THE ARTS: ARTSCENE RADIO TALK SHOW EPISODE 03, MAY 6TH 2004 (transcript) ____ ____ ____ / //__ __ / //____ / //__ __ _) ___( (__) / (__) __/ (_ barium .---------------------/ \| / / _/ /--------------------. |_ /_ \ _/____/ _/__ _/ _| | \____________________\\_______\ //____\ \\______\____________________/ | | | | t h e A R T S | | . ___/ ___/ ___/ ___/ . | | : _____ ____/ // _ / //_ __________ / //__ _____ / //__ ____ : | | | ____\__ /__ / |_______ / __/_ / __/__ | | | |_ __\ ___ /__) ___ /______) ____/_______)____ /___ _| | | // \ | (_\ | / \ | \ | \\ | | // \| |/ \| \| \\ | | // \ / ' ' \\ | |// \ \ \\| |/ \______________\ \_________________| \| `-------------------------------\______________\------------------------------' The ARTS: The Artscene Radio Talk Show Hosted by RaD Man and Spinsane Episode 03 - Air Date: May 6th, 2004 (Lead-in music plays followed by the ARTS show ID.) RAD MAN: Welcome to episode 3 of the ARTS, the Artscene Radio Talk Show. I'm your host, RaD Man. SPINSANE: And this is Smokin' Joe Racer. RAD MAN: Today's date is Thursday, May 6th, 2004. For those of you who are joining us for the first time, the ARTS is a variety talk show dedicated to the scene; including graphics, demos, tracking and all things in between. Somehow we've managed to release bi-monthly so far, meaning every 2 weeks. Next episode could go the direction of bi-monthly's other definition, meaning once every 2 months. We've said it before, it's basically whenever Spinsane and I have time to do the show and put it together for everybody. With that said, check out WWW.ACID.ORG/radio/ for new episodes and show notes. SPINSANE: By the way, what was the opening music? RAD MAN: The opening music was "Candytron" -- a clip from "Candytron" by Farb-Rausch. SPINSANE: I guess we'll get into that later as well. RAD MAN: This show we're going to be covering a few topics; as promised, we have an exclusive interview with fieserWolf, member of the controversial Commodore 64 group MetalVotze that won first prize in the PC Demo category at this years Breakpoint. We'll also be discussing the recent Art and Technology conference Notacon and featuring some of the highlights from the speech that Jason Scott and I delivered entitled "100 Years of the Computer Art Scene". We'll also be covering some current events, but first we have some emails... We've been getting a lot of supportive emails from people, including a detailed correspondence from Psychic Symphony of SCENE.ORG: He just wanted to note -- he had some notes regarding the SCENE.ORG Awards and how the results are tallied. They're basically calculated by an international jury which selects the best works from each category and then votes on them. So -- SPINSANE: They're given statues and diplomas for that? RAD MAN: Yup, yup. Diplomas -- SPINSANE: I guess. I'm more interested to see what that statue looks like, if it's plastic or platinum -- RAD MAN: Oh, I think it's solid platinum. SPINSANE: It probably is. It's probably just a big gold bar. RAD MAN: Yeah, so -- statues and diplomas are handed out by two very handsomely dressed sceners Melwyn and Steeler. SPINSANE: Handsomely dressed. Did they want you to say that? RAD MAN: Yeah, they paid me to say that. Apparently they have some sort of after party for the VIPs and the award winners there. I think they're serving Cristal. SPINSANE: Cristal? Alright, bling. Sounds fun. RAD MAN: Definitely. There's photos of the awards ceremonies. You can reach those on SLENGPUNG.COM. SPINSANE: And how do you spell that? RAD MAN: Oh dude. I love spelling URLs. It's s-l-e-n-g-p-u-n-g.com. SPINSANE: Alright. If you just heard that over the radio, you would automatically know how to spell it, you know? RAD MAN: Yeah, you would! SPINSANE: Very intuitive. RAD MAN: So just hit up Slengpung and do a search for "scene.org awards" and you'll be able to pull those up. PS also wrote in with a clarification regarding Annie's winning of the Wild compo. In fact he did not win the Wild compo, he won the REAL Wild compo, and there is a difference between the two. The Real Wild competition is a separate competition exclusively for console machines and hand helds, whereas the Wild compo is intended for pre-rendered animations and live performance shows. SPINSANE: Oh OK. Interesting variation between the two there. RAD MAN: Yeah. I think he said something about "nobody there was sober enough to notice the difference." I don't know what he means by that. SPINSANE: I think that makes it the real wild compo actually. RAD MAN: Ricky Martin of Remorse also wrote in to note that the Farb-Rausch demo that we spoke about earlier, when we were commenting "How do they compact the music into 64k?" Because it sounds much cleaner than your typical chip tune or something like that. They're just utilizing speech synthesis and instrument synthesis real time. That's how they're pulling that off. He also mentioned that "Saturday Night Scener" was not the only parody of "The Popular Demo" at this years Breakpoint. The Loonies released a 4 kilobyte version of that as well entitled "Ikanim" which won first place in the 4k competition on the Amiga platform. The 4K version by Loonies, it's done in 4 kilobytes and it looks kind of -- I mean it's clearly a parody on "The Popular Demo", but it looks kind of like a 3-D animated version of an Atari 2600 video game. I mean -- it's really basic stick figure, but three dimensional. SPINSANE: Right. Thanks for writing in Ricky Martin. RAD MAN: