Content

tagged: *spark

resolume outboarding

being asked to revive rbn_esc begged the question: will the software still run, can i even remember how to handle the complexity? it was an amazing milestone back in 2006 going from two laptops linked by midi to running the complete performance off one laptop. but there was a lot to that integration, and my license of ableton live was long expired. i wondered whether there might be a simpler way, now that resolume avenue effectively had ableton’s session view – in which rbn_esc’s basic structure and audio-visual links are laid out – and was built to be an audio-visual software from the ground up.

turns out, resolume does make this possible, and it’s great to perform from just one software. but, i needed to ‘outboard’ quite a lot of functionality. it’s great that’s possible – to the extent i was able to make my own render stack fed by the individual layers in resolume – but not all of it was me being fussy. the audio side has a long way to go: elastic audio, setting bpm from a column trigger, pre-fade / post-fade effect processing.

video: https://vimeo.com/148427383

diary | 10 dec 2015 | tagged: *spark · vj · rbn_esc · resolume · quartz composer

rbn_esc at av depot

was invited to perform ‘rbn_esc’ at vjlondon’s first big gig: ‘av depot’. to the organiser, it’s a piece that stood out from times past as something deeply audio-visual, considered and executed as one. so it was nice for the invite to be motivated like that, and it was nice – if surreal, somehow – to go through the process of resurrecting the piece, seeing what my former self had been up to, some ten years later.

photo credit: fabrizio d’amico

diary | 05 dec 2015 | tagged: *spark · vj · rbn_esc · live cinema · resolume

*spark d-fuser » osc and a/v tutorial

prompted by the vidvox feature, a guest tutorial video showing vj use of the d-fuser, complete with a demonstration of how you can link the d-fuser controller with your laptops for better audio-visual integration when performing as a group.

http://vdmx.vidvox.net/tutorials/using-the-spark-d-fuser-with-vdmx-with-toby-harris

diary | 05 apr 2013 | tagged: video-out · dvi-mixer · *spark · vj

b-seite » particle experiment

b-seite charge two: a performance. it’s good to do things away from the stresses of big theatres, to be able to experiment amongst your peers. and wonderfully, there was mesh, smoke machines and the very capable tim vis. there’s a one minute video on vimeo.

diary | 23 mar 2013 | tagged: particle · dfuse · *spark · vj · b-seite · live cinema

b-seite » *spark's stall out again

b-seite charge one: provoke vjs into thinking about the future of their practice, via showing the toys and talk about how i made it as a post-vj. this was a tidied up version of the talk i improvised at LPM last year, except that then the mixer was a final prototype, and here I was at a festival with two d-fusers as part of their tech setup. mixer’s i’d sold but had never seen, the boxes opened up by hands other than mine, in a country far away.

diary | 23 mar 2013 | tagged: titler · dvi-mixer · *spark · vj · b-seite · talk

*spark d-fuser » to retail

turning the dvi-mixer project into the *spark d-fuser product was very much an act of faith that peer demand meant something. but in no small part too, it was an act of hubris: i said i was going to do this thing, and i found i wasn’t at all happy looking at it fizzling away before the 2012 reboot. put those two things together, and you will likely decide to offer a pre-ordering window, and pledge to make as many are as ordered. it could be two, twenty, or two hundred; a loss at the low-end, a profit at the high end, but one way or another they were going to get out there.

but this is not how people expect to buy a product, nor is it how the world is set up to let you sell products. with daily enquiries from people too late to get in on that first run, december and january saw me getting to the point where the *spark d-fuser could become a retail operation. the face of this you can see in the completely reworked website pictured above, but the big development is partnering with a company to take on the logistics of the d-fuser as a retail operation. it’s a company i used for some parts of the original production run, that worked out well so they’re now my manufacturing partner with orders going directly to them.

all which is quite a preamble to a simple fact: there’s now an order button. go use it!

diary | 07 feb 2013 | tagged: dvi-mixer · *spark · vj

lpm'12 » *spark's stall: mixers, screenrunners, and making it as post-vj

in which i set out my stall, hawking the wares and ideas that have helped make my ‘post-vj’ life. half an hour, somewhat off the cuff, and probably ill-advised in parts. the bulk of the talk covers some of the backroom work and event life of the dvi mixer hardware and screenrunner software projects, but contextualised by how i. vjs should work towards exploiting the liveness possible in their practice, ii. which should lead to a more rewarding, less clichéd life, iii. and one more profitable and sustainable.

diary | 02 jun 2012 | tagged: titler · dvi-mixer · *spark · vj · live performers meeting · talk

festival of ideas » and out into the venue

…aaaaand, no more test data. we did so much more than can be shown in a still or two here, we even pulled a whole four minute finale piece out of the bag, video edit and all[1]. most of all, we did it, the audience made it… live!

Amazing event. Loving the Brain! #festivalofideas
Alice Murphy @almurph75
Thanks. We’re having a brilliant day too!
Accenture Ireland @Accenture_Irl

Over 2000 ideas have flown through ‘the brain’ @ @Accenture_Irl #festivalofideas.
Andrew Hetherington @a_hetherington
Wow & we’ve still got the afternoon!
Accenture Ireland @Accenture_Irl

Still buzzing a little after #festivalofideas yesterday. I think the crash will hit hard!
Carolyn Jones (Cj) @TheWidget
@TheWidget you guys were great. The Brain made #festivalofideas. Hopefully we’ll see you again some where, some time…
Eithne Harley @EithneHarley


  1. i’m learning: never has under-promise and over-deliver been so clear in my mind! ↩︎

diary | 09 feb 2012 | tagged: titler · *spark · vj · festival of ideas · engaging audiences

festival of ideas » animating around a 3d diorama of post-its and plastic

after a bout of yet more *spark screenrunner back-end building up – libPusher, ‘event’ document packages that encapsulate the media and graphic template, the all important enqueue new – it was onto what really set this gig apart.

visually, i’d always thought of the rendered output as 2d motion graphics, the made by movie re-working being the canonical example. but here the content wasn’t coming in from the virtual ether, or just signing who was in front of the screen, we were visualising the venue we were in, and it was laid out with yurts, with conversation threads and ideas coming from each of them. we needed a map, we needed a way of collating the ideas… and one-creative-process-later, i was loving the result: animating around a 3d tabletop diorama of post-its and plastic yurt board-game pieces, with polaroid snaps falling down on one side and A4 sheets sellotaped down on the other.

true 3d in quartz composer was a branch out into the unknown for me, and not without its developer terror moments finding out what it was happy with and what it wasn’t. bottom line, while there’s issues a-plenty with qc’s 3d rendering, couple it with sketchup for quick 3d modelling and globs of javascript to handle the data-scape, colour me impressed. it was captivating watching the animation unfold as the live content came in - and a proud moment.

diary | 09 feb 2012 | tagged: quartz composer · titler · *spark · vj · festival of ideas · engaging audiences

festival of ideas » channeled through *spark screenrunner

at the heart of the brain was the increasingly inappropriately named *spark titler, collating all the media and channelling it to the screen. it runs the screen, and gives just what you need to be responsive to the moment without breaking the visual illusion. so… *spark screenrunner?

whatever its grown-up name is, it monitored a fileshare for photos incoming from the caption-shot camera, illustrations and data-vis from ciaran and caroline’s laptops, listened to twitter accounts and hashtags, and, wonderfully, got updates in real-time from convotate, stef’s conversation annotation web-app. a technical shout-out here to pusher, the HTML5 websocket powered realtime messaging service, and to luke redpath’s objective-c library. and via the venue’s many-input HD vision mixer and a quartz composer patch or so more, we had treated feeds from above ciaran’s illustration pad, photoshop screen and whatnot.

it might be that you have to do this kind of job to grok the need, but i really think there’s something in *spark screenrunner, whether its just titling and transitioning between two presenters’ powerpoints or this kind of high-end craziness.

diary | 09 feb 2012 | tagged: code · mac os · quartz composer · titler · *spark · vj · festival of ideas · video-out · engaging audiences

festival of ideas » interfaced, interpreted, illustrated

clockwise from top left

  • ciaran lucas illustrating key ideas and playing with post-its and sharpies across the venue
  • stef lewandowski live coding
  • caroline beavon plugging the data into spreadsheets galore on the data-journalism tip
  • carolyn jones wrangling everything and everybody together
  • yours truly, at this moment dealing with the good problem of having so much data coming in, the visualisation needed re-scaling

the physicality doesn’t match up to kinetxt’s, but there are definite and deliberate echoes here. its not a big ‘visual rock band’ performing realtime story-telling from audience contributions, but perhaps released from the demands of that, we finally delivered on some of those original ideals of transforming a sea of contributed snippets into something meaningful and coherent.

photo credits matthew thompson

diary | 09 feb 2012 | tagged: titler · *spark · vj · festival of ideas · engaging audiences

festival of ideas » all feeding into 'the brain'

This is the Brain.

We are using experimental thought-casting technology to display in real-time the ideas and thoughts are emerging at this moment, inside the Hexayurts and elsewhere. Come join our artists and coders in drawing it all together: talk to us, doodle with us as we find the emergent themes, trends and stories.

diary | 09 feb 2012 | tagged: titler · *spark · vj · festival of ideas · liveness · engaging audiences

festival of ideas » and portraits taken of everybody, by everybody

if you’re going to gather all your staff for a one-off event, why not take the opportunity while you’re at it to make a company portrait? this being a boz affair, however, its not a case of a photographer marshalling the troops into one shot. rather, everybody is tasked with taking everybody else’s photo - cue each pair having that connected moment of “oh, i don’t want a disastrous photo of me: do as you’d like done to you”. and, this being this, we also had them caption themselves with their favourite place to think and suchlike, and that camera and app was also wirelessly linked to our setup.

diary | 09 feb 2012 | tagged: titler · *spark · vj · festival of ideas · engaging audiences

festival of ideas » in those yurts, 200 conversations

and why the twenty hexayurts? they were there to partition off the main business of the day: facilitated conversation in small groups. some form of internal market had been conducted in advance to arrive at the best 200 suggestions for topics, and the proposers were there to host each session. suffice to say, there were going to be a lot of ideas. and this is where we came in: could we capture them? visualise them? archive them?

“we” were stef and i, reforming our rave-era visuals partnership in our decidedly more rarified present – he a webby winner, clore fellow, top five of the observer future 500 (need i go on!?), and me deep on a journey of reorienting live events from the passive observation of ever more spectacle to something that builds on the character of liveness as i’ve experienced it, that exploits the potential of here and now of us together.

stef told me of the blue-sky conversations he’d had with the event’s mastermind, inspired arts producer boz temple-morris who had earned the trust of a corporate client to really explore what their events could be, and more importantly be for. this time, it all seemed to be around yurts, facilitated conversation, and the event being precisely the opposite of a bubble – the lynchpin of an on-going process yes, but that on-going process very much the thing.

a day or two later, stef had taken a conversation annotation web-app from idea to prototype. this was serious, and so i introduced stef to ford vj, kinetxt and how my *spark titler was changing the game of running screens at organisation’s events. there was something big and interesting that we could do here.

in the photo above, there’s a facilitated conversation in full flow, and on laptop the stef’s corporate-IT grade version of that original prototype[1]. most importantly, its enmeshed with all the other instances of the web-app in the room, and – drumroll – with our setup.

hardening and security is one thing, just don’t talk to stef about last minute requests for IE8 support on XP…


  1. ↩︎

diary | 09 feb 2012 | tagged: titler · *spark · vj · festival of ideas · engaging audiences

festival of ideas » 900 people and 20 hexayurts

a big convention centre, not so much sleep, and it’s barely dawn: back to high-stakes corporate events. there’s a good reason for taking some time out from the phd to be here: this is interesting, innovative stuff, embracing what a live event can bring, and doing it a long-term context of strategic and organisational renewal.

the photo – credit matthew thompson – shows the bulk of those people, and a smattering of the twenty hexayurts it was their first task of the day to build.

diary | 09 feb 2012 | tagged: titler · *spark · vj · festival of ideas · engaging audiences

*spark titler v3: live brand video [out]

sane control of the media and scenography needs to be partnered with the animation mechanics to handle it all gracefully. luckily, thats what i do – and what tools like quartz composer enable – and i had the best materials to work with in the form of made-by’s brand video. it’s great. watch it, and you’ll also see how perfect it was to be remade into a never-ending animation with dynamic content interspersed with the hand-animated elements.

best of all, now i have the interface and back-end largely worked out i can concentrate on creating bespoke animation for future gigs: everybody wins.

diary | 14 oct 2011 | tagged: code · mac os · quartz composer · titler · *spark · vj · MADE-BY

*spark titler v3: live brand video [in]

how did joanna run the screen? with *spark titler v3: no longer a now-and-next titler, more the means for a live brand video. into an animation template go tweets, titles and all sorts of media, and the user is presented with a sane way of wrangling that media and controlling the output.

the app as a whole is mac-native in the best of ways, with the behaviours a naive user might expect. i’m especially proud of the interface, which takes the standard elements and extends them where necessary[1], all to be used without fear of killing the output or screwing up the content.


