I first met Wolfgang Tillmans at a rave in Copenhagen in 1989. He had copper wire woven around his head and his face was decorated with Letraset text. Later that evening, bouncers ejected him for being drunk and incapable.Things have changed a lot in seven years. Tillmans is now one of Europe's foremost young photographers, esteemed by both the art world and fashion magazines. He is currently showing at New York's Museum of Modern Art and his work appears regularly in periodicals like Interview, i-D and Spex.
Tillmans is best known for his off-kilter fashion spreads and in-situ observations of the flamboyant extroverts of European techno culture. But another side to his work is reflected in his new book, For When I'm Weak I'm Strong: cityscapes and pastoral scenes, textural expositions of fabric and still lives that are sometimes lyrical and elegiac, sometimes humorous (particularly "AA Breakfast" which juxtaposes a tumescent penis with an American Airlines in-flight meal).
Tillmans' strength is that he refuses to recognise borders between "commercial" magazine work and "art gallery" projects. A pop portrait may end up on a gallery wall or an art commission in the pop press. The pictures don't require a theoretical understanding of art to be enjoyed - you can just get off on their sheer visceral impact. The book brings these parallel strands together for the first time. Tillmans is a relentless seeker after truth and beauty - not, in his case, mutually exclusive.
For When I'm Weak I'm Strong, by Wolfgang Tillmans: £23. Published by Cantz in association with Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg. Distributed in the UK by Art Data.
The most eye-catching thing about the Video Sender is not its stunning use of the latest Japanese flat-screen technology, nor its sculpted, ergonomic design, or even its magnificent CD-quality surround sound. The Video Sender has none of these. It does, though, have a small sticker on the base saying "Illegal For Use In The UK". For the purposes of the following review, therefore, product testing was undertaken on Sark.Feel like an early night? What could be more decadent than snuggling up in bed with your loved one and a video of Casablanca? If the VCR happens to be downstairs in the living room, this may present a problem. "You lie there and relax, darling. I'm just dashing out for 50 metres of coaxial cable and some drill bits" - it does rather kill the moment.
With the Video Sender - no problemo. It cordlessly relays a signal from any audio-visual appliance to any TV within a given radius. The possibilities are endless. Got kids? Worried that the poppets are surfing the Net or playing Quake when they purport to be doing homework? Just hook up their PC to the Video Sender and monitor their exploits on the family 24-inch. Dinner-table conversation will never be the same. "Oh look,dear! Young Tommy's viewing the goat-fucking .gif again."
Given thin enough walls, neighbours too can enjoy the benefits of your cable subscription. So next time that git next door refuses to loan you his lawn-mower, you can emulate Jim Carrey and thrust your face up against his window, screaming "I gave YOU free cable TV!" Alternatively, should he have cable already, you could sneak into his property, connect the Video Sender to his telly and enjoy Premier League matches on your own small screen. Dammit, what's one conviction for breaking and entering when you're already using illegal equipment?
Despite minor niggles (the signal could be a tad stronger), the versatility of this device far outweighs any criticisms. Buy one today. Just don't tell the bizzies I said so.
Video Sender: £15. Bull Electrical: (01273) 203 500, email bull@pavilion.co.uk.
I check in and get handed a card with a microchip in it. I take the elevator to the 19th floor penthouse and when I wave the card in front of the doors, they open and the hall light comes on. This is no ordinary hotel room; it's the Cyber Suite at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles.When the Century Plaza opened in 1966 it was state-of-the-art, partly because it was the first hotel to offer colour TV in all rooms. Thirty years on, like any LA matron, it has gone under the scalpel to revive its sagging fortunes. Cyber Suite, perhaps the most high-tech hotel room in the US, is tricked out with more than US$75,000 worth of electronics.
Once inside, I tell Alexander, the Butler-in-a-Box, to set the room's ambience. There are Party Time, Romance and Good Night lighting and music settings. Voice recognition has a way to go, though: several times I request Party Time but Alexander gives me Good Night. How like life.
