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tagged: particle

Particle

Particle strips back the visual façades of the city to reveal an immaterial web beneath. Processed urban imagery fluctuates between recognisable urban landscapes and abstract, data-like patterns, combined with dense sound textures, layered harmonies, abstract rhythms and snippets of found sounds. Particle creates an arresting, dream-like vista of a city that exists as much in the virtual as in physical space.

The source material for Particle is from a pool of video and sound collected across the globe for the D-Fuse documentary film Endless Cities. Particle is concerned with processes of abstraction. Both images and sounds have been broken into fragments and then reconfigured, in a parallel to the data flows that permeate the urban fabric.

D-Fuse, Particle Press Kit

Mike gave me the hard drive with all the Endless Cities footage, and said “let’s make a live show of this”. The subtext was: this is all HD footage, and nobody has yet cracked how to work high-def live. Let’s crack it.

In D-Fuse’s previous live show, the experimentation happened in the studio, using motion graphic tools like After Effects to create clips and sequences that could then be played out live. The expansion of the frame into the theatre was by simply doubling the 4x3 source up: one vj setup of dvd player, loop-playing laptop and mixer, gained a twin, and the two outputs were projected side-by-side.

For me, the challenge was clear: to shift that experimentation from the studio into the performance space. Going from analogue SD to digital HD had to be dealt with, but what mattered was to be able to walk into a venue and have the spatial flexibility to work with beams of light and semi-transparent screens, and then perform a show through that projection setup that was responsive to the moment.

The answer was clear: ever more single-screen vj setups put side-by-side wasn’t tenable, and laptops were now powerful enough for high-res playback, doing the visual effects in realtime, mapped to multiple screens.

But as Mike knew, this was all bleeding-edge, and critically there wasn’t a mixer: no jamming together, and with a single laptop plugged directly into the projector, a crash would take down the whole show. And that was a deal-breaker.

To make Particle work, I –

  • Made a triptych of three projection outputs out of the 1920x1080 Endless Cities footage, cutting out clips and loops as 4x3, 8x3 and 12x3 crops.
  • Created a VDMX setup that could composit these different crops into the triptych, and put the first-gen SSDs just available in our laptops to be able to play them.
  • Coded the video effects we wanted, some GLSL pixel shaders but mostly openGL where I could stretch smaller textures across the full canvas.
  • Laced audio-analysis through it all, hooked up midi-controls, and exposed the functionality as best as could be done: custom VDMX UI, lots of Quartz Composer beneath.

That was the kind of stuff I’d been brought into D-Fuse to do. Mike had seen what I’d done elsewehere and liked it. But nomatter how much fun I could have in the studio with this, we were still in the world of plugging the laptop straight into the projector – or rather, the laptop that output a non-standard 1920x480, which a splitter box then made into 3x 640x480, from which the three projectors were fed.

So how to mix this? Or what if we needed to reboot a laptop with an audience in front of us, or take away a laptop to finish prep after the soundcheck but still with hours before doors open?

That is where the *spark d-fuser came from, a hardware mixer I hacked together for doing HD and more or less anything else a computer could output at the time. In fact, all my peers wanted one the moment they heard it was possible. This took on a life of it’s own, and it’s quite the story –

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In short, I did crack it, and as a collective we’ve created and performed Particle around the world. Here’s an edit of the premiere. If you click through, you can see comments that show the impact it had at the time –

project | 2009

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

...to concrete bunker

warmed-up from the apple store gig, its down into a concrete bunker for two d-fuse sets at the redsonic festival. small, intimate and stuffed with 50 speakers in a surround sound dream, its quite the gig. matthias rocks out, his musique concrète scores now chasms of sound; latitude is the immersive drift that totally captured the audience, the trip of particle finally is (how else to describe it?/) dancing in abstraction to the music, and mixes to a finale of new work by paul that in drawing the audience back into a breathing-like minimal simplicity had them in the palm of his hand. gasps and whoops: nice!