  1. suffice to say i now know a lot more about subclassing cocoa views than i used to: say hello SPKTableView and SPKArrayController ↩︎

diary | 14 oct 2011 | tagged: code · mac os · quartz composer · titler · *spark · vj · MADE-BY

*spark titler v3: for them, not me

thats my laptop, but not my hands. if i can write software to make it more fool-proof for me to drive big, important screens, could that same approach empower organisations to drive their own screens?

if you catch me while i’m thinking about that with a beautifully animated video explaining your work transforming the ethics of the fashion industry and an annual event coming up, am i going to suggest working with me on a journey to find out? of course.

and so at mady-by’s annual event, it was made-by’s joanna who knowing the people, the running order, the messaging, made the screen reflect that.

diary | 14 oct 2011 | tagged: titler · *spark · vj · MADE-BY

americas cup » the hoe

i’d just rediscovered the ‘re-booted’ america’s cup, when what-are-the-chances I get a phone call to vj at the plymouth event. given i was considering taking a day-trip there any way, certainly worth dusting off the old vj machine. and what a venue to play… glorious weather, fantastic coastline, screen bang on top of a grassy cliff.

diary | 14 sep 2011 | tagged: *spark · vj · americas cup

americas cup » six hours and 200GB

providing visuals from 5pm to 11pm was somewhat daunting given i’d pretty much chucked away all my random-gig vj clips a year or three back, they wanted it all america’s cup themed, and oh: 1080P.

well, nothing like a bit of fear to rise to the challenge: rocked it, aided and abetted by

  • cuts culled from 200GB of america’s cup footage downloaded from their broadcast server
  • a few choice compass rose type animations
  • some custom quartz composer patches
  • a live stills camera
  • the dvi mixer pumping out 1080P into their system, but the laptops only working at the (good chunk lower) actual resolution of the screen.

wish I had got a photo of the big americas-cup cuts glitch mash-up i had going on, but then again, it was all about how it moved with the music.

diary | 14 sep 2011 | tagged: video-out · video-in · vdmx · quartz composer · *spark · vj · americas cup

americas cup » san pedro to plymouth

sometimes the simplest things are the best. got to debut the set made from filming san pedro docks earlier in the year. constant side-scrolling cut-up by the audio transients; motion graphics perfection with the old mirror trick.

diary | 14 sep 2011 | tagged: *spark · vj · americas cup

*spark titler v2

and how did those live graphics make it to the screen? i sat down and took the idea of *spark titler from sheep music and remade it as a fully fledged cocoa+quartz composer application. the idea being it can’t muck up: animation designed to gracefully transfer from state to state, participant names pre-filled in a drop-down menu, no mouse cursors on the output, text fields that commit their edits on pressing take… the little details that make-or-break a live application. oh - and it exports its title animations as quicktimes for integration with playback pro.

diary | 04 sep 2011 | tagged: code · mac os · video-out · quartz composer · titler · *spark · just tell the truth · vj

av:in contributor

  • What is AV:in — Introduction To Audiovisual Arts
    Audiovisual Culture is rapidly gaining momentum with new technology and information resources quickly aiding the drive. In 2010 more and more people are seeking and acquiring the skills required for audiovisual production and interactive creation. This global movement is spreading into screens, phones and other commercial applications as well as providing a rich source of culture for digital communities inspiring new trends in design and art.
    AV:in is a new media course for this market. We have designed AV:in as a comprehensive online educational program for audiovisual studies. It follows a trend of regular workshops and lectures and professional training, which have continued to grow in popularity all around the world on the subject of audiovisual production and performance.

…and it has me in it, as d-fuse we filmed a pro-tip section and my live cinema documentary is part of the curriculum.

http://audiovisualacademy.com/

diary | 15 oct 2010 | tagged: *spark · vj · dfuse · live cinema documentary

vbfest » here+now final compile

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…

diary | 11 jun 2010 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · code · mac os · video-in · visual berlin · herenow

vbfest » dvi mixer presentation

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.

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

diary | 11 jun 2010 | tagged: *spark · vj · visual berlin · dvi-mixer · talk

in development: here+now

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/

diary | 03 jun 2010 | tagged: herenow · *spark · vj · visual berlin · liveness

thomas dolby and friends tech

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!

diary | 28 feb 2010 | tagged: *spark · vj · vdmx · video-in

thomas dolby and friends

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…

diary | 28 feb 2010 | tagged: *spark · vj

particle dualhead geek shot

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.

diary | 18 feb 2010 | tagged: quartz composer · particle · dfuse · *spark · vj · vdmx

vimeo staff pick!

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](http://vimeo.com/channels/staffpicks#9065736)! 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](http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail717.html) of mine bruce sterling [even posts about it](http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2010/03/a-documentary-on-live-cinema/). like being touched by the hand of god!]

the world likes it!

diary | 05 feb 2010 | tagged: *spark · vj · live cinema documentary · qmat · live cinema

opus vj » *sparkin' it up

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.

diary | 19 dec 2009 | tagged: *spark · vj

london gig alert: urban vs suburban

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

diary | 03 nov 2009 | tagged: *spark · vj · rbn_esc · dfuse

photobank thanks

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.

diary | 01 nov 2009 | tagged: *spark · vj · photobank

photobank debuts

after a month with a heavy dose of xcode on the side, its up to newcastle clutching two fledgling applications to marry with newcastle library’s digitised photo archive, a bunch of iMacs clustered around a 1080P plasma screen, and the memories of the visiting public. it was a heavy weekend of being there with the installation by day and further coding by night, but out of this a very real and user tested photobank has been born.

as the latest manifestation of my personal practice, and something that will very likely become part of my PhD research, there is much more to say than a quick diary post can stretch to. so the full project page will come, i guess in the meantime its easiest to point the lineage to kinetxt which was - with novak - my first attempt at creating an environment where layers of interpretation are encouraged, and they in turn add up to something interesting and unexpected. photobank tries to address this in a more focussed and repeatable way, starting with a base of media archive, and ending with a flow of illustrated short verse.

at the nuts and bolts level, its a full screen photo browsing and annotation application that can be run on many computers for mass interaction by the public, which are networked to a central computer holding the photo archive and running the central display, which acts as both an attractor for the public, animating through the archive and latest annotatations, and as the writer’s tool for creating and showing mini-narratives by selecting six photos and their annotations, and handwriting short verse around them. all written as native mac osx applications using objective-c/cocoa and quartz composer.

diary | 01 nov 2009 | tagged: quartz composer · photobank · *spark · vj · code
- mac os

chase & status » plan b shoot

finally, its plan b for the rip-it-up pieces and their new single ‘end credits’, taken from the upcoming film harry brown. think gran turino but with michael caine instead of clint eastwood, but from the opening minute that i’ve seen, hard hitting would be an understatement.

diary | 28 aug 2009 | tagged: *spark · vj · light surgeons · chase+status

chase & status » takura shoot

third up, takura for three tracks. we’re in double shoot mode here, flicking the lights and filming in HD and nightshot going for some frenetic cuts when it gets to post.

diary | 28 aug 2009 | tagged: *spark · vj · light surgeons · chase+status

chase & status » jenna g shoot

onto jenna g for [in love]. this started off all warm orange fuzz, and ended up barely blue. strange how things evolve sometimes.

diary | 28 aug 2009 | tagged: *spark · vj · light surgeons · chase+status

chase & status » kano shoot

into the studio with chris allen for a day’s shoot of chase & status vocalists. i’m pulling together the visuals for the chase & status autumn tour for the light surgeons. this was the first step: film four vocalists over seven tracks in one day. kano up first, though without the against all odds afro.

diary | 28 aug 2009 | tagged: *spark · vj · light surgeons · chase+status

são paulo » rbn_esc in print

reservations about file apart, its damn nice seeing yourself in print. their catalogue is truly something to behold.

i was also interviewed by mtv before my performance, talking briefly about rbn_esc and some of the ideas of live cinema. that hasn’t found its way to the internet as far as i can see, although somebody does seem to have uploaded some filmed excerpts: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71MDtdPm3bY&feature=related

diary | 29 jul 2009 | tagged: *spark · vj · rbn_esc · file · live cinema

abertura3 » *spark/d-fuse noodle

abertura was the first time i really got to throw myself into a ‘particle-esque’ performance, using the d-fuse content with the live setup i’d created. as a warm-up for são paulo, it was a great one: the music and visuals really came together to give an intense show in the relatively small space of abertura’s hall, it really gave me a confidence boost.

i captured five minutes worth from abertura’s documentary footage, and its on vimeo here: http://vimeo.com/5731407

diary | 19 jul 2009 | tagged: quartz composer · particle · dfuse · *spark · vj · abertura · vdmx · live cinema

electrovision: the *spark d-fuser

as a warm-up to d-fuse’s trip to brazil, we performed a test of the new live piece “particle” at electrovision. it definitely felt like a test, as things were plugged in and loaded up to be used in anger in for the first time, and while i wasn’t so happy creatively with the form this first rendition took, that is secondary to what happened there: the dvi-mixer i’ve been dreaming of for years - and that my work turning transforming d-fuse’s live shows has been predicated on - worked as simply and unobtrusively as it should. all the sophistication and craziness lives in the laptop, where we have creative control as far as we’re wishing to configure and code, and we have hardware reliabiliy to ensure we can a) guarantee solid output signal to the projectors no matter what is going on with the laptops and b) mix together and tag team the performance between two visuals laptops.

i am working on getting this out to the vj world for a limited run, and a full announce will follow. it will cost somewhere in the range of a $1000 - £1000 , input and output VGA and DVI, and allow you to do what nothing else will: dualhead at 1600x600, triplehead at 1920x480, HD at 1920x1080@60Hz. it is based on a conference bit of kit that i have developed a controller for, and that i hope to get some extra vj-love put into its firmware. the trick to both those goals is to aggregate our demand into one order big enough for a production run of the controller to be made and for it to be worthwhile for the developers of the conference kit to spend some time enhancing it for our uses. so expect a full announcement once everything is locked down and orders can be taken.

diary | 18 jul 2009 | tagged: dvi-mixer · dfuse · *spark · vj · electrovision · particle

ofWorkshop » open frameworks is awesome

…and i use the word awesome precisely, for making my first application was an awe-inspiring experience. i could make a better screenshot, i could work it untill i really do have plasma pong, but ffs it took two hours for a standing start! never having done any c++ let alone work with a fluid library before, let alone… yeah, i could go on. possibly the better route is just to try and sample some of my communication in the 24 hours since then…

twitter #openframeworks workshop: coded pong: http://img.ly/VN , got MSAFluid working: http://img.ly/VM . now to combine

twitter #openframeworks awesome awesome awesome. an hour for pong, ten minutes for the demo, fiften to combine: http://img.ly/VQ

› was going to come down to that, let me know how it is
btw the workshop was great, or rather the workshop was a decent enough workshop (memo is a great teacher, btw) but OF is really really great. i think i probably got a lot more out of the workshop that some others, as i’ve spent so much time coding this last year or two i was able to dive straight into c++ and OF, but really OF comes highly recommended: quick to code, fast to execute, and vast in its scope. if you can do processing, OF is pretty much processing for grown-ups.

› so how you finding OF? you know you can just recompile it for the iphone…
simply that i could write that from a standing start in a weekend OF workshop blows my mind.

