tagged: vj

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 –

Kickstarter pitches are now part of maker culture, but when do you hear back from the other side?

How did an Arduino hack turn into £50k in pre-orders? How do you get an assembly line going if all you have is a laptop? Four production runs and a retail partnership later, what were the final accounts?

Join Toby Harris as he talks product and dissects a successful run of a maker business.

— Taking stock: what made a maker business

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

to chartres to help katharine vega turn dreams into immersive video. what, years before, had started as sharing some drawings, had got stuck as powerpoint-and-pull-down-screen. kate wanted to ‘vj’ it live to a narration, and she was right. cue me getting onto eurostar with a resolume deck and luggage full of scrim and projector…

the work kate and her peers are doing is actually right up my street. putting the context aside, the basic idea of a feedback loop with those in the room is the crux of the more interesting work i’ve done: interpreting talk, reifying into media, re-presenting back.

diary | 07 jul 2018 | tagged: vj · video-out · resolume · engaging audiences

splice, as a punter, before waking up at the crack of dawn for a weekend of endurance cycling… yikes. wasn’t going to go before seeing eboman, a hero of mine whose audio-visual antics made computers do things that are still on the edge twenty years later.

of course, it’s always dangerous meeting your heroes, but a sense of humour and love for the craft goes a long way it seems: his set was a riot. not my taste, and just a guy and a laptop – no wearble sampling suit! – but so much fun.

diary | 11 may 2018 | tagged: vj · splice festival

some days, it all just works: smooth setup, time to rehearse, packed house, nailed performance. boom. d-fuse at emaf.

diary | 21 apr 2018 | tagged: vj · dfuse · resolume · tekton | downloads: Angela_180421_50.jpg · Kerstin_180421_084.jpg · Kerstin_180421_109.jpg · Kerstin_180421_114.jpg · Kerstin_180421_139.jpg

to birmingham, invited to give my talk about the live in live cinema at the new projectionists. formative place, brum.

Revived ‘About the live in Live Cinema’ for ‘The New Projectionists’ at @Centrala_space. Felt like a manifesto from my former self, a baton to be picked up. Thanks @mlightborne and @leolodreamland for organising.

— toby*spark (@tobyspark) February 24, 2018

Tarot a/v improv from @whiteemotion at The New Projectionists pic.twitter.com/b66GbN23Pa

— toby*spark (@tobyspark) February 24, 2018

Live drawing PETSCII from @raquelmeyers with @whiteemotion on sound. pic.twitter.com/w6wVnfNuhT

— toby*spark (@tobyspark) February 24, 2018

...and that’s the point I checked train times, and found the last sane train back was 9.30pm. Rubbish! I had to bail and run (literally). Apologies @leolodreamland, @_cat_weasel, @Test_Card_MCR and all...

— toby*spark (@tobyspark) February 24, 2018

diary | 24 feb 2018 | tagged: vj · live in live cinema · live cinema · talk | downloads: uk05-poster.jpg

was part of the live cinema panel, with chris allen, sally golding and lisa brook. chris, sally, and i have talked on this before, but new and outside-of-our-scene is lisa’s live cinema org.

here’s a moment from the talk, as i recall it:

lisa – come to the sheffield doc fest, we’re curating live performances and there’s budget

chris – what! they’ve been turning down live work for years. it’s been maddening.

i mention this as it might mark the point where live cinema pieces (a wide definition per lisa, but including what i’d say and like to see) might start to be commissioned and appear in more mainstream contexts.

diary | 27 may 2017 | tagged: vj · live in live cinema · splice festival · talk · live cinema

i wasn’t going to miss the ninja tune tour when i was a student in '98, and the show did not disappoint. scratching audio-visual samples? crazy. and there’s the let us play album, which came with a cd-rom that was a year ahead of me having a computer powerful enough to actually run it.

but, sometimes, it’s hard to escape the past. their latest visual collaborator, matt sharp, had updated everything using oh-so now style transfer techniques. this was perfect: bang-on homage to coldcut’s ethos and actually stylish!

diary | 26 may 2017 | tagged: vj · splice festival

the discovery of the festival for me was alba corral, whose generative graphics were captivating and didn’t tire or jar like so many do – i’ve tried a few things, but never crossed an expressive barrier which she has quite wonderfully. it was quite inspiring, and leads me back to ideas of a visualist band, with people passing around live drawing in realtime.

the performance was a pair-up with tim cowie, who is silhouetted on the left. you can just make out alba in the dark on the right.

diary | 26 may 2017 | tagged: vj · splice festival

what might the final part of a trilogy be, when the first part was so definitive? is there anywhere else to go?

the answer, of course, is something different, something bonkers. not the mise-en-scene and future-props (neon-tube-guitars, anybody?), but a journey through a warped world. a more conventional setup, but much more mind-warp. nice moment afterwards when franz goes “narrative, yes. who was talking about that the first? you.”

good to see old friends continuing to push it. what they were doing the first time i met them, a decade back, is still something i talk about.

diary | 26 may 2017 | tagged: vj · splice festival · live cinema

Performed Latitude last night at @splicefestival - great setup, booming bass... https://t.co/SKoMqmnVEM

— toby*spark (@tobyspark) June 5, 2016

pic.twitter.com/S3ZkldgXIi

— Splice Festival (@splicefestival) June 5, 2016

...and an amazing audience, on home turf to boot. Thanks to fellow @d_fuse M & M, organisers and all who turned up. https://t.co/bHSe53HRIp

— toby*spark (@tobyspark) June 5, 2016

pic.twitter.com/5AoRx0EEEP

— Splice Festival (@splicefestival) June 5, 2016

Oh! That's me. Pre-gig projector worship? https://t.co/9ghL8sF4xi

— toby*spark (@tobyspark) June 5, 2016

pic.twitter.com/S3ZkldgXIi

— Splice Festival (@splicefestival) June 5, 2016

diary | 05 jun 2016 | tagged: vj · dfuse · splice festival · live cinema

being asked to revive rbn_esc begged the question: will the software still run, can i even remember how to handle the complexity? it was an amazing milestone back in 2006 going from two laptops linked by midi to running the complete performance off one laptop. but there was a lot to that integration, and my license of ableton live was long expired. i wondered whether there might be a simpler way, now that resolume avenue effectively had ableton’s session view – in which rbn_esc’s basic structure and audio-visual links are laid out – and was built to be an audio-visual software from the ground up.

turns out, resolume does make this possible, and it’s great to perform from just one software. but, i needed to ‘outboard’ quite a lot of functionality. it’s great that’s possible – to the extent i was able to make my own render stack fed by the individual layers in resolume – but not all of it was me being fussy. the audio side has a long way to go: elastic audio, setting bpm from a column trigger, pre-fade / post-fade effect processing.

video: https://vimeo.com/148427383

diary | 10 dec 2015 | tagged: *spark · vj · rbn_esc · resolume · quartz composer

was invited to perform ‘rbn_esc’ at vjlondon’s first big gig: ‘av depot’. to the organiser, it’s a piece that stood out from times past as something deeply audio-visual, considered and executed as one. so it was nice for the invite to be motivated like that, and it was nice – if surreal, somehow – to go through the process of resurrecting the piece, seeing what my former self had been up to, some ten years later.

photo credit: fabrizio d’amico

diary | 05 dec 2015 | tagged: *spark · vj · rbn_esc · live cinema · resolume

friend kate genevieve had been asking about live drawing and going in to space. back from our (interstellar journey)[/diary/2014/09/starshiphackcircus], it was time to resurrect some old code for a live drawing experiment with will scobie at Transmute – Digital experiments for sensory beings. Loved the quote on the flyer: “The night is a tunnel… a hole into tomorrow…”, Frank Herbert, Dune.

Perhaps, perhaps of course, even with a nice dualhead projection setup, what we did was outshone by simple pen, paper and a very long corridor.

diary | 28 sep 2014 | tagged: vj | downloads: TRANSMUTE_flyer.jpg

friend kate genevieve had been asking about live drawing and going in to space. so, we boarded starship hackcircus and (made some art)[http://www.hackcircus.com/blog/2014/9/15/starship-hack-circus-the-elephant-has-landed]. Loved these posters leading you into the hack circus venue.

diary | 14 sep 2014 | tagged: vj

a screenrunner client wanted an animating tiled layout. it’s surprisingly non-trivial to code, at least if you want to go beyond hard-coding a few grid layouts. thankfully, the problem is academically interesting too, and lo! there’s a paper on spatial packing of rectangles, complete with MaxBinRectPack algorithm and c++ implementation. respect to jukka jylänki.

getting this working for me was time worth investing, and i’ve released the results: a quartz composer patch and animation technique. it’s up on github, and is something best seen in action, so check the quick demo video on vimeo.

diary | 18 nov 2013 | tagged: code · mac os · quartz composer · titler · vj

friends who made a cinema camera out of industrial cameras are getting excited about gig-e vision for live video work. as am i.

more on this will come. in the meantime, hospitality at brixton academy was round the corner, had a friend running visuals, and i’d just got our plug-in running at 60fps.

• soak test with d’n’b frequencies: check.
• flexibility of just dropping in the tiny camera on it’s single cable: check.
• image quality: check, the cheap-ass lens i used was surprisingly good, and i have a high-quality prime lined up.

while i’m here, justin has done a fine job with the hospitality staging - the massive ‘h’ fixture is proper class, and the visuals were perfectly designed for a judicious minimum of LED panels.

diary | 27 sep 2013 | tagged: code · mac os · video-in · quartz composer · gev · vj

If you’ve been keeping your finger on the VJ pulse as close as we do, you couldn’t have missed the arrival of the Spark D-Fuser. However, we appreciate the fact that some of you are busy touring or designing wicked content. Or even may actually have a social life. Either way, you could have missed it getting that elusive ‘Buy Now’ button earlier this year.
Or it could be that you’ve seen the button and the hype, but are wondering if it’s really all that it’s cranked up to be. It could be that you want to know more about this mysterious magic box that will solve all your problems, before you part with your hard-earned VJ cash and actually press that ‘Buy Now’ button.
Either way, we’ve had the pleasure of working with that little bad boy on various occasions, as well as seen it in use by quite a few touring VJs. So we figured it was high time to give a first hand experience of what the D-Fuser actually defuses.

it’s a fun and informative review, and who doesn’t like being told they rock.

above the detail and any quibbles, there’s two meta-comments about the mixer that i really appreciate resolume making. the first is that “the *spark d-fuser is a new mixer for a new age”, with the review leading the reader from the act of vjing where the hardware mixer is the central instrument to where we are now: the sophistication and breadth of software is the prime driver, and so everything should be built around that. second, is that the *spark d-fuser is in many ways a hardware equivalent of resolume - it is a carefully designed product with a honed rather than expansive feature set, a product entirely built around the user experience for the user.

Now go press that ‘Buy Now’ button, everyone.

http://resolume.com/blog/review-hands-on-with-the-spark-d-fuser

diary | 12 aug 2013 | tagged: dvi-mixer · vj

a milestone in post-retail *spark d-fuser life - there are compelling new firmware revisions for the controller, and a support website that backs that and more.

notably, i’ve assembled a guide based on people’s experience beyond the getting started video, so now there is an extensive document that details use, what you need to know around mixing with DVI/HDMI/VGA, and what to try if things aren’t working out.

headline features from the controller firmware v25 to v29 are
keying - tweaked keys are now remembered, you can key right-over-left as well as left-over-right, and the menu / user experience is much better.
resolutions - better user experience; fit/fill/1:1 implemented for mismatching sources and output; 24 and 25fps HD modes are listed by default.
network - better implementation of OSC / ArtNet / DMX modes, plus detailed OSC how-to document.

all at http://sparklive.net/dfuser/support

diary | 30 jul 2013 | tagged: dvi-mixer · vj

to manchester for the premiere of manchester international festival ‘film-gig’ commission massive attack vs adam curtis. well worth the train.

thought one: amazing talent behind one show doubled upon with horace andy, liz fraser, and the powerhouse of uva.

thought two: amazing audience numbers, 1,200 people each night for eight nights has to be a live cinema record?

thought three: if you deliver a two hour single screen edit while talking up ‘a new kind of event’ something went wrong

hope to see the piece develop, such potential between curtis threading of story and the multi-screen presentation of archive.

diary | 04 jul 2013 | tagged: vj · live cinema · massive attack

leaving the desert sun behind desert sun we’re now deep into the night: ali demirel tripping the light fantastic for richie hawtin’s enter stage at EDC las vegas. photo taken by the perfectly portraited barbara klein.

