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Diarywell, technically, vjtalks was the first thing in the programme, so it actually started with me hollering in the daylight… but this image is nice, so lets roll with it.
well, technically, vjtalks was the first thing in the programme, so it actually started with me hollering in the daylight… but this image is nice, so lets roll with it.
photo: todd thille; http://avit.info/gallery2/v/lpm08/
first vjtalk, a who’s who of the dedicated, with the camera turned on its owner
photo: http://avit.info/gallery2/v/lpm08/
this was actually sunday’s talk, but hey, its the photo that gives the idea.
again a post taking some liberty with its posting date, it took me the best part of a month to actually get vjtalks online in acceptable form. go check, i like sunday’s.
http://avit.info/vjtalks
diary | 29 may 2008 | tagged: avit-vj-network · vj · web · live performers meeting
photo: me; http://avit.info/gallery2/v/lpm08/
its such a shame you can’t see the screen in the daylight, as brendan’s lovely vjtheory partner ana was full screen, getting the full lpm tour while she was still in bed in portugal… and especially surreal seeing her disembodied head glide into my periphery vision a few minutes later when i was sitting down and concentrating on vdmx… a definite moment of ‘we are in the future’ shock for me.
“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
photo: me; http://avit.info/gallery2/v/lpm08/
todd’s bio-sensor driving generative graphics craziness: the vjs are the plants. thats even better than ‘vjing with my mind’.
photo: todd thille; http://avit.info/gallery2/v/lpm08/
lpm marked a great thing: finally meeting akira, for whom a few years back i was just 48 hours away from buying tickets to buenos aires for an avit vj festival that fell through at the last minute.
his set rocked, and really good to see audiovisual work from a vj who was a musician first. his act of performance was really visceral, and he ended with the nice touch…
amazing photo: federico ciamei; http://avit.info/gallery2/v/lpm08/
yet again, i largely missed yroto’s very considered triple-head audiovisual piece. what i saw was quality, and this photo just blows me away.
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
photo: me; http://avit.info/gallery2/v/lpm08/
akira’s performance on friday was so good in fact, that on hearing he was having trouble with his gameboy, on saturday along came a gifted one from the crowd, a special edition with an audio mod to boot. and he won the vj contest, quite his festival.
photo: federico ciamei; http://avit.info/gallery2/v/lpm08/
there was a vj contest, and i really liked how it was run. a film was selected, the contestants had a few hours to make their clip selections etc, and they all had to make a five minute mix out of the film. and the judging was by amassing the results from a real range of judges, including myself. and thats ilan giving out modul8 as prizes, akira was up next to win the grand prize, a codanova midi controller.
photo: me; http://avit.info/gallery2/v/lpm08/
having spent the best part of a week in the venue, i won’t ever forget the feeling of looking up at the contrast of classically proportioned, warm textured roof against barbaric ironwork.
photo: federico ciamei; http://avit.info/gallery2/v/lpm08/
i love this image of the day after, it speaks volumes to me about what is good about things like live performers meeting and the people around it. the festival marked joana’s first anniversay as a vj, and here she is helping derig.
anton aka vade seeing whether he make his quartz-composer leveraging app v002 ready for live-use… in a few hours time. coding at the venue: a dangerous thing, but a few hours later there was a very happy anton bouncing around saying he’d nailed the weird bug and was going to perform with it for the first time.
jaromil roio was at this year’s lpm too (see vjtalks last year), and gave a really good talk in which he said something i will be repeating for years to come. probably not verbatim, but “if a community has trust, it can invest in its future”. which is a nice way to sum up a lot of what i’ve thought in trying to push the vj (and post-vj!?/) community on. a simple example would be a “live performer’s meeting club”, where you pay some amount to become a member, which lpm can then invest into securing the next festival, up to which you then rock up knowing you helped make it happen, with your workshop fees already paid. jaromil used the example of blender, where the users contribute in advance to help facilitate not only to its development, but the production of a work made with it.
[edit] having just found the note i wrote at the time, it was something like “community trust to pay for what you’re about to do”
the slides are here - http://jaromil.dyne.org/journal/creazione_dal_basso_e_p2p.html
silly artist name, absolutely great work.
having met david through visual berlin and his offering to help make the vjtalks happen at lpm, it wouldn’t have done to miss his set. so, early on the first night of lpm we were there, and in that next 45 minutes pretty much the festival was topped: serpendity was a great work. it held together. it felt complete. it carved its own line between abstraction and representation, music and noise. the visual was the audio and vice versa, conceived and engineered together.
i say engineered, as the visuals were rendered live using quartz composer using audio-analysis to really great effect. i had seen david’s early sketches on flickr (curly code), and while pretty and kinda interesting my “meaningless abstract 3d filter” turned on. what a difference the focus of a performance makes: worked up with music, animated and paced with the set, and there as a triplehead composition over nine screens with an energised figure at the centre, commanding it.
david, as well as having the content worked out, also had the tools worked out. one laptop as render client, one laptop as controller, linked by ethernet. nice to see this in the wild, its the approach i’m going for with *spark cinema. but going back to the photo, check the number of buttons: truly a flight deck!
toby - “but you know you still had the fps on”
david - “yeah, its so they know its really LIVE”
the best bit was when one track just didn’t sound right. the singer, probably rightfully having a diva moment, stopped it and was trying to get it to his ear… meanwhile fabio / vjk suddenly looks busy, and a blink later the whole performance space is surrounded by flames. to continue the theme: thats live.