Yes. I've also been receiving a lot of fan mail regarding the typing sounds that you hear on the ARTS show. SPINSANE: Oh yeah? RAD MAN: Oh yeah! People are -- they're writing in to inquire what kind of keyboard do I have here in the background. I just want to represent I'm using an IBM Model M here, baby. It's 20 years old. SPINSANE: Nice. I have a friend who collects those actually, so I knew what you were using. I've got the stealthy keyboard; I'm actually looking at porn sites right now and no one is the wiser. RAD MAN: Speaking of porn sites... I heard you had to pay for your first porn site recently? SPINSANE: Yeah, it's ridiculous. It's the end of an era... I started out in the computer scene because of porn and now I'm leaving it because of all the sites going down. I can't seem to get any porn and the clips just aren't working. So I had to cough up the cash and get some actual movies. It's not -- it's not the same though, you know? It's kind of sad. I shed a tear. RAD MAN: Yeah. That's really not right. It's good to know that our tax paying dollars are going towards Operation Fastlink and the busting of PORN SITE WHAT? TRADERS? SPINSANE: Yeah I guess so. Not that that was the major focus of the operation. RAD MAN: Oh come on dude, you know that was the major focus of the operation. SPINSANE: That was the shady hand behind the actual operation. It was funded by the porn industry, not the RIAA. RAD MAN: Yeah, exactly. They're not being monopolized by the recording and the movie -- the motion picture industry here. It's porn! SPINSANE: That's right. That's what makes the world go 'round. Anyway, I digress. RAD MAN: OK, so, current events: We have the 2004 MIC compo coming up, which is short for the Monthly Invitational Competition. It's put together by Novus. It looks like the voting deadline is this Saturday, May 8th. SPINSANE: Yeah. I actually, just last night, downloaded all the tracks -- there is I think, 12 or 13... I'm actually going to vote on it. It's actually a very cool concept. And according to the website it says it's also the longest running competition of underground art on the internet right now -- which is debatable, I'm not sure of that fact. But it's been going on for 2 years now. Very very interesting and there is some good music there to hear. Check that out. RAD MAN: From what I understand they've been running for 2 years. They used to be known as the Complete MOD Competition and then they changed their name, for some reason, to the Monthly Invitational Competition. Basically what's happening is, the people who are selecting the MODs out there, they're going and pulling from a variety of different MOD tracking sites. Like MODplug Central, SCENE.ORG, Scene Satellite Network, S3M.COM and a lot of others. They're pulling the best songs from that particular month and then putting them up on the MIC compo site for everybody to listen to. I think they're selecting, like you said, 10 or 12 of the best releases from that particular month. Then everyone can go in and vote on what they thought was the best that month. SPINSANE: Oh, I see. I was unclear as to that. I didn't know they were calling other sites. I figured there were more releases than that every month. I had an idea that they were doing something along those lines. RAD MAN: There is actually a way for people to directly submit something for consideration in the competition. But, for the most part, it sounds like he is pulling from sites that he can pull down stuff that is released within a certain time frame, such as the last months releases or something like that. SPINSANE: Right. Those aren't actually in MP3 format -- they're in XM or IT. RAD MAN: Yeah, I think it's any module that will play with XMplay is allowable in this competition, so that cancels out a few of the newer formats that are out. For whatever reason, Novus is suggesting to use XMplay as the player for this particular compo. A lot of trackers out there prefer MODplug. So I guess that's debatable which one is actually better than the other. SPINSANE: I actually use DeliPlayer just in case anyone needs another option. It works fine for me. I guess there is probably a plug-in for WinAmp, but I've heard real bad things about using it. RAD MAN: Any tracker will tell you that WinAmp just bastardizes any true MOD format out there for the most part, especially the older ones. So yeah -- check it out and get involved. The web site for that is WWW.NOVUSMUSIC.ORG/mic/. Also this weekend, there is the ASCII Compo which is organized by Dead Brain in conjunction with Thuglife. That's also taking place this Saturday, May 8th. It's a live competition where people are competing real time and they're given a limited amount of time to compete, anywhere from 60 to 90 minutes. That's taking place on IRC in #ASCIIcompo on EFnet. That's May 8th, I believe 7:00 PM GMT. SPINSANE: OK. I'll have to check that out. We spoke about the last one, the Easter Compo on a previous show -- people are interested in that, we got into a little more detail about it. RAD MAN: Are you going to be -- are you going to get involved in this ASCII compo Spinsane? SPINSANE: Yeah, I'll give it a shot. I hope a lot of people turn out. RAD MAN: Awesome. What else... Today, Assembly opened up their doors to advance ticket sales to the general public. So, starting today, May 6th, you can purchase those tickets at ASSEMBLY.ORG. SPINSANE: And the ANSI news, or the low rez news is: Sense #19 came out a couple