› dude, are you saying what I’m thinking you are saying? Create a layer for openframeworks -> QCplugin!?!? so you can compile an openframeworks app as a QCPlugin!? cos that would be ace! lets do it!!
i am saying something like that =]
you either create a OFRenderer class that is patterned on QCRenderer, or yeah, you somehow get an OF app to impersonate a QCRenderer or QCComposition.
either of which would blow the doors off. OF wrapped and frame-driven from cocoa (ie. NSOpenGL, CV display link), coding rendering pipelines that go through both OF and QC, OF as plug-ins for all QC enabled apps… la la la le la shazaam.

note - a zip of the project is attached, frozen at the minute it first was alive as a working plasma pong. so its not to be taken as an example of coding best practice, but just to illustrate what two hours can get you. space bar to start, a/z and k/m for the paddles.

diary | 15 jun 2009 | tagged: *spark · vj · ofworkshop-ldnjun09 · open frameworks | downloads: TBZ-PlasmaPong-OFLondonJune09.zip

ofWorkshop » "amazing programmers now"

i’m part of a open frameworks workshop, along with some very interesting other people. this means during a lovely sunny weekend in london, i’m geeking out in a dark room learning OF. as a lot of people there haven’t spent the past year or two getting deeper and deeper into code, it starts with the basics: “int r,g,b; // could be on separate lines but we are amazing programmers now”.

diary | 13 jun 2009 | tagged: *spark · vj · ofworkshop-ldnjun09 · open frameworks

dual core, dual drive. high def, laptop style...

lost the dvd drive, moved the hard disk into its place, and installed a super-fast solid state drive in the original’s slot. as philikon says, “you can have your cake and eat it, too. warp drive and good old V8 muscle.”… this not only makes the system “biblically fast”, but now means i can pull multiple high-def streams for vjing without the laptop breaking a sweat. more than that, with genuinely instant random access, i should be able to scratch, stutter, trigger to my hearts content. so… time to play!

diary | 27 may 2009 | tagged: *spark · mac · vj · i/o

mapping'09 » kinetxt › the performance, part two

that was the positive, here’s the negative. well, it was an outdoor performance, and it rained. which sucks, and its a shame that because of rain cover the audience couldn’t crowd around us performing it, seeing the creative hub and being able to join in with our text clients and general heckling to do this idea or that. but that is life.

what i feel is the real shame, is that despite the promise seen in rehearsal the performance didn’t pick up on the storytelling thread, which is perhaps one of the consequences of having to start earlier. this was to allow the other (truly open-air) act the chance to perform once the rain had passed, and it meant we started in sudden chaos rather than well briefed order, and with me dealing with an unpaired wii-mote that refused to play nice.

similarly because of the earlier start, we didn’t get a slot to properly tweak the canvas to the wall either, so the text was too small for the amount of relief texture we were projecting onto, and our texts weren’t exactly aligned with the wall edge… and so on, its easy to get hyper-critical about these things when you’ve so much time invested in it. i should say that the tech backing was fantastic - shout out to fanny - with the projectors being a dream to use, so bright, crisp and colour accurate.

however, the image quality speaks for itself, so i should stop whining and wait to see it objectively through the footage shot by the mapping documentation team.

diary | 14 may 2009 | tagged: *spark · vj · kinetxt · mapping · name · novak · live cinema · live illustration

mapping'09 » kinetxt › the performance, part one

after three days of prep, the performance. to quote the internet:

“It is a beautiful project and one that brings together three local illustrators and a poet for the festival performance. Despite some last minute technical difficulties - including rain forcing the start time forward by almost two hours, the show delivers with some moments of true beauty and the six busily active artists and live soundtrack make for an absorbing spectacle.” - lucy benson

lucy wrote that for friend sean healy’s skynoise blog and publication back in oz. so not exactly impartial, but on the flip side that should be in print!

diary | 14 may 2009 | tagged: *spark · vj · kinetxt · mapping · name · novak · live cinema · live illustration

mapping'09 » kinetxt › white on black

from rehearsal to the performance proper. one of the challenges for us of projecting onto a building rather than a cinematic screen is that you don’t have the clear frame for your ‘canvas’, rather you’re just lighting up bits of a facade: type in the void. this gives a problem for making an art-pad the backdrop of your canvas: you don’t want a bright white rectangle somewhere on your building, you want the lit pen-strokes floating in the wider surface. so here we are for one part of the performance proper with our illustrators experimenting with black paper and tipp-ex (correction fluid) type pens.

diary | 14 may 2009 | tagged: *spark · vj · kinetxt · mapping · live illustration

mapping'09 » kinetxt › tiger cut-outs

and here is the kinetxt cut-out submitter app, one button to make the tethered camera shoot and load it into photoshop, and the other to drop the photoshopped image onto for submission to the kinetxt canvas.

i was really happy having created it the night before, a few delays and furrowed brows but essentially a few hours work to make just what i wanted. this was, however, until i saw the artist’s laptop it was to sit on, which didn’t quite look right. "ah… its running tiger. and this is written using leopard obj-c grammar and frameworks. ‹expletive›”. cue legacy re-write on the morning of performance.

diary | 14 may 2009 | tagged: *spark · vj · kinetxt · mapping

mapping'09 » kinetxt › kitchen coding

its the day of the performance, and we set kinetxt up in one of the communal rooms of îlot 13 to rehearse.

we do a few ten minute tries, which really give some hope that this could go really well. my favourite memory is seeing one of these start with the outline of an island, and the performance takes the form of a kind of evolving map of utopia. that, and seeing the difference one of the innovations for this performance makes, the ‘cut-outs’ which allow the illustrators to draw characters and tweaked-through-photoshop-whatevers into kinetxt. having pen drawings cut-out and then soft-shadowed with vibrant colours, composited into the kinetxt canvas really opens things visually.

though, of course, it can’t always be rehearsal: kitchen coding called.

diary | 14 may 2009 | tagged: *spark · vj · kinetxt · mapping

mapping'09 » kinetxt › the themes are set

one of the ideas of kinetxt is starting off from a blank sheet of paper, story unwritten, and the way I see it one way of increasing the quality or interest in the resultant performance is using the context of the performance as catalyst or reference for whatever emerges. so mapping gave us a great hand in programming us as an outdoor projection in the courtyard of îlot 13, a place with lots of history and spirit. we were projecting on the back walls of one of the blocks, which instantly gives ideas of x-ray views through to the people living there, and the whole complex is a kind of utopia, being a former squat that came to an agreement with the city council, and instead of the standard cycle of demolition and profiteering redevelopment seen world-over, an association was formed to develop the block in the interests of its inhabitants. and what a wonderful job they’ve done, it is quite the urban oasis, both smart and informal.

and so we met there, talked through the history, looked at the wall we were to project on, doodled themes we could explore and so on, captured a little by the photo above.

diary | 12 may 2009 | tagged: *spark · vj · kinetxt · mapping

mapping'09 » kinetxt › meet the artists

after arriving at this year’s mapping festival and having the plan-the-week meeting with andrew, its the next day and we’re meeting the artists. mapping have curated seemingly a dream-team for us, which really fits the idea we proposed of emphasising the idea of a ‘band’ coming together to tell a story. we’ve always run kinetxt as a longer-form audience-led event/environment, and for this performance we’ve brought it down to 45 minutes and we’re really hoping to somehow create the equivalent of a band performance, but instead of guitars and drums, we have illustrators, a poet, and a backing setup of me, andrew and james of novak, and lots of laptops with lots of custom code and things hanging off them.

introducing the band -

  • heike fiedler, a ‘realtime poet’
  • thomas perrodin, an illustrator and comic-strip artist
  • themes.ch, aka thomas and mathias, already well versed in live illustration as projections, and photographed above checking out our in-development calligraphy set-up.

and as a footnote, preceeding that meeting with andrew came two tweets from me: “writing lists a week before a performance is always scary” and “realising its much less than a week to the performance: even scarier”

diary | 10 may 2009 | tagged: *spark · vj · kinetxt · mapping · name · novak

SPK-Calligraphy v1.1

…and here is the bugfix release.

  • fixed purge last object exception
  • removed unused boilerplate methods
  • added zPos to animator
  • ordered ports (arrange in @dynamic line)
  • fixed x,y mis-patch in sample qtz file

diary | 07 may 2009 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · live illustration · vj · code · mac os · release | downloads: SPK-Calligraphy-v1.1.zip

SPK-Calligraphy v1.0

KineTXT has spurred many custom plug-ins, generally either esoteric or usurped by kineme or the next major release of QC. the latest however probably deserves to see the wider light of day, and so here is a snap-shot of it having just passed a notional ‘v1.0’. its two patches designed to capture and render handwriting and doodles from a tablet, but they should be pretty useful to anyone who wishes for some form of digital graffiti in their QC compositions.

if you want anti-aliasing, you’ll need to leave the QC app behind unfortunately, but if you can run without the patching editor window its just three lines of code to add to the qc player sample application and voila: this plugin and all 3D geometry become anti-aliased. vade worked it all out and outlines the territory here: http://abstrakt.vade.info/?p=186.

if you want different nibs, pen-on-paper-like textures or suchlike… well i have my needs and ideas, but the source is there. share and share alike!

the plug-in is released under gplv3, and is attached below.

diary | 28 apr 2009 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · mac os · vj · code · release | downloads: SPK-Calligraphy-v1.0.zip

kinetxt handwriting dev

a little sneak peek of a quartz composer plug-in in development: spk-calligraphy, a set of patches for recording and playing back 2d strokes. the basic patch is equivalent to the kineme GL line structure patch, but draws the line as if it were a chisel nib at 45° and with a flow fade-out. the other two are what is going to enable a big part of the next kinetxt development: handwriting to go alongside the rendered text.

diary | 27 mar 2009 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · live illustration · vj · code · mac os · kinetxt

rbn_esc on home turf

a nice performance i think: not that i could see the screen or a proper monitor, but everything largely worked as it should, and its not like i haven’t done this before. even on that, though, still many vj types who hadn’t seen it, even on home turf.

diary | 12 jan 2009 | tagged: *spark · vj · rbn_esc · electrovision · live cinema

narrative, anti-narrative, non-narrative

to bristol for the “narrative/non-narrative/anti-narrative conference” held at the the watershed to follow on from the encounters film festival. never fails to amuse me that the watershed, forever home of the exploratory in my child’s head, is still relevant to my life.

while i am placeholder blog post mode, highlights to be elaborated are

  • keynote by: stephen volk, film and television scriptwriter
  • duncan speakman, sound artist
  • faith collingwood, development producer, bbc radio drama
  • hazel grian, film-maker, including web-based drama.
  • better things by duane hopkins

diary | 24 nov 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · pervasive media studio

imageradio » kinetxt creatives

the creative hub. props to all involved: you can see the energy.

diary | 30 oct 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · kinetxt · imageradio · live cinema · live illustration

imageradio » kinetxt tour

with imageradio’s opening speeches over, we see crowds come through

diary | 30 oct 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · kinetxt · imageradio · live cinema

imageradio » kinetxt starts

6pm: kinetxt is go. and the other innovation: its recording itself, so it can spend the rest of its time at the imageradio exhibition iterating through the opening night’s perfomance.

diary | 30 oct 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · kinetxt · imageradio · name · novak · live cinema

imageradio » lampcam innovation

two anglepoise lamps on the desk, smart and suitably adjustable, but light only seems to be coming out of one of them…

diary | 30 oct 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · kinetxt · video-in · imageradio · name · novak

imageradio » hour interview announced

eek, slightly daunting: an hour interview to highlight how “the artist’s work” relates to the theme. and there’s me still not entirely comfortable with the idea of myself as an artist…

diary | 27 oct 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · kinetxt · imageradio · interview

kinetxt at imageradio » the week starts

kinetxt has been curated to be part of imageradio: new media in public space, taking place in eindhoven from thursday to sunday next week. so back in the uk for just one day, its off to the netherlands to try and pull it together over there.
check the website for lots of interesting work:
http://www.imageradio.nl/content/blogcategory/24/55/

diary | 27 oct 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · kinetxt · imageradio · name · novak

multiplicidade » live!

this is during the ‘straight’ performance of latitude, essentially an edit. as i hoped, there was call for an encore and i had vdmx ready for a much more layered, graphical remix. its so gratifying when an improvisation like that goes really well, especially when the time you’d planned to rehearse and shape it was taken with dealing with after effects consistently crashing half way through the updated led renders.
thanks to multiplicidade for the photo.

diary | 14 oct 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · video-out · multiplicidade · dfuse · live cinema

multiplicidade » now that is an audience

weird to see the clarity of this photo against my blurred impression from within the performance. having been told there was upward of a thousand people out there waiting to see us, they are of course in pitch black it being a theatre/cinema and i couldn’t see anything… until the moment came to release the secret weapon, bathing the place in light when we got to the buddha-like moment before knocking it down to highlights of the imagery.
thanks to multiplicidade for the photo.

diary | 14 oct 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · video-out · multiplicidade · dfuse

multiplicidade » hoarding, check

ok so actually this is just being put up in the hour before the gig, but that didn’t stop 900 people coming to the gig. lets just repeat that: 900 people attended a live cinema gig. on a tuesday. rio and multiplicidade rock.

diary | 14 oct 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · multiplicidade · dfuse · live cinema

multiplicidade » mission control, check

…and the laptop looking positively dwarfed by nasa* mission control, aka d-fuse live. setup finished the day before the gig, soundcheck and all: definitely the way forward. especially when your 45 minute render for the led panels crashes after an hour and a half right near the end.