When the system works, music plays through the futuristic Bang & Olufsen BeoSound 9000. The TV, a SAIC Electronics plasmavision flat screen, is hooked up to a laser-disc player. In the bedroom is a Micron Millennium computer and a Panasonic TV with Lucas THX Surround Sound. NetTV, a high-definition 37-inch colour set, offers speedy ISDN Internet access and also has videophone capability.
From the main bedroom, I can control pretty much everything - from drawing a bath to changing TV channels - all via a Gyration wireless radio mouse. I slip on the VFX1 VR headset to immerse myself in Dark Forces until, completely nauseated, I make my way to bed. I effortlessly close the shades, dim the lights and turn off the music. I also flush the toilet - just because I can - and lie back for a low-tech kip.
Cyber Suite: US$2,000 per night. Century Plaza Hotel: +1 (310) 277 2000, fax +1 (310) 551 3355.
Pete Leigh runs his label from a hammock and obviously knows a thing or two about chilling out, so when news of a Chill Out compilation arrived, the public sat up and took notice - or it would have done if it hadn't been rather comfortable just where it was, thanks.Defined as "hip hop, techno, jungle, jazz-post-rock 'n' roll noiseniks funkin' it on a laidback tip", New Moves... (Abstrakt Grooves) proves that extreme chilling is no barrier to physical motion.
As well as featuring the usual Chill Out luminaries, New Moves... sees the debut of Talvin Singh's excellent Future Sound of India. Entropic.
- James Doheny
New Moves... (Abstrakt Grooves). Chill Out: fax (0171) 234 0092, on the Web at www.obsolete.com/carrot/chillout/newmoves.html.
Only a year ago you could get by on HTML with maybe a little Unix knowledge thrown in. Now it's essential to be at least conversant with a whole list of arcane technology - Java, ShockWave, CGI, PERL, SGML, VRML and the rest. Still, Web Publishing Unleashed claims, in Carlsberg fashion, to be "probably the only Web publishing book you will ever need".To cover such a wide area is difficult, if not impossible, even in 1,000 pages. So most chapters give you just enough to understand what things are, but not enough to actually use them. Macromedia's ShockWave is advertised on the cover, yet only rates one paragraph that incorrectly describes it as a "streaming" technology. And the book has nothing at all about the Lingo scripting language, though a whole chapter is devoted to VRML, which has yet to make much of an impact on the Net.
Web Publishing is best used as a resource; it lists every graphic-file type, Web browser (some really obscure ones) and HTML tag, as well as short pieces on video, graphics and audio software. Times change fast and the heady days of the Internet revolution may already have gone. The one-person start-up companies are evolving into groups of specialists occupying traditional roles - designers, programmers, copywriters and so on. A book attempting to cover all these disciplines as one task is already out of date. Maybe reading a book about how to "do" the Internet is missing the point completely. The best resource for learning Net skills is, of course, the Net.
Web Publishing Unleashed with PC CD-ROM, by William Robert Stanek: £46.95. Sams.net Publishing, on the Web at www.booksite.com/cgi-bin/wiz_in.
Apart from a disregard for women's rights and a "relaxed" approach to personal hygiene, what do recording studios and Viking settlements have in common? Central to both is a tradition of fantastic and (more often than not) drug-assisted storytelling - part entertainment, part information. But whereas the Vikings had sea monsters and the duller bits of North America to help while away the long night-hours, their modern-day counterparts tell fabulous tales of studio technology.Wondrous gadgets that afford those who wield them magic, mystery and fat advances have traditionally stayed firmly in the realms of fantasy - especially as regards advances. But now one of the thrice-told has crossed the Rainbow Bridge and is available in a computer shop near you. Previously known by its mythic name "The Box That Does Everything", this tool can not only replace every other piece of audio recording and processing equipment (apart from a mike and some monitoring), but also runs video games and even helps balance your chequebook. Its name is the Power PC, and all that's needed to activate it is an innovative new spell from German software wizard Steinberg.