diary | 22 jun 2013 | tagged: dvi-mixer · vj

doing a phd is a strange thing, and perhaps most strange is the extremely long reward cycle involved. so it was a joy to give a saturday daytime to the campaign against arms trade: bust in, give your all, and get that good feeling of seeing your work out there and appreciated within the confines of the day. also nice is reading the guardian write-up and knowing the majority of the ideas mentioned bore your fingerprints!

http://www.caat.org.uk/events/hack-day-2013-results.php

diary | 22 jun 2013 | tagged: vj

happiness is seeing photos like this: prototypes and factories far behind, a d-fuser out in the wild. truly the wilds here, courtesy of sean healey and his audio-visual performance ‘desert engines’. was it almost a year ago he was interviewing me as this whole endeavour was announced, prototype to pre-order?

diary | 16 jun 2013 | tagged: dvi-mixer · vj

prompted by the vidvox feature, a guest tutorial video showing vj use of the d-fuser, complete with a demonstration of how you can link the d-fuser controller with your laptops for better audio-visual integration when performing as a group.

http://vdmx.vidvox.net/tutorials/using-the-spark-d-fuser-with-vdmx-with-toby-harris

diary | 05 apr 2013 | tagged: video-out · dvi-mixer · *spark · vj

“VDMX has been a big thing for D-Fuse. It’s the engine that drives our most innovative shows, laying out and compositing footage across multiple screens, hosting patch upon patch of custom D-Fuse development work. However, for our kind of theatrical shows, plugging a laptop directly into the projection setup just isn’t an option. We need video hardware to keep a solid feed to the projectors from early soundcheck to us walking on stage, we need to have a master fade control for our output, and we need to crossfade between our laptops to mix collaboratively. For year after year there was no solution to this, as with each laptop rendering all screens simultaneously the video format is outside of what the SD and then HD hardware can handle. What we needed was a DVI mixer. There wasn’t one, and so I made one.”

http://vdmx.vidvox.net/blog/history-of-spark-d-fuser

diary | 05 apr 2013 | tagged: dvi-mixer · vj

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

b-seite charge one: provoke vjs into thinking about the future of their practice, via showing the toys and talk about how i made it as a post-vj. this was a tidied up version of the talk i improvised at LPM last year, except that then the mixer was a final prototype, and here I was at a festival with two d-fusers as part of their tech setup. mixer’s i’d sold but had never seen, the boxes opened up by hands other than mine, in a country far away.

diary | 23 mar 2013 | tagged: titler · dvi-mixer · *spark · vj · b-seite · talk

a highlight of the festival was seeing the mr-808 in action. appropriately enough for a realer-than-real interpretation of the classic 80’s drum machine, seeing it in the flesh having seen it documented online was a nice moment. quite the performance prop, it renders somewhat tangental the quality of the music or musician’s engagement: with that thing beside you, the show is going to be a hit.

diary | 22 mar 2013 | tagged: vj · b-seite

to b-seite on the vj-tip. i like the kind of festival where the drinks menu has had a bit of production effort, a nicely backlit branded enclosure that follows through with a selection that starts with pixelstolz and vj-wallbanger.

diary | 22 mar 2013 | tagged: vj · b-seite

back at the factory to check on more d-fusers being made. don’t think i’ll ever quite get over seeing other people making my things in bulk.

diary | 19 mar 2013 | tagged: dvi-mixer · vj

after the talk and panel discussions on live cinema itself and what role the LCF could or should play, an evening of performances. limited to a single screen, scott amoeba did a wonderfully restrained remix of the documentary kanzeon into a meditative contemplation on the ritual texts. very much my kind of thing.

that said, what made my heart race was the performance that though theoretically limited to the event’s single screen certainly wasn’t. sally golding hauled in a load of old projection gear, assembled it in the middle of the space, and coaxed an audiovisual show out of celluloid and mechanics. it was less about what was on the screen, than how the whole venue was transformed with light leak textures and sally’s shadow swooping around as she literally embraced the setup with body and arms.

diary | 17 mar 2013 | tagged: live cinema foundation · vj · live cinema

the live cinema foundation finally hits the ground with ‘av assebmly’. an idea much talked about over the years between various london folk, chris found the kind of venue that could incubate work, and made a booking on spec. jump-cut a month later, and i’m presenting ‘about the live in live cinema’ to an on-topic audience as you can get.

diary | 17 mar 2013 | tagged: live in live cinema · live cinema foundation · vj · talk · live cinema

turning the dvi-mixer project into the *spark d-fuser product was very much an act of faith that peer demand meant something. but in no small part too, it was an act of hubris: i said i was going to do this thing, and i found i wasn’t at all happy looking at it fizzling away before the 2012 reboot. put those two things together, and you will likely decide to offer a pre-ordering window, and pledge to make as many are as ordered. it could be two, twenty, or two hundred; a loss at the low-end, a profit at the high end, but one way or another they were going to get out there.

but this is not how people expect to buy a product, nor is it how the world is set up to let you sell products. with daily enquiries from people too late to get in on that first run, december and january saw me getting to the point where the *spark d-fuser could become a retail operation. the face of this you can see in the completely reworked website pictured above, but the big development is partnering with a company to take on the logistics of the d-fuser as a retail operation. it’s a company i used for some parts of the original production run, that worked out well so they’re now my manufacturing partner with orders going directly to them.

all which is quite a preamble to a simple fact: there’s now an order button. go use it!

diary | 07 feb 2013 | tagged: dvi-mixer · *spark · vj

with the production run now done, for posterity here is what it took, as evidenced by the update emails i sent out to everybody whose future-mixer was being made.

Hello,

Thanks for ordering a *spark d-fuser, you’re one of 80. I realise its quite a thing to put your money down on something sight unseen, doubly so something that has yet to get through its manufacture run. So I’m going to do my best to keep you in loop as I get them manufactured and out to you.

Before getting onto the production status, here’s a little story. While the orders were open, the prototype was out on a field trial in the hands of Jim and Adam of As Described, who were running a stage at the Bestival weekend. Saturday morning, my phone rings, and its Jim on the other end. This makes me worried: I assume he’s ringing because something has gone horribly wrong. But no: its a very excited Jim, reporting a great night VJing with the mixer, guest acts such as Pfadfinderei rocking it, and saying Matt Black of Ninja Tune saw it and asked straight away how could he order one. And later that day, in comes an order from him.

Firmware

• I’m working on the controller firmware to read in settings from a configuration file, aiming for the resolution menu and keying parameters to be set from a text file. I was hoping to say this was done by the time of writing this email, but I’ve been having grief with all the config file reader libraries I can find. At this rate I might just roll one myself, its only reading in lines from a text file after all.
• The people at TV One were finally back in the office, and while I still haven’t got a firm answer about the processor firmware with additive blend, they are at least making positive noises.

Summary: developments, but nothing definite yet.

Controller Manufacture

• Case: I’ve approved the production sample and transferred the payment for 85 machined and printed cases to be manufactured. This what I had quoted at 5-6 weeks, and has gone off within the first week, so we’re still on track here.
• MBED: This is the ‘brain’ of the controller, and is a £40 part a bit like a Arduino on steroids. The minimum order quantity to get them direct is 100, so I thought I was in the bad position of having to find 80 plus spares through places that sell them one by one… and the place I usually use was out of stock. The great news is that they’ve managed to bend their system to allow me to order under the minimum quantity. The not so great news is that their hand over to their sales department got dropped, so while I’ve prompted them and its back on track, I still haven’t been able to commit to the order, and there may well be a few week lead time to get them to me.
• DC jack: I want the controller power supply to be interchangeable with the processor’s power supply. This meant finding the special locking socket like TV One use on the processor, which I had done and tested its fit. Unfortunately that part has now gone out of stock and won’t be back in stock till the end of the year. I’ve found an alternative, and while I’d have to order 500 the price at bulk is actually quite OK. But that has an eight week lead time. I haven’t made a decision on this yet, but there’s a good chance I might just have to use a generic non-locking jack. Its not the end of the world, but it is a bit of a shame.
• Electronics: I sent out the design and bill-of-materials to get quotes for manufacture and assembly of the PCB, and while they’ve started to come back I still haven’t had them all back. They’re looking ok so far, but I need to resolve the MBED and DC jack situation before being able to get that going. With the lead time of 5-6 weeks for the case, I thought there wouldn’t be pressure on the PCB assembly, but if the MBED supply means this can’t start for a few weeks, that might change things and push back everything.
• Assembly: I’ve made up instructions for assembly of the complete controller. We’ll see whether its economic for the PCB assemblers to take on the whole package, or whether its me who slips the PCBs into the slot in the case. Regardless, its a nice moment, it makes it feel a good step ‘more real’.

Summary: waiting on a quote or two, possible delay due to MBED sourcing.

Toby

Hello,

This week’s update. At the end of week two the totalling and quoting for the controllers is done, company chosen and monies paid. There’s even an assembly and test document, if not the actual test rig or code setup. The TV One situation is still unresolved.

The bit you care about: when? The controller manufacture is stated at five weeks, which starts Monday. So thats one week over, I’m afraid.

Toby

Hello,

First - I’ve done this update mail through the service I’m using to handle future production run enquiries, any issues let me know.

There have been two weekends without updates - apologies. I should have known better than to wait on somebody getting back to me with an update, and definitely known better than to let that happen twice! I have been busy though, updates below.

Firmware

• I had a less than fun weekend realising there was a crashing bug in the controller code. Without a proper a debugger tracking this kind of thing down is a nightmare, especially when you read a load of internet posts about the library you’re using at that point displaying just the behaviour you’re seeing. Inevitably, the mbed library turns out to be faultless and it my code that was the problem. An edge case in my optimised TV One comms code was quietly setting the stage for a later crash, but at least its fixed now and I’ve learnt a thing or two in the process.
• The code is in there to work with resolutions and keyer settings read from a config file – much better for you than having to tweak the source code – but I still haven’t got a library running as part of the firmware that actually reads and writes settings to a file. Perhaps more eyes on that will solve it trivially, its probably a compile problem or suchlike.
• You wouldn’t believe it, but TV One still haven’t given me an answer on the additive firmware. But by the ‘end of the week’, ie. now, they should ‘have something to show me’ and a development cost. It seems they’re doing the work before quoting me a cost to get my approval? Next week I’ll be able to say, surely!

Controller Manufacture

• Case: They arrived this morning, and the quality is outstanding. Boom! Really stoked. http…
• MBED: They arrived ahead of schedule and are at the assemblers. Getting them direct means dealing directly with ARM, which felt quite surreal: invoices and letterheads from the architects of the chips that power pretty much all smartphones and tablets!
• Electronics: Remember that DC-In issue? Well this is where the news gets more annoying. Long story short, I had a supplier who thought they could source that part, and two weeks later found out that they couldn’t, so we’ve had to make a plan B, and we’re delayed. The controllers will now come with a non-locking part, and I’ve ordered that 500 lot of a UK manufacturer’s equivalent part just so this never need happen again. This is doubly annoying, as by this point after much searching around for power supply options, I’d decided to go with the genuine TV One ones, which of course have the locking plug. Quality assured matching part, the plug shaft will will just stick out 1mm from the controller.
• Assembly: The product assembly and packaging will be done by the PCB assemblers, which is great news for my kitchen table and general sanity. The cardbox box supplier is even making up tooling for the fold-up insert that will have to be made to hold everything in place. Thats yet another example of things being more complicated than you first thought: I had standard foam lining in my costing spreadsheet, but when it comes to making up a test you realise you can’t squash together the power supply and cable along with the controller… hence a night of origami and cardboard as an insert is designed and shaped to hold everything just so. http…

Anyway, the bit you’re really interested in? I’m hoping they’ll ship the week of 5th November.

Toby

Hello,

Here’s the bit you’ll like and makes me super happy: TV One are going to develop the custom firmware, have been paid for it, and are getting on with it.

On a personal note, adding additive mixing was pretty much the reason I put this project out to the community back in 2009. I thought with the leverage of many TV One could be persuaded to tweak the 750. Didn’t quite prove that simple and while the journey between then and now has been frankly crazy making, at least there’s the reward of the feature as an artist I felt was missing right from the start.

Here’s this week’s standard bit of production WTF: I’ve just spent the best part of two weeks going back and forth with a cardboard box company to find out that they couldn’t in fact do the basic job I’d asked them about in the first place. When you say to them the sample box is good but can it be made up of a better grade of cardboard, there’s quite a difference in answering “Yes, we have lots of grades of cardboard” instead of “Well, we have lots of cardboard but that box can only be made up in the grade we sent you”. Especially when they’re going to spend the next week working up tooling quotes and samples that are specific to the exact properties of that box. That can’t exist.

Here’s the really horrible side you don’t ever want to know about: despite having got all payments up-front, with the wonders of PayPal I’ve had an oh-so-interesting time actually accessing that money. I’ve had to put in £10k of my own money so far to push things along, and its just occurred to me I’m probably going to have to pay the VAT on all the sales before actually receiving the money for half of the sales. Which could make that figure a lot higher. Gah.

