after four days of being in a night-club complex, its time to not be there to the end and have a relaxed final drink on the way to collapse in bed. and just as i leave, this crazy character pitches up to the vj clash. looks super cool, but surely it distorts your sight? kinda important to a vj?
but you could say the performances are secondary. what lpm is really about, and is titled as, is as a meeting space. here a user of niche-gamebody visuals software (mary-ann aka outpt) meets the actual creator of that software (clément, aka pikilipita, and actually has the opportunity of time and space for it not to be a “omg! hello! but i’ve got to go and its too loud here” conversation.
thorsten e-gruppe giving it some vb represent. there was a beautiful moment earlier on the hack-bench, where he was staring at his laptop screen for five minutes in a zen-like trance, finally happy that his visuals were generating just right.
so here is my parable about the value of a community focussed event like lpm: in a world where there are only so many screens for so many hours, and open submissions for vjs, you’d think video-chaos could be the only result. it certainly happened, with different outputs on adjacent screens hurting artist’s feelings and my eyes. thing is, we’re an adaptive species, we’re social. enter the community aspect: a group of peers who’d largely never met before the festival got together as a sufficiently large group so that individually they’d take all the screens for the vj clash, but collaborated on a joint performance instead. it rocked, they all got much more out of it than performing alone, and from the audience perspective it was a revelation: the vj set commanded the space, not least of all for actually having an intro, all screens breaking down in sync with the music, performers energised as a team and so on. total win for everybody; organisers, artists, punters.
to pick one example of good vj practice seen at lpm, 14c0 caught my eye with a strong graphical sensibility and focussed aesthetic. to cliché his output, there’s nothing revolutionary in audio-driven-maths-surfaces and mirrored architecture, but amongst the chaos of lpm it was really refreshing to see something dialled in and done right.
we should have some interviews filmed at lpm up on the vjtalks site, but it might take a while: they developed into hour long in-depth affairs, so there’s some editing to do, and in david’s case, a baby almost due.
it felt funny there being a quartz composer workshop, me not giving it, and the copy being beyond something even i could even have pumped-up (world exclusive! creator of the most widely viewed online video tutorial series!). but definitely a sign of progress in this world, so props to graham (centre back) and lpm. the class had a good time, and the word was spread: hopefully more interesting work will happen because of it.
this was perhaps the most inspiring moment of lpm for me. to set the background, i’ve been planning a entirely new paradigm of vj interface for years now, have a subversion repository with a project to that end, and have had many discussions with people like anton about how flightdecks-of-buttons suck and where are we in our quests to make something better. the short answer is: years in, far from anything demonstrable due to the overhead of having to write such a thing from scratch.
enter david, who was kinda freaking out about a hip-hop gig he’d been asked to do, as he wasn’t sure how to get the scratch control and ‘ting required. two hours later, he had a whole functioning gestural interface for vdmx using a tablet and the ultra-cool idea of tracing a line through a… er… control space along which pulsed the beat. a) genius b) rapid prototyped in two hours c) vdmx is cool because it can host qc, but the conceptual shift here is it works the other way round, a qc interface running in front of vdmx sending commands via open sound control.
awesome. watch the video: http://www.vimeo.com/5019365
the best bit was when one track just didn’t sound right. the singer, probably rightfully having a diva moment, stopped it and was trying to get it to his ear… meanwhile fabio / vjk suddenly looks busy, and a blink later the whole performance space is surrounded by flames. to continue the theme: thats live.