  • actually we’re european. esa!

diary | 13 oct 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · vdmx · multiplicidade · dfuse

multiplicidade » led panels, check

…with the led panels on the side walls firing with my pixelmapped dfuse test sequence…

diary | 13 oct 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · video-out · multiplicidade · dfuse

multiplicidade » cinema screen, check

thats two big projectors, a lot of seats and the beginnings of the live setup…

diary | 13 oct 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · video-out · multiplicidade · dfuse

multiplicidade » touchdown in rio de janeiro

hello batman, director of multiplicidade, rio de janeiro’s festival of ‘unusual image and sound’. and quite something too, a marathon through spring, summer and autumn producing a new event every 15 days. and on tuesday, d-fuse will be presenting ‘latitude’ as the opening event of multiplicidade’s new strand presenting works in a theatre that takes their capacity from 100 to 1000. so between now and then, i’d better work on making assets to fit the led panels at the side of the theatre space, and working out an encore with musician si-cut-db, as for this trip, d-fuse is me.

diary | 11 oct 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · multiplicidade · dfuse

eindhoven » kinetxt creatives

…explaining the kinetxt idea to local creatives, hopefully we can gather a group of people to really take the storytelling and content-for-the-context beyond where we’ve had it before.

diary | 19 sep 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · kinetxt · imageradio

eindhoven » kinetxt reconnaissance

checking venues for the kinetxt installation. this is eindhoven’s town archive, far from a musty building it rings with cool modernity - the only file boxes in sight form the design for the fascia.

diary | 19 sep 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · kinetxt · imageradio

paralympics » yeast slides, yeast film

although it meant i had to forgo the celebratory beers-in-the-sun after the showcase, i managed to get the digimedia showcase onto the plasma screens at the reception - so we got to show some work as well as the film that yeast facilitated documenting the whole forum. that film really did the job: well done james.

diary | 11 sep 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · teaching · beijing paralympics · yeast

paralympics » 100 slides for the showcase

here’s the presentation in pdf form that was built-up during the workshop, finished by me and shown to all at the final showcase. i’m quite proud of it, and watching your computer turn pin-yin into chinese characters for the first time is pretty cool.

diary | 11 sep 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · teaching · beijing paralympics · yeast | downloads: yeast-yap-dmshowcase-web.pdf

paralympics » there we are

while excessive taking group photos seems is definitely endemic here, its nice to see all the group in one.

diary | 10 sep 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · teaching · beijing paralympics

paralympics » “kitchen”

the other play, caught in the moment.

diary | 10 sep 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · teaching · beijing paralympics

paralympics » 10 word play to stop motion

steve with the final day’s project: watch a 10-word play developed by another workgroup, and turn it into an animation. this is the moment when they realise that stop-motion is a long-haul game…

diary | 10 sep 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · teaching · beijing paralympics

paralympics » yes you can (#23 / 240)

no arms but want to play the piano? yes you can.

diary | 09 sep 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · teaching · beijing paralympics

paralympics » workshop

and so it starts. 27 “young advocates” drawn from china, the uk and beyond, of mixed abilities, ranging from learning difficulties to physical impairment, representing those who’ve achived great things in their communities back home to those picked out of special schools… and in some cases all in those in the one person.
yeast culture ran the film making workshop and the digital media workshop, and i was a leader for the latter. in what could have just been a get media-savvy and learn powerpoint thread, we instead delved into the power of the image; communication beyond photos and text. and they learnt photoshop, and when to abandon photoshop in favour of print-outs, scissors and card.
here is kelly during our (ahem) ‘monkey see, monkey do’ afternoon of photoshop tutorials.

diary | 07 sep 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · teaching · beijing paralympics · yeast

paralympics » spectacular: check

spectacular, it was. the paralympics opening ceremony might not have had quite the lavish and epic reach of the olympics that i saw broadcast, but it did have soul - and watching a wheelchair bound athlete pull himself up a rope to the top of the stadium to light the olympic flame was something both awe-inspiring and humbling: when he paused to get his composure back 50 meters up and still a little of the war to go, i’d wager there were 90,999 other people also experiencing a deep moment of reflection.

diary | 06 sep 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · photo · teaching · beijing paralympics

paralympics » ticket, check

kelly and steve just having got their tickets - we’re going to the paralympic opening ceremony, school trip style.

diary | 05 sep 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · teaching · beijing paralympics

paralympics » workshop room (spacious)

30 desks… not quite filling the room. not your average digital media workshop venue, this.

diary | 04 sep 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · teaching · beijing paralympics

paralympics » beijing airport / british council

…which is (to oversimplify) a british council project working with young people, hosted as part of the paralympics here in beijing.
young advocates programme: http://www.yaponline.org/index.jsp
yap youth forum in beijing: http://www.yaponline.org/youth-forum.jsp
oh - and just when you’d appreciated the scale of the beijing airport terminal, you take a shuttle train out and under a few more identical and identically sized terminals, eventually walk out into what you think is the outside, just to find yourself in another cavernous hall. scale… scale…

diary | 04 sep 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · teaching · beijing paralympics · yeast

bbc blast » goodbye pavillion

the pavillion is a day, park, outside thing. strange to see it misty at night as we walked away, project over.

diary | 30 aug 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · bbc blast @ serpentine · teaching

bbc blast » final filming

and on performance day, the sun comes out. aaaah.

diary | 30 aug 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · bbc blast @ serpentine · teaching · yeast

bbc blast » tapes, eh

i’d happily forgotten about things like this in an age of solid state. managed to rescue what was needed, but the last minute stress quite apart from the glitches wasn’t welcome at all.

diary | 28 aug 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · bbc blast @ serpentine · teaching

shambala » rbn_esc, dome edition

i came to fully test all sorts of interactive patches, but the old classic had to be tried blatted up around the dome.

diary | 24 aug 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · rbn_esc · shambala · dome · live cinema

bbc blast » aaah, the dlr

instant supercool visuals for young people #1: ride the dlr, apply mirror effect. ref cityscan to see it taken the highest level, and arrive as the piece that started it all.

diary | 21 aug 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · bbc blast @ serpentine · teaching

bbc blast » dance + vjs

not just playing with a live camera feed and kaos pad, but shaping the dance through the control of graphic elements: a simple cross can become a character, a circle shape the movement

diary | 20 aug 2008 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · bbc blast @ serpentine · teaching

bbc blast » vj taster sessions

working as part of yeast culture for bbc blast on a two week project for young people that encompassed film, vjing, soundscape, spoken word and dance culminating in a performance at this years summer pavillion at the serpentine gallery. frank gehry, no less.

diary | 18 aug 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · bbc blast @ serpentine · teaching · yeast

planetarium test iii

atari-esque asteroids. planentarium. geddit.

diary | 08 aug 2008 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · dome · pervasive media studio

planetarium test ii

spiralling text… not quite as easy to solve as i thought if you look closely.

diary | 08 aug 2008 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · dome · pervasive media studio

planetarium test i

patching away… been waiting a long time as a visualist to finally have an immersive output, and here i was at 9am having had no sleep due to the slot coming forward from the evening and a non-cooperating field-of-view, camera placement, and clip plane.

diary | 08 aug 2008 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · dome · pervasive media studio

dome101: voila!

voila. animating, and distorted for projection via the you-don’t-need-a-boutique-fisheye-setup-anymore technique that uses a standard projector and a spherical mirror bought from a security store. all hail paul bourke and the pbmesh patch

diary | 02 aug 2008 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · dome

dome101: radians not degrees

ah. always a silly gotcha in there. quirk fixed with the realisation that quartz composer uses degrees as its rotation unit, but the maths functions i used for the trig deal in radians.

diary | 02 aug 2008 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · dome

dome101: sprites on a sphere

finally making something of a long-talked-about spark project: immersive and interactive visuals in a dome. hoping to start with some basic ‘chuck a ball about in the crowd’ type stuff, and get to a fully playable asteroids or missile command.
first test: can i tile small sprites in 3d space as if they were placed on a sphere? answer here: only sort-of. they are on a sphere, but they’re certainly not in neat rows like they should be, or aligned to the surface.

diary | 02 aug 2008 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · dome

spot the gehry

the serpentine gallery has - yet again - come up trumps with its summer pavillion. while appreciation is subjecting, from the perspective of what could be done with a night-time visuals mesh+projector fest, its a wonder.
which is interesting, as i’ll be part of a two-week arts education project based there. i’m won’t be surprised ‘health and safety’ type concerns will render plans down to a fastfold at one end, but i’m certainly going to try…

diary | 29 jul 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj

barco nx4

the led wall was made of the latest barco tiles, and i haven’t seen anything as amazingly made in a long time. they are like a vision from the future, amazing machining, materials, structure, interconnect… and as a theme of tonight, i didn’t quite manage to nail the photo that illustrates what i saw. but hey. gives faith in the world, seeing quality like that.

diary | 24 jul 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · video-out

blackberry bold à la light surgeons

just finished a week production making the video content for the blackberry bold launch in the uk. while not the first time i’ve made stuff for led screens, its both amazing and terrifying seeing your seemingly perfect after effects composition playing out so big and so bright… any tiny mistake becomes crystal clear. also a test for live camera + laptop, combining band ‘the feeling’ with the neon backing comps. not as sucessful as i’d like, but still good to see and a good proving ground.
we rocked it tho’, with the goalposts changed at the last minute due to a sudden corporate influx from worldwide headquarters we pulled off a really nice balance of brand and bespoke imagery, to the point where said corporate types were overheard talking about ‘messing with the brand’ as a wonderful and mysterious thing: in short, london did itself proud.

diary | 24 jul 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · vdmx · video-out · video-in · light surgeons

southwark lido » supercool iii

…huzzah!

diary | 12 jul 2008 | tagged: *spark · mac · vj · southwark lido

southwark lido » supercool ii

…vinyl stickers cut to a very exact spec…

diary | 12 jul 2008 | tagged: *spark · mac · vj · southwark lido

southwark lido » supercool i

gonzo, my laptop and the cutting machine…

diary | 12 jul 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · southwark lido

phds and vjs

up to newcastle’s cuture lab for a day workshop: a phd student is investigating vj performance as a vehicle for innovative hci. int_er_est_ting.

diary | 11 jun 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj

LPM08 » rbn_esc on a lot of screens

photo: todd thille; http://avit.info/gallery2/v/lpm08/
bizarre midi crash apart, this was the most stressfull gig in a quite a while. talk about in front of your peers, on a great many screens.

diary | 31 may 2008 | tagged: *spark · avit-vj-network · vj · rbn_esc · live performers meeting · live cinema

LPM08 » toby*spark on qoob.tv

“Un voto positivo per l’intervista e un altro voto positivo per le basette di Spark :D”
…aah, basette = sideburns

http://en.qoob.tv/video/clip_view.asp?id=11282

also
http://en.qoob.tv/video/clip_view.asp?id=11053
http://en.qoob.tv/video/clip_view.asp?id=10844

diary | 29 may 2008 | tagged: *spark · avit-vj-network · vj · live performers meeting

rbn_esc___av @ lpm: sat 31st, rome

the programme for rome’s live performers’ meeting has gone up, featuring rbn_esc____av and a vj talk session a day.

diary | 25 may 2008 | tagged: *spark · avit-vj-network · vj · rbn_esc

µ:avit2008 » quartz composer workshop

gave a complete overview to quartz composer from a vjs perspective, and got some really nice feedback. photo by todd thille.

the basics

  1. getting beyond quicktime clips: what qc can do for you
    ie. dancing abstract 3d a la toneburst and memo
    ie. animating text files in your vj sets
    ie. making dynamic installations

  2. quartz composer 101
    your first patch
    dynamic controls
    the key idea of time
    common pitfalls

applying it and getting advanced

  1. qc and vdmx
    qc as dynamic clips
    qc as filters
    qc as rendering stacks

  2. shaders
    image kernels
    glsl

  3. 3rd party plug-ins

diary | 24 may 2008 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · avit-vj-network · vj · teaching · visual berlin

kinetxt[v2] » what do you want?

kinetxt in action: no storytelling at this point, but the audience starting to feed the event into the installation. i’m looking forward to seeing what our photographer for the two evenings comes up with.

diary | 22 may 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · kinetxt · live cinema

kinetxt[v2] » “he’s drawing it”

…also at the baltic, needless to say.

diary | 22 may 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · kinetxt

kinetxt[v2] » tyneside & baltic

the two nights of kinetxt[v2] - first as part of the opening gala for the renovated and extended tyneside cinema, and the next night at the baltic centre for contemporary art as part of the thinking digital conference. this is the setup at the baltic, with client macbooks kindly lent by the tyneside cinema.

diary | 22 may 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · kinetxt · name · novak

back in newcastle for kinetxt[v2]

or strictly speaking, as of this-photo, gateshead. they’re finally about to knock down the iconic ‘get carter’ car park and rooftop restaurant-that-never-was. loving the irony of seeing a derelict shop front ‘well worth it’ just above the ‘danger - demolition site’ sign.
yesterday was a non-stop afternoon at the tyneside cinema’s open house reopening event, demonstrating kinetxt to hundreds of people exploring the venue. some good usability testing, not to mention some last minute fixes to the new kinetxt engine and brand spanking new client. best of all though, was seeing all sorts of people ‘get it’, from kids to grannies alike.

diary | 19 may 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · kinetxt · name · novak

late at tate » narrative lab

i feel the screening programme made by paul and lara is a really important review of works to have come out of the “vj” scene, or rather the collision of vj practice with ideas beyond wallpaper. i’m also proud to be part of that, with rbn_esc and a hand in the story collector, but more so that such a programme has been assembled for posterity. bravo!