On a lighter note, this week saw some pretty pictures going through the prototype for the opening concert of the Belfast Festival, with D-Fuse providing a visual score to Holst’s The Planets. Plenty of power politics and setup stress at such things, but so good to get back in the mix.

Toby

Hello,

Since writing last time, I’ve spent a day in a lab coat at the factory. They’re getting on with the final build and testing, and I have the first off the production line in front of me here. Huzzah!

Here are three diary posts from the factory, and a shot of the real controller. A drawing no more!

Controller firmware is up to v21, there’s a lot of code and time in there. I’m quite proud of the way it handles additive mixing, and you no longer need to hack the code to change things like the resolutions in the menu system: its reading settings from a text file. But really all the effort is about smoothing the edges of the TV One unit. Hopefully it does, more and more.

Away from the digital anvil, I’ve sanded 100 menu knobs down to fit (https://twitter.com/tobyspark/status/263411649485094912), the packing tape came in handy sooner than expected (https://twitter.com/tobyspark/status/263412216122970113), and I’ve got there with the packaging (https://twitter.com/tobyspark/status/264152349923237888). Although since that photo, I’ve chucked it down the stairs and realised that with the way the laser cutter works, I need to cut from the bottom not the top for strength… so just when you’re done, you find yourself doing the fiddly business of changing all the cut marks so valley folds become mountain folds and vice versa.

By now though, you know there’s always a spanner thrown in the works somewhere. Here follows this week’s. The crossfader comes plain or with a black dust cover over the slot. I wanted that black version, but it was never in stock. By the time of the production run, it was, so with some minor joy I ordered them. Of course, getting the assembled PCBs back now, I find out that the shank is somehow ever so slightly different on them, my 100 slider knobs don’t fit any more, and I’m not sure if there’s an alternative I can order that will. Gah!

Shipping: close but not quite! Still a week.

Toby

Hello,

Processors are waiting to be shipped to me. Custom firmware for the processors is in my hands. Controllers don’t have their slider knobs, but a plan is in action. Controller firmware is done. Packaging is designed, my hall full of 100 cardboard boxes, and a day with a laser cutter awaits to make up the inserts.

All in all, pretty much there. It will take a few days of sitting in a warehouse upgrading processors, folding boxes and whatnot. The place I had lined up turns out to not be free next week, which is kinda annoying, however my main worry is actually sending them to the right addresses: looking at the list from PayPal, some don’t look quite right.

Important: you should receive an individual email from me at some point today confirming address. Please make sure to reply to it.

Toby

Hello,

Packages are shipping!

I spent last week setting things up so that this week the kitting company can package up the boxes and send everything out. They’ve got through most of the orders now and will be done by Tuesday. I’ve just got back from London peers The Light Surgeons and seen theirs arrive. If I wasn’t writing this through the fug of a cold, I think I’d be thrilled =]

Talking of being ill, this week has been a write-off and I haven’t made the ‘take it out the box and plug everything in’ demo video I wanted you all to have by the time you received your mixers. It will come, but in the meantime, feel free to hit me up to help you get started: email operator@tobyz.net and we’ll take it from there, I’m rarely far away from the email.

Two notes on cables:
DVI: The processor is only single-link DVI, so there is no benefit in using dual-link cables. Back in 2009 I bought the highest spec DVI cables I could find and have been lugging around these heavy cables that barely bend ever since! If you need to go and buy yourself some DVI cables, I’d recommend thinner, flexible, cheaper single link ones over ‘premium’ ones.
Controller software and power-on settings: Its open to you to tweak and upgrade, to do so you’ll need a right-angle mini-USB lead to get to the socket inside.

A note I hate to write:
Something may not be right with the additive mixing bonus feature. I will see what is what, and what can be done, in the next week.

A final ask:
Tell me how it works out for you! It would be great to hear about your unboxing experience and first use. What information are you missing? What doesn’t work as you’d expect it? Also I need to know how reliable the kitting company has been in doing the final step of the process with me not there. A photo or two of the state of the mailing bag / box / insides would be really helpful.

Toby

Hello everybody,

Thanks to everybody who has sent feedback. I’ve learnt a few things, some of which are for me to do better if there is a next time (packaging - I’m looking at you), but some of which need addressing here and now. I’ve had a hunch that something wasn’t as I expected with the shipped units, and have now verified this.

In short, the fully tested hardware has gone out with the software/settings not applied correctly. I am working on a fix. It should be simple. Apologies to all.

I’m pretty clear now on the sequence of events that led to this, and while my manufacturing partner has let me down bad on their final steps, I can’t push all the blame to them: there’s also a problem in the controller software that is my fault alone. Obviously, this is annoying for so many reasons.

In the next few days, I’ll have videos detailing everything. You’ll need the mini-usb lead I’ve mentioned previously. If you are eager to get things going today, follow the software available online (http…).

Toby

Links to usb leads –

I’ve used these: http…

They can be easily found online, and probably at your local computer shop.
http…

I also found one of these in my house, if you go this route you can leave the adapter plugged in and close the case back around it, and from then on use whatever mini-usb lead you have to hand.
http…

Hello everybody,

In the last mail I wrote: I’ve had a hunch that something wasn’t as I expected with the shipped units. The fully tested hardware has gone out with the software/settings not applied correctly. I am working on a fix. It should be simple. Apologies to all.

I’ve got the fix and documented its application.

Note if you bought the controller alone, I’ll send a follow-up with the specific instructions and downloads for you tomorrow - which device and TVOne firmware you’re running complicates things.

Without further ado -
Instructions: http…
Download: http…

The instructional videos are coming, this has consumed my time so far.

Toby

ps. For the hackers, this week included reverse engineering the missing factory step that required a PC so that it can now be applied directly from the controller. Rock!

Hello,

A quick mail to say the v24 software for the controller is developing further in response to feedback from some of you. Now its not just me with a controller, I’m having a few people beta test the updates, which is proving really helpful.

If you want to get the fixes, check the latest and put in any feedback before I push out what should be the final version, check http… and get in touch. I’ll email again when its done.

Toby

Hello,

These emails were to keep you informed during the production process. That process turned out not to finish with them shipping, but it is done now: may I present v25 of the controller software, along with the getting started video.

v25 has a clearer, more consistent user experience. Behind the scenes, it keeps a much closer eye on the processor and has strategies to handle things not being as they should. It handles processors with different versions of TVOne firmware. It even has a reworked blend fade level algorithm: it took pages of diagrams and equations to get past my intuition to something that was 100% correct instead of mostly correct. Who knew crossfading could be so tricky!

Who also knew how much the software would grow. The arduino code for the first gig had 68 lines of program and 128 lines of TV One library, and it did us proud. v25 has 1834 lines of program, 1047 lines of TV One library, around a thousand lines of program supporting bits and bobs, plus things like the OLED library I wrote from scratch. Crazy!

Even crazier, the MBED version control system tells me 2124 lines of code have changed between the version of software I launched with – ie. the version against which you placed your orders – and the version I’m releasing to you now. If you took into consideration the evolution between those snapshots, that number would be even higher. Thing is – and just like the original arduino code – its not as if that version didn’t work: its what was running for the demo video. Just that user-friendly features, refinement, robustness… these add complexity, and seem to do it exponentially.

Enough! Lets get mixing!

Please download the v25 updating procedure instructions here:
http…

If you just bought the controller only, please also download this PDF and start there.
http…

The getting started video is here:
http…

Toby

ps. Caveats below.

1. Network modes and troubleshooting are still undocumented at the moment.
2. Deselecting a network mode now seems to cause the controller to crash - not something you do outside of studio tests but annoying nonetheless. This has worked before and the network code is unchanged from then. I think the developments since have increased the memory footprint of the controller and dynamically creating / deleting the network stacks can now cause a stack/heap collision.
3. There seems to be a bug in the OSC float receive, and right now its beyond me to fix it. In the open source tradition, this should prove trivial given more eyes looking at it.

diary | 19 dec 2012 | tagged: dvi-mixer · vj

the demo video upon which pre-orders were placed had prototype hardware; here now is a manufactured product, out of the shipping packaging, running the final v25 software. i say final, because as the units spread around the world that prototype is no longer the sole test-bed: v25 encodes feedback and testing from real customers. i’m proud of where i’ve got it to.

i never could have anticipated how much work it would take to get here – and it isn’t over, and there’s always scope for more – but right now, it all feels a good place to be, and that video a good point to draw a line. from here, let the videos start coming back, scenes exotic with a small black box with diagonal stripes somewhere in the mix…

diary | 19 dec 2012 | tagged: dvi-mixer · vj

by rights, as the first off the line this should be sean healey’s, but the delivery note at the top of the pile was one for the US. but - this is it! the beginning of the end, the first packaged product.

a project no more: products, shipping.

diary | 21 nov 2012 | tagged: dvi-mixer · vj

not just the solitary 1T-C2-750 that we, as D-Fuse, bought in the summer of 2009 any more! a shelf full of the things, all programmed up with custom firmware to do additive mixing. what you can’t see is the floor of the industrial unit laid out with a sea of boxes, ready to be assembled up and shipped off.

diary | 19 nov 2012 | tagged: dvi-mixer · vj

there’s a certain terror in thinking that all the time and effort invested into getting a good product could be wiped out by damage in transit: designing the packaging has been just as involved and stressful as the product itself.

diary | 16 nov 2012 | tagged: dvi-mixer · vj

this is the first factory build, running the firmware to be shipped, and with that an announcement: the video processors are coming with custom firmware that allows additive mixing, and the controllers have an implementation that morphs the crossfader behaviour from a flat blend to full add.

diary | 04 nov 2012 | tagged: dvi-mixer · vj

the assembled PCBs and manufactured cases passed the physical fit test, but thats moot if the damn things don’t actually work: the real business of being at the factory was to finalise the test spec. finish up a self-test firmware, supply a pc with rs232, open sound control, dmx and a processing sketch to tie the different comms together, and spend the rest of the day detailing up the test procedure document, as pedantic a document as something can be.

diary | 30 oct 2012 | tagged: i/o · dvi-mixer · vj

back to the south coast where an electronics facility has assembled the PCBs and is about to start the box build. people in lab coats walking around with trays of electronic innards with my logo on it… a new one for me, and the first concrete sense of the scale of this.

diary | 30 oct 2012 | tagged: dvi-mixer · vj

jupiter, through the lens of d-fuse - and, less desirably, the lens of my phone.

diary | 20 oct 2012 | tagged: dfuse · vj

to the opening concert of belfast festival: d-fuse have been commissioned to provide a visual score for holst’s ‘the planets’. here, the inevitable shot of test card on gauze screen.

one flaw in this line of expression is that you never have the setup to fully explore the form or pretty much even rehearse most of the time. history repeated itself here with much time lost to flying a succession of screens and battens to get an acceptable framing, and the belfast philharmonic providing a coda to the light level negotiation that was beyond parody… far, far from the professionalism you’d expect with belfast festival the loser.

nonetheless, amongst all that, we had that magic moment where it all comes together: alone in the hall with lights down, imagery commanding a vision in space… and, simply put, that music.

diary | 20 oct 2012 | tagged: dfuse · vj

a wonderful moment: the enclosures have arrived, and on opening the box the quality is outstanding. what was in the mind’s eye, now perfectly realised in hand.

diary | 12 oct 2012 | tagged: dvi-mixer · vj

at some point, you realise that foam lined box isn’t going to cut it. to hold cable, power supply and controller neatly together, and do it without squashing requires some form of carefully shaped insert. hence a night of cardboard, metal rule, craft knife and ever-refining design print-outs.

diary | 05 oct 2012 | tagged: dvi-mixer · vj

Just a quick reminder that if you did want to order one and haven’t so far, we’re now in the last 48 hours for ordering.
Given the delays in opening – banks and paypal, urgh! – I’m going to hold orders open for an extra day. Orders close 23:59 Monday 10th, GMT.