days ago. The pack is available at SENSE.NAMISTAI.ORG. Or as you would say, "Namistai.org". RAD MAN: I would say Namistai, I wouldn't say Namistai. SPINSANE: Oh I like to represent Vietnam to the fullest. But anyway, they lost their old host for I guess some internal group struggle with Sinister Silent. RAD MAN: Little internal drama there? It happens. SPINSANE: Yeah, it happens. Anyway, it was a good pack. It was about two months since they released according to Aesthetic, who was the former leader who just handed over the reigns to Avenging Angel and Maytag Man. He would actually like to give them props for actively recruiting and keeping the group alive during the interim period there when things were not going so well. It looks like they definitely got things together because this is one of the best ANSI packs I've seen in a long time. It blows TNT away, I have to say it. RAD MAN: I thought it was rather good. I don't know that I totally agree with you that it blew TNT away. I thought it was a very solid pack and I'd say that maybe they might even be on par with each other. I think there was -- well, there was that one ANSI by Enzo and some other people with the Spiderman. That was probably the best piece of the pack and probably beats anything that was in the TNT pack. But on the whole, I think that the quality of the TNT pack may have been slightly better. SPINSANE: I guess everyone has their opinion on it. I'm personally more of a fan of a lot the style that is in the Sense pack. There's a little more like abstract stuff. Like the piece by Ville; it was a rock star with a guitar, it has some really weird coloring. I dug it. The pieces by Lum are real nice. It just reminded me of like old, older more experimental stuff, whereas -- RAD MAN: Yeah, there was a lot more really good experimental art, whereas TNT was I think almost exclusively comic-rips. SPINSANE: I guess it's just a preference. I'm not as into comic-rips, but I like seeing people do original pieces. Not that either is bad of course, they're all awesome. Anyway, it was a great pack. RAD MAN: I agree, Sense 19 was pretty kick ass. Well, let's see. On the party calendar, there is a lot of demo parties that are coming up. There is more to life than just Assembly and Breakpoint. Coming up rather quickly here -- May 28th in Turku, Finland is the Motorola Inside party, which is organized by Britelite. SPINSANE: That's Ricky Martin's brother, isn't it? Shouts out to Turku, Finland. RAD MAN: It's an Amiga-only party though. It's going to be a relatively smaller party for people who are in the Amiga scene. SPINSANE: It's 3 days long? RAD MAN: Yeah, from what I understand it's 3 days long. They're probably going to have a lot of different vendors for people who still have Amiga hardware on the premises. What else, the 10th annual Remedy demo party is coming up. That is going to be taking place in Stockholm, Sweden, June 24-27th. Symphony after that in, July 8-11th in Poznan, Poland. And August is going to be an extremely busy month. You have Assembly in Finland, Buenzli in Switzerland, and Evoke in Germany, all taking place one after another. SPINSANE: Nice, I guess people in Europe can just hop around on the train system and hit all those different parties up. RAD MAN: I guess if you lived in Europe you could conceivably take the train and hit them all up in one month. SPINSANE: I'm assuming they're not on conflicting weekends. RAD MAN: No, not at all. You could conceivably hit all of these parties within a month. OJUICE.NET has an entire section online dedicated to upcoming demo parties. There are over 3 dozen additional parties that are listed there that will take place before the end of this year. SPINSANE: Damn, that's like one a week. RAD MAN: It's getting pretty late in Germany, so let's give fieserWolf a call. SPINSANE: Sure, sounds good. (International telephone number is dialed followed by the sound of the phone ringing.) RAD MAN: OK we have fieserWolf of MetalVotze on the phone. FIESERWOLF: Hello. I'm here. This is fieserWolf of MetalVotze. RAD MAN: What is your current involvement with MetalVotze right now? FIESERWOLF: I'm a coder on the C64 and a musician on the PC and C64. So I'm doing some SIDs and -- I'm doing some coding on the C64 mainly. RAD MAN: When did you first join MetalVotze? How did you come to get in the group and get into the scene and all of that? FIESERWOLF: The first party I attended was Mekka Symposium in 1998 and that's where I met those guys and we became friends. So I think -- shortly after that I joined them. I just can't remember really. I thought these guys are crazy and -- yeah, they're just my type so I joined them. RAD MAN: So MetalVotze does a lot of crazy, kind of wild, or "joke" type of demos Are there any demos that have been produced by MetalVotze that are more "serious", I guess you could say? FIESERWOLF: Well, I dunno -- We had some more or less serious stuff on Commodore C64 before. In all productions, there was something... well... adult stuff. I think this PC demo now was one of our most serious productions ever. RAD MAN: How many of your members ended up going to this years Breakpoint? FIESERWOLF: This year, well, quite a few. I think it was only one member missing; Syntax. But BitBreaker was there, Final Conflict was there, Drago and Ragnarok, so we were quite complete this year. We celebrated our 10 year scene anniversary. So this was a great party for us. RAD MAN: Excellent. What was your general