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tagged: novak

novak 3d disco

novak were in london doing their 3d disco show, so i dropped by to see how it had come on: i saw an early version - possibly the premiere even - back at the reopening of the tyneside in 2008. i was impressed with what i saw and what i knew about its development, so i put a line to create digital motion that there might be a good story in it. which, somehow, just got posted to their front page. read on, and the comments.

diary | 11 apr 2010 | tagged: vj · name · novak

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 › 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

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

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

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

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

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

name » our friends in the north

visited the ‘our friends in the north’ exhibition on the way out of newcastle, a retrospective of graphic design from the north east from the generation that straddled the analogue and digital divide. as such, it would be pretty hard for it not to be stuffed with good work, but the flipside was there wasn’t and obvious theme or progression. and a poster or two apart, the thing that lingers in my memory is the architectural space - an old railway building still with original timber - combined with the yellow ropes holding up many of the works. the photo kinda gets there.

diary | 02 nov 2007 | tagged: errata of life · vj · name · novak

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

second nlab night

the narrative lab nights at roxy bar and screen are going well, in the time since the first one we’ve had some excellent feedback and with this one we knew we were in safe hands with name - they’ve been hosting lumen vj/bar nights in newcastle for years now. shame their beautiful narrative piece (meditation?) ‘privy’ is kinda too subtle for a packed bar, but worth it to see it again. watch this space for the next, hopefully coming early in the new year.

diary | 14 oct 2006 | tagged: narrative lab · vj · name · novak · live cinema

rbn_esc >> urban escape

event, deadlines, stress, allsuch over - time to escape the urban condition, honour the title of my piece. the 2020 crew catch the metro to “the coast”… and the sign even says that. its an escape one-two, in fact… airport or coast. i like.

diary | 05 mar 2006 | tagged: errata of life · vj · 20/20 · name · novak

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

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