A specially curated screening and presentation by the Narrative Lab, inviting the Editors of the VJTheory book to show and tell some experimental works alongside screened material from artists all over Europe including Solu, Visual Kitchen, Girrafentoast, Ben Sheppee, Visualnaut, Oxygen, ZooZooZoo, Spark and Lucidhouse.
The Narrative Lab is a creative network and group of friends, who love to VJ and make moving images. Our work, and the work we love, use narrative techniques to enrich our work and bring emotion and potency to it. We don’t think VJing should be like film, rather we see other VJs and AV performers using narrative structures and devices in creative and unusual ways, and we want to showcase a cross-section of performers using narrative to create a language of VJing, and to engage the audience in alternative ways.We have selected a screening programme which will run as follows. Information on the artists, where given, is included below.
The Narrative Lab - Screening Programme - Av Social - Late at Tate
April 4th 2008 - Tate Britain - 6.30 - 9.30
Marginalia 2
Dur: 10.00
Embolex (2007)
Marginalia 2 is an audiovisual remix of footage from the films Bang Bang, by Andréa Tonacci, and A Mulher de Todos, by Rogério Sganzerla, creating a dialog between two characters that were originally in different films. Spliced into these are new scenes inspired by the films, which reinforce this dialog according to the interpretation that unfolds in the live remake. The soundtrack was produced using selections from the original films and their respective remakes in a way that blurs the boundaries between soundtrack and dialogs. Ideas of low-tech are also explored through effects and textures produced with diverse non-digital processing techniques. Marginalia 2 explores the possibilities for re-contextualizing by applying original and non-original samples to recreate a story/dream of visual and sound textures.
Space-Travel
Dur: 1.15
Dr Mo (2008)
www.morishuz.com
During his performance, Dr Mo mixes video generated by a novel stop-motion technique he terms ‘space-lapse.’ This type of photography continually changes camera viewpoints to produce breathtaking perspective shifts. Material for this sequence has been shot around the world and reflects Dr Mo’s interest in architecture and photography. His shadow weaves through the narrative reflecting traces of the protagonist. This is the story of a traveller - finding that which is constant in a continually changing environment.
Brilliant City
Dur: 13.43
D-Fuse (2007)
www.dfuse.com
Produced during a stay in Shanghai with the British Council Artist Links program, Brilliant City was made with Axel Stockburger and the musician Matthias Kispert. The title refers to the location, a residential complex comprised of 25 high rises in the northern part of Shanghai, China. It is entirely shot from the 34th floor of one of the buildings and stages a peeping tom view of the city below, capturing everyday activities that can be observed from this vantage point, such as training soldiers, building activity, traffic, gardening. The camera hovers above the entire panorama and focuses on details in the everyday life of this rapidly changing metropolis.
Jack’s Back (Get Carter Redux)
Dur: 9.51
Addictive TV (2007)
www.addictive.com
Addictive TV are known for their audio-visual remixes and dynamic live shows. They’ve been twice voted #1 VJs in DJ Mag’s annual poll. The Addicitive TV duo were commissioned by The Northern Lights Film Festival and Arts Council of England to remix cult 1970’s movie Get Carter, one of the most celebrated British gangster films. Jack’s Back defies cinematic convention by applying audio-visual sampling techniques, creating a new breakbeat driven cinematic syntax.
Fire Organ
Dur: 6.37
Lucidhouse (2008)
www.lucidhouse.com
Morris La Mantia, aka Lucidhouse in one of Brightons most prolific VJs working with imagery that is always infused with a sense of narrative. In this short mix Morris took a spontaneous, dirty approach making 4 live recordings and then remixing the entire sequence to create a piece with a frenetic life of it’s own: a split up, multi threaded, abstract narrative with an angry, choppy rhythm, that induces a bit of discomfort.
Mixmasters Submission
Dur: 10.00
Girraffentoast (2005)
www.giraffentoast.de
Thumbnail Express
Dur: 6.12
Light Surgeons(2006)
www.lightsurgeons.com
The Light Surgeons debut documentary short film commissioned by onedotzero festival in 2000, the first chapter of “Gilligan’s Travels”, a series of experiemntal short films based around an interview with the Venice Beach street philosopher Robert Alan Weiser and his travels across America. This landmark project combines Super 8 and DV footage with motion graphics and has been screened as part of the onedotzero festival internationally. While Thumbnail Express is an old piece of work in our view it one of the most seminal pieces of narrative in live audiovisual performance to date, staking a position in this programme.
V.E.R.A. / TELEFON
Dur: 8.55
Secret Films (2007)
www.secretfilms.co.uk
Two separate video tracks edited and produced by Secret Films are remixed here ‘back to back’ for this special Narrative Lab screening. Together they form a study in both telephonic and televisual
hypnotism. “The woods are lovely, dark and deep but I have promises still to keep. I have miles to go before I sleep”
In Telefon a mass-hypnotism appears to take place via the telephone. Visual and audio phenomena act as forms of mind control. The riddle enunciated by a voice from afar acts as a potent trigger on those listening to it. It’s recipients seem under threat as something terrible is transmitted as if by a spell. Opening out to a void, the message becomes an undoing of the pleasure principle as the mesmeric voice evokes the links between sleep and death. In VERA there are further intimations of brainwashing and social control. Sound becomes the master of everything ..controlling perceptions of space, time and possibility. Man is mastered and
defined by his own technology in a succession of loops and fatal repetitions.
These themes are often explored by Secret Films in the format of a live AV show, usually ( as here ) through the use of appropriated film and sound. “Are you listening?”
Urban Nature
Dur: 10.06
Video: Olga Mink / Music: Michel Banabila & Eric Vloeimans (2006)
www.videology.nu
Urban Nature is an atmospheric audio-visual collage accomplished by visually dramatic movements and atmospheric sounds. Urban Nature observes public behavior in a post-modern urban environment. The individual almost becomes non-existent, whilst surveillance is part of a new social infrastructure. A ’sophistication of modern living’ becomes almost apparent, by use of images that appear as frozen moments over time.
Synken
Dur: 10:00
Video: Transforma / Music: O.S.T. (2007) Producers: Visual Kitchen
http://www.synken.com/
With a mix of abstract images, graphic animation, digital image effects and complex film sequences, Synken creates a fantastically spaced out, darkly romantic image-world. Forests filled with distorted organic forms are contrasted against an architectural abyss, as strange and fantastic characters try to make sense of their surroundings. A mysterious vagabond works as a medium between these parallel worlds, transporting artefacts that become recurring symbols in the dual system and means of communication between the creatures which inhabit them. As sound and image merge and fall apart again over time, they form a synergy that opens up subtle leads which can never be read only as linear. As plot fragments refract and reoccur, Synken continuously confronts the viewer with a modular narrative that can be potentially combined to create any number of interpretations.
RBN ESC
Dur: 5.00
Spark Audio Visual (2006)
www.sparkav.co.uk
*spark is an audio-visual producer and performer, the alter-ego of Toby Harris. Spanning art, design and engineering, Toby is interested in anything that uses media to make people interact or think in unexpected ways.
‘rbn_esc’ is a project fusing cinema and live experimental visuals. presenting a series of character scenarios, it invites the audience to construct a narrative around the key theme ‘urban escape’. The clip library has been worked over in a Soho sound house, a soundtrack selected and resequenced, and the means to perform a refined, multichannel audio-visual whole developed. The resulting 45 minute performance work rbn_esc___av is an example of what ‘live cinema’ can be, and presented here is a five minute sampler.
Autometa
Dur: 8:50
Labmeta / Paul Mumford (2007)
www.labmeta.net
Paul Mumford is a director and designer currently working through the fields of VJing, motion graphics, animation and special effects across a range of music promos, live audio visual performances, short films and commercials with various London based companies. At the heart of his work though is a love for stories, people and dreams, something that has driven his research and personal work; manifesting itself as intricate, sensitive and contemporary motion graphics for live audiences and audio visual lovers. Building on early works and collaborations with the Narrative Lab, Paul’s intentions were always to continue building graphic narrative films. This is the first of his solo attempts to create a feature length audiovisual performance. Autometa is the story of a corporation, one that we see running a sinister machine, that operates upon the people of the city, taking their dreams and hopes, harvesting them and selling them around the world in a global economy. In a politically unstable landscape what happens when the public uprise? The world of Autometa erupts, forcing a world of the hybrids and dreamy constructions to collide and recombine in impossible ways.
KAAMOS
Dur: 5:25
Video: Solu / Audio: Circle: Jäljet (Traces), Kontackto : Mustikkaa Silmissä (Blueberries in the Eyes)
Mika Vainio : Kotiin (On the Way to Home) (2008)
www.solu.org
A journey into the heart of darkness. Kaamos is a Finnish term for the darkest period of the year in the north, when the light turns into shades of grey and sun is a rare visitor. Two women travel to a spring in the middle of the forest. This spring is known for its magical healing powers, that can cure from blindness. On their return it becomes obvious that the way back home is not what it used to be.
Insects
Dur: 3.43
Ben Sheppee (2007)
www.lightrhythmvisuals.com/sheppee
A tightly synchronized text based work based on ideas of modesty and genuiness. This hip hop electrock sound palette produced by “Back Ted n’ Ted” provides a rich audioscape for the evolving 3d graphic narrative executed by Tokyo based Ben Sheppee. A premiere screening for the UK - set for release on Lightrhythm Visuals label – Notations 02 - Autumn 2008.
1+1=3
Dur: 6:49
Rafael (2008)
www.leafar.be
In our view Rafael is one of the european stars of narrative performance, always witty, challenging, senstive and engaging in a way unlike anyone else we’ve ever come across. This is an extract from his latest audiovisual project that takes the form of an audiovisual puzzle. What more can we say apart make sure you see this.
Latitude
Dur: 3.43
D-Fuse (2007)
www.dfuse.com
Latitude [31°10N/121°28E] follows the emotive qualities of the space that surrounds us. Fragments of conversations, crowds, journeys, lights, deserted spaces, architectural contrasts are reconstructed to form a unique live performance that traces the multitude of paths, identities, encounters and influences that constitute everyday life in the city.
Les Projections Aléatoires
Dur:3:43
Stéphane Abboud - Le projectionniste (2003)
Les Projections Aléatoires (”the chance screenings”) are multi screen projection works made with several projectors (super 8 and 16mm). The movie combinations are realised live with found footage (family movies) and also original movies. Over the period of many years Stéphane Abboud has performed them with sound performers Plimplim and Philippe Fernandez.
The Story Collector
Dur: 15.02
Narrative Lab (2006)
www.nlab.org.uk
The Story Collector is the project that originally brought together the Narrative lab group. The performance shows Blake, an urban city dweller whose alienation with his surroundings prompts him to start collecting stories. VJ-ed graphic overlays help to build and explore the new world Blake creates as he layers multi-sensory information over the gritty cityscapes that are his home. In the performance jigsaw pieces demand narrative interpretation, activate memory, search the mental database and compare structures to give rise to a periodically shifting map of shared cultural meaning. Follow his character’s growth through the development of a magical second sight through which all the events in his life become connected.
True Fictions - Organised Lies
Dur: 15.02
Light Surgeons 2006
www.lightsurgeons.com
The result of a year long digital performance art project produced and directed by Christopher Thomas Allen and commissioned by EMPAC, The Experimental Media and Performing Arts Centre in Troy, New York. The final piece was completed and presented in September 2007 and has begun touring to festivals internationally.
It is an audio visual spectacle fuses documentary film making, music, animation and motion graphics with cutting edge digital performance tools. A stunning collage of music and narrative film making which explores the themes of truth and myth through a multitude of American and Native American voices; with a original musical score created through the collaborations of 25 New York based musicians and vocal artists.