diary | 27 jan 2012 | tagged: dfuse · vj · particle · live cinema

la » particle

endless cities over, the scrim is dropped and its time for particle. the last performance of particle – cynetart – had the sense of finally getting to a definitive, rounded piece. this, then, with the new season upon us should have been the start of particle phase two, starting with much upped audio-visual linkage and a higher-res two-up 16:9 format. the world has a way of conspiring sometimes, and instead for me it was one step forward and three back as the challenges of the format re-working and no time outside this trip ate any creative or rehearsal time just to get a functioning show. which isn’t to say that it still wasn’t quite an experience for the audience. as the photo shows, it was not the average film school evening!

diary | 22 apr 2011 | tagged: dfuse · vj · particle · live cinema

cynetart » particle

live audio-visual projects are hard to take a measure of. its something that only exists in the moment, but in that moment you, as the performer, are as far removed from a position to judge the work as possible: you’re not in the audience experiencing the whole effect, but on-stage in the middle of those screens locked in a specific mindset… if you’re lucky you get to look up from the laptop screen to the monitors, which themselves are no real representation of the final projected whole.

so its all very subjective. the first gig of particle was a triumph - or felt that way - and i think that was a combination of the release of something that you’ve worked on turning out good as it came into being for the first time properly, along with some more-than-we-realised luck with the staging, and a lot of simply mentally editing out the bad bits. at least here i can qualify it somewhat with comments on the [quick edit i made] from our recording of the gig, pretty much all of which are great.

since then, lots of ups and downs; starting to concentrate on the weaker sections, lots of juggling the content around, spending too much time trying to get the midi-sync working (particle is jinxed there, i know not why), and finding out that the particular geometry of stage, auditorium, projector and screen is much more critical and subtle than at first it seemed.

so it was really good to finally have a performance where it felt like we’d really smashed it, a true high. the above image are frames from a ten second excerpt from our recording that in itself forms such a satisfying loop. we don’t have a full recording, but we certainly have the footage to make a proper promo edit with that as the base. huzzah.

comedy bonus: there’s a video podcast from the festival with us in it. the footage is a rum selection, but yes, it really happened.

diary | 16 nov 2010 | tagged: dfuse · vj · particle · live cinema

cynetart » impeccable production

straight on the heels of the ‘holotronica’ onedotzero d-fuse performance, to dresden for ‘cynetart: international festival of computer based arts’. after the experiment of holotronica - more diversion and distraction in the end - this was the return to the real thing, and the chance to up its game with a refined set of footage.

the festspielhaus turns out to be an immense room, but moreso their technical production turns out to be impeccable. setting the staging for performances like particle is always tricky as the immersive effect we are after for the audience is so dependent of the geometry of the space, and at cynetart it all came together. the projection onto the front screens was able to fill the front screen fully while bathing the whole seating area in the spill-through projection, yet without the audience being blinded by that projection’s source, looking down the lens. rigged for a ‘trip’, rather than as cinema.

check the attachment too, the whole space was quite special, not to mention cycloid-e behind us.

diary | 16 nov 2010 | tagged: particle · dfuse · vj · cynetart · video-out | downloads: dfuse-cynetart-setup.jpg

particle experiment noodling

particle’s air conditioning units finally get an airing, midi sync or no. it turned out a really good gig to try new things, i was really happy with the ‘noodle’ i got going.

diary | 15 may 2010 | tagged: dfuse · vj · particle

particle experiment at shunt

with the musion to play with once more, to the shunt vaults with for an experimental performance of particle.

diary | 15 may 2010 | tagged: dfuse · vj · particle

mapping'10 » particle: the magic ork shot

may wouldn’t be the same without the annual pilgrimage to the excellent mapping festival. fourth time running now, having played as part of narrative lab performances and workshops, then journalism, and last year doing a workshopped kinetxt performance. this time, its as part of d-fuse, performing particle.