It’s now or never, world!

diary | 09 sep 2012 | tagged: vj · dvi-mixer

happy to report the festival of ideas has won a business to arts award. it was a really satisfying project to be part of, and i’m really proud of how it responds to the ‘liveness’ of that kind of live event.

interestingly, it won the ‘staff engagement’ category. my research on liveness has led to audiences and interaction, so ‘staff engagement’ is a good fit there. what i find interesting is that in having recently talked about my ‘engagement with liveness’ agenda in entrepreneurial circles, it’s the ‘organisation innovation’ consequence of this that really hit home to them… and here we have that reinforced. there were plenty of other categories the festival of ideas could have won in, and plenty of other aspects of the event they could have chosen for that accompanying photo.

diary | 09 sep 2012 | tagged: liveness · vj · festival of ideas · engaging audiences

with two huge milestones, it’s the point of no return: the site with price, spec and ordering info went live yesterday at sparklive.net, and i’ve just committed real money to get the first manufacturing task primed.

diary | 20 aug 2012 | tagged: vj · dvi-mixer

“The *spark d-fuser lets you cross-fade between laptops. It’s compact, affordable and — after quite some time(!) — I’m now ready to make the manufacturing run. So this is the final prototype, and with this I’m making this video to demonstrate the features and functionality so you can decide whether you want to have one yourself. If you do, you need to order now so that it can go and be made as part of that manufacture run.”

https://vimeo.com/tobyspark/sparkdfuserdemo

the video doesn’t look like the above, but thats how i remember it: a huge amount of faff to get the point of being able to knock out not far off a one-take wonder. you can probably see the time in keynote presenters display, i’m not sure i want to: the afternoon turned to evening and then night, and i ended up returning home when the tube had started up again. note to self: start in a studio instead of trying to transform the office most of the bits and bobs were already in. at least the night allowed me to hijack a reception area, even if it meant ripping up half the floor to find the cabling.

diary | 18 aug 2012 | tagged: video-out · dvi-mixer · vj

i’m super happy to announce that the site through which i’ll be detailing and selling the *spark d-fuser mixer will be going live next friday, then will start taking orders for a week starting the friday after that, and on the first september the manufacture run will start. huzzah!

diary | 10 aug 2012 | tagged: dvi-mixer · vj

it doesn’t look like much at the moment, but this is the first step into my research group at university doing a study on real festival audiences at real festivals. i’m developing an interactive map / timetable app, which will have quite some interesting features and opt-ins by the time we’re done. the promoters we’ve been talking to already have an interactive map of sorts, i’ve already done some interesting things visualising live events, and of course there’s my phd on audiences and interaction.

diary | 10 aug 2012 | tagged: code · open frameworks · ios · imc at festivals · vj · liveness · research · qmat

drawings do not a mixer make, but in their finality for production and retail they make things that much closer.

diary | 06 aug 2012 | tagged: dvi-mixer · vj

things are building to a crescendo. as promised the software that runs the controller will be open-source, and so here it is being released.

http://mbed.org/users/tobyspark/code/SPK-DVIMXR/

notably -

• the main controller code at v18: http://mbed.org/users/tobyspark/code/SPK-DVIMXR/file/d46cc49f0f37/main.cpp
• library for communicating with TV-One units: http://mbed.org/users/tobyspark/code/SPK-TVOne/
• library for driving the OLED display used: http://mbed.org/users/tobyspark/code/spk_oled_ssd1305/

i’ve also been corralling the OSC code available for mbed into a library: http://mbed.org/users/tobyspark/code/OSC/

for history’s sake, and perhaps it will help any hackers, attached is a zip of the arduino code i had before the leap to mbed was made, v07 to today’s v18. none of the interface goodness, but has got the fast serial communication technique i came to along with keying etc.

diary | 02 aug 2012 | tagged: code · release · dvi-mixer · vj | downloads: spk_dvimxr_v07_arduino_final.zip

file under ‘so glad this worked first time, because if it hadn’t i wouldn’t have known where to start’.

as alluded to in the last mixer dev post, the ethernet jack wasn’t just an ethernet jack any more. my first pcb design had the ethernet jack as a ‘magjack’, which has the electrical isolation to protect the circuit from rogue cabling within the jack and was simply a case of leading the signals from the mbed to the jack. however, all the magjacks i could find could not in the end fit within the final tolerances of pcb position and case height, so i had to move to using a discrete isolation chip and a low-profile RJ45 socket. and at that point, the now plain RJ45 socket was suitable for direct connection of DMX - there’s a standard RJ45 pin mapping as well as the XLR type normally seen. so version two of the pcb, in addition to the physical fit issues, had two subcircuits for ethernet and RS485 leading to the socket, carefully electrically isolated and switched.

however, the assember did a snafu and a wrong part was fitted to power the RS485 subcircuit, and it blew on my attaching power. the advantage of it being a subcircuit is that it didn’t take anything down with it, so with an otherwise operational board, the DMX side was sidelined. some months later now the reworking has finally been done, so i made up some RJ45-XLR DMX patch cables, linked in a contributed DMX library from the mbed repository, worked it into the controller’s code, borrowed some DMX gateway hardware… and it just worked! fabulous.

diary | 20 jul 2012 | tagged: i/o · dvi-mixer · 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

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

after being one of the forces behind qmedia’s inaugural open studios last year, this year i was playing behind-the-scenes fixer, and with things fixed was able to get a few hours hacking on the dvi mixer before the show wrapped. even better, having established last year the reward of documentation, there was now a film crew looking intrigued and asking me to explain my research…

diary | 01 jun 2012 | tagged: qmedia open studios · qmat · vj · dvi-mixer

for a few fractions of a millimetre here and there, this is pretty much a whole new pcb design. it also meant no magnetically isolated ethernet jacks (the mag in magjack should really be magic instead/), which puts you on a path of doing that isolation your own circuitry, and that… that can put you on the path of feature creep.

yep, feature creep it has, and with that more delay. but for a very good end: that ethernet jack can now do more than ethernet…

diary | 23 apr 2012 | tagged: embedded · dvi-mixer · vj

having worked some magic to visualise the actions back into the venues in realtime, aiming for a positive feedback loop of commitment, my legacy contribution was a film to capture the activity and commitments of the event to show as part of the finale - a review as celebration and reward that developed over the phases of change nation.

here’s the final version capturing the full three days. i’m proud of it, and it shows how these posts have barely scratched the surface. http://vimeo.com/39511237

there’s also a download of the poster image made for this post below, at 5000px wide.

diary | 30 mar 2012 | tagged: video-out · vj · change nation · engaging audiences | downloads: ashoka_changenation_2012__tobyspark_poster.jpg

to the country estate in the heart of dublin: farmleigh house, for the public day of change nation. and not just to the grand house itself – state photos of obama and northern ireland peace process on side tables, first prints in the irish language in the library – but to a boutique festival site pitched specially on the lawn. it was a wonderful day opening out the process to the public, starting with the two hundred handwritten commitments to action from ministers and all sorts of power brokers lining the walls of the main tent, and finishing with many more commitments made as the ticket holders brought their skills and connections to bear.

diary | 24 mar 2012 | tagged: change nation · vj · engaging audiences

another day, another dublin landmark: dublin castle. a regal setting for an amazing day of action, as if day one were a dress rehearsal. the ‘live’ page we worked so hard on says it best, go take a look: http://changenation.org/live

this was also the day i was charged with disappearing for a few hours to produce the event-so-far look-what-we’ve-achieved video, quite the rabbit out out the hat. part video edit, but mostly keynote backed by a judicious music choice and the wonderful photos by sean and yvette. oh, do i love keynote.

diary | 23 mar 2012 | tagged: vj · change nation · engaging audiences

day one, and tourist location number one: the guniness storehouse. lots of briefing the facilitators, lots of wrangling screens, pipelines and all things digital that that weren’t the website, and far too much time trying to get posterous to work on everybody’s phones. but through it all, the website morphed from a brochure to a live account of the event, and the commitments to action were coming in and becoming part of the public record.

photo credit: http://www.seanandyvette.com/

diary | 22 mar 2012 | tagged: vj · change nation · engaging audiences

to dublin, to save ireland. 50 social entrepreneurs had been flown in from around the world to kickstart the adoption of their ‘proven solutions’ in ireland: the three day event was called change nation, and that really was its aim. ashoka have that kind of clout, and aren’t afraid to use it.

working again with event mastermind boz temple-morris and digital maestro stef lewandowski, their agenda was clear: stop three days of networking from being just a talking-shop. action and accountability needed to come out of it. for me, it was a opportunity to be at the heart of event conceived around audience-audience interaction, where facilitation and legacy were conceived hand-in-hand. stef has an excellent write-up on his site.

i arrived the day before to find stef explaining his digital strategy to ashoka. tip: if you want to impress somebody, draw the diagram upside down across the table…

diary | 21 mar 2012 | tagged: vj · change nation · liveness · engaging audiences

package was waiting for me, opened the box: two assembled pcbs, all looking as they should.

to my utter amazement, the electronics all work out: once the pinouts were updated in the mBed firmware, its talking RS232 to the video processor without drama or debugging. to my double amazement, after a quick primer on SPI and decyphering the oled’s datasheet, a test program incants the screen into life, and some time after that the random pixels of an uninitialised buffer have turned to a pattern of my coding. some image editing and two processing sketches later, i have the byte sequences to display a full screen image and typeset my choice of pixel font. the test program fleshed out and re-rolled as a library, and we have the above sight. given the delays the screen has caused since 2009, its so satisfying having this work as per the data sheet, as per design, out of the box; and not even relying on other people’s voodoo: my library, from scratch.

of course, things are never quite that simple. the electronics check out, but the physical fit requires some rejigging – note to self: order the enclosure in advance next time, no matter how well dimensioned its spec drawing may seem. a millimetre here, and a millimetre there has now forced a complete re-layout of the PCB.

aaaand: the ultimate irony? the physical fit issues weren’t just components hitting case internals. what you can’t see in the photo are 40 jumper wires coming out of the mBed’s socket on the PCB leading to a displaced mBed sat in a prototyping block. for all of the correct design and manufacture, these assemblies are compromised by a square peg (mBed pins) not fitting into a round hole (a quirk of the socket strip i spec’d). tssssch!

diary | 04 mar 2012 | tagged: embedded · dvi-mixer · vj

it’s been two and a half years since the magic week of going from idea to breaking a working dvi mixer package and the ensuing dreams of getting it out there for everybody. problem is, thats still in dream territory: where’s the manufacturable hardware or website buy-button?

by june 2010 there was a v1 and things were looking good. it had taken far longer than seemed necessary… but that turned out to be just the tip of the iceberg. this was a year ago, and this slightly less. so what has been happening? long story short, the software^[1] had been waiting for hardware that was perpetually “almost” there. if you’re time-constrained, don’t work with someone else who is also time-constrained; doubly so if you’re entirely relying on them. if you don’t have the skills to make you the master of your own destiny, get on with getting them.

getting on with getting them, for the past two months i’ve been working away and what you see above is an extract from my first PCB design, a from-scratch reworking of what a d-fuser PCB needs to be. i’ve just sent it out to be manufactured and all-importantly assembled up (data sheets and making up eagle library parts may no longer scare me, but soldering 0.5mm pitch FFCs does). if it doesn’t work its because of the design, and that i can work with – and now have some guru backup.

all of which means it’s as if it’s may 2010 again: we’re in “pcbs, parts, plans” territory, complete with corresponding announcement: i will be presenting the work-in-progress at dorkbot london #78^[2]. the difference is, this time i know the whole widget, its entirely down to me, and i’ve even secured a little start-up funding to expedite this prototyping.

diary | 19 feb 2012 | tagged: video-out · embedded · dvi-mixer · vj · dorkbot

…aaaaand, no more test data. we did so much more than can be shown in a still or two here, we even pulled a whole four minute finale piece out of the bag, video edit and all^[1]. most of all, we did it, the audience made it… live!

