The realms of advertising and of public relations... are replete with instances of bullshit so unmitigated that they can serve among the most indisputable and classic paradigms of the concept. And in these realms there are exquisitely sophisticated craftsmen who... dedicate themselves tirelessly to getting every word and image they produce exactly right. - 'On Bullshit'. Harry Frankfurt, Princeton University

Anyone that has worked in advertising production, as I have, knows that not only can you polish a turd but it is main part of your business. To spend time on kerning a font that spells out some inane garbage about improved concrete pouring - that's modern art. When I was invited to electrofringe festival in 2002 that themed 'appropriation' I was concerned that I addressed something quite different to the cut and paste politics of most exhibitors. That technology was available to rip off other artists was not only stale but avoided some serious questions. My rules of engagement were designed to clarify these:

• No name dropping, no parasitism. Not 'plunderphonics'. This is not a review.
• Assemble the products with the same care and attention that I would use for a paying job. Love your work. Stealing is part of the mainstream. Also in my case, as I made bad television for profit, I was both source and remixer.
• Use the dreamwork to create new beauty. This dreamwork, where paradoxical circumstances are created - that is the real power of cut and paste techniques.
• Live video and sound, all sound from the sources. Possibility of dreadful failure.

I took a slab of television and culled a good selection of musically interesting bits. This first performance was given using a fairly primitive piece of Director code called MyTime. It allowed small sections of video to be 'bowed' from a larger QuickTime stream, triggered by computer keys. I performed this live and people laughed.

This became Turd Polish, and since then I have performed two more 'movements'. Twice the lucky folk of Newcastle endured this entertainment, then it was the good people of Wagga Wagga that got to tap their feet.

The Following Is A Paid Presentation

The Third Movement. 2006.

How this was done.

For each clip: record two hours of regional TV. Grab bits, find a nice loop. Grab other bits and chop them to match up, slide the loop back and forward while it runs to find the cute spot. (Doing this in Sony Vegas is easy, fluid and fun. In Final Cut you will enter a world of pain.) Render out as WAV and MJPEG. Don't use anything else. Now get all the collected bits and put WAVs and AVI in a folder.

Now it's a question of VJing the loops and keeping time - you could use any number of software combos. I found that LIVE and ARKAOS worked here, but LIVE has a few limits that will guide me elsewhere next time.

All the stuff here was fired off in real time and there are glitches where my computer could not keep up. Ignore them. I VJ'ed on party night at Unsound 06 really fucking loud and made people laugh.

Hungry

The Second Movement. 2004.

How this was done.

When I got invited back to electrofringe I did not want to do quite the same set. Instead I thought to take the dullest commercials and make them into gaudy pop music. So for example Sleep Doctor and Bunnings Warehouse turned into psychedelic disco. I wrote some pop tunes that included the original sounds and worked out a series of treatments through a video synthesiser to spice things up. These are two of the eight clips - I love the colours in Hungry Jacks (Burger King) baguette menu and hope that maybe Kylie could do a cover of this. The other is a small shop in Wollongong that panned a camera up a local girl - it needed more girls and so I added quite a few more, until it was raining school ball dresses..

Both these got an replay at Big Day Out 2005 on a screen about the size of Texas - alas not in a position where escape was impossible.

Mayhem

The First Movement. 2002.

How this was done.

As above - the main weapon was a piece of Macromedia Director called MyTime. It may still be around but was cantankerous even back then. Mytime could work through a single QuickTime 4 video from a given starting point in a number of interesting ways, defined by two main controls - how far to leap, and how often to leap. Pressing keys on the laptop keys calls up a preset. That was text based and woe if you moved any of the files around.

Although it was easy to do a live sound mix I had no way to mix VGA at the time and so used a simple knife switch to cut between sources.

Mayhem is bad art in that all the vision comes from a single source, but it's a real crowd pleaser. Nothing satisfies like explosions. I used this again at Big Day Out 2004 to frighten the little children as they entered the show grounds.

Deano steps methodically through the clip for some R&B dude as a series of fixed loops - it makes him considerably more funky. Up the end Dean Martin joins in to give the whole a bit of extra class.

It's your ABC takes the 15 second intro to Australia's national news service and dices it up into interesting sound events. This probably would only be evocative for Australians.