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…
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
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
many memories of preparing live cinema talks and performances for berlin vj events with fALk, so always good to be surprised with new things including a bold stab at a live cinema interface that might just have the engineering oomph behind it to make it real.
diary | 11 jun 2010 | tagged: vj · visual berlin · live cinema
festivals are all about meeting your peers and being inspired, and meeting the pair of joris and eavan certainly fitted that bill. at the festival’s opening party they had a really nice live drawing program hooked into vdmx via vade’s screen capture qcfx. pictured is eavan, tablet and alchemy. its well worth checking out: http://al.chemy.org/
diary | 10 jun 2010 | tagged: vj · visual berlin
this is what the people behind a videokunst club look like the day before their festival starts. pretty relaxed to be sure, but this is berlin.
diary | 09 jun 2010 | tagged: vj · visual berlin
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
another work-in-progress update for the *spark d-fuser aka dvi mixer project: here we have the v1 pcb design, parts specified, plans drawn, and – with shawn multimeter in hand – the leg-work translating that into something that works. the real announcement here, though, is this: i will be presenting the project in full in berlin on the 12th june, so expect to know a lot more about what, when and how around then.
http://festival.visualberlin.org/day-program/
http://festival.visualberlin.org/news/spark-dvi-mixer-coming-to-berlin/
diary | 28 may 2010 | tagged: vj · video-out · visual berlin · dvi-mixer
derivative were over from toronto for transmediale, and it was suggested they show off ‘touch’ at the visual berlin meeting. and quite the jaw-dropper it was.
greg hermanovic started by demoing his ‘drunk vj’ mixer. all so-so, designed for a touch screen but still a ‘flight deck of buttons’. that was, until he zoomed through the interface into the workings below. behold: a fully node-based realtime engine with 3D heritage from houdini and a recent video re-working, and so confident in it’s power every node featured a preview of what was passing through it, and the patch cords were even animated. and the rabbit hole continued, zooming futher into nodes to reveal they were themselves patches of further nodes - right to the point of answering my standing interface question of “so what if i need the slider to have feature x”, because all the interface elements are patches themselves. touch077 looks to combine previous alternate favourite of vvvv’s elemental and 3d power with proper video support, while at the same time dissolving the concept of editor and output: quite something.
so while greg’s mixxa patch may not have floated my boat so much, the platform he built is amazing. if i wasn’t committed to cocoa+quartz composer, i’d be investigating it very deeply right now.
diary | 29 jan 2009 | tagged: vj · visual berlin · vj software
if you’re in berlin working on the new avit vj network website, you’re not going to miss going to visual berlin’s weekly meeting: its a concrete expression of what avit stands for, of what can happen through the network effect. so doubly nice to have a tag-team history of avit presentation shared between so many in the room, and not just be able to trace not only visual berlin’s genesis, but many other nice things such as joanie of antivj’s proto-mapping work at avit>c23 that led to a permanent installation in maria where we had been two nights before, as well as being the big movement in visuals since.
diary | 29 jan 2009 | tagged: avit-vj-network · vj · visual berlin
the back room is much better however, and we have servando, met at live performers meeting and since a visual berliner, on stage. servando makes custom controllers, this one sits in a dvd spindle and has accelerometer as well as the usual spread of knobs and buttons. dr nojoke, the muscian crumpling a plastic bottle to the microphone here, dubbed it techno tambourine.
diary | 27 jan 2009 | tagged: vj · visual berlin
local live cinema authority falk gaertner gives a rare work-in-progress performance of his magnum opus kalkin revelation.
diary | 24 may 2008 | tagged: avit-vj-network · narrative lab · vj · vdmx · visual berlin · live cinema
bram delving into audio-visual midi matters. photo by todd thille.
diary | 24 may 2008 | tagged: avit-vj-network · vj · visual berlin
…aka stuff we like, photo complete with dmy design stall. here are some links to the people/acts/work we talked about.
http://flight404.com
http://transphormetic.com
http://abstrakt.vade.info
http://sanchtv.com
http://antivj.com
http://bigartgroup.com
diary | 24 may 2008 | tagged: avit-vj-network · vj · visual berlin
gave a complete overview to quartz composer from a vjs perspective, and got some really nice feedback. photo by todd thille.
the basics
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
quartz composer 101
your first patch
dynamic controls
the key idea of time
common pitfalls
applying it and getting advanced
qc and vdmx
qc as dynamic clips
qc as filters
qc as rendering stacks
shaders
image kernels
glsl
3rd party plug-ins
diary | 24 may 2008 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · avit-vj-network · vj · teaching · visual berlin
putting the visual berlin t-shirt on their mascot… check this to get the full picture.
diary | 24 may 2008 | tagged: avit-vj-network · vj · visual berlin
On the horizon: Visual Berlin and Live Performer’s Meeting
On a more peer-to-peer tip, late May will see a one-two with Visual Berlin organising a formal one day event of workshops and showcases amongst their ongoing antics at the design fair dmy-berlin, followed the next week by the four day collaborative frenzy of Live Performer’s Meeting in Rome, now in its fifth edition, more successful than ever, and expanding into a cool new venue. Its submissions are still open too. The formal disclaimer should state I have a hand in both, probably doing an in-depth Quartz Composer day-long workshop in Berlin and hosting vj talks in Rome. Come!
diary | 22 apr 2008 | tagged: avit-vj-network · vj · writing · visual berlin
…love to see people moving things on (and a cool bar too: M12)
photo credit: todd thille (flickr -> artificial eyes)
diary | 30 dec 2006 | tagged: avit-vj-network · vj · visual berlin
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
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
a real highlight, and a great way to start a new year, was lawrence lessig talking CC at the CCC. obviously the creative commons idea was the thrust of the speech, but it was framed by comparing the free / open source software movement with that of media culture. in those terms, media and culture is an upstart by comparison, and the window of opportunity is probably shorter than we realise. makes the work of vjs and others in the coming decade even more important.
diary | 29 dec 2006 | tagged: avit-vj-network · vj · visual berlin
to berlin straight after christmas for avit vj gathering hosted within the chaos communication congress, the winter get-together of the hacking classes.
diary | 28 dec 2006 | tagged: avit-vj-network · vj · visual berlin