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tagged: live performers meeting

320x240 → holodeck

to rome, where live performers meeting organiser gianluca had invited me to play my fuel piece. even better, he said they had an immersive room. would i like to play that?

well, look at what i looked out at. hell yes.

to think that original fuel tour had vdmx2 running at 320x240px. to think that this contemporary revival happily runs at 11510x1080px in volta, and does so on a laptop not even breaking a sweat while pixel-mapping that onto 2x 4k outputs and running ableton.

diary | 27 apr 2024 | tagged: volta · fuel records · live performers meeting

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

lpm'12 » live cinema scope session

to rome for live performers meeting, once an annual institution for me. a weekend in a nightclub is always a strange thing, but being in roma with friends old and new cuts through all. some of whom were old visual berlin types staking out interviews on the rooftops for their new scope sessions project. picture are valerie and david talking about node and vvvv. before that, the light surgeons and i happily bantered back and forth around live cinema past and present… the kind of conversation that just doesn’t happen in the london day-to-day.

diary | 02 jun 2012 | tagged: vj · live performers meeting · live cinema

lpm'09 » parting shot

after four days of being in a night-club complex, its time to not be there to the end and have a relaxed final drink on the way to collapse in bed. and just as i leave, this crazy character pitches up to the vj clash. looks super cool, but surely it distorts your sight? kinda important to a vj?

diary | 31 may 2009 | tagged: vj · live performers meeting

lpm'09 » what its all about

but you could say the performances are secondary. what lpm is really about, and is titled as, is as a meeting space. here a user of niche-gamebody visuals software (mary-ann aka outpt) meets the actual creator of that software (clément, aka pikilipita, and actually has the opportunity of time and space for it not to be a “omg! hello! but i’ve got to go and its too loud here” conversation.

diary | 31 may 2009 | tagged: vj · live performers meeting

lpm'09 » visual berlin represent

thorsten e-gruppe giving it some vb represent. there was a beautiful moment earlier on the hack-bench, where he was staring at his laptop screen for five minutes in a zen-like trance, finally happy that his visuals were generating just right.

diary | 30 may 2009 | tagged: vj · live performers meeting

lpm'09 » triumph over chaos

so here is my parable about the value of a community focussed event like lpm: in a world where there are only so many screens for so many hours, and open submissions for vjs, you’d think video-chaos could be the only result. it certainly happened, with different outputs on adjacent screens hurting artist’s feelings and my eyes. thing is, we’re an adaptive species, we’re social. enter the community aspect: a group of peers who’d largely never met before the festival got together as a sufficiently large group so that individually they’d take all the screens for the vj clash, but collaborated on a joint performance instead. it rocked, they all got much more out of it than performing alone, and from the audience perspective it was a revelation: the vj set commanded the space, not least of all for actually having an intro, all screens breaking down in sync with the music, performers energised as a team and so on. total win for everybody; organisers, artists, punters.

diary | 30 may 2009 | tagged: vj · live performers meeting

lpm'09 » 14c0

to pick one example of good vj practice seen at lpm, 14c0 caught my eye with a strong graphical sensibility and focussed aesthetic. to cliché his output, there’s nothing revolutionary in audio-driven-maths-surfaces and mirrored architecture, but amongst the chaos of lpm it was really refreshing to see something dialled in and done right.

diary | 30 may 2009 | tagged: vj · live performers meeting

lpm'09 » a little prosecco interlude

why have one bottle when you can have two!

diary | 30 may 2009 | tagged: vj · live performers meeting

lpm'09 » vjtalks

we should have some interviews filmed at lpm up on the vjtalks site, but it might take a while: they developed into hour long in-depth affairs, so there’s some editing to do, and in david’s case, a baby almost due.

diary | 30 may 2009 | tagged: vj · live performers meeting

lpm'09 » qc workshop... behold the glitch

anton dropped into the qc class to show how qc can be extended by installing custom plug-ins… which naturally featured a fair bit of glitch.

diary | 30 may 2009 | tagged: quartz composer · vj · live performers meeting

lpm'09 » qc workshop... by somebody else!

it felt funny there being a quartz composer workshop, me not giving it, and the copy being beyond something even i could even have pumped-up (world exclusive! creator of the most widely viewed online video tutorial series!). but definitely a sign of progress in this world, so props to graham (centre back) and lpm. the class had a good time, and the word was spread: hopefully more interesting work will happen because of it.

diary | 30 may 2009 | tagged: quartz composer · vj · live performers meeting

lpm'09 » more tricks up david's sleeve

this was perhaps the most inspiring moment of lpm for me. to set the background, i’ve been planning a entirely new paradigm of vj interface for years now, have a subversion repository with a project to that end, and have had many discussions with people like anton about how flightdecks-of-buttons suck and where are we in our quests to make something better. the short answer is: years in, far from anything demonstrable due to the overhead of having to write such a thing from scratch.

enter david, who was kinda freaking out about a hip-hop gig he’d been asked to do, as he wasn’t sure how to get the scratch control and 'ting required. two hours later, he had a whole functioning gestural interface for vdmx using a tablet and the ultra-cool idea of tracing a line through a… er… control space along which pulsed the beat. a) genius b) rapid prototyped in two hours c) vdmx is cool because it can host qc, but the conceptual shift here is it works the other way round, a qc interface running in front of vdmx sending commands via open sound control.

awesome. watch the video: http://www.vimeo.com/5019365

diary | 29 may 2009 | tagged: quartz composer · vj · live performers meeting

lpm'09 » singer + musician + vj = band

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.

diary | 29 may 2009 | tagged: vj · live performers meeting

lpm'09 » serpendity › just to prove its live

toby - “but you know you still had the fps on”
david - “yeah, its so they know its really LIVE”

diary | 28 may 2009 | tagged: vj · live performers meeting

lpm'09 » serpendity › interface - ethernet - renderer

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!

diary | 28 may 2009 | tagged: quartz composer · vj · live performers meeting

lpm'09 » serpendity by mr monkeypresso

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.

diary | 28 may 2009 | tagged: vj · live performers meeting

lpm'09 » jaromil and community trust

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

diary | 28 may 2009 | tagged: vj · live performers meeting

lpm'09 » v002 in the wild

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.

diary | 28 may 2009 | tagged: vj · live performers meeting

LPM08 » community postscript

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.

diary | 02 jun 2008 | tagged: avit-vj-network · vj · live performers meeting

LPM08 » it ends

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.

diary | 01 jun 2008 | tagged: avit-vj-network · vj · live performers meeting

LPM08 » judging panel

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.

diary | 01 jun 2008 | tagged: avit-vj-network · vj · live performers meeting

LPM08 » akira’s gifted gameboy

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.

diary | 31 may 2008 | tagged: avit-vj-network · vj · live performers meeting

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 » yroto performing hyperspace

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.

diary | 31 may 2008 | tagged: avit-vj-network · vj · live performers meeting

LPM08 » akira with the big and little touches

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…

diary | 30 may 2008 | tagged: avit-vj-network · vj · live performers meeting

LPM08 » the vjs are the plants

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’.

diary | 30 may 2008 | tagged: avit-vj-network · vj · live performers meeting

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

LPM08 » vjtheory skype tour

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.

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

LPM08 » avit.info/vjtalks

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

LPM08 » vjtalk interview

photo: http://avit.info/gallery2/v/lpm08/
this was actually sunday’s talk, but hey, its the photo that gives the idea.

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

LPM08 » vjtalks

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

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

LPM08 » it starts

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.

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