diary | 04 apr 2008 | tagged: *spark · narrative lab · vj · rbn_esc · live cinema

skynoise interview online

me and sean aka jean poole have only been kicking about an interview since, oh, july, some eight months ago. but as of this morning, its online in full form of 2k words and was printed in australia’s 3d mag around christmas.

behold: http://www.skynoise.net/2008/03/13/sparkin-it-up/

diary | 13 mar 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj

kinetxt photos

been dragged into facebook to get a peek at the photos, digital politics aside, it’s certainly good when you see the festival director write “this was such an amazing event!”. huzzah!

diary | 11 mar 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · kinetxt · name · novak · live cinema · live illustration

kinetxt: success via sms

meanwhile in newcastle, it was the kinetxt evening. and according to the photo and text message i got, it all went really well. huzzah, what a relief: definitely an experimental project, and one with a fair amount of risk given the experimental technology and audience participation. can’t wait to hear more and see some real footage…

diary | 05 mar 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · kinetxt · name · novak

ford vj geneva, one year on

back again at the salon d’auto, and what a difference a year makes. smooth setup, new content, all good. even when walking straight in off the plane, having had a gig in newcastle the night before… eek!

diary | 02 mar 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · ford vj · imagination

kinetxt: tick

a kinetxt self-portrait, with the isight camera on me rather than our bullet cam on graffiti writers. more importantly, this is my contribution to the kinetxt event working, the interactive text messaging display ready to hand over to novak for tuesday’s installation / performance. huzzah!

diary | 01 mar 2008 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · kinetxt

geek desk porn

wiimote with 2 diy ir markers + 2 bullet cameras into uncompressed quicktime stream converters -> laptop running quartz composer with 2 weeks of custom coding -> triplehead2go giving a canvas of 2400x600, 18” wide when projected.

of course, qc won’t accept the two streams simultaneously. vidvox worked it out, apple didn’t for the own tool. tsssck.

diary | 27 feb 2008 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · video-out · kinetxt · video-in

qc model view controller

being able to code custom plug-ins is really making quartz composer so much better: not just giving the ability to make different types of ‘teh pretty’, but letting qc’s patching world do what its best at - fiddling with views - and leaving the coordination and control aspects to a dedicated lump of code, like a brain sitting in the middle of the patch.
long story short, this kinetxt installation is seeming like a case study in the object-orientated / model-view-controller way.

diary | 25 feb 2008 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · code · mac os

SPK-StringToImageStructure

having worked through the hillegass cocoa book, its time to start putting that to good use. and project number one was always going to be one of the big glaring omissions in quartz composer to my mind: a means of animating a string on a per-character basis.

if you want to compete with after-effects, then you need to be able to produce the various type animations directors are used to, and you need to do so at a decent framerate. to animate say the entry of a character onto the screen, you would create the animation for one character and then iterate that operation along the string. the problem is, rendering each glyph inside the iterator is both massively expensive and massively redundant, but thats the only approach qc allows, hacks on the back of hacks apart. a much better approach would be to have a single patch that takes a string and produces a data glob of rendered characters and their sizing and spacing information, firing off just once at the beginning and feeding the result to the animation iterator: at which point you’re just moving sprites around and the gpu barely notices.

the patch is released under gplv3, and is attached below.

a massive shout to the kineme duo for leading the way with their custom plug-ins and general all-round heroic qualities. in particular their ‘structure tools’ patches were the enabler for those early text sequencing experiments.

diary | 15 feb 2008 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · code · mac os · release | downloads: SPK-StringToImageStructure-1.0.zip

kinetxt v0.0000001

system diagram: discussed, ok’d.
wiimote: check. triplehead2go: check. folder of text messages: check. custom qc patch to enable text animation: check.
blend together for kinetxt v0.00000001.

it doesn’t do much, but its a start.

diary | 15 feb 2008 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · kinetxt

av:ision with kinetxt

up in newcastle to start work proper on the kinetxt project, a collaboration with novak commissioned for the ‘av festival’ as part of the after dark programme. they had a town full of script writers with nothing to do in the evening, novak wanted to combine the interactive possibilities of tools such as quartz composer with vj production and performance techniques. we put those together and proposed an installation space where those in the space can leave their mark and become part of an ongoing conversation: with an audience of authors, we are really hopeful about embracing text entry and display to create a kind of storytelling space.

whats nice about this, is that this is a geniune case of business development money actually making things happen: name approached me for mentoring based on my live cinema and dynamic content programming work, and following three days of quartz composer and other allied things, we were talking in the pub about project ideas enabled by this kind of work, and here is one of those ideas actually commissioned and fitting an audience profile perfectly.

kinetxt: tuesday 4th march, middlesborough, ‘the basement’, 8pm - 12am, free.

diary | 11 feb 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · kinetxt · name · novak · live cinema | downloads: final proof poster.pdf

motorshow life v

aka “thats what i call a real motor show”. rock on italy. thanks to will for the photo - my s80’s zoom wasn’t able to get anything like this.

diary | 15 dec 2007 | tagged: *spark · vj · ford vj

*sparkage verbiage

a little round-up of spark interviews in the past month, as part of the compass film festival in bristol and a hazy californian morning post-motorshow (strange how you can lose a weekend then find yourself online in interview form). it would probably a good idea if i actually watched these before posting online, but hey, here i am in a little motorshow vj break, and so are the links as i got them:
http://operator11.com/shows/1054/episodes/32121
http://crustea.vjfrance.com/article-198583.html

diary | 12 dec 2007 | tagged: *spark · vj

motorshow life iv

…well, what can i say.

diary | 11 dec 2007 | tagged: *spark · vj · ford vj

motorshow life iii

hello gianluca, organiser of avit-like live performers meeting. while i couldn’t be part of the event as i was doing this in frankfurt, it came in useful when a selection of italian vjs was needed to chose my vj partner here…

diary | 10 dec 2007 | tagged: *spark · avit-vj-network · vj · ford vj

motorshow life ii

crash test dummy. genius costume.

diary | 09 dec 2007 | tagged: *spark · vj · ford vj

motorshow life i

saturday was super-rammed. and then this guy came round, as if in a bubble. totally immersed, clicking things in space in front of him. no way of finding out more or hitting up the autowebpagediarylogthing the rig may or may not produce.

diary | 08 dec 2007 | tagged: *spark · vj · ford vj

protest!

the second day of the motor show was picketed by anti-car protesters. i barely got in to the show, check further back in the photo and you’ll see the red banners of them marching in to close down the entrance. photo was just holding the camera up and pointing back. crazy times. should i mention i ride a push-bike around london?

diary | 06 dec 2007 | tagged: *spark · vj · ford vj

they do things differently in italy

suffice to say i haven’t seen this happen at any other motor show.

diary | 05 dec 2007 | tagged: *spark · vj · ford vj · imagination

inés aka pintaycolorea

speaking of inés, here she is, my vj partner for this italian show. check www.pintaycolorea.com, much goodness there.

diary | 04 dec 2007 | tagged: *spark · vj · ford vj

ford vj los angeles » autoshows.ford.com

http://autoshows.ford.com/190/2007/11/17/digital-stage-makes-its-north-american-debut-at-the-los-angeles-auto-show/

tsk, the editor has made it jasmin only. c’est la vie.

diary | 18 nov 2007 | tagged: *spark · vj · ford vj · imagination

ford vj los angeles » ready to go

obligatory quick 1am shot, wrapping up the build. looking “freakin’ awesome”, with beautiful new content, new ways to mix it, and rejigged text display. smooth, controllable, motion graphic’d smartness.

diary | 14 nov 2007 | tagged: *spark · vj · ford vj

ford vj los angeles » build

hello jasmin and her superproduced content commissioned for the american shows. the (and i use the word loosely) car driving in is something to behold: a “green” monster truck, complete with rocket-launcher-esque hydrogen tanks racked up on the back.

diary | 14 nov 2007 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · vdmx · ford vj

ford vj los angeles » cardboard tubes

the wall here is made of recycled cardboard tubes. looks good, makes the environmental message… and makes me laugh knowing the technology they’ve squeezed in for the section with the screen.

diary | 14 nov 2007 | tagged: *spark · vj · video-out · ford vj

cuisine at compass » on the radio

onto bristol for more teaching via three hours in my own bed. the progressive clubnight cuisine had organised an edition of their vjschool as part of the compass film festival, and i was invited to talk about live cinema and do a performance of rbn_esc___av at the festival afterparty. however before the vjschool session, was an interview on local radio promoting the festival and discussing just what the hell vjing is and the future of film could be.

diary | 03 nov 2007 | tagged: *spark · vj

name » desktop snapshot

guess what we were up to. if only leopard and reactivision would play nicely together: the qc osc receiver doesn’t seem to be receiving what it should, and its beyond me to port the tiger hacked-up plug-in to an official api leopard one. that is something that will hopefully change after christmas, when i finally embrace cocoa and the live cinema interface.

diary | 01 nov 2007 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · teaching · name · novak

name » quartz composer 101

straight from a marina in italy to a biscuit factory in newcastle, home of the most proper name. they had organised three days “mentoring” aka professional development funded by the region, and i was the mentor. first up was quartz composer 101. so glad we waited for leopard to debut, what a change: its actually sane now!

diary | 31 oct 2007 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · teaching · name · novak

five years in the making

leading up to the first avit event back in 2002, i thought to myself: “if i’m going to be centre stage of this thing i’ve spent the past month organising, business cards would be the thing to have”, but, well, that soon got overtook with the idea of making a *spark t-shirt, far cooler i thought. and in the photos - and so history - from festivals and gigs since, that decision has done me well.

but times change. so herald the new, courtesy of the excellent moo.com service.

diary | 01 oct 2007 | tagged: *spark · vj

london gig alert: sputnik and beyond

UPDATE: The video side has been cancelled.

the thomas dolby tour starts on the 3rd october at the ica with a special gig called ‘sputnik and beyond’, featuring me taking over the visualist reins from johnny dekam now the tour is on this side of the atlantic.
the ica gig will be used to pilot a new piece in the live-cinema direction - the sputnik of the title - and if it is well received we hope to develop a full live cinema piece to tour in the future.
http://www.ica.org.uk/Thomas Dolby: Sputnik & Beyond+14800.twl

the tour continues in the ‘sole inhabitant’ mode for the next week, let me know if there’s a chance you can make it:
10.04.07 BRIGHTON–CONCORDE
10.05.07 BRISTOL–ACADEMY
10.06.07 HOLMFIRTH, YORKSHIRE–PICTUREDROME
10.07.07 MANCHESTER–ACADEMY
10.08.07 BIRMINGHAM–ACADEMY
10.09.07 CAMBRIDGE–BARFLY@THE GRADUATE
10.10.07 ISLINGTON–ACADEMY

diary | 26 sep 2007 | tagged: *spark · vj

goodbye frankfurt...

that was the view from the 28th floor of the mariott, halle 3.1 and its ford group stands centre stage.

diary | 24 sep 2007 | tagged: errata of life · *spark · vj · ford vj

ford vj frankfurt » stützstrümpfe

…so stützstrümpfe are “support stockings”. tee hee. do love this photo.

diary | 23 sep 2007 | tagged: *spark · vj · ford vj

ford vj frankfurt » at home / in bed

last day, soon to be at home, in bed: so many people’s “favourite place to think”.

diary | 23 sep 2007 | tagged: *spark · vj · ford vj

ford vj frankfurt » late night filming

stayed late to get a clean recording of a few sets. got ghetto with the tripod, to get it in just the right place kinda involved jasmin holding onto a tripod above a leaking bin… eeek.

diary | 21 sep 2007 | tagged: *spark · vj · ford vj

ford vj frankfurt » segway police

first time i’ve seen a segway in the flesh, the german police having taken them on… and quite ironic in the context of a car show.

diary | 19 sep 2007 | tagged: *spark · vj · ford vj

ford vj frankfurt » beard world champions

well, go the cliché: we certainly are in germany, having had not one but three beard grooming world champions pass through the stand. just check those creations on the left.

diary | 17 sep 2007 | tagged: *spark · vj · ford vj

ford vj gets gold!

our shiny gold award, via the cameraphone of dan sloane, imagination’s tech master for the vj project. the ford vj area won the best exhibition feature area at friday’s event awards 2007 at the natural history museum. huzzah!

diary | 16 sep 2007 | tagged: *spark · vj · ford vj · imagination

ford vj frankfurt » press shot

jasmin and mo hamming it up for the press. check mo smirking tee hee.

