*spark

tresor backstage, 1am, get to the final compile of here+now for the 3am performance. there is never enough time in this world, and for experimental projects on the side doubly so. the dream of just hanging out at a festival…

having spent most of my time since arriving in berlin behind a laptop screen, it was time to unveil effort #1: a dvi mixer project presentation, keynote document with i’s dotted and t’s crossed. more importantly, for the swedes won’t buy a pig in a sack, the presentation was followed by a demo of - and hands on with - the new *spark d-fuser prototype.

pedro recorded the presentation, and i’ve comp’d it together with the slides and a quick top-and-tailing. watch it here: http://vimeo.com/12657671

thanks to prack for the photo, although i do look like a muppet…

pixelnoizz, *spark, an empty media card and a glitch machine: when its here+now, you’ll be part of it. an experimental performance workshopped as part of visualberlin festival 2010.

tomorrow week, i’ll be in berlin crossing my fingers for a performance based on only semi-tested technology and a lot of custom development that will happen once i’m over there. collaborating with david aka pixelnoizz, who so impressed me with his performance serpendity at lpm last year, and has since gone on to develop a whole suite of quartz composer based glitch stuff. which is just what a project based on a stream of photographs coming in from a camera roving around the venue needs. its also a collaboration-in-absentia with vade, as his v002 plugins are a big part of this, and he was there at lpm where the spirit of collaborations took hold amongst our group. and if he could, i’d wager he’d be over doing this with us in a flash.

there’s also an interesting aside in that the poster image for this was created by quickly knocking something up in quartz composer, and pressing the ‘re-glitch’ buttons until a nice combination popped out. so really, rather than having the static image, that composition should be the poster, quietly evolving by itself, glitching through the embedded images and whatever it finds in the graphics memory of everybody’s individual machines. not that that would be a ‘safe’ composition that would be allowed to play in a osx browser, but hey.

http://festival.visualberlin.org/news/herenow-friday-june-11-tresor/

the thomas dolby gig was a test for bringing in live photography as well as live video, and it was really rewarding to see it working. live video turned out to be appropriate for the songs, and then a slideshow of the recent photos for all the catching-up that was happening between songs. it was also good to run the screen and framing graphics at native res, giving strong, defined and intricate output, and see that completely mask - figuratively - the much lower quality PAL video feed.

special props to neil guy: testing the reception of the eye-fi card in his own 5DmkII, he took it apart and removed the shielding around the media slots!

thomas dolby had got back in touch saying he was going to have a reunion gig with his old touring band, and could i arrange some kind of live camera and screen for it? probably yes, but i was really interested by the idea for the show: somewhere in-between a masterclass and a candid first rehearsal as old friendships and old pieces were picked back up for the first time in years. and having a screen presence to really get in there on stage, almost like photojournalism, could be really illuminating, as well as having a camera picking out the fingering or whatever.

so i bought an eye-fi card, got in touch with avid photographer and dolby fan neil guy (whose photo this is), woke up on the day and went for it…

there’s no denying its like a flight deck of buttons, but props to vdmx’s configurability and plug-in friendliness. full playback control of both single screens and the dualhead spanning as quicktime sources, and a hardcore quartz composer patch wrapping a lot of custom openGL code, fronted by an interface builder laid out UI panel.

CDM, the blog about VJing and beyond that seems to have the best signal to noise ratio, has just picked up the live cinema documentary i’ve been deep in the production of since returning, and has said some very nice things:

Utter brilliance: finally, our friend toby*spark has documented live cinema and visualism with a medium that reflects the concept. Music and video are presented as frames within frames, manipulated and placed interactively. It’s part fiction and illusion, of course, but that won’t stop you from dreaming as you watch of interactive audiovisual software that did behave fluidly.

I could say more, but just watch it. The video says it all. I hope toby and others pick up on this ideal and develop it more – both this narrative presentation, and the imaginary software it conceives.

ego massaged, what then happens: vimeo staff pick! a fairly niche documentary gets picked up and — writing this retrospectively — daily viewing figures go from the tens to the thousands, likes start pouring in and really positive comments appear.

[on the writing this retrospectively theme, the next day intellectual hero of mine bruce sterling even posts about it. like being touched by the hand of god!]

the world likes it!

i met denis at the first vision-r, which i thought was the first french vj festival. not so he said: he had organised opus vj, down in marseille. schedules have aligned finally and i’m sky crowds and snow at gatwick to fly down there for opus vj #4. its also likely the last, denis wanting to move onto something more meaningful than what club contextualised vjing seems to lead to. definitely end of an era for a certain generation there: the first straight-up club vj set i’ve actually done in a year or two, i’m on a nostalgia voyage through *spark past myself: rocking it like its 2003.

thanks to mo, who also played, for the photo.

this friday i will be doing my vj thing together with mike, matthias and sarah of d-fuse, paul of labmeta, and mo of electrovision. we have the run of the london transport museum, who are opening late with a bar. its the first time we’ll have done something there, so it will be baby steps but i think there’s real potential with the victoriana building with the spatial feel their scale of exhibits gives, the covent garden location, and the real gem of their proper screening theatre downstairs.

Sounds of the Suburbs, Friday 6 November 2009
Tune in to a multi-sensory journey of light, image, colour and sound with D-Fuse, Labmeta, *Spark and Electrovision and their collaborative set - Urban vs suburban with VJing, audio visual performance and screenings complete with silent disco. Check out Designated Area artist Andy Morgan’s live illustration of a classic cityscape with a suburban twist.

http://www.ltmuseum.co.uk/whatson/126.aspx

photobank couldn’t have happened without novak’s curation of the opencity event. talking about our joint project kinetxt and things like memory bank led to the idea, and being given a development fee and the host event made it possible. they also did a great job in finding some local writers to be the masters of interpretation for the weekend, of whom alex is pictured above, scribbling around his notes for the final haiku-like selection.