Amazing event. Loving the Brain! #festivalofideas
– Alice Murphy @almurph75
Thanks. We’re having a brilliant day too!
– Accenture Ireland @Accenture_Irl

Over 2000 ideas have flown through ‘the brain’ @ @Accenture_Irl #festivalofideas.
– Andrew Hetherington @a_hetherington
Wow & we’ve still got the afternoon!
– Accenture Ireland @Accenture_Irl

Still buzzing a little after #festivalofideas yesterday. I think the crash will hit hard!
– Carolyn Jones (Cj) @TheWidget
@TheWidget you guys were great. The Brain made #festivalofideas. Hopefully we’ll see you again some where, some time…
– Eithne Harley @EithneHarley

diary | 09 feb 2012 | tagged: titler · *spark · vj · festival of ideas · engaging audiences

after a bout of yet more *spark screenrunner back-end building up – libPusher, ‘event’ document packages that encapsulate the media and graphic template, the all important enqueue new – it was onto what really set this gig apart.

visually, i’d always thought of the rendered output as 2d motion graphics, the made by movie re-working being the canonical example. but here the content wasn’t coming in from the virtual ether, or just signing who was in front of the screen, we were visualising the venue we were in, and it was laid out with yurts, with conversation threads and ideas coming from each of them. we needed a map, we needed a way of collating the ideas… and one-creative-process-later, i was loving the result: animating around a 3d tabletop diorama of post-its and plastic yurt board-game pieces, with polaroid snaps falling down on one side and A4 sheets sellotaped down on the other.

true 3d in quartz composer was a branch out into the unknown for me, and not without its developer terror moments finding out what it was happy with and what it wasn’t. bottom line, while there’s issues a-plenty with qc’s 3d rendering, couple it with sketchup for quick 3d modelling and globs of javascript to handle the data-scape, colour me impressed. it was captivating watching the animation unfold as the live content came in - and a proud moment.

diary | 09 feb 2012 | tagged: quartz composer · titler · *spark · vj · festival of ideas · engaging audiences

at the heart of the brain was the increasingly inappropriately named *spark titler, collating all the media and channelling it to the screen. it runs the screen, and gives just what you need to be responsive to the moment without breaking the visual illusion. so… *spark screenrunner?

whatever its grown-up name is, it monitored a fileshare for photos incoming from the caption-shot camera, illustrations and data-vis from ciaran and caroline’s laptops, listened to twitter accounts and hashtags, and, wonderfully, got updates in real-time from convotate, stef’s conversation annotation web-app. a technical shout-out here to pusher, the HTML5 websocket powered realtime messaging service, and to luke redpath’s objective-c library. and via the venue’s many-input HD vision mixer and a quartz composer patch or so more, we had treated feeds from above ciaran’s illustration pad, photoshop screen and whatnot.

it might be that you have to do this kind of job to grok the need, but i really think there’s something in *spark screenrunner, whether its just titling and transitioning between two presenters’ powerpoints or this kind of high-end craziness.

diary | 09 feb 2012 | tagged: code · mac os · quartz composer · titler · *spark · vj · festival of ideas · video-out · engaging audiences

clockwise from top left

• ciaran lucas illustrating key ideas and playing with post-its and sharpies across the venue
• stef lewandowski live coding
• caroline beavon plugging the data into spreadsheets galore on the data-journalism tip
• carolyn jones wrangling everything and everybody together
• yours truly, at this moment dealing with the good problem of having so much data coming in, the visualisation needed re-scaling

the physicality doesn’t match up to kinetxt’s, but there are definite and deliberate echoes here. its not a big ‘visual rock band’ performing realtime story-telling from audience contributions, but perhaps released from the demands of that, we finally delivered on some of those original ideals of transforming a sea of contributed snippets into something meaningful and coherent.

photo credits matthew thompson

diary | 09 feb 2012 | tagged: titler · *spark · vj · festival of ideas · engaging audiences

This is the Brain.

We are using experimental thought-casting technology to display in real-time the ideas and thoughts are emerging at this moment, inside the Hexayurts and elsewhere. Come join our artists and coders in drawing it all together: talk to us, doodle with us as we find the emergent themes, trends and stories.

diary | 09 feb 2012 | tagged: titler · *spark · vj · festival of ideas · liveness · engaging audiences

if you’re going to gather all your staff for a one-off event, why not take the opportunity while you’re at it to make a company portrait? this being a boz affair, however, its not a case of a photographer marshalling the troops into one shot. rather, everybody is tasked with taking everybody else’s photo - cue each pair having that connected moment of “oh, i don’t want a disastrous photo of me: do as you’d like done to you”. and, this being this, we also had them caption themselves with their favourite place to think and suchlike, and that camera and app was also wirelessly linked to our setup.

diary | 09 feb 2012 | tagged: titler · *spark · vj · festival of ideas · engaging audiences

and why the twenty hexayurts? they were there to partition off the main business of the day: facilitated conversation in small groups. some form of internal market had been conducted in advance to arrive at the best 200 suggestions for topics, and the proposers were there to host each session. suffice to say, there were going to be a lot of ideas. and this is where we came in: could we capture them? visualise them? archive them?

“we” were stef and i, reforming our rave-era visuals partnership in our decidedly more rarified present – he a webby winner, clore fellow, top five of the observer future 500 (need i go on!?), and me deep on a journey of reorienting live events from the passive observation of ever more spectacle to something that builds on the character of liveness as i’ve experienced it, that exploits the potential of here and now of us together.

stef told me of the blue-sky conversations he’d had with the event’s mastermind, inspired arts producer boz temple-morris who had earned the trust of a corporate client to really explore what their events could be, and more importantly be for. this time, it all seemed to be around yurts, facilitated conversation, and the event being precisely the opposite of a bubble – the lynchpin of an on-going process yes, but that on-going process very much the thing.

a day or two later, stef had taken a conversation annotation web-app from idea to prototype. this was serious, and so i introduced stef to ford vj, kinetxt and how my *spark titler was changing the game of running screens at organisation’s events. there was something big and interesting that we could do here.

in the photo above, there’s a facilitated conversation in full flow, and on laptop the stef’s corporate-IT grade version of that original prototype^[1]. most importantly, its enmeshed with all the other instances of the web-app in the room, and – drumroll – with our setup.

hardening and security is one thing, just don’t talk to stef about last minute requests for IE8 support on XP…

diary | 09 feb 2012 | tagged: titler · *spark · vj · festival of ideas · engaging audiences

a big convention centre, not so much sleep, and it’s barely dawn: back to high-stakes corporate events. there’s a good reason for taking some time out from the phd to be here: this is interesting, innovative stuff, embracing what a live event can bring, and doing it a long-term context of strategic and organisational renewal.

the photo – credit matthew thompson – shows the bulk of those people, and a smattering of the twenty hexayurts it was their first task of the day to build.

diary | 09 feb 2012 | tagged: titler · *spark · vj · festival of ideas · engaging audiences

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

with mike sharpening his critical muscles doing an information environments mres, there’s not been much d-fuse action since los angeles earlier in the year. but here we are, in an apple store for latitude – not quite the theatrical staging, but oh my: the slightly surreal setting disappears upon using the new generation of laptops in anger for the first time. vdmx b8 + quad core i7 + latest radeon + ssd = finally, flawless performance for us. the ghost of perfectly smooth hardware playback has been hanging over my head since moving us to a software setup is banished in a blaze of compositing and audio-reactive tweak. happy days.

diary | 26 jan 2012 | tagged: dfuse · vj · live cinema

sane control of the media and scenography needs to be partnered with the animation mechanics to handle it all gracefully. luckily, thats what i do – and what tools like quartz composer enable – and i had the best materials to work with in the form of made-by’s brand video. it’s great. watch it, and you’ll also see how perfect it was to be remade into a never-ending animation with dynamic content interspersed with the hand-animated elements.

best of all, now i have the interface and back-end largely worked out i can concentrate on creating bespoke animation for future gigs: everybody wins.

diary | 14 oct 2011 | tagged: code · mac os · quartz composer · titler · *spark · vj · MADE-BY

how did joanna run the screen? with *spark titler v3: no longer a now-and-next titler, more the means for a live brand video. into an animation template go tweets, titles and all sorts of media, and the user is presented with a sane way of wrangling that media and controlling the output.

the app as a whole is mac-native in the best of ways, with the behaviours a naive user might expect. i’m especially proud of the interface, which takes the standard elements and extends them where necessary^[1], all to be used without fear of killing the output or screwing up the content.

diary | 14 oct 2011 | tagged: code · mac os · quartz composer · titler · *spark · vj · MADE-BY

thats my laptop, but not my hands. if i can write software to make it more fool-proof for me to drive big, important screens, could that same approach empower organisations to drive their own screens?

if you catch me while i’m thinking about that with a beautifully animated video explaining your work transforming the ethics of the fashion industry and an annual event coming up, am i going to suggest working with me on a journey to find out? of course.

and so at mady-by’s annual event, it was made-by’s joanna who knowing the people, the running order, the messaging, made the screen reflect that.

diary | 14 oct 2011 | tagged: titler · *spark · vj · MADE-BY

i’d just rediscovered the ‘re-booted’ america’s cup, when what-are-the-chances I get a phone call to vj at the plymouth event. given i was considering taking a day-trip there any way, certainly worth dusting off the old vj machine. and what a venue to play… glorious weather, fantastic coastline, screen bang on top of a grassy cliff.

diary | 14 sep 2011 | tagged: *spark · vj · americas cup

providing visuals from 5pm to 11pm was somewhat daunting given i’d pretty much chucked away all my random-gig vj clips a year or three back, they wanted it all america’s cup themed, and oh: 1080P.

well, nothing like a bit of fear to rise to the challenge: rocked it, aided and abetted by

• cuts culled from 200GB of america’s cup footage downloaded from their broadcast server
• a few choice compass rose type animations
• some custom quartz composer patches
• a live stills camera
• the dvi mixer pumping out 1080P into their system, but the laptops only working at the (good chunk lower) actual resolution of the screen.

wish I had got a photo of the big americas-cup cuts glitch mash-up i had going on, but then again, it was all about how it moved with the music.

diary | 14 sep 2011 | tagged: video-out · video-in · vdmx · quartz composer · *spark · vj · americas cup

sometimes the simplest things are the best. got to debut the set made from filming san pedro docks earlier in the year. constant side-scrolling cut-up by the audio transients; motion graphics perfection with the old mirror trick.

diary | 14 sep 2011 | tagged: *spark · vj · americas cup

and how did those live graphics make it to the screen? i sat down and took the idea of *spark titler from sheep music and remade it as a fully fledged cocoa+quartz composer application. the idea being it can’t muck up: animation designed to gracefully transfer from state to state, participant names pre-filled in a drop-down menu, no mouse cursors on the output, text fields that commit their edits on pressing take… the little details that make-or-break a live application. oh - and it exports its title animations as quicktimes for integration with playback pro.

diary | 04 sep 2011 | tagged: code · mac os · video-out · quartz composer · titler · *spark · just tell the truth · vj

phone call from friend louis: “help me with mike figgis at the royal opera house”. certainly. watching timecode live with figgis reworking the playback and audio was a seminal experience for me. this however is not that, rather a weekend of curated stuff spread throughout the royal opera house’s many spaces. and in the middle, a screen driven by me: live cameras, live graphics, and edits through the film-making people+pipe louis has (impressively) put together.

diary | 04 sep 2011 | tagged: titler · vj · just tell the truth

last two days in LA spent with the excellent morgan bernard, though again largely behind laptop screen: trying to pull the PhD and whatnot back into focus. a welcome diversion came by way of scenic diversion coupled with morgan’s realisation there was a GH1 camera in an office in town… cue hours of amazing filming around san pedro docks. perfect blue gradated sky with industrial everything scrolling by against it. and we even found the same container and car trains that had been snaking through the windfarmed desert at the beginning of the trip.

diary | 27 apr 2011 | tagged: dfuse · vj · photo

fun night drinking old fashioneds at los angeles video artists monthly night at mandrake. good to see scrims going up and singers bathed in projection light.

diary | 26 apr 2011 | tagged: vj

straight from the rhythms and visions workshop to “levi’s film workshop” for a performance of latitude. the place is a bit like santa’s grotto for visualists, all sorts of equipment there to be borrowed and used. its also in the same building as moca’s street art exhibition, an embarassment of riches with some standout shephard fairey pieces (yes, its his constructivism cliché, but the textural qualities of the physical pieces was amazing/).

diary | 23 apr 2011 | tagged: dfuse · vj · live cinema

as part of the rhythms and visions event, a day of workshops was organised. los angeles visual artists - lava had the morning, and covered the past and present of ‘visual music’ works. mike, matthias and i had the afternoon, which we nailed the four hours precisely with a tour through the d-fuse oeuvre and a journey through our particle production process. the latter was my main contribution, and its a tricky balance to give: lots of really cool stuff – shooting, taking crops, building abstracting effects – but with what can reduce down to a sea of noodles and buttons. pretty happy though, good feedback that the thread was there and it all tied up: people got it.

diary | 23 apr 2011 | tagged: teaching · talk · video-out · vdmx · quartz composer · dfuse · vj

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

first d-fuse performance: a new cut of endless cities with live score from matthias and guest brian lebarton. me and mike have to stay on stage even though its press play on the visual side, so i spend 45 minutes in front of my laptop trying to not look idle while not touching it for fear of disturbing the playback.

update: footage of matthias interviewed on the radio is upload on youtube

diary | 22 apr 2011 | tagged: dfuse · vj

up before us: scott pagano with musicians brian king, trifonic, brian lebarton and mb gordy. with amazing works such as parks on fire to draw on, i was really looking forward to seeing scott play. it was a real smooth show. it was also one in which the vj wasn’t stuck behind a laptop screen: in the photo its not scott behind the laptop, he’s to the left, free to move around controlling the visuals with iPad in hand. the render muscle – which doesn’t skip a frame – is a tower under the table. rekindles my desire to build a hackintosh again: a black box of mac pro class power in a form i can bring on the plane.