impression of this years Breakpoint party? FIESERWOLF: Oh yeah, we loved it. We've been at the Mekka Symposium parties before and now we have Breakpoint. This is absolutely 100% pure scene spirit I would say. I mean, I watched DVDs with reports from Assembly but I would not like to exchange that to the Breakpoint experience. This is pure scene! We love it. RAD MAN: What were your expectations after viewing some of the other competing PC demos at Breakpoint? Did you expect that "WinnerDemo" would come out on top? FIESERWOLF: No, we would never expect that. OK, we named it "WinnerDemo" and stuff and put in all these graphics in it. But this was just plain fun. We never expected to be at any party, number one. This was a big surprise for us, as for the rest of the scene. You know, MetalVotze means -- the word "votze" means in German to give someone a slap in the face and I think we've done that this year. We don't know why and how, but somehow the people voted for us. So it was a great surprise for us as well. RAD MAN: Clearly, it was the popular choice at Breakpoint. The people spoke through the voting. Some people maybe don't seem to have a sense of humor about things whereas the people at Breakpoint got it. FIESERWOLF: Afterwards, we had some discussions with the PC sceners. We're just outsiders to the PC scene and then we came and somehow the people voted for us. But I think the point is that we amused the sceners. They were bored with the other productions somehow. So I hope we've set a sign here; that demos have to be -- I mean, not as technical advanced as they have been, but more fun -- just to give a laugh. SPINSANE: I guess what you strove to do, or what you did do was combine the entertainment aspect above and beyond what the other people did. Whereas the other people might have just shown technical mastery -- FIESERWOLF: Yeah, I think we have. We heard here and there that our demo was technical crap, but we don't care. We just want to have fun. This is the main philosophy, if there is any, behind MetalVotze. We just wanna have fun and show the people the scene spirit. Just friendship and fun. That's everything we call the scene, no? RAD MAN: Exactly. Why do people go to demo parties? It's for camaraderie and share some good times with people that you've been talking to over the internet forever. FIESERWOLF: Yeah. To meet them and -- at all these parties we do some barbeque and stuff and boozing. We like this stuff. Just to meet the people and -- not just by chatting with them over the IRC or whatever but to really meet them and talk to them about -- not only computer issues, what do they do, how do they live in their real life and stuff. You know, that's what really makes the friendship. That's why we go there. I mean that's just the fun, you know? RAD MAN: Did you have an opportunity to make any new friends there or anything like that? FIESERWOLF: Oh yeah. Me personally, I met many new interesting people there. And spontaneously, two very good friends joined us after this success in "WinnerDemo". We don't know if they would have done without the success here. I think so but -- we just meet friends at all the parties we go to. RAD MAN: What sort of production work went behind "WinnerDemo" to create the vocals and the soundtrack to "WinnerDemo"? FIESERWOLF: Well, BitBreaker asked me to do some hip-hop, so I made the beats and stuff in a studio. I have, with some friends of mine here. You know the chorus "we have computers which can beat your computers" just came to our mind while being on the bathroom some day. I was always in close contact with the other MetalVotze members over the internet and so we all did the rest of the lyrics together here. I think that the other thing we like best about the chorus was that somehow it sounds childish. But, unmistakably, it's not about who can code or design better, but it's just that WE have the better machines, you know? (Laughs.) That's all the point. RAD MAN: Who were the people that did the vocals? Was it just one person -- FIESERWOLF: Well, I wrote the music and stuff, and then I just asked two friends of mine to sing along with me. So we are three people here. We call ourselves the Amaretto Gangsters. This is just two friends of mine here. RAD MAN: Very cool. SPINSANE: Well I was actually wondering if you have a favorite demo that you've coded in the past, or a favorite MetalVotze production perhaps. FIESERWOLF: Oh, I don't know. I just think making this PC demo was plainly fun. I like coding on the C64 a lot, but this was something completely new. I think I like this best. RAD MAN: That's a good point. Do you see, in the future, more PC demos coming from MetalVotze? FIESERWOLF: We thought about that, and people ask us, but I don't know. Maybe just minor productions. We'll stay on the C64. Now we have a member who can do some Gameboy Advance stuff. We will just do that. We'll just try everything, but we'll stay a C64 group. RAD MAN: Cool. Alright fieserWolf, thank you very much for being a part of our show. FIESERWOLF: My pleasure. RAD MAN: Take care. SPINSANE: Alright, see ya. FIESERWOLF: OK, bye. (Call with fieserWolf is disconnected.) RAD MAN: That -- I think that interview with fieserWolf went very well. What was your reaction to it? SPINSANE: I thought it was pretty good, seemed like a nice guy. It was interesting to see someone with the -- well I'm sure everyone has the mindset who is in the scene of looking at it as something to do for