Cubase VST (that's "Virtual Studio Technology" to you and me) opens the door to a new era of recording technology. This is particularly true given the increasing numbers of manufacturers making their equipment available on PCI boards and so doing away with tiny indecipherable screens, bulky metal cases and unnecessary transformers. Cubase VST gives you up to 32 tracks of CD-quality digital audio, 128 automated real-time Eqs, a complete and fully automated mixer with four effects ends and a virtual "outboard" effects rack, all in software: there's not a piece of additional hardware in sight.
Naturally it contains the MIDI recording facilities that we all know and love, as well as running QuickTime movies for film work, processing samples with the best of them and even generating some very nice-looking scores, should you ever feel the need to interact with the rest of the tribe. All that's needed for total studio domination is a copy of Galaxian, a coffee percolator and a roast ox curry. Skäl!
- James Doheny
Steinberg Cubase VST for Power Macintosh: £375. Harman Audio: (0181) 207 5050.
Credited as one of the most innovative figures of the instrumental hip hop scene, DJ Shadow's debut LP, Entroducing, has been eagerly awaited since his debut twelve-inch, Influx.Unlike his contemporaries, Shadow delves deep, introducing a kaleidoscope of harps, guitars, organs, film dialogue and found sounds from a library of dime-store vinyl, all backed with his amazing drum programming and record scratching.
Entroducing shows up most other "trip hop" acts for the shysters they are. To call this album the Pet Sounds of instrumental hip hop is perhaps hyperbole, but it hints at the innovation and artistic mastery that has gone into it.
Entroducing, by DJ Shadow. Mo'Wax: (0171) 837 2152.
As a hard-working reviewer, I take pains to lambast any game that doesn't meet the required levels of originality. Carbon copies, rip-offs, clones and the rest are all fair game for my verbal lashings. And then The Muppet CD-ROM comes along, a collection of some of the most basic games imaginable (witness Missile Command, Tic-Tac-Toe and even Doom) and can I let rip? Can I swipe my critical sabre at its unoriginal innards? Can I heck. It's too much fun.A mishap at the Muppet Labs has scattered the familiar felt puppets around the insides of your PC. Your task is to roam from one folder to another (travelling on the local data bus), take part in the aforementioned sub-games and rescue the gang.
Ordinarily a collection of basic arcade titles like this would earn either global condemnation or invoke tears of nostalgia, but thanks to the presence of the Muppets, everything takes a very different turn. The Doom clone, for instance, finds you in the Swedish Chef's kitchens fighting mad killer vegetables, while The Great Gonzo Presents Death-Defying Acts Of Culture has to be seen to be believed.
It helps if you're a Muppet fan, and if you are then you'll be hooked from the installation sequence, when your Windows 95 desktop appears to crash, only to be split asunder by Muppet workmen. With the added bonus of Muppet screensavers, wallpaper and Windows goodies thrown in, nobody over the age of 25 should be without it.
The Muppet CD-ROM: £39.99. Starwave/Ocean: (0161) 832 6633.
It's ironic that as technology sidelines the body we are increasingly obsessed with it. Cyberflesh Girlmonster, the latest CD-ROM from Australian artist Linda Dement, uses flesh, skin and unidentifiable internal organs in an attempt to relocate the female body inside the machine.Dement worked with the VNS Matrix cyberfeminist collective to gather body parts. About 30 women recorded a sentence or sound and donated a section of their body to be scanned (though to whom, I wonder, does the limp penis belong?). Dement used these "snapshots" to create composite bodies which she animated, constructing a randomised journey through the life of night-club stripper Typhoid Mary.
Dement says her intention is to use the bodies of real women to contaminate the technology of the "pure" computer, and to this end we are deprived of guiding interfaces and forced to fumble around inside heaps of mutating flesh. You make your way blindly through Cyberflesh Girlmonster, encountering clamped-back wounds with pulsing orifices at the centre; vulva-like openings leading one into another in an erotic laparoscopy; and abstracted collages of draped fabrics, bones and organisms. There are intestinal arrangements that beat like hearts or sway gently like Christmas decorations made by some crazed butcher.
