The Age of Surplus

We are now in the age of surplus. We have too much of everything really, there's piles of stuff everywhere. If we never made another table, chair or guitar we would never run out of these things. That's not all. We have squadrons of items just lining the sidewalks on clean up day in my neighbourhood. Favourites of the past, cast aside, seemingly worthless, only to be gathered up by mini van driving seagulls, diving on your old chest of drawers like a hot chip. Flogging it on E-Bay for twelve bucks. Go capitalism!

Same seems true of stuff we watch. Rehash after rehash adorns our screens. New money for old jam as we plow the twentieth century for it's forgotten public domain IP or the glowing embers of glimmering childrens programming of days gone by. Jungle Jim will return. Gilligan's Island will be back. Fritz & Felix the Cat haven't been done for a while either. Maybe they could duke it out to the death like Alien VS Predator.

So what's new and truly fresh? Cyberspace. The initial frontier of the externalization of our minds eye. You can have it all in Cyberspace, baby. You can be taller. You can create an Avatar with super powers and no problems. It is the ultimate escape machine. Another world within a world. A world of words and secret codes. A land of text and violence. Virtual sex and rugs and rock 'n' roll. You can have it all online. We'll deliver if you pay postage.

The light box celebration of the short attention span. A never ending realm of meaningless distraction. Isn't it fabulous? If we could just get the fucker to pay we could all give up our day jobs. Play World of Warcraft or Space Invaders for a living.

A zillion schemes float around every nano moment trying to beckon you in like micro bouncers out front of so many Cyber strip joints. "Roll up! Roll up! c'mon Smiley, in we go, see the amazing Karina and her curious carpet snake! Roll Up!  Just opt in here, Sunshine, give us an email address and all your dreams can come true."

Maybe they can. I know some people on the web are shovelling in the cash, and you know that too. 

Though has anyone really come up with the perfect business model? I have, but I'm not telling anyone. It is so simple and real and fun it would just be a monster success. I just don't get time to do it. I like the real world. Tree's and sunlight, the noise of the urban drainforest, with it's mysterious creatures roaming and rambling through it's streets and corridors. I can only put a certain amount of time in online before I get twitchy and need a little action. Know what I mean?

As a communication portal though, it is unparalleled. If we can just get our apple translators to work properly, maybe we can finally learn to speak to each other intelligently and realise that the separation is an illusion and that we are truly one. One heart, One mind, One Love.

I doubt that though, due to the general proliferation of fuckwits per capita. Could we give it a shake anyway? Might be fun.

Things are heating up.

With the advent of this micro world that now takes up so much of our time, time that used to be engaged with other non techno related activities. You wonder what people actually did back then. You know? back in the dawn of time, 1984 and all that. I was there and I am beggining to forget how I actually made arrangements with people. In fact how did anyone ever manage to find anyone or organise anything without mobiles phones?

Did we really go home and check the answering machine first? I can't remember. Frankly I don't want to remember. I like my nanopod and all things macintosh. As a scientific instrument makers apprentice in the early eighties I used to dream of toys like these. I used to name everything "pods" too, no joke.

Now finally, they are here. I can record a voice over, here at my desk and send it to you right now. For anything you can think up. That's so cool. I can work with fantastically interesting, intelligent, brilliantly creative people anywhere on earth, from right here on my comfortable Cappellini chair.  Hey, I can even work with unmitigated fuckwits! which is great too, because you don't need to be in the same room. That's just a small example of the astounding flexibilty that's available to us all right now, 247, on the acronym loaded zone we call cyberspace.

We have entered this new arena without a big bang, just the sound of a customized ringtone. I can do those too, if you want one, just click my face and follow the link. Love your work and it'll love you back.

Have another beautiful day in paradox.

Cyberavalon and the valleys.

I have decided that even though no one reads this blog I am going to add to it continually, daily over the next month. I have decided to describe the kinds of crazy things that happen in the voice over world. It is a world unto itself. Or in movie trailer speak "In a world, where everyone is speaking, what do you say?" The great booming La Fontaine is lost to us now, so where are the originals? The new distinctive characters. No one does Humphrey Bogart anymore. So what do we do? All I see is rehashing the old A/V haberdashery from the twentieth century.

But not everywhere. There is some amazing shit happening in cyberspace. Positive, ecclectic, interesting, did I say positive? As the cathode said to the annode. An electric world sits buzzing alongside our old world. It is the externalization of imagination in technology. We may currently interact with it in any way we can fit on the platform. So methinks only a large slushies worth off the iceberg, of an inrode, into this world, has yet been imagined.

Will we look back at this point of the c21 from c22 and say "wow, it was so obvious! how couldn't those primitives see it?" Are we at flat earth stage in our relation ship with Cyberspace? The new equivalent to the feature movie is yet to be. Experiential interactivity is attractive to artists & creators of content in all emerging genres. Especially alluring is it to voice over artists who trawl the web daily looking for an mp3 deal. Or a spoken word document. Or a twelve part animated series watched by zillions.

Anything. They all have studios too, i.e. they own a mac. Or portable studios, an iphone. Voice artists' works are scuttled around the globe via the interweb to over 100,000,000 people with active online bank accounts. Ready to consume. So what's on the menu? This menu has an event horizon that is continually re-emergent. The new C word is content. We gotta have content, we need to generate some cooooonteeeennnt. Everybody wants it.

So where is it? Who has it? To whom do we turn? To lead us from the flat earth primordial mists of Cyberavalon?

Voice over guys, that's right! Voice over guys. "Yeah, O.K. Do it again, without the exclaimation mark." I can do it, too. Check out my demo. I can record anything you want.

www.rmk.com.au/troy_planet

You hear us everyday yet you never see us and all we really want to do is to appear on TV or in Cyberspace. A Zillion downloads a day.

Check out this new clip I voiced with The Unicorn Hunters bit of a laugh, on you tube, for fun.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pv91URj2UoI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pv91URj2UoI