fun. Even though MetalVotze may take it to a further step and get a little more kooky than some other groups, I think everyone is in it for the fun. RAD MAN: I think people maybe had the wrong impression of the group, they're basically just like everybody else. They're pretty down to earth people. SPINSANE: Well, they come across as Satanists. RAD MAN: (Laughs.) I think they come across as pornographers, I don't know what you mean by satanists. SPINSANE: Well, I was just looking at some of the pictures from their demos on the front of their site. It seemed pretty evil. Maybe it was porn. Maybe I got it mixed up. RAD MAN: Porn is not evil dude. There's nothing wrong with porn. SPINSANE: Well it depends on the porn. You should see some of the stuff I watched today. Hah Hah! Just kidding. RAD MAN: Alright. Well, what else -- We gotta cover past events as well. Of course the Notacon conference took place a couple weeks ago in Cleveland, Ohio, April 23-25th. It was a conference dedicated to art and technology which was put together by Froggy. He threw that conference together to fill the void that was left behind by Rubicon. From what I understand they had to cancel Rubicon because they were basically banned from every hotel in Detroit. SPINSANE: That will teach them to hold an event in Detroit. RAD MAN: Fortunately the Notacon even went very smoothly. I read from some of the party reports, I think somebody said that even though this was their first con it ran like it was their second. They really had their act together and they were on top of things at all times. They did a really good job organizing it. Approximately 200 people attended this first year. SPINSANE: Not too bad. RAD MAN: I got to meet some of the Apartment 103 crew too as well. I got to meet the Trank^ASCII founder Whodini and ASCII artist Chex. SPINSANE: Yeah, shouts to Chex. RAD MAN: You used to be a part of the Apartment 103 crew, right? SPINSANE: I'm still sort of affiliated with it, in a way. I never actually lived there. Of course Apartment 103 was the apartment that Whodini, Chex... RAD MAN: Kaleidas, right? SPINSANE: Was it Kaleidas? RAD MAN: Yeah. SPINSANE: That must have been one ASCII pimping household. I'm sure they had some great times there. RAD MAN: They -- What did he say -- I think it was Chex who was saying that the intention was in theory for it to be the ultimate ASCII art -- you know, they wanted to do like "The Real World for ASCII Artists", but it just never worked out that way. It turned out to be the Real World for Alcoholics. SPINSANE: Yeah. That's what I've heard. I've seen some web cam stuff from there too -- some interesting stuff there. That was a good site when it was up. It used to be a community weblog as well, type thing. Anyway, so you got to meet them. RAD MAN: Yeah. Chex and Whodini were really cool. We got to go out to some Italian dinner at -- I don't remember what the name of the place was, it was like Franky and Paulie's or something like that. It was family style; you order one serving of spaghetti and it serves twelve people. SPINSANE: Right. That's always the best. RAD MAN: Our "100 Years of the Computer Art Scene" speech had a pretty strong turnout. SPINSANE: I was wondering. I know a lot of conferences hold multiple -- presentations at one time. At Notacon, was there just one at a time? Or were there a couple? RAD MAN: Notacon was a three track conference so there could be up to three speeches going on at the same time. I think at most, they only had two scheduled at the same time and then maybe a third event type of thing, but not necessarily a speech. SPINSANE: OK, I was just curious about that. RAD MAN: One of the audio samples which we were unable to play during our talk due to the fact that it was a streaming Real Audio or Real Media clip, we now have, we've fixed that problem. It's a clip from -- actually it's a clip of the first song to be reproduced by a non-human voice with an IBM 7094 computer, which was made in 1961 and it was of "Daisy Bell"... (The IBM 7094 synthesized version of the "Daisy Bell" song plays.) (Clip from the Notacon "100 Years of the Computer Art Scene" speech fades in with Jason Scott speaking...) JASON SCOTT: So that's what he's got to work with. So you look at it -- once you realize this, it's a case in art; sometimes you need the information that goes with it. Like "Oh, that sounds pretty good", "Oh yes, but he did it using a calculator", "OH, then it's REALLY good." The actual use of the technology changes the quality of the art in your mind once you become aware of it. (Clip from the Notacon speech fades out.) Yeah, we actually received some feedback regarding that speech, or presentation that we gave. Somebody wrote me to say that he actually played this speech for his girlfriend in order to help articulate what it is he's doing in his spare time, or not-so-spare time. SPINSANE: Oh nice. I actually loaded it up for my girlfriend as well. It's teaching the fairer sex about the nerdly art of ASCII. RAD MAN: What did she think of it? SPINSANE: She actually thought it was cool as hell. I actually liked it a lot how you guys tied in the whole teletype and Morse code and all that stuff, it was very interesting. It was very well done, very academic. Also very entertaining. Very good speech. RAD MAN: Thank you. All in all, the conference turned out very well. We had a chance to meet a lot of new people. There was also a 10K taking place there. SPINSANE: Oh yeah? RAD MAN: It