But despite the fact that these images all come from real people, it's really quite bloodless. Maybe I'm just too gross, but when I click to make a fork move in and out, I want to see the blood, to probe the resulting wound, to hear the stabbed body really gasp.
However, this is more than just a meat experience. Text appears as quotes, diary extracts and printable stories, as well as medical information on the symptoms of typhoid itself. The intensity of the disease is certainly mirrored here as we dive deeper and deeper into Typhoid Mary's disturbingly painful world.
Cyberflesh Girlmonster CD-ROM for the Macintosh, by Linda Dement: Aus$60. Contact: Linda Dement, Box 429, Potts Point, 2011 Sydney, Australia. Email linda@real.com.au.
I'm in love. I thought it'd never happen again, but it has. My pair of Vexed Generation trousers are about the coolest thing I've ever been inside.Aaron had a pair first, and I had to try them on. The polar-fleece waistband does up with two sets of velcro and they're available in "performance fabrics" (padded denim, half wool/half silk, and knife-retardant nylon), so I rushed out and got my own pair, in white parachute silk.
They're washable, fire- and waterproof and impervious to my cat Lucifer's claws. They're also impossible to wrinkle. So my new trousers are staying on - at least until I get a really good offer.
Parachute silk trousers: £55. Vexed Generation: (0171) 287 3223.
The movie Twister - despite being the worst film adaptation of a game since Super Mario Brothers- has made weather sexy again. Never have so many exciting machines been named after nature's uncontrollable forces. Tornado: a big aeroplane for bombing people. Hurricane: a smaller aeroplane for bombing people. And Cyclone: a, erm, small black box with a wire sticking out the back and a little green light.The Cyclone Floppy Disk Drive isn't going to impress your mates, but plug it into a Psion 3a and you've instantly rendered this already indispensable palmtop a million times more useful. Quit monopolising your PC's serial port with Psion's fiddly interface; now you can save files straight to floppy disk. Programs will run directly from the Cyclone. And current utilities seem to have no trouble recognising it as another local drive.
With Cyclone, what you see is definitely all you get. But like the black-box flight recorder it closely resembles, it's a robust little beggar that performs its task with consummate ease. Highly portable, it allows back-up of important data even on the move. So when your Psion itself is sucked into the eye of a tropical storm - you're laughing. Hell, the drive mechanism even chunters to itself smugly. It knows you can't do without it. Truly, the first example of self-satisfied hardware.
Cyclone Disk Drive: £139. Purple Software: (0171) 387 7777, email purplesoft@cix.compulink.co.uk.
The latest addition to the haul of electronic door-stoppers which claim to bring us closer to the "excitement" of virtual reality in, gosh, our very own homes, is the Interactor, a strap-on backpack that promises to give computer games-players the physical experience of explosions, punches and air crashes via the magic of vibration.The Interactor resembles a deeply unstylish laser-tag outfit and works by converting bass sounds into "body-pulsating rhythms" that ripple through the backpack into the user's hunched, twitching flesh. Although the machine has a feature that supposedly filters out extraneous sound, it seems not to work. Thus the experience is more like playing your favourite video games while straddling a washing machine set to "spin" than actually being in Tekken - especially since you experience your own punches, as well as your opponent's.
While good for Doom-clones, for most other games the Interactor is actually pretty useless once the initial kitsch-value has worn off. However it's still a great half-hour of bowel-wobbling entertainment, and has potential for other uses. These range from the sordid (use your imagination) to the creative (plug into your Walkman and use as a mobile sub-bass). Despite allegedly selling 1.4 million units in the States, at £70 a pop the only people buying the Interactor will be either hardcore Quake-heads or people with "sucker" tattooed on their foreheads.