update: some footage of the performance is up via brian king

diary | 22 apr 2011 | tagged: vj

onto the reason behind the trip: d-fuse are to headline the rhythms and visions: expanded and live event put on as part of the visions and voices initiative at the university of south california. arriving there, i do like seeing that magic photo printed up nicely and put around.

the tech check turns surreal as the campus is invaded by frat house types in swimming gear attempting to dip in all the fountains… except that the cinematic arts one is barricaded off as we set up around it. cue scenes of zombies at the gates.

diary | 21 apr 2011 | tagged: dfuse · vj

and those wind turbines were placed there for a reason: keeping the tripods still wasn’t trivial.

diary | 20 apr 2011 | tagged: video-in · dfuse · vj

to los angeles in d-fuse mode: what wasn’t prep for three shows, a workshop and a seminar was filming for the ongoing endless cities shot bank.

here we are outside LA nearing palm springs, wind turbines and freeway, and rail track just out of this shot seeming to also be transporting mile-long trains of new cars. the turbines, somewhat ironically, power las vegas. might be a cut too far for endless cities, but couldn’t help linking seeing pensioners acting out their retirement program, trundling around on golf carts in courses terraformed out of the desert with thoughts of america’s by-gone obsession with space… infinite expansion and resources on the new, intergalactic frontier.

diary | 20 apr 2011 | tagged: dfuse · vj · adventures

in town for the ‘what is live’ symposium, and there’s also a 10 screen surround audio-visual environment round the corner? bring it on.

the rml cinechamber is a fantastic thing. yes they have technically assembled such a thing, but what excites me is their focus on content for such an environment and hosting artist residencies to develop that content in-situ.

signal’s live show – pictured – was compromised to the extent they held a free gig at the close of the festival with the visuals resolved, even so the simple effect of the spectrum analyser stretching far around you was eye-opening. the monolake show justified the ticket and then some. while not my aesthetic taste per se, it had moments of arresting majesty, whereaudio-visual sync combined with some immersive twist and you really weren’t sure where you were any more.

cinechamber is a long term project remade for 2011 and (re-)debuting at club transmediale, and so the hope is to catch it again: the overriding thought i kept having was that there finally is the true environment to actually experience the 11,000x1080px ‘dot from the void’ motion graphic piece d-fuse produced a summer or two back.

diary | 03 feb 2011 | tagged: video-out · vj

and onto me

In the 1970’s cinema was expanded; in the 1990’s it met ‘new media’ as soft cinema. In 2010 the technological landscape is ripe to combine these, siting cinema in a live performance context. As such a body of work is built, called ‘live cinema’ by its practitioners and curators, it is worth taking a step back and asking just what the value of the live in live cinema could be?
To examine this closely, we first need to address what live cinema could be, and what current practice is.
To address what live cinema could be, we will extrapolate from the aforemen- tioned expanded cinema as characterised by Gene Youngblood, and soft cinema as characterised by Lev Manovich. We will consider a ‘cinema of the imagination’ as practised by oral storytellers, and hear of directors such as Peter Greenaway and Mike Figgis who have experimented with live perfor- mance as well as enjoying Hollywood success.
The current practice of live cinema will be presented through an experimental documentary offering a novel approach to representing this overtly ‘broken out of a pre-determined, linear, framed practice’ in pre-determined, linear and framed video.
In summarising the characteristics that could make cinema live, we will con- clude that an analysis purely of production and medium does not provide suf- ficient differentiation from previous forms of cinema to justify any claim of live cinema to offering what could not be offered before. We shall instead turn to studies of other kinds of live performance and focus on the human interaction and ideas of audience. By identifying some unique qualities of storytelling, we shall arrive at a conclusion of what could truly make live cinema an art form with unique, compelling qualities: where core to the experience is that as well as a story is told, the story world is explored as a group experience.

full presentation: http://vimeo.com/17485334

photo by blanca: http://www.flickr.com/photos/whiteemotion/5189942616

diary | 18 nov 2010 | tagged: research · vj · live in live cinema · talk · live cinema

always going to be slightly strange to hear a cultural researcher talk about a subject you’ve wound your life up in, as did dominik hasler in “party as art? antivj and the migration of vjing into the sphere of fine arts”. even stranger when the focus is on a project you’ve known since its inception and people you count as good friends: joanie and (his) antivj (label). looking back, joanie’s proto-mapping at avit>c23 precedes this blog, it was december 2006.

The paper considers the European visual label AntiVJ as an extraordinary case of the widespread practice of VJing. The example shows how VJing does not only connect music and the moving image but also the two sepa- rate worlds of the dance floor and the white cube. The recent orientation of art museums to performances and events as well as the growing interest in public art offer alternatives to the club for ambitioned visual artists such as AntiVJ.
My presentation concentrates on the way AntiVJ relates to classical themes from the history of fine arts. After tracing the history of AntiVJ’s visual vocabu- lary back to constructivist visuals I will discuss the way the group joins the modernist tradition of problematising the picture’s surface. Other important features of AntiVJ’s work are its remarkable spatial and sculptural qualities that result from a thorough reflection on the use of perspective. Before con- cluding, the paper takes up a development by which, from the Dadaist move- ment on to Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable, party has become a possible medium for fine arts. It addresses the question to which extent the art of VJing includes aspects beyond the screen.

full presentation: http://vimeo.com/17192497

photo by blanca: http://www.flickr.com/photos/whiteemotion/5189310465/in/photostream/

diary | 18 nov 2010 | tagged: vj

the lovely ana carvalho - of http://vjtheory.net and abertura, amongst other things - gave a talk around her phd research, called “on the ephemeral in AV realtime practices: an analysis into the possibilities for its documentation”

The performative moment is a unique narrative, defined as a gathering of multiple elements of varied origins, a point in time, which is no longer past, neither is future yet, which stands between biography and fiction. We will at- tempt to approach the performative moment within the context of audiovisual practice and the philosophy of process. We narrow down our subject of study to collective practice, consisting of two basic components: audio and video.
The uniqueness of an audiovisual realtime performance is the point of de- parture from where to elaborate on the subject of documentation. This point where we stand is a location of questioning. Defined by its uniqueness, the moment is an artistic, collective, momentary manifestation; its documenta- tion does not replace it. What is, in this context, the document? Which criteria should describe this documentation?
We put forward the possibility that audio and visual data are source material only capable of constituting meaning through the momentary construction of narrative. The relationship between moment and construction of memory is in documentation. Photographs, souvenirs and memorabilia are examples of objects that help the construction of social memory. Objects constitute ways to extend our thoughts (individually and collectively) in the attempt to expand memory in time. Parallel to the institutionalized frame of the museum, we propose the collective to create its own ways to document activities, using the practice ́s tools and knowledge, in order to leave traces that will allow future memory construction.

full presentation: http://vimeo.com/17192234

photo by blanca: http://www.flickr.com/photos/whiteemotion/5189891874/

diary | 18 nov 2010 | tagged: vj

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

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

having been well received at the ‘holotronica’ screenings at kinetica art fair, d-fuse were invited back to perform live as part of onedotzero’s london festival on the musion setup there.

as the musion setup is a transparent (pepper’s ghost screen in front of a ruffled curtain to set a depth cue for the audience, and the d-fuse piece ‘particle’ we were to perform is an explicitly multi-layered projection, we needed to replace the rear curtain with a screen. at kinetica, the effect wasn’t what we hoped for, so we went to musion’s vair old-money hq in the week beforehand to experiment. after testing some combinations of screens and projector placement, the real breakthrough was just how transformative a performer’s presence was between the screens. having a body on stage, even if stuck behind a laptop, transformed the imagery from something easily flattened into a composite to something that had depth and mystery as the straight lines typically projecting across the stage to screens behind would wrap around the organic form, dipping in and out of the void. that was partly to be expected, but i think there was something also more subtle where it grounded the scale of the piece, adding back something that was subtly set by the texture of the curtain in a straight musion setup.

of course, we arrived at the bfi and were shown to our performance space… front of house. it was a compromised gig in many ways, testing out a dual 1024x768 setup and content redux instead of our well developed triple 640x480 setup and media bank, but that really killed it for me. c’est la vie.

there was some consolation in that we had a top-spec mac pro waiting to be returned off the back of a commercial project, and so i got to test how particle runs on a machine that isn’t my four year old laptop. you can guess the answer, mmm! first, however, to get the solid-state drive in there… courtesy of a lollipop stick, some tape, which wasn’t much short of a wing and a prayer. and with the lack of a musion hq test shot or crowd-sourced photo of the gig, thats what sets this entry.

diary | 13 nov 2010 | tagged: vj · dfuse · onedotzero

there is now a mac pro in china running DFD, something that has been consuming my time for a while now. the roadshow d-fuse have been developing is our first big foray into automated dynamic content, lighting and audience interaction, and so without us being there for every gig holding it down with a hacked-up vj setup we needed something that you could just power on and the show would start. and so d-fuse/dynamic was hatched, a quicktime and quartz composer sequencer which reads in presets and its input/output functionality from a folder we can remotely update, and essentially just presents a “next” button to the on-site crew.

what i think is particularly novel about DFD is it was designed to output a consistent framerate, rendering slightly ahead of time so the fluctuations in QC and QT frame rendering are buffered out. i’m not sure is the effort/reward of this was worth it, but it will be an interesting code base to come back to and re-evaluate.

for the roadshow, it is playing out any number of four sources at 1280x576, including the generative, controlled by iPads in the audience and LED balls on stage, audio-reactive core of the show, sending the central 1024x576 to the main screen, driving 10 LED 72x1px strips from the remaining 576x128px on either side, and sending DMX back out to the stage lighting and LED balls.

big thanks to vade, luma beamerz, and memo for helping me one way or the other grok anti-aliased framebuffer rendering.

having spent much time i didn’t have trying to get 64bit QTX giving me openGL frames at QuickTime 7 efficiencies, life saving thanks also to vade and tom for v002 movie player 2.0, for which there is patch back with them giving it the ability to play the QT audio to a specific output.

lastly, a perennial thanks to kineme, couldn’t have gone this direction without knowing their DMX, Axis Camera, and audio patches were out there.

i’m not sure what to do with the code at the moment. it was made as a generic platform, but its current state is still very much tied to that specific project. or rather, the inevitable last minute hacking as it hit china needs to be straightened out. it has been made and funded as a tool for d-fuse to build on, so that needs to be taken into account too. in short, if anybody has a concrete need for such a thing, get in touch and we’ll see what could be done.

diary | 27 oct 2010 | tagged: quartz composer · vj · video-out · code · mac os · dfuse

happiness is twelve hex bytes, generated by a pocketable custom LED fixture on detecting a bounce, transmitting that via xBee, receiving into the computer via RS232, being parsed correctly, outputting into a QC comp, doing a dance, and commanding back to the fixtures via Artnet via DMX via xBee.

diary | 16 oct 2010 | tagged: quartz composer · vj · code · mac os · i/o · dfuse · embedded

• What is AV:in — Introduction To Audiovisual Arts
  Audiovisual Culture is rapidly gaining momentum with new technology and information resources quickly aiding the drive. In 2010 more and more people are seeking and acquiring the skills required for audiovisual production and interactive creation. This global movement is spreading into screens, phones and other commercial applications as well as providing a rich source of culture for digital communities inspiring new trends in design and art.
  AV:in is a new media course for this market. We have designed AV:in as a comprehensive online educational program for audiovisual studies. It follows a trend of regular workshops and lectures and professional training, which have continued to grow in popularity all around the world on the subject of audiovisual production and performance.

…and it has me in it, as d-fuse we filmed a pro-tip section and my live cinema documentary is part of the curriculum.

http://audiovisualacademy.com/

diary | 15 oct 2010 | tagged: *spark · vj · dfuse · live cinema documentary

the iPad-screens interaction isn’t even half of it, though. the project is to be a roadshow travelling through china, a modular setup of stage and staging reaching out into the club. two ‘hero’ videos with dance choreography and interactive props (hello LED balls/), a video feedback piece, a live drawing piece, the backbone of the evening as the iPad interaction and audio-reactive graphics, all feeding out onto the mains screen, duplicated onto any in-house video system each venue might have, with LED sticks extending the video canvas out from the stage and video controlled stage lighting effects.