was rather spur of the moment, unplanned. Decided to see what would happen if I stayed up really late, woke up really early and partook in some festivities the night before and then see how that would affect my running performance. SPINSANE: How did it affect it? RAD MAN: Oh and indeed it did! SPINSANE: Did you end up vomiting? RAD MAN: No, nothing like that. I'm sure there were people that night though -- I'm very sure! No, it -- I think it tacked on a solid 3 minutes to my time. I think I've achieved my worse time ever by doing that. That's probably the only way I would drink before a race anyways, if it was totally unplanned and spur of the moment like that. SPINSANE: Right. I'm sure that's not on your training regimen. RAD MAN: Now I know, I've proved it! It just doesn't help. SPINSANE: Yeah. You did it for science right? RAD MAN: Exactly. So afterwards -- after the conference wrapped up... Jason Scott and I made the trip from one end of Ohio to the opposite one and had a chance to meet up with Ebony Eyes. She is -- Ebony Eyes has been referred to as the queen of ANSI art. SPINSANE: What about Kitiara? RAD MAN: Kitiara? Well she came in much much later. God, after the mid 90's right? Ebony Eyes got her start in the late 80's. She started spreading her ANSIs around via the WWIV message networks. SPINSANE: Right. RAD MAN: What was it... I think she had drawn something to the tune of several hundred ANSIs before she retired from the scene. SPINSANE: She doesn't have to settle for being the queen. She can be the king with that kind of output! Dominating. That's a lot of art. RAD MAN: It is. She was a very popular artist during her time. So we had a chance to interview her for the BBS Documentary that Jason Scott is doing, and then later on had dinner with her. It was pretty nice. SPINSANE: Was she actually around after the art groups started up? Was she a member of any art groups, was she in ACiD? Or -- RAD MAN: No, she was not. She was still drawing ANSI in the very early 90's. I think -- I believe that she retired some time around... '92? So right as the artpacks as a format started to emerge was pretty much was when she was fading out from things. But she was very aware of the art groups that were present at that time. SPINSANE: Actually -- Do you have a link to the Notacon speech for the listeners to download? RAD MAN: Yes there is. There are two places where you can download our presentation speech: The first place is WWW.COW.NET/conned/notacon/artscene/. You can also pick it up from WWW.ACID.ORG/images/notacon04/. There you will find several different encoded versions of the speech. We have it as low as 24kilobits per second and as high as 320 and several version in between. I really recommend for this particular speech, picking up the -- at a bare minimum -- picking up the 128kbps version of it. It's about 47 megs and it's recorded in stereo. We do make use of a lot of different sound clips and such. It's kind of cool, you can actually hear Jason Scott and I moving around the room, so if you're wearing headphones you have that sort of immersive experience. SPINSANE: Oh nice. I actually listened to the -- I had the 24 meg version. RAD MAN: Oh, the 64k encoded version? SPINSANE: Yeah. That sounded pretty good. I'll check out the higher ones but I just wanted to get it real quick to get it into the car. RAD MAN: Yeah, the 64k version -- these were all encoded with LAME 3.97. And the 64k version is decent. Obviously there's going to be some quality degradation there. But it is good enough if you don't have a broadband connection. I don't really recommend the 24k encoded version though. Let the download run over night. Check it out, make sure it's something you're interested in maybe and then get something higher quality than that. SPINSANE: Especially with the demo music in it, it probably makes a pretty big difference. That music is phenomenal. When you guys put that on, it turned my car into a rave. It's great. RAD MAN: (Laughs.) It actually picked up the sound rather well, I was pretty impressed by the sound system they had there to record that. There is also a transcription available. I know that there is a few people in the scene that are hearing impaired. There is a full transcription of the speech that was prepared by Ghost Rider and I'm sure that took him a long time. SPINSANE: Yeah. RAD MAN: That's available as well at the same two sites, you can easily find that if you want to grab that. SPINSANE: For all you plagiarists out there. RAD MAN: So what did you think of the printer music? SPINSANE: I thought that was pretty fucking cool... What more can I say? Especially -- what was the first one? I know that the second one was "Blue Danube"? RAD MAN: There was the "Blue Danube" and "Raindrops Are Falling on my Head"... Something we didn't mention in our last show was The Gathering demo party which also took place April 7-11th and it overlapped the Breakpoint demo party. For those that aren't familiar with The Gathering it's one of the largest demo parties in the world. Last year they had over 5,200 visitors attend. Unfortunately the figures for the 2004 attendance were not immediately available so I don't have those handy. They had a lot of really great entries there, and they also seemed to have a rather intense Dance Dance Revolution competition there. SPINSANE: I see. You're a fan of that, aren't you? RAD MAN: I've done a little DDR in my time. SPINSANE: Can't say I've ever played it. I save