The Interactor backpack and cushion: £69.99 and £99.99 respectively. Aura Distribution: (0161) 973 0505.
Any day now we'll all have broadband access to the Internet from our living rooms. Yep, we've been hearing that for a while now. Trouble is, an awful lot of back gardens still need to be dug up. And don't think ISDN's going to save us anytime soon. But Net users in the US have a new choice, one not restricted to an earthbound infrastructure.The DirecPC service from Hughes Network Systems beams data to the home via satellite. Its Net access speeds ramp up to a sizzling 400Kbps: three times faster than ISDN, twelve times faster than your poky old 28.8 modem. The first time I downloaded a 1.5Mb file in under a minute - child, it was like the shades fell off my eyes. Hughes provides, at no added cost, some real-time video content (CNN Headline News, as well as finance and sports tickers) and with an MPEG card, you can watch your video in a quarter-sized window.
Hughes also offers a 1Mbps delivery package which is more than 20 times faster than its basic service. It originally thought this service would drive the platform and had planned to pump updated software onto every enterprise desktop overnight, but then the Web exploded, and it's standard Net access which keeps that order phone ringing.
However, fast access doesn't come cheap. For US$1,295 you get a little oblong satellite dish to install on an exterior wall, a satellite decoder built into a PC adapter card, and Windows software to handle installation, registration and technical support. Download up to 30Mb of data per month for $15.95, or 130Mb for $39.95, although, of course, you still have to pay an ISP.
So far, this fat pipe is one-way. Information requests (mouse clicks) are sent the old-fashioned way via modem and telephone lines. When a request comes into the Hughes Network Operations Centre, the data gets pumped through the satellite to your dish.
So while @Home procrastinates and Teledesic waits to clear liftoff, DirecPC is the fastest game on the planet. If you've got a Wintel box, 486 or better, running at 66MHz or faster, with a minimum of 8Mb of RAM and 500Mb free on your hard drive, you're ready to leave your lawns intact and start getting your data straight from space.
- Peter Sugarman
DirecPC: US$1,295 for start-up kit. Hughes Network Systems: +1 (800) 347 3272, on the Web at www.direcpc.com/.
Perhaps you Yanks have long suspected that a thread connects your childhood love of car rides in Mom's wood-panelled station wagon to your more adult pleasure in Vegas theme hotels and clunky virtual reality rides. That thread is ride theory, a discipline encompassing everything from amusement parks to mass transportation. Your entry into this entertaining new subgenre of cultural criticism is a black-and-white 'zine called The Journal of Ride Theory.JoRT tells the true story of working as a "vomit spotter" at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk and uncovers the secrets of Disney's Haunted Mansion. Issue one features the wonderful "Iconographic Palimpsest of the Magic Kingdom", a map of attractions and traditions that have been removed or altered over the years.
JoRT's obsession with amusement park rides has a purpose. They are the "more abstract and often more revealing counterparts" of everyday transport. Planes, trains and automobiles aren't neglected: Trevor Blake compares airports to the Internet, observing that both "push space-age technology through jet-age bottlenecks".
Despite its whimsicality and Gilliamesque fondness for mechanical wonderment and childhood, JoRT also tackles practical issues, such as why arcade flight simulators suck. All things Disney receive extra attention - did you know that nearly 50 visitors have died travelling to and from the Heliport? Neither did I, until JoRT opened my eyes.
The Journal of Ride Theory: US$2 per issue, $6 for a one-year subscription. JoRT: Institute for Post-American Studies, Box 2044, Portland, Oregon 97208-2044, USA.