as i write this, i still haven’t got the shots of mapping from d-fuse hq, but just found this one on the internet. its by mapping’s genius photographer ork, check out his portfolio of mappings past and present.

diary | 06 may 2010 | tagged: dfuse · vj · mapping · particle · live cinema

l.e.v. » this is how every gig should be

aaah, a proper theatre. well resourced, good tech crew, and a lovely auditorium for the audience.

diary | 30 apr 2010 | tagged: particle · dfuse · vj · lev · video-out · live cinema

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

particle in barcelona

in barcelona on a solo d-fuse mission: particle to audio by asférico, refactored down to a dualhead screen setup. good gig: refactoring prep worked out, no nasty surprises throughout, performance felt smooth.

diary | 18 feb 2010 | tagged: particle · vj · vdmx · video-out · live cinema

são paulo » particle

with the standard in the bank, it was onto the experiemental performance, the world premiere of ‘particle’.

Particle explores urban conditions on an abstracted level. While projects like Undercurrent, Latitude and Surface look at city life in its social and psychogeographical dimensions, Particle zooms in on details of the urban fabric and reveals a web of rhythms, patterns and textures.

particle is also in many ways a rite of passage for me; its not often you get the chance to take an HD film and transform it into the next-generation ‘we wrote the book on vjing’ d-fuse performance. there’s a lot more work to do, especially in creating an audio-visual syncronicity in collaboration with particle’s musician matthais kispert, but we rocked it and got such a positive response. there is a video showing some excerpts of the performance here: http://vimeo.com/5787905

i’m really happy with

  • the staging with an 8x3 ‘cinematic’ canvas behind us and a mesh screen in front, with that projector throwing forward through the mesh into the venue+audience. people loved the ‘holographic’ or ‘3D’ nature this gave to the performance, and i personally love how the forward throwing projector beams the dancing lines and other abstractions of the performance throughout the venue, immersing the audience in the ‘trip’.
  • the twin laptop setup enabled by the dvi crossfader i created and our solid state drives. the ability to tag-team the performance really transforms things, allowing the breathing space to check pace and prepare for the next section. and within each laptop, being able to seamlessly scale from cinematic playback to ultra-noodle is so empowering as a visualist.
  • the customisation of my vj tool of choice, vdmx, allowing panels dedicated to doing creative things with 4x3 and 8x3 sources within the 12x3 canvas. this was achieved with a combination of quartz composer sources i made, fronted by an experimental vdmx feature allowing you to build your own interface plugins, and backed by a set of quartz composer plug-ins i’m working on that scale to any canvas rather than working per-pixel in the source resolution.

thanks to itaú cultural for the photo

diary | 25 jul 2009 | tagged: quartz composer · particle · dfuse · vj · on_off · vdmx · 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

d-fuse 'particle' preview

beyond visible things like keane3D, lots of work has been going on in the background with d-fuse this past year or so. some of it pitching, some of it pushing along internal projects, and at the moment a massive commercial job under NDA: all things which don’t really get to this diary. but i’m glad to announce a little preview of something i’ve been working on a while, which is transforming d-fuse live.

as part of electrovision on saturday the 18th july at roxy bar and screen, d-fuse will be performing for the first time with their high-def laptop live setup. it will be something between a test of the setup and a preview of the performance that will become ‘particle’, so all are welcome and beta-tester feedback appreciated!

there’s much more to say about what has been developed for this setup, but in the meantime here is the blurb i wrote for electrovision:

D-Fuse present a work-in-progress viewing of their new live performance, an experimental audio-visual triptych exploring urban conditions. Having mastered an HD production process for films such as Brilliant City and Surface, they have challenged themselves to bring this back into the live arena and with the graphical sensibility they are noted for.

pictured: vdmx work-in-progress setup, with amongst other things custom quartz composer 4x3 into 12x3 layer, backed by unreleased open-gl based qc plugins, and fronted by a native vidvox control layout.

diary | 09 jul 2009 | tagged: quartz composer · particle · dfuse · vj · electrovision · vdmx