my moves for the dance floor... and the bedroom. Ah yeah. That's cool. So I guess they had a bunch of the actual arcade machines setup? RAD MAN: It looked like in this particular case, it looked like they had the real machines there. I know some of the smaller parties just pick up probably a PS2 and a dance mat or a dance pad, but this looked like they had the real deal. SPINSANE: I was actually wondering how you play it on PS2. I guess there's like the old NES Track & Field thing that you can run on? RAD MAN: Yeah, it's improved a little bit since then but it's basically the same concept for the console machines. You have your choice of this dance mat, there is different dance mats that you can purchase, and then if you really want to spend the big bucks you can buy these dance platforms which really aren't that much better even though they cost about five times more. SPINSANE: Do those have the hand rails and stuff? RAD MAN: No they don't. They're like a raised, solid platform rather than a foamy material. So it's like a hard plastic platform. I've seen them before and they're not that great. It's kind of like gigantic buttons that you have to jump on and they kind of click, so they're more tactile feeling than the true Dance Dance Revolution floor. You know, you'd have to be there. (Laughs.) SPINSANE: Right. RAD MAN: From what I read, people traveled from various parts of Europe just to compete in this competition, it's getting pretty big there at The Gathering. SPINSANE: Wow. I'll reserve judgment. RAD MAN: OK. They had some really good competitions -- they had some really good demos that were entered in the competitions. In the top three combined demo competition, in order; there was "Our Demo" by Outracks, there was also "Pornographic" by INF. Did you have a chance to check out "Pornographic?" SPINSANE: No, it crashed my computer. RAD MAN: It crashed your entire computer? SPINSANE: It just -- it wouldn't load the graphics. It popped with some kind of error message and I just ran it anyway. I got to listen to the music, but the graphics were all FUBAR'd so. RAD MAN: What kind of video card do you have again? SPINSANE: GeForce 2. RAD MAN: How old is that baby? SPINSANE: Several generations old, it was donated to me. It was an upgrade from my TNT that I had. RAD MAN: What did you have, a TNT Riva? SPINSANE: Yeah. RAD MAN: It looks like it's time for you to get another "upgrade". SPINSANE: The problem is I don't use the graphics card for anything besides these demos. I don't know if I can justify the cost right now. I'm sure I could upgrade for pretty cheap anyway. RAD MAN: Demos alone would justify the most expensive video card out there. Since "Pornographic" wouldn't run on your [computer], I'll just tell you about it. Well, you've heard it. SPINSANE: Yeah. RAD MAN: It was actually a very well put together demo. SPINSANE: Was it pornographic? RAD MAN: Pornographic? I don't know. I personally think that it could of won first place had it not been such a blatant bite off of "The Popular Demo". It seems like the trend right now is to borrow from that retro, 70's style that "Popular Demo" set forward. It was really good, but had "Popular Demo" not existed, let's just put it that way, it probably would have won first place. SPINSANE: Well shoot. I hope a demo calling itself "Pornographic" didn't borrow too much from the 70's theme. RAD MAN: It had a nice pancake recipe in there, you could have appreciated that. SPINSANE: Really? I've been looking for a new recipe to spice up my pancakes. RAD MAN: And then the closing sample -- yeah -- the closing sample is really what made it. (Clip from the tail end of "Pornographic"'s soundtrack is played.) SPINSANE: I guess I should not have closed it after about 30 seconds. RAD MAN: Yeah. It was a really good way to wind down the demo there. SPINSANE: Perfect ending, money shot. RAD MAN: Really, I don't know why it didn't win. SPINSANE: I didn't really like "Our Demo" that much. Graphically it was pretty nice but like fieserWolf was talking about earlier, it didn't seem to really entertain as much. I didn't get to see Pornographic so I can't compare them. RAD MAN: "Our Demo", I liked it. I thought it was good. I liked the dizzying domino scene they had there. It was kind of humorous, kind of geek humor there with the flashing "this is not edible" or whatever it said. "PWNED!" when the dominos started falling -- SPINSANE: "This is not real water." "Precalculating is for pussies". Stuff like that. RAD MAN: Yeah, "precalculating for pussies", that kicks ass. That's why it won. Right there. You say "precalculating is for pussies"... INSTANT MONEY. That trumps ripping off "The Popular Demo". SPINSANE: Yeah... I don't know though... Like, "Come on my face"? That's a push. That's a close call. I wonder how close the voting was. Probably neck and neck. RAD MAN: Yeah, I think it was a tight competition dude. "Hog" by Spaceballs was also a very good demo which was entered in the "combined" competition. "Combined" meaning that both the IBM PC and the Amiga PC were competing in the same category. "Hog" was an Amiga demo by Spaceballs, which had a really nice dark ambience to it. For those of you without an Amiga 1200 handy, there is a DivX AVI version which is available on SCENE.ORG or you can just grab a copy of WinUAE at WINUAE.NET. That was a very nice demo. SPINSANE: Yeah I agree, it was awesome. RAD MAN: I really think that the crowning release at The Gathering was the