Functionally, Sharp's ZR-5000 is simply amazing. Beneath its nondescript black case lies an organised person's paradise. The built-in word processor includes a spell-checker and is supplemented by a separate document outliner. The diary and a contact manager are both configurable and easy to use. The calculator and alarm functions are simple but effective. Most captivating of all is the notepad, which stores notes and drawings scrawled with a pen-like device. Thank the Lord, there is no attempt to recognise handwriting, which always seems to be more trouble than it's worth. To cap it all, you can print and fax directly from the machine, use infrared data transmission and, with a PCMCIA modem card, even go online. All this from two penlight batteries. Not bad.But - the size of the machine seriously lets all of these goodies down. None of its three text sizes lets you see a complete line of processed words on the 13-x-7cm screen. This makes writing and reviewing substantial documents simply impossible. Meanwhile, the keyboard, spread over roughly 16-x-7cm, is a nightmare to use: touch-typing, even for my relatively dainty hands, was a no-no.
I could be persuaded to organise my life with the ZR-5000 or its relatives (the ZR-5700 includes CompuServe access and a spreadsheet; the ZR-5800 also has an extra 1Mb of memory and a backlight), and type letters and longer documents on the move, but only if Sharp undertakes a brave and trend-setting redesign to an A5 footprint, which would raise both screen and keyboard to a practical size. Presumably the technology wizards would be able to maintain the unit's light weight, and might even make it thinner, so that it could still, technically, be labelled pocket-sized. Forget competing with Psion, buck the small-is-beautiful trend and you'll have a real winner here, Sharp. I'd stake my Filofax on it.
Sharp ZR-5000: £399.99. Sharp Electronics (UK) Ltd: (0345) 125 387 or (0161) 204 2633, fax (0161) 205 2638.
Interesting experiment. Play Josh Wink's Higher State of Consciousness (XL) at 10am in the office while your workmates are trying to have a key business meeting. Watch as the mad acid noises destroy their concentration! Marvel as their faces contort in blind rage! Goggle as they rush towards you, almost putting you off your trance-dancing!
"Blow your brains out!/Ec-stasy!". Just one of the cheery hum-along phrases you'll hear on Johnny Violent's Shocker (Earache), a self-described "gangsta gabba nightmare". The final track, "Burn Out", claims to run at a "world record" 20,000,000BPM. Making up for something, Johnny?
Slices o' funkystuff most enjoyed this month include the Music With No Name compilation (B&W), Shoot Tha Pump (Concrete), a kicking New York hip hop mix which, for some reason, isn't about guns and drugs, and The London Funk Allstars' superbly-titled Flesh Eating Disco Zombies vs. The Bionic Hookers From Mars (Ninja Tune). "Ruff like da fluff on ya needle". How well put.
Zeitgeist alert! The sequel to the soundtrack of the Playstation tie-in is out. Wipeout 2097 (Virgin) has music from FSOL, Photek, Underworld, Daft Punk and other techno luminaries. It's also a nail-biting thumb-twitcher of a game. Cool-and-boss!, as some senior wirelings have occasionally been known to remark.
Liz Bailey is chief sub at Wired.D. A. Barham is a TV and radio scriptwriter who doesn't like to admit to having worked on Celebrity Squares. Tiffany Lee Brown publishes Hot Geeks! and edits the Cyberculture section of Anodyne, a Portland, Oregon, monthly. She's assistant editor of Fringe Ware Review.
Matthew Collin is the author of Altered States, a forthcoming book on drugs and the dance culture.
Simon Crab is a Web designer and, like the Wired team, spends too much time in Southwark.
James Doheny is a musicologist and writer. He lectures in music and technology at London's Royal Academy of Music.
James Flint is a section editor at Wired.
Hari Kunzru is a section editor at Wired.
Daniel Pemberton did excellently in his A-levels. Well done, Daniel. Are you off to university?
Paul Presley gets up at noon, writes about computer games for money and watches too much Animatics. Jealous?
Chris Rubin lives and works in his own cyberspace in Silverlake, California.
Peter Sugarman is yet another toiler in the telecom vineyard and delights in the design of interactive bon mots.
Sue Thomas has just completed The [+]Net[+] of Desire, a novel set in virtuality. She runs the trAce Writing & Technology project at Nottingham Trent University.
Sandra Vogel is a freelance writer and information management consultant.