A conservative reckoning of the number of books ever published is thirty-two million; Google believes that there could be as many as a hundred million. It is estimated that between five and ten per cent of known books are currently in print, and twenty per cent—those produced between the beginning of print, in the fifteenth century, and 1923—are out of copyright. The rest, perhaps seventy-five per cent of all books ever printed, are “orphans,” possibly still covered by copyright protections but out of print and pretty much out of mind.

Finding a legal resolution to the orphan issue is even more urgent in new media, where there are only decades, rather than centuries, to intervene before a work decays past any hope of restoration. An experimental program to grant individual licenses for the use of orphan works was launched last year in Canada, and may provide an example of how this can be made a standard feature of copyright law worldwide.

The one on the left is Alexander Graham Bell, and on the right is his dad Melville. The Bell family emigrated from Scotland to Canada, and Melville stayed behind when A.G. moved to the U.S. When AT&T was founded, Melville ran its Canadian branch, Bell Canada, which remained part of AT&T until its antitrust breakup in 1956.

As the title suggests, the book is mostly concerned with what our other energy options are as crude oil becomes more scarce. As a geologist, he wisely sticks to his area of expertise, covering natural gas, coal, tar sands, oil shale, uranium, and hydrogen–he doesn’t spend much time discussing solar, wind, or tidal energy. Clearly an experienced lecturer, Deffeyes spices up the dry science with digressions, like an anecdote about how he got access to good uranium mining records by plying the night computer staff with pastries and soda.

After enumerating the problems with most of the alternatives (for instance, tar sands have high capital costs and require expensive hydrogen to convert into more usable lighter crude), Deffeyes concludes that our most promising prospects for the near future lie with coal and uranium. Though they both have significant environmental costs, they’re both proven fuels that we have in plentiful supply.

When I was at CalArts, I took a crack at Maya again…version 5 this time. There had been a lot of improvement, of course–modelling was now much closer to sculpting out of blocks of clay, and not so much like gluing spheres and cones together. And you could paint right on your model, too, which helped a lot. But getting around in it still felt awkward to me. Mondi Anyango, another student at CalArts, is in the business of creating custom interfaces for his 3D work, including one made with a freeware motion-capture program called EyesWeb. But that sort of thing is pretty well beyond me. (And also, I guess, the Polar Express folks–take a look at this animator’s opinion on what they did wrong, complete with photo examples.)

…so recently I downloaded the demo of version 6, ready to grit my teeth and try again…and I got a wonderful surprise. Version 6 has full integration with a Wacom tablet. They’ve let you paint and sculpt with the tablet for a while now, but you still needed a mouse to get around the 3D space. Now you don’t. The difference is amazing. Something in my brain just sort of clicks into place.

And now, the best part–they’re starting to make Tablet PCs that run Maya.

Naughty By Nature should sue Microsoft. Let the big guys try and prove a negative in copyright law for a change.

“This October 1900 advertisement for the Gramophone emphasizes how 52 discs can be stored in the space of 8 cylinders.”

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Over the past twenty years, computers that record and play back video have become commonplace tools in the arts. Only in the past few years, however, have they seriously begun to infiltrate the world of live performance. The problem wasn’t that earlier machines particularly lacked for power and speed, but that they didn’t work reliably, as theatrical equipment must. An occasional breakdown is an acceptable price to pay when creating a pre-recorded video piece with an exciting new technology, but a similar risk is too great to take in theater. Thankfully, though, the situation has improved significantly, and plenty of new live performance software has sprung up to take advantage of it.

These programs may each take different approaches, but they all start with the same idea. Once you’ve created a series of video clips than you want to use as cues in a performance, you use the software to design the way they’ll be played back and controlled. Isadora, by Mark Coniglio, isn’t the most powerful of the lot, but it’s probably the easiest to learn and use, and also one of the cheapest. Maybe the most attractive thing about Isadora is that it’s designed with theatrical performance in mind, which distinguishes it from more general-purpose live-video-processing software. This restricts it in some ways, but it also results in a program that’s streamlined and oriented towards a single goal. For example, when you load in your video clips, they arrive in a “cue sheet,” and you can break them down into “scenes,” anticipating the way you’ll need to organize your material for a show.

Isadora’s basic design concept is similar to that of Cycling 74′s Max software series, which may already be familiar to theatrical sound and video designers. You create your desired setup by choosing objects from a list, and then draw lines that link them together to perform various functions. For example, to make a simple series of video cues, you’d draw lines between the “video player” object, a “counter” object that counts up from zero, and a “keyboard” object that will recognize when the space bar is pressed. The resulting setup will play the next video cue each time the operator hits the space bar–a basic theatrical need. More complicated Isadora setups can be created to manage fades, dissolves, and special effects, all triggered by the operator with the keyboard or mouse. If you want, you can also add elements that are not directly controlled by the operator, responding automatically to MIDI messages from another computer, or to live video and sound from the stage.

This last feature has particularly interesting implications; it allows the performer onstage to take control over sound and video playback, using only their own bodies. By linking a few objects together, you can make a video camera “watch” for movement above a certain threshold and trigger a sound in response, or you can make a microphone “listen” for sound above a certain volume and play a video in response. And because you can connect one object to any other object as you like, you can come up with simple, elegant tricks that work very well in a theatrical setting. For instance, in a 2002 CalArts performance, artist Carole Kim hid a microphone in a wooden cutting board, leading to an Isadora computer that would speed up a video clip whenever it picked up a very loud sound. As she chopped apples on the cutting board, the video drove rhythmically forward in time with each impact. In another example, a 2004 performance by Nick Fox-Gieg and Sean Clute pointed a camera at a blank pad of drawing paper, and had Isadora “key” video into the dark marks left by an ordinary black marker (the same process that puts an animated map behind a TV weather reporter). Onstage, a slight touch with the pen would create a large, fiery red streak on the projection screen.

It’s important to keep in mind that a computer running Isadora is significantly more expensive, more complicated, and more difficult to operate than an ordinary DVD player. But wherever the demands of theatrical video design are greater than simple playback, it can be an invaluable tool.

INT. POLICE STATION, DAY

     CERVANTES      But take a look at this.

He holds out a grainy black-and-white photo of a grinning fat man seated behind a desk. Youngblood and Napoleon stare at it intently. The face is hard to make out, but…

     YOUNGBLOOD      It’s Paperboys J. Mercantile! I knew it.

Napoleon shakes his head slowly.

     NAPOLEON (in fake British accent)      Don’t you worry, Chief, we’ll take care of that jolly old fellow all right.

     CERVANTES      Now, no rough stuff….