amazing 64 kilobyte demo which was entered there entitled "Nemesis", put together by Excess and Kvasigen. "Nemesis" was really on par with some of the better 64 kilobyte demos that I've seen. I mean it was definitely on the level -- I think, in my personal opinion -- I think it was definitely on the level of some of the better Farb-Rausch 64k demos that have been coming out. SPINSANE: That's pretty high praise. RAD MAN: There were also some really fantastic High Quality music entries, which was an open competition for music in the MP3 and OGG formats. So it's basically the non-tracked music. First place was awarded to "30,000 and Counting" by Flipside: (Music clip from the track "30,000 and Counting" plays.) Second place was "Alumina" by Edzes: (Music clip from the track "Alumina" plays.) And third to "RR Plastic" by Dominei: (Music clip from the track "RR Plastic" plays.) And of course if you want more information on this, you can always go to WWW.GATHERING.ORG or SCENE.ORG as well, which will take you there and that's where you're going to find all of these downloads anyways. SPINSANE: Could you spell those URLs for me? RAD MAN: No. I'm not spelling that for you dude. SPINSANE: Alright, thanks. For nothing. Anyway, go on. RAD MAN: For nothing. What -- I heard you got some SPAM lately, something about PROJECT30.COM? SPINSANE: Yeah, which was interesting. You never get any good SPAM, you know? This is actually pretty interesting, I don't know how the f-- hell I got it. It's basically not too related to the digital computer art scene, but it is an online gallery run by artists. Quoting their website: "Designed to expose artists to `brick and mortar' art galleries which may be interested in presenting their work." So basically what they do is they select a bunch of artists for exhibits and some of the art is actually pretty good, I was checking it out. A lot of online galleries that I do check out that -- whether they're digital or physical media -- there is a lot of crap out there. Not to be too judgmental, but there is a lot of wheat to cut through or whatever, a lot of chafe to pull from the wheat or whatever. And this one actually seemed like it was mostly high quality, and I thought it was pretty interesting. Usually you don't find random interesting stuff like that in email. So... that was cool. RAD MAN: So it looks like they're taking, what, art that's based in technology and bringing it into real world galleries or something like that? SPINSANE: I guess what they're doing is they're having the artists submit pictures of their work. There are sites that actually will have artists submit actual physical pieces of work and then sell them for you, but I believe what this one is doing is they've put up high quality pictures of the artist's work and then they give you a link to contact the artist. The prices aren't actually discussed on the website. I think it's mostly for exposure. I'm sure most of these artists that I saw on there when I was digging around -- I'm sure most of them have actually sold a bit and are probably fairly successful. Can't really speculate too much on it -- RAD MAN: On a related note, did you hear about the record that was set last night on the Picasso painting? SPINSANE: No, I did not. RAD MAN: The 1905 painting "Boy with a Pipe" sold for $142 MILLION dollars at the Sotheby's auction house. I'm wondering when the Spinsane ASCII is going to break that record. SPINSANE: Break it? I keep all my transactions private. Let me just say that $142 million? I'm out of that league by far, my works command far more. They command that per line. Anyway. I have one more thing I would like to discuss, too; the Demovibes CD. RAD MAN: What's up with that? SPINSANE: It's something I found on planetd.net, or PLANET-D.NET I should say. It's a mix compilation of demo music and it's put into -- you can download either the individual tracks or you can get the cue sheet and the MP3 and burn it to CD. It's mixed by Willbe, he does a good enough job considering that most of the tracks are very unrelated in theme. RAD MAN: So he goes through some sort of an effort to beat match all the tracks? SPINSANE: He does and for the most part it's acceptable mixing, it's not -- I don't think that's the main focus of it. It's very interesting, it's got a lot of different genres of demo scene music and it's actually quite good. Anybody can get that at: WILLBE.PLANET-D.NET/demovibes.htm -- It's a free download. RAD MAN: Can you spell that URL for me? SPINSANE: I'm sorry, what? RAD MAN: Can you spell that URL for me? SPINSANE: You want me to? RAD MAN: No. I think we should just start forcing people to google for stuff. SPINSANE: That's a good idea. RAD MAN: Google is your friend. So what else is going on, has your cat read any good books lately? SPINSANE: No, no he hasn't. (Laugh.) He's actually fucking opening doors right now and causing background ambient -- kind of distracting me. RAD MAN: OK, well I guess that's a wrap then, right? Anything else dude? SPINSANE: Shouts out to Sir Garbage Truck. I'd also like to shout out to the local Tampa 2600 meeting which will be having its inaugural meeting tomorrow! RAD MAN: OK, to close out, the song we're going to play for you is the "Blue Danube Waltz". A remix version based on the 1403 printer song by Ron Mak remixed in with an actual orchestra. (Lead out music plays followed by the abbreviated ARTS station ID.) Speech transcribed to ASCII by Ghost Rider (a!p) on May 6th, 2004