…it makes for a nice diagram.

diary | 15 oct 2010 | tagged: vj · video-out · i/o · dfuse

there is a big d-fuse production in the works, where the brief rather wonderfully was emphasising interaction with and within the audience. as briefs often do, things have changed a lot since the heady time of working on and winning the pitch, but the core of it is still generative graphics and punter control from the club floor. and so here, courtesy of dr.mo’s crack team of coders is an in-development iPad app talking over WiFi to a QC plugin, where my two fingers-as-proxies-for-collaborating-audience-members are sketching locally and that is being incorporated on the club’s screens.

diary | 06 oct 2010 | tagged: quartz composer · liveness · dfuse · vj · code · ios · mac os · engaging audiences

to berlin for laika, an event investigating audio-visual culture. helene, its creator, wrote to me saying

my goal for laika is to make people aware in berlin that live cinema is something avantgarde and will be big in the future. i have the impression even with transmediale people in berlin underestimate the importance of the topic. i would like that u make it valuable to them.

quite the tall order, but a cause I’m happy to prod and push at. it also gave me the opportunity to start framing my recent obsession with what the ‘live’ in live cinema can/could mean. having laid out a pitch for why live cinema is something interesting in the (uninterestingly titled - tssk, toby) live cinema documentary, i really feel it is time to investigate what is unexpected or unobvious in the siting of cinema in a live context.

diary | 03 sep 2010 | tagged: vj · live in live cinema · research · live cinema

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

a night tweaking firmware, a morning visiting the laser cutter workshop, some black vinyl, and the first ‘manufacturable’ prototype is born. huzzah: and promptly off to berlin…

diary | 08 jun 2010 | tagged: vj · dvi-mixer

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

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

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

thats the invert button, in real life.

diary | 07 may 2010 | tagged: vj · mapping

franz and fernand in grid world

diary | 07 may 2010 | tagged: vj · mapping

highlight of mapping was seeing franz’s ‘euphorie’ performance in the flesh, or rather, in the light. its yet to grow to a cohesive, flowing performance, but just to look into their laboratory was quite the experience. its the band you’d expect to see if a bladerunner nightclub scene were filmed, but that somehow makes it sound like its derivative: quite the opposite.

diary | 07 may 2010 | tagged: vj · mapping

mapping finally broke beyond performances and gallery to make a serious go of some kind of joint project / residency. pitching up after the d-fuse performance, i got to hang out on the night before their big evening. the timeline stuck to the wall was a recent innovation, apparently… made me smile.

diary | 06 may 2010 | tagged: vj · mapping

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

personal reward, beyond a morning spent sipping coffee in a cafe overlooking the crescent beach of gijón, was seeing plaid perform itsu live, with the pleix video behind. its just a perfect track with the perfect video.

diary | 01 may 2010 | tagged: vj · lev

before us, “zan lyons vs bladerunner”. a film remix of bladerunner raises the cliché alert, but to see such good material transformed so well into a whole new aesthetic experience, thats double good. i couldn’t see it all, but what i did was really beautifully abstracted away, 99% shadow with scorching audio-visual flashes. oh, and violin.

diary | 30 apr 2010 | tagged: vj · lev

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

…and laboral is full of nice details as well, from the modern sophistication of the cloakroom ticket rack in LABoral, to the tiling and signage around the theatre.

diary | 30 apr 2010 | tagged: vj · lev

to spain for laboratorio de electrónica visual with d-fuse in full wives and girlfriends mode - who wouldn’t, seeing the venues. this was the central quad of laboral, complete with church hosting one performance space to the left, and the entrance to the theatre where we were performing particle to the right. laboral is simply the best setting to have a festival i’ve ever seen: a full campus of venues stretching from this architecturally beautiful and technically top-notch main space to modern art galleries, workshops, labs and allsuch spread around the perimeter.

diary | 30 apr 2010 | tagged: vj · lev

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

its been quite some time since november and nothing visible has been happening. this is a quick post to say that stuff is happening behind the scenes, albeit with lots of delays caused by my spare time being completely out of sync with people i’ve been trying to get things going with. but now the momentum is back, and here shawn bonkowski and i are choosing sliders from the seemingly limitless selection on offer.
being trained in product design and loving this book, i’d have said i have a fair understanding of how much work it can take to transform a prototype into something suitable for manufacture and the real world. but i have to admit, this has taken far far longer than i expected. though now, i think, i can say that the controller is falling into place: still far from having a final, manufacturable, design, but the road to get there is clear and doable.

diary | 22 mar 2010 | tagged: vj · video-out · dvi-mixer

the thomas dolby gig was a test for bringing in live photography as well as live video, and it was really rewarding to see it working. live video turned out to be appropriate for the songs, and then a slideshow of the recent photos for all the catching-up that was happening between songs. it was also good to run the screen and framing graphics at native res, giving strong, defined and intricate output, and see that completely mask - figuratively - the much lower quality PAL video feed.

special props to neil guy: testing the reception of the eye-fi card in his own 5DmkII, he took it apart and removed the shielding around the media slots!

diary | 28 feb 2010 | tagged: *spark · vj · vdmx · video-in

thomas dolby had got back in touch saying he was going to have a reunion gig with his old touring band, and could i arrange some kind of live camera and screen for it? probably yes, but i was really interested by the idea for the show: somewhere in-between a masterclass and a candid first rehearsal as old friendships and old pieces were picked back up for the first time in years. and having a screen presence to really get in there on stage, almost like photojournalism, could be really illuminating, as well as having a camera picking out the fingering or whatever.

so i bought an eye-fi card, got in touch with avid photographer and dolby fan neil guy (whose photo this is), woke up on the day and went for it…

diary | 28 feb 2010 | tagged: *spark · vj

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

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

in reality, all very much a work in progress. but: if you wanted to track a radio control car around a room, and explode it remotely when it crossed its own trail, this is just how you might make the car.

diary | 17 feb 2010 | tagged: vj · physical computing · qmat

d-fuse were asked to do something with the musion screen at kinetica art fair. particle was designed for a transparent screen layered in front of the cinema screen behind, so mike got to work on a 15 minute redux. playback was just hitting play on two laptops simultaneously, and even for this oh how i was reminded that i should write that basic show playback app…

diary | 06 feb 2010 | tagged: vj · dfuse

CDM, the blog about VJing and beyond that seems to have the best signal to noise ratio, has just picked up the live cinema documentary i’ve been deep in the production of since returning, and has said some very nice things:

Utter brilliance: finally, our friend toby*spark has documented live cinema and visualism with a medium that reflects the concept. Music and video are presented as frames within frames, manipulated and placed interactively. It’s part fiction and illusion, of course, but that won’t stop you from dreaming as you watch of interactive audiovisual software that did behave fluidly.
I could say more, but just watch it. The video says it all. I hope toby and others pick up on this ideal and develop it more – both this narrative presentation, and the imaginary software it conceives.

ego massaged, what then happens: [vimeo staff pick](http://vimeo.com/channels/staffpicks#9065736)! a fairly niche documentary gets picked up and -- writing this retrospectively -- daily viewing figures go from the tens to the thousands, likes start pouring in and really positive comments appear. 

[on the writing this retrospectively theme, the next day [intellectual hero](http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail717.html) of mine bruce sterling [even posts about it](http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2010/03/a-documentary-on-live-cinema/). like being touched by the hand of god!]

the world likes it!

diary | 05 feb 2010 | tagged: *spark · vj · live cinema documentary · qmat · live cinema

such seems my life: christmas day means a largely clear day to crack some of the live cinema documentary. not quite the idea!

diary | 25 dec 2009 | tagged: vj · live cinema documentary · qmat

denis, the next day, the fortnight of opus vj over. comatose and content.

diary | 20 dec 2009 | tagged: vj

i met denis at the first vision’r, which i thought was the first french vj festival. not so he said: he had organised opus vj, down in marseille. schedules have aligned finally and i’m sky crowds and snow at gatwick to fly down there for opus vj #4. its also likely the last, denis wanting to move onto something more meaningful than what club contextualised vjing seems to lead to. definitely end of an era for a certain generation there: the first straight-up club vj set i’ve actually done in a year or two, i’m on a nostalgia voyage through *spark past myself: rocking it like its 2003.

thanks to mo, who also played, for the photo.

diary | 19 dec 2009 | tagged: *spark · vj

my phd has this first year not doing phd stuff. which isn’t all bad: i have to make an “experimental documentary about a contemporary arts practice” to hone my media production skills. i think the brief was “make sure they know how to use a camera”, props to the film department at queen mary for challenging us with something a bit more interesting.

so here i am, mike’s EX3 in hand, spending a day or so running round london on a slightly gonzo mission to talk about live cinema with my practitioner peers. big thanks to chris, mike and paul for the interviews and sarah for the assistance and interested-outsider perspective. and this photo.

diary | 16 dec 2009 | tagged: live cinema documentary · vj · liveness · qmat · live cinema

part research, part curiosity, part embarrassment at just not having been before, i mounted a solo reconnaissance of secret cinema. and was impressed. if i’d known the film was going to be bugsy malone, i probably wouldn’t have bothered, but it was great: hundreds of hipsters in 1920’s chicago dress, and a moment of sheer audience electricity as they all realised there really was going to be a giant custard pie fight, and they were not just in the middle, but the only way through was to embrace it. that, and grab and put on a plastic poncho in the ten remaining seconds…

diary | 27 nov 2009 | tagged: vj · liveness

second of two installations i’ve really enjoyed recently, re-rite is a multitrack recording of the philharmonia orchestra performing stravinsky’s the rite of spring, played out across 25 screens and the three floors and many rooms of the wonderfully dilapidated bargehouse. i’d have gone to see such a mediated-live-performance-with-lots-of-screens type thing anyway, and doubly so as the philharmonia partnered with friends yeast to make this (props, pulled it off to a really high standard/) but it really got under my skin: the experience was unique, beyond the goal of somehow giving the experience of being inside an orchestra on stage.

easy to explain would be the thrill of hearing a percussion crash somewhere else in the building come reverberating through while you were isolated with an entirely more delicate section of the orchestra. harder to convey would be as you explored the different rooms there was almost a touch of a haunted house rather than the known jigsaw you’d see on stage. at the heart of it is something that could only be delivered through such an installation, that wasn’t about the orchestral unit you see on stage, but was still very much about the orchestra, the music, the players. which is also why there is no photo from the installation above, just a production still i cullled from the website.

diary | 15 nov 2009 | tagged: vj · liveness · qmat

here’s an update on the dvi-mixer project; i’ve been through the replies to the expression of interest, am working on some things that have come up, and here are a load of answers to common questions that came up.

CONTROLLER

Tap buttons: This is something a fair few people have asked for, and yes, I’m planning on adding this in.

Some kind of switch to route A or B to the output: Apart from temporary overrides of the tap buttons, the crossfader will be the only control for this. Its the hardware angle of just knowing that whatever the crossfader is set to, is what is actually happening. That said, I understand the concern of guaranteeing a solid output of A or B, not a flickering mostly A and a bit of B, and there’s already some logic in there to only start crossfading after a certain movement away from the extremes.

DJ-style faders: A single crossfader is all the control an over/normal or multiply blend mode needs. When you have additive mixing, you might want the A and B levels to be more than simply what is on either side of the crossfader’s knob. I’m thinking about this, DJ-style faders is probably overkill (expense, signal noise, break-ability and loss of simplicity of control surface), a fader curve setting at the back alongside the resolution setting is what I’m preferring at the moment.

Still button: I’m in the fence but looking into this. Displaying a preloaded still is possible, but then why not just full-screen an image on your laptop? A button to hammer on each channel while mixing live is probably not doable with the hardware as-is. We’ll see.

Single controller, multiple processors: This would fit what I want to do with a v2 controller.

Ethernet / OSC / Midi interface: This would fit what I want to do with a v2 controller.

Fader response time: Currently, this isn’t as I’d like it. Its been fine for D-Fuse or *spark use, but a scratch mixer it isn’t. Talking to the manufacturer turned up a technique that I hope should sort the communication side, and we should be shipping with a crossfader with much better electro-mechanical qualities. Regardless, there’ll be a demonstration video showing exactly the kind of response the shipping models will have before taking anybody’s money.

PROCESSOR

Higher resolutions: The hardware can only go so high. There is a bandwidth limit and a line length limit, so while it can do 1920x1200, it can’t do 2400x600 which is actually fewer pixels. I’d love it to be otherwise, I have a major project that really needs that Triplehead at 800x600, let alone the requests for 3072 x 768 I’ve had! Still, triple 640x480, dual 1024x768 and straight 1920x1080 are such a leap from 720x576. Addressing this seems the obvious next step for a version two of the processor.

Different resolutions: The twelve timings I settled on (six resolutions at 50 or 60Hz) were what seemed the most useful in my experience of AV work. Now bear with me: the processor has stored many more resolutions, but to get the plug’n’play ability I want the EDID info transmitted on the inputs needs to match. The tweaked firmware should increase the number of EDID memories, but this isn’t finite and we might not even get twelve. So as shipped, I haven’t had feedback that changes what the six common resolutions would be. The good news is that they should be reassignable, the bad news is that it won’t be trivial - lots of fiddling at your end.

Dual-link DVI: See above, the unit cannot process dual-link resolutions. There is a bonus here in that single link DVI cables are nicer, they should bend easier and weigh a good chunk less than dual-link ones. The dual-link cables I have are the single thing I really don’t like about the setup.

