside the country. The Mark of Cain are the masters of controlled guitar power with a despotic rhythm that I witnessed several times in the inner city pub venues of Sydney in the early 1990s. I would recommend Battlesick, their 1989 release as a good starting point for the music of this trio from Adelaide.

Thank you and enjoy your flight.