shot details ----
Frankfurt, 13.9.2007: Ford-Messestand IAA 2007 Frankfurt, Jasmin Judry und Mauritius Seeger arbeiten auf dem Ford-Messestand als DJ und VJ. — © Ford/Stark - Verwendung honorarfrei

diary | 14 sep 2007 | tagged: *spark · vj · ford vj · imagination

ford vj frankfurt » and so it starts

another show, another get-up.

diary | 11 sep 2007 | tagged: *spark · vj · ford vj

ford vj frankfurt » never this empty again

jasmin finding her way round the vj setup, in a hall never again to be so quiet. opening soon…

diary | 10 sep 2007 | tagged: *spark · vj · ford vj

ford vj frankfurt preview

…and this is what it was looking like when i hit the screengrab key-combo before putting the mac pro in its flight case to start its journey to frankfurt.

diary | 03 sep 2007 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · vdmx · ford vj

*spark titler redux and release

as shown in the ‘pun me this’ entry, the *spark titler was used in nascent form at sheep music, and the promise to tidy-up and release as open-source software has been followed through. so, please find attached: sparktitler-v1.1.zip.

the titler’s interface allows you to take between two sets of title/subtitle, with the choice of four backgrounds: black / green / a quicktime movie or a folder of images. the output window will automatically go full-screen on the second monitor if it detects one is available at launch, otherwise it will remain a resizable conventional window.

it is released with the intention that it can be reused for other events without changing a single line of code: you can design the animation and incorporate quicktime movies in the design by editing the ‘GFX’ macro in the quartz composer patch, and its a matter of drag and drop replace the logo in the interface.

for those who wish to dig deeper and improve the whole package, the source is released under GPL. the xcode project provides an adequate shell for the patch, implemented with just two cocoa classes and an nib file complete with bindings between the qc patch and the interface window. the classes are required to tell the quartz composer patch where to find the resource directory of the application’s bundle (neccessary for any ‘image with movie’ nodes), and to subclass the output window so it is sent borderless to the second display if appropriate. features apart, there is certainly room for improvement, a ‘open file’ dialog instead of the raw text fields would be good, likewise solving the text field update issue.

if you do use it, let us know: operator@tobyz.net

diary | 30 jul 2007 | tagged: titler · release · *spark · vj · code · mac os · quartz composer | downloads: sparktitler-v1.1.zip

sparkav.co.uk on the digital anvil

since there’s been *spark there’s been sparkav.co.uk, and its minimal form of home page and four links has always kinda charmed me. but at v1.3 after all these years, its time to take those genes and retool it into something that reflects the state of the nation 2007.
so here goes v2.0, with 440x700 pixels of featured project on the homepage and the ford vj geneva superedit a click away. now to lose that table for css, and embrace a whole world of flash presentation, not to mention getting the hosting sorted…

diary | 21 jun 2007 | tagged: *spark

sónar » in the macba store, i'm in the store

in the museu d’art contemporani de barcelona bookshop, the two big vj tomes were prominently on display. which is both a super good thing for the scene, and personally pretty damn freaky to see yourself as an artist featured in such a venue.

diary | 16 jun 2007 | tagged: errata of life · *spark · vj · sónar

pre-sónar » *spark and vdmx++

showing eloi and sean my live cinema work and the state of play on macs, with vdmx, quartz composer and image kernels

diary | 12 jun 2007 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · vdmx · adventures · sónar

southbank overture

here is ‘re-engaging reactive graphics’ from a post or two ago, in its final projected form (or at least, one frame of one of the permutations i delivered). its on tonight too, as part of the south bank’s overture event, the re-opening of the royal festival hall. 10.30

diary | 09 jun 2007 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · photo · light surgeons

vdmx plug-in: dj style mixer

here is a prototype/demonstration of using your own image kernel in vdmx. rather than being an effect, this is an A/B mixer that means you can use vdmx in the ‘old skool’ way, by mixing together two video streams rather than rendering the whole stack of layers. it also has controls like a DJ scratch mixer, so as well as a crossfader, you’ve got a fader for each channel, and a fader curve control.

to use, make a layer or group for the A channel and another for the B channel, and a layer at the top of the stack for your output. trigger the qc patch in the output layer, and assign the A and B layers/groups to its video input drop downs.

if you open the qc patch, you’ll see the video inputs get resized to the output res, as image kernels don’t handle different sized inputs too well, and then all the inputs are fed into an image kernel, ie a little filter written specially for the graphics card. in that there is some basic maths for applying a variable crossfade curve, and a line that adds the two inputs together. take a look, its not so hard; i have far more trouble with doing things like translating the crossfader curves into a mathematical expression than with the code itself.

so take this as a starter for ten if you’re interested. attached below.

i have my own mixer now that does three channel mixing just how i want, and its really cleaned up my vdmx interface[1] let alone the directness of the processing. sweet.


  1. no more layer masks or fade to blacks getting in the way in the different layers and the preview window are now just post fx and not post masking/mixing fx as well. ↩︎

diary | 08 jun 2007 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · vdmx · release | downloads: spark-DJmixer-v3.qtz

re-engaging reactive graphics

back in the early days of visuals in brum with the most talented stef lewandowski, computers could barely hack video and so the dynamic stuff was a combination of flash and good old mixer twiddling. flash was cool for making loops, at a basic level if you had a few layers, you made them different lengths and they would loop independently pretty much always giving you a new combination with each frame… do that with a pre-rendered loop and it becomes clear you’ve only got a second or two worth of frames pretty immediately. then you could bring in text read on the fly into your graphics and allsorts.

all that pretty much got left behind when i went to the single laptop with the vdmx video based vj setup, quicktime loops or nowt. much richer, much more interesting capabilities for mixing that video, but no dynamic/generative content.

so continuing the theme of the vj platform really delivering on the mac nowadays, with dual-core/decent-gfx-chips and osx/vdmx-in-cocoa, it was nice to have a commission to make a graphic layer for the light surgeon’s contribution to the reopening of the royal festival hall, a commission where keyframing it all would be madness, and new the visual identity of the south bank centre lent itself to a generative machine.

so not quite hello flash again like the days of old, but quartz composer parsing the audio spectrum and turning that into reactive combinations of the sbc’s weave. and given the pain of editing a 4xSD wide canvas from a huge media library, its actually a shame the whole thing couldn’t have been a prototype for the innovative live setups coming into view.

diary | 06 jun 2007 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · light surgeons

spk.mxr... image kernels are go

today i programmed my first image kernel, another step on the journey of making custom technology to fulfil what i want to do artistically. and this one was with real, low-level code: its basically writing a shader for the graphics card, eek! actually not so hard at all, the code was pretty easy, it was the process of working out the maths required that took time to wrap my head back around.
osx is developing so well for video: you can write your image kernel in the appropriate quartz composer node, load that into a layer in the vj app vdmx, and then find all your kernel inputs natively displayed in the vj interface. so now not only do i have the exact kind of mixing i want processing at maximum efficiency, i’ve simplified my vdmx setup no-end with just one panel with all the controls, instead of a mish-mash of filters and blend modes spread around the different layers.

diary | 24 may 2007 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · vdmx

nlab » generative titles

for the nlab remix of people on sunday i made a generative titler, though it didn’t quite work out how i expected as the final patch didn’t want to load in the vj app despite some earlier testing. so vjing for me was largely reduced to changing the section number directly in the qc patch with its output running fullscreen, seen on the preview above. was cool though, seeing the titles drawing together from the bag of words i made from watching the clips: just like you don’t exactly know which way the vjing of the clips is going to go, you don’t know exactly what the titles are going to imply in it…

diary | 19 may 2007 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · narrative lab · vj · live cinema

2007>2001

so here i am editing on the latest apple laptop using the latest final cut pro, and yet as the flow of the work goes, it feels just like 2001. editing in fcp2 on my beloved tibook. however, thats not to say the edit is equivalent: this is a motion graphic’d promo piece in sexy hd. amusingly enough, not even my cinema display has enough pixels.

diary | 16 may 2007 | tagged: errata of life · *spark · vj · ford vj

detonation

epic all-nighter in nottingham, ably abetted by the amsterdam crew of jilt, the pantoffeldiertjes vjs and v-king. travelling back by train on a bank holiday: not recommended.

diary | 07 may 2007 | tagged: *spark · vj

pretty pictures != shell scripts

why does trying to make cool stuff involve half the train journey to the gig writing a shell script to batch treat your 80 graffiti cuts…

diary | 07 may 2007 | tagged: *spark · vj

mapping festival » share.gva

three days of share, open media jamming. part of the setup is a widescreen projection of three 4x3 projectors/screens, which you can drive from a laptop with a matrox triplehead2go… very nice.

diary | 02 may 2007 | tagged: *spark · vj · mapping

mapping festival » story collector

five screens, two narrative lab navigators, and the night starts early at the contemporary arts centre. story collector is a beautiful set, david last and mr projectile crisp over the pa, the mix working well, tag team keeping the story and aesthetic tracked.

diary | 27 apr 2007 | tagged: *spark · narrative lab · vj · vdmx · mapping · live cinema

ford vj amsterdam: home run

its tuesday, its the first day not working for over two weeks, and with the next month or so paid up from this to devote to developing the setup and contributing to the cultural side. there is a little description of amsterdam on the photo page, suffice to say it was a smooth experience, we had it down, we had a nice time. very rewarding to have that experience after the challenges of getting the project to the 1.0 of geneva.

diary | 10 apr 2007 | tagged: *spark · vj · ford vj · imagination

t-2007

a steadycam operator on an all-terrain segway type thing… you can imagine the cool shots made possible, but it looked straight out of some robocop/terminator future. and, of course, i want i want i want.

diary | 27 mar 2007 | tagged: errata of life · *spark · vj · ford vj

this may not look like much...

but thats an exact 1:1 pixel mapping on the LED wall, which we got to in minutes rather than days. shame its not the geneva monster-wall, but you can’t have it all. anyway, progress. and hello jilt, fellow vj along with olga for the amsterdam motor show.

diary | 25 mar 2007 | tagged: *spark · vj · video-out · ford vj

ford vj geneva: a very big thing

i’ve just arrived back from, well, from a very big thing. quit-your-job type thing. i signed a non-disclosure-agreement in december, things were set by january, had quit apple not long thereafter, february was intense pre-production, and then it really happened: two and a bit weeks at the geneva motor show, putting out a four minute vj mix every 16 minutes, a peer to the hd brand videos on the immense led wall.
its a really amazing project as the vj is not there for sparkle, but more akin to tom cruise in minority report, taking in a flow of user generated content and magic’ing it onto the big screen. massive props to imagination for the concept and the multi-disciplinary clout to make it happen, and to ford for really going out on one with this project.
i would write more, but i’ve only 36 hours back in london before being off again: a short break after all this and then straight into the amsterdam motor show. onwards!

diary | 19 mar 2007 | tagged: *spark · vj · ford vj · imagination

mapping festival say yes to nlab

huzzah. the narrative lab proposal for the mapping festival has been accepted, and i was even in geneva at the time so had dinner with boris and ilan. there’ll be three narrative led vj sets and two big talks by us, so i’ll be performing ‘rbn_esc’ as the vj film example to my presentation on ‘live cinema and vjing’.

diary | 14 mar 2007 | tagged: *spark · narrative lab · vj · rbn_esc · mapping

sleep deprivation, pt1

wasn’t the only one working through the night.

diary | 01 mar 2007 | tagged: *spark · vj · ford vj

istanbul » rbn_esc at live cinema nights

thanks to artificial eyes for bringing me to istanbul to perform rbn_esc. 4 layers of image floating behind me, layers of scrim hung all around. that and ae’s own thrill software hooked up to a moving-mirror video projector setup (think gobo) made it all a den for the senses. cool to be able to soundcheck for hours too, headphones just aren’t quite the same as a club PA…

diary | 24 feb 2007 | tagged: *spark · vj · rbn_esc · live cinema

advantages of working through the night

is that when you finish working on the materials at 7am, and have a few hours to kill until the presentation later that morning, you can go out and take photos in the new found winter wonderland. this is my local, and more a visual joke than photo, but hey.

diary | 24 jan 2007 | tagged: errata of life · *spark · vj · ford vj

avit>c23 » ableton live & vdmx5

rbn_esc in audiovisual form used an iMac G5 and a titanium laptop working as video and audio machine respectively, both operating on the edge… kinda scary. now, they fit on the same screen on the same laptop, thanks to the cocoa rewrite of vdmx5 and a macbook pro… and barely stress the machine. add in motorised faders (loving my new behringer bcf2000, wondering how long it will last), and its quite the revolution.

diary | 30 dec 2006 | tagged: *spark · avit-vj-network · vj · rbn_esc · vdmx · ableton · visual berlin

avit>c23 » live cinema

first chance to speak with falk of the live cinema blog since his summer superproduction followed by autumn of declaring the tools just not ready. so the piece wasn’t performed, but we did hear a run through of his thesis. how i would love to take that to hollywood to see the culture clash. followed that with a quick talk on my piece rbn_esc, and some of the ideas and processes behind it. and then the first performance with new toys, ableton and vdmx running on the same machine…

diary | 30 dec 2006 | tagged: *spark · avit-vj-network · narrative lab · vj · rbn_esc · visual berlin · live cinema

stavanger » graffiti research lab

simply, too cool. they’ve figured magnetic, conductive paint for integrating electronics with graffiti, and these little numbers: led throwies.

diary | 09 sep 2006 | tagged: *spark · vj · nu-music

stavanger » graf - moona lisa

great graf by nick walker: mona lisa pulling a moonie right on a harbourside corner. its a very clean, serene town. i wonder if there’s been any accidents yet?

diary | 08 sep 2006 | tagged: *spark · vj · nu-music

stavanger » numusic

to norway for the best part of a week as a guest artist of the numusic festival. for the nuart strand, i’m a multimedia man-who-can, documenting the interventions and melding the daytime art activities into animated backdrops for the nighttime venues.

diary | 07 sep 2006 | tagged: *spark · vj · nu-music

london gig alert - nlab showcase, 26th august

a rare london gig from me, and it should be a nice one: a curated programme of live cinema / vj works in a comfy bar that has shared some genes with a restaurant and cinema. i’ll be performing the audiovisual version of my ‘rbn_esc’ piece, and the night has been put together by paul, lara and myself as a showcase of some of the work we’ve been doing as the ‘narrative lab’ project.

we’ve been waiting a long time to find the right venue to do something like this, and the roxy is looking good so far - be good to see one and all down there. starts at 8pm, no cover charge, fingers crossed.

more info here -
http://roxybarandscreen.com/listings.php?event=45

diary | 15 aug 2006 | tagged: *spark · narrative lab

published! spark in xárene’s 've-"ja book

just got through a copy of the final *spark spread from xárene eskandar’s being-published-now-right-now book on vjing. four pages! preview of the first spread above, to read the words and see the pictures filling the other spread, you’ll just have to buy the book =]

xarene and grant (aka vjculture) are the best of people and have been working on this for years - i really hope this gets the recognition it deserves

http://vjbook.com

diary | 15 aug 2006 | tagged: *spark · rbn_esc

dj mag - chekkit

supercool: my alter-ego gets into dj mag, as well as the 20/20 event. here’s what we had before the final edit onto the page…

  • names: toby harris
  • location: london… but it all came together under the concrete brutalism and bass-bins of birmingham.
  • style: *spark is the audio-visual producer and performer, my alter-ego with an eye for the graphic. whether raw for a dnb allnighter or refined for my work creating a kind of live cinema, its all about fusing video with motion graphics and creating a canvas with the complexity and temporal texture that underpins the music we’re so used to.
  • technique: i’ve been leading from the front of the laptop revolution, there’s just no way you could do what i do without. having mastered the reaktor-like vidvox vdmx, i’m now on a whole new plane tying it together with ableton live.
  • other skills: behind the scenes i’ve helped promo directors turn their five-minute videos into vj-sets for acts going on tour, even hardwiring that set into an extension of the act’s live rig.
  • previous gigs: march 4th saw my commission to turn rbn_esc, my showpiece vj set, into a full audiovisual production premiered at 20/20 in newcastle. i had seven channels of sound, three layers of video, 30 minutes of performance, and a critical audience from the north east’s av festival going on at the time… a baptism of fire.
  • upcoming gigs: i’m currently hunkered down in the studio refining the audio work in ‘rbn_esc’ before it sees its london debut and developing an av breaks remix of the car chase of choice for the summer festivals.

diary | 13 apr 2006 | tagged: *spark

spk.mxr v0.00001

i hereby resolve to make something seriously cool.
enough talking about the minority report interface, time to actually sketch things out and learn some serious stuff to make it happen. i reckon that given spk.av’s level of preproduction and the way some vj functions have been offloaded to ableton’s control, its at least possible - if not sane - to be able to create a custom interface to partner ableton and extend ableton’s audio to a full audiovisual show.
i have this particular vision of what i’d like to perform live cinema with, but in there are some basic design ideas that in themselves would be cool and could be used to make a three channel mixer controlled by a tablet… providing i can get a vj app to do the heavy lifting. the spk.mxr interface will effectively be the ultimate midi controller that is then patched onto a vj app.
its definitely time to keep the aspirations limited for the time being tho’ - six hours in quartz composer has told me i’m going to have to code this as a proper app using cocoa+quartz. its going to be a long journey…

diary | 26 mar 2006 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · live cinema interface

v1.0 back home

…well at least it worked plugged into the tv, back home and comfy on a sunday night. so even if i don’t have the glories of live event footage, i now at least have a v1.0 mix recorded: a marker in the sand.

diary | 05 mar 2006 | tagged: *spark · rbn_esc

2020: beauty and horror

its still a bit sharp, but there were beautiful things at 2020 and there was horror. the horror bit was coursing through my veins when after i finally stood up, walked to my equipment, took a breath and proverbially hit ‘play’… the screen, the image, well, it wasn’t right.

i’d soundchecked first, everything had been fine - i even had a dj mixer to tweak my somewhat untested levels on. my ‘cinematic’ visuals were cinematic, and the crazy section certainly was full-on with such a big screen and booming PA. so it was distressing to the core that when mid-event it became my turn, that ideal audiovisual environment turned to a nightmare, my clear, tuned pallette turning to grey fuzz. if you’ve ever seen ntsc on a pal tv, think that. and as you couldn’t really see any of it properly - and you certainly couldn’t read the text, which is central to the experience - all i could do was wince and crash through it all as quickly as possible. to compound things, this meant there was no time to massage the audio as i went along, and so the piece largely became a series of jolts between audio sections. it was so disappointing, on so many levels.

unbelievably, people still applauded and apparently there was still a really positive reaction - though i still haven’t quite got a handle on that. i wasn’t around to hear it first hand, as all my seething mind could do was trace the source of the failure… i had rebooted after the sound/vision check, which kinda breaks the golden rule and meant i was too afraid to try and really troubleshoot as the performance started, but it turned out to be some interference on the cable as it was routed around the stage, somebody must have tidied it up against a transformer or a lighting signal passing nearby with some voodoo frequency turned on when it wasn’t before.

the bottom line though, is that shit happens, there was nothing that could be done, and the work, the commission, still stands. its not cinderella territory here, this has been my ongoing project for two years, and it now exists as an audiovisual whole - a paradigm shift not just for it but my practice. the technology to realise my approach is now there, and my concept and visual production has matured to be able to really exploit the potential. suffice to say, its like having entered the golden kingdom having seen it glimmering over the horizon for so long.

and so a thousand props to the organisers of 2020, for the commission is what it took, and they built an outstanding event on a series of them. their piece was also stunning, a meditation on memory and feelings, and perhaps appreciated even more by myself as it fits perfectly with the narrative lab agenda. andrew and nik - respect!

diary | 04 mar 2006 | tagged: *spark · vj · rbn_esc · 20/20 · name · novak · live cinema

119 clips, 76 scenes, one piece

4.30 am on the day of 2020, and rbn_esc__av is at v1.0.

119 mostly audiovisual vj clips in vdmx.spk
76 scenes in ableton live
7 channels of sound
3 channels of video
one spark

the week has been a blur, 24/7 production is pretty accurate what with two nights without sleep at all, but i’m here in newcastle, noodled some ambient bar visuals back at lumen on thursday and even managed to get the opening gala of the wider av festival that 2020 is a part of. but all that is by the by: i’ve got to the magic 1.0, with less than 12 hours to the sound check, cutting it fine but so happy…if a little tired.

diary | 04 mar 2006 | tagged: *spark · vj · rbn_esc · 20/20 · live cinema

no sleep, newcastle and lumen

with the final vj clips rendered and no sleep for 36 hours, hit the train to newcastle. passing durham is one of my favourite scenes, i somehow caught it perfectly at sunset despite being comotose the rest of the time… but that is one confined to memory alone, so heres a final render grab instead.
been worrying about playing a set at lumen, a kind of monthly partner to 2020 that showcases established vjs alongside encouraging first-timers… a social, i guess. turns out, its good to be challenged, as i rediscovered some of vdmx’s flexibility and audio-reactive complexity, not to mention a few clips in the back-catalogue as i went for minimal and refined motion graphics suitable for a bar.
by the time i got to bed, it had been quite a day - powering through content creation on paul’s twin-view G5 tower, hitting the final render, dying on a train but waking up to castles, cathedrals and the dramatic entrance to newcastle, having fine, fine tapas with equally fine fellows of name, a set that surprised me, and all rounded off with the discovery of sailor jerry rum.

diary | 02 mar 2006 | tagged: *spark · vj · rbn_esc · 20/20 · name · novak

vv.mod.midi.hack = a/v ok

you can have a deadline in your head, but theres nothing like it viscerally hitting you as you make your nth cup of tea, seeing it scribed coldly in the best before field of your milk carton. some kind of techo-primordial early warning system. works for me, anyway.
and so it was today that with joy and relief chasing each other round my head, finally watching the pieces of my audiovisual ideal slot into place and the proverbial engine stutter into life, that i saw that date on the milk and thought - yup, its a week from this very moment.

so i now have ableton live with the music cut up and laid out alongside midi clips corresponding to vj clips. that midi control goes to the visuals program, so i can mix the visuals with the material synced to the flow of the music i’m laying down. the sound work laid into the vj clips will then flow back into ableton to be tweaked as part of the audio mix. a rich audiovisual brew, an indistinguishable whole… cinematic motion graphics. fingers crossed.

the two visuals apps i feel are suitable for the long-form video-fused-motion-graphics i’m doing both don’t quite a the midi control i specifically require, but today i got the fruits of a little commission to retrofit my midi spec onto vdmx 4.2, and ye gads its working - i can actually do this for real now! the other contender, grid pro, will smash vdmx4.2 for me once they’ve got two features down, but as i write this they’re not quite there yet - but they’re working on it, and working on it as in right now - we’ll see which app makes it to the post! the picture is the moment of genesis, jdk’s hacked vv.mod.midi piping ableton control into each movie player. oh, and where did jdk code and send this? in a car on a 18 hour journey down america armed with powerbook and gprs phone, naturally.

so now the pieces are in place - music, vj clips with sound effects, sequencer, audio and visuals apps… its time to create the whole setup for real, and time to ensure all the remaining production tasks get finished - a chunk of the performance finished is not the whole thing!

diary | 25 feb 2006 | tagged: *spark · vj · rbn_esc · vdmx · ableton · 20/20

spark site updated for 20/20

with the 2020collective.org website about to go live with my updated profile on it, its definitely time to give the spark website some love, or at least some 2006 feeling. pretty much all change content wise, not that it looks in any way different. its funny what you find still online - the spark site still had my pre-vjcentral faq on the then brand new vdmx2… which makes me feel old, or something like that.
so - out with the one minute showreel and five minute av piece, in with the five minute ‘vj++’ 2005 showreel (finally encoded for iPod video at 320x240 not 300x240 - in quicktime, set the properties to 768x576px if the source is PAL DV). also in is a pdf preview of the promotional spk.dvd, and a redone scrapbook. tobyz.net even got a rss badge for this, oh the wonders.
go check it, it could do with a test - http://sparkav.co.uk/

diary | 13 feb 2006 | tagged: *spark · web

why is it...

…that i seem to get most work done on trains? anyway, eurostar all good. i hate airports. out the house, on the tube, onto eurostar, a la metro et voila. makes paris probably easier than newcastle, where i’ll be in a few weeks performing the audiovisual premiere of rbn_esc. this narrative lab presentation will be online soon, for you budding vj theorists.

diary | 19 jan 2006 | tagged: errata of life · *spark · narrative lab

xplsv.tv

this site is a good thing, and i’ve finally just added my vj retrospective and context is everything piece. get their video rss feed into iTunes for daily motion graphic joy.

i wonder if anybody will comment, the as-live/vj production methods should be interesting to motion graphics peeps. certainly a different audience to normal… eeek!

diary | 16 jan 2006 | tagged: *spark

vision’r - a parisian avit

i’m heading over to paris on thursday for vision’r, a vj festival holding the avit-the-international-vj-network banner. so nice to be able to take the train.
will be performing the narrative lab storyteller set, and talking a bit about what we’re up to, including the key question - do you sit or stand to live cinema?

http://vision-r.org/

diary | 16 jan 2006 | tagged: *spark · avit-vj-network · vj · vision'r