DVI-I sockets: You get DVI-D and VGA in the same socket, done right. Mix and match DVI or VGA inputs or output. EDID transmitted on the inputs that can be independent of what the output is doing.

Additive blend mode: The good news is that this should be happening! This is supercool, a great win. Also I’d had a blind-spot in not asking for multiply as well, so thanks to the feedback this is on the list as well: in terms of implementation, they’re pretty much equivalent, so the omens are good.

Photoshop-style blend modes: No chance. From my personal perspective, this is where you want to be doing stuff in software, the mixer is there to guarantee your signal to the projector, to give a hardware controlled fade to black, to allow seamless switching between between laptops outputting an image already fully composited in the modern vj app of your choice.

Audio In/Out: I’m not touching audio for a load of reasons, but would like to make a v2 controller that is controllable externally, so you could link an audio mixer with this via Midi / OSC for instance.

Split/Preview output: Its just two in, one-out. If you want to split anything, you’ll need separate DAs. Typically for me this is downstream of my TripleHead anyway, splitting the three VGA projector feeds to have a monitor preview of each.

TripleHead: Any TripleHead is separate to this. Bring your own if you want to use one in conjunction with the mixer. I’ve tested with a TH2Go Digital Edition only.

Latency: As per the fader response time, there’ll be a demonstration video showing exactly the kind of response the shipping models will have before taking anybody’s money. While we’re at it, the processing is in 24bit 4:4:4, so there should be no quality loss because of the mixing.

Internal power supply: It sucks, but its an external power supply for both the processor and controller I’m afraid. I did work through an all-in-one version, but the cons outweigh the pros.

THE SWEDES WON’T BUY A PIG IN A SACK

What a great saying; hat tip to Mikael. Once I have a processor running the tweaked firmware, and a controller representative of what will ship, I’ll make a video to show it all in action, and have the purchasing terms all laid out. And hopefully, you won’t just have my word to take for it… more to come soon.

diary | 11 nov 2009 | tagged: vj · video-out · dvi-mixer

this friday i will be doing my vj thing together with mike, matthias and sarah of d-fuse, paul of labmeta, and mo of electrovision. we have the run of the london transport museum, who are opening late with a bar. its the first time we’ll have done something there, so it will be baby steps but i think there’s real potential with the victoriana building with the spatial feel their scale of exhibits gives, the covent garden location, and the real gem of their proper screening theatre downstairs.

• Sounds of the Suburbs, Friday 6 November 2009
  Tune in to a multi-sensory journey of light, image, colour and sound with D-Fuse, Labmeta, *spark and Electrovision and their collaborative set - Urban vs suburban with VJing, audio visual performance and screenings complete with silent disco. Check out Designated Area artist Andy Morgan’s live illustration of a classic cityscape with a suburban twist.

http://www.ltmuseum.co.uk/whatson/126.aspx

diary | 03 nov 2009 | tagged: *spark · vj · rbn_esc · dfuse

photobank couldn’t have happened without novak’s curation of the opencity event. talking about our joint project kinetxt and things like memory bank led to the idea, and being given a development fee and the host event made it possible. they also did a great job in finding some local writers to be the masters of interpretation for the weekend, of whom alex is pictured above, scribbling around his notes for the final haiku-like selection.

diary | 01 nov 2009 | tagged: *spark · vj · photobank

after a month with a heavy dose of xcode on the side, its up to newcastle clutching two fledgling applications to marry with newcastle library’s digitised photo archive, a bunch of iMacs clustered around a 1080P plasma screen, and the memories of the visiting public. it was a heavy weekend of being there with the installation by day and further coding by night, but out of this a very real and user tested photobank has been born.

as the latest manifestation of my personal practice, and something that will very likely become part of my PhD research, there is much more to say than a quick diary post can stretch to. so the full project page will come, i guess in the meantime its easiest to point the lineage to kinetxt which was - with novak - my first attempt at creating an environment where layers of interpretation are encouraged, and they in turn add up to something interesting and unexpected. photobank tries to address this in a more focussed and repeatable way, starting with a base of media archive, and ending with a flow of illustrated short verse.

at the nuts and bolts level, its a full screen photo browsing and annotation application that can be run on many computers for mass interaction by the public, which are networked to a central computer holding the photo archive and running the central display, which acts as both an attractor for the public, animating through the archive and latest annotatations, and as the writer’s tool for creating and showing mini-narratives by selecting six photos and their annotations, and handwriting short verse around them. all written as native mac osx applications using objective-c/cocoa and quartz composer.

diary | 01 nov 2009 | tagged: quartz composer · photobank · *spark · vj · code
- mac os

well… the word is officially out, and rippling around the internet. never seen so many twitter mentions or positive adjectives next to my name - which is nice - but the real deal is are there enough people out there who want one to make a limited production run from the prototype: its not about interest, it will be about orders. http://tobyz.net/project/dvi-mixer

is amazed from this example of userGeneratedProduct: 1° #DVI #Mixer supporting Matrox/Hd. @tobyspark http://tinyurl.com/yfnt4vh Support!

• Davide Gomba, http://twitter.com/VonGomben/status/5041067954

Nice! Compact DVI mixer. http://sparkav.co.uk/dvimixer (via @tobyspark + @_vade ) Make sure to read the direct impetus for its creation!

• Andrew Lovett-Barron, http://twitter.com/ReadyWater/status/5025800435

the amazing @tobyspark has put together the first affordable DVI mixer. you know you all want one! sign up for it now!

• jasper cook, http://twitter.com/VJzoo/status/5010721582

yes you, person who has repeatedly complained about the lack of “affordable” or “digital” mixers, you’re about to get both. So head on over to the *Spark D-Fuser project page, read all of the juicy details, and then hit Toby’s expression of interest form.

• jaymis, http://createdigitalmotion.com/2009/10/20/community-led-entry-to-the-digital-video-mixer-era-spark-d-fuser-approaches/

So now it is here. Not quite. Its really up to you now to go over to his page and put your money where it counts and order one of these things, custom built just for you. Your support will drive this device into demand.

• ilan katin, http://www.modul8.us/2009/10/dvi-mixer-finally-someone-has-done-it.html

diary | 21 oct 2009 | tagged: vj · video-out · dvi-mixer

a sunset to end, aaah. lucky with the weather for our filming day!

diary | 02 oct 2009 | tagged: vj · dfuse

and here we go, leading into the bridges

diary | 02 oct 2009 | tagged: vj · dfuse

coming into newcastle, but can’t shake the oil rigs yet, just too good.

diary | 02 oct 2009 | tagged: vj · dfuse

two screengrabs of output featuring footage andrew shot at tynemouth. oil rigs, beaches and a bleaching sun.

diary | 02 oct 2009 | tagged: vj · dfuse

the title should really be ‘live at sea’ by the looks of this clip. not to mention the setup looked a bit like the bow of a ship.

the performance had some really beautiful moments, and clips made to pan across the full triplehead work so well in that triangular setup, making lighthouse beams in the space. in my opinion we let ourselves down by not having time for a full run through beforehand, the to and fro between ‘particle-as-is plus a newcastle bit’, or ‘newcastle-in-the-style-of-particle’, resolving itself live and as a factor of SSD drive capacities.

diary | 02 oct 2009 | tagged: vj · dfuse · live cinema

the performance was to be the newly transformed great north museum’s event space, a big, white, and empty room. standard two layer ‘proscenium arch’ presentation not so suitable, mike came up with a triangular staging.

diary | 02 oct 2009 | tagged: vj · video-out · dfuse

up to newcastle with d-fuse for a performance of particle as part of reinventing the city. we collaborated with locals novak for a day of filming and a day of performance/prep. nice to be out with them with a camera on a glorious day rather than worrying about wiimotes and audience interaction.

geordie hospitality really can be great. me and andrew were just scoping out an alleyway in byker that got the sunset over the city centre, and literally at the moment we turned around and saw a balcony above a house’s garage perfectly positioned for the shot, when the owner rocked up and offered to take us up there. cups of tea and all.

(and excuse the contrast pump on the shot, couldn’t help myself)

diary | 01 oct 2009 | tagged: vj · dfuse · reinventing the city

and if chase & status wasn’t enough to be getting on with, there was also a long awaited project with moving brands, of which neither i nor they can talk about beyond saying i sat behind a mac and xcode for a week.

diary | 22 sep 2009 | tagged: vj · code · mac os · moving brands

saxon was a straight 2D after effects mission, animating up the cover artwork and compositing into it carnival soundsystem footage. its a heavy dubstep track, and i spent some time making the visuals really follow the bass… looping keyframe expressions ahoy. i’ll upload videos once the tour is over.

diary | 20 sep 2009 | tagged: vj · light surgeons

in many ways, this is my favourite video. they wanted the vocalists up on the screen, and this certainly delivers but taking it into chris cunningham territory. the magic was shooting with two cameras simultaneously, one recording crystal clear HD and the other super contrasty nightshot, while flicking the lights around. just compositing the two straight gave a crazy shifting ghost effect, and after some audioreactive magic and graphics passes the effect is really intricate. and with barely a manual keyframe, to boot.

i’ve made a 4-up frame to try and give an idea, but in retrospect it should have been a filmstrip of adjacent frames, the representation of takura flickering around.

diary | 20 sep 2009 | tagged: vj · light surgeons

chase and status delivery time: here’s a still from against all odds. this was a nice one to make, splicing together with a good dose of graphical sensibility the card-game-in-a-smoky-nightclub promo video c&s had already with the vocalist shoot we did at the beginning of the project.

diary | 20 sep 2009 | tagged: vj · light surgeons

and to answer the title of the first post, here is the best i can do, courtesy of the freestate photographer.

of course, you’re missing six of the satellite screens, two facing in just out of sight offset at the far end, and the four to mirror that end behind the camera’s position. buts the nature of the beast: you can’t watch a 11,000px quicktime, you can’t watch a 3200x1080 crop alongside four 768x768 crops, you can’t get everything in with the viewing angle of the unaided eye even in the stand. thats what immersive, or certainly surround, means.

i hope we can pitch again next year, impressive as it all was i really want to break away from these big white walls…

diary | 03 sep 2009 | tagged: vj · video-out · dfuse

having spent a day documenting our work, i can say this steadycam rig may look the part but is the most awful thing to actually try and use. makes you realise why the film-grade ones are basically terminator suits.

diary | 03 sep 2009 | tagged: vj · video-in · dfuse

a tribute to fellow frequent d-fuser paul mumford: its pretty tough: you’ve been holed up for weeks on end with the impossible brief of this video environment; master of after effects or no, a 11,000px canvas is going to hurt, and you’re finally seeing the results… and you can’t even get a photo of it all, 'cos its wrapped around walls and towers surrounding you!

diary | 03 sep 2009 | tagged: vj · dfuse

from pitch and the day-long meetings to kick it off, its now three months later and i’m actually in the sony stand at ifa 2009. a non-disclosure agreement, a 11,000x1080px canvas in after effects, 15 full-bore mac pros compositing their slice of the 400GB drive image full of particle layers and product prisms, eight screens pixelmapped in surround across the stand’s towers… its been one of those projects of scary statistics, corporate reputations riding on the line and knowing there is no preview, the not-yet-there architecture is the output monitor.

to take a step back, d-fuse won the commission to create the video environment that forms the centrepiece of the stand. having contributed to what in effect were a series of brand films last year, this year was the real thing: together with andy visser’s sound design, creating an audio-visual environment to give a… well, how to describe: something between an emotional journey and a feeling of space to the stand. i like freestate’s vision for the stand, almost as parkland with scattered mini-booths of products, rather than the products! products! products! you find elsewhere.

so its a nice moment to see have mike, mr d-fuse, and adam, mr freestate, in-situ and discussing the finer points of trade-show land with smiles, looking at a stand that pretty much nailed what was discussed those months ago.

diary | 03 sep 2009 | tagged: vj · video-out · dfuse

while in berlin on d-fuse delivery duties, its the birthday of ilan katin. to mauer park with a bottle of fizz for sunset, booze and cake. in opposite order.

flux and lucy as acting masters of visual berlin merchandise surpassed themselves with a gold printed t-shirt for ilan based on his skype icon, how - i certainly - see him week by week. now we just need to make those eyes spin…

diary | 01 sep 2009 | tagged: vj

finally, its plan b for the rip-it-up pieces and their new single ‘end credits’, taken from the upcoming film harry brown. think gran turino but with michael caine instead of clint eastwood, but from the opening minute that i’ve seen, hard hitting would be an understatement.

diary | 28 aug 2009 | tagged: *spark · vj · light surgeons · chase+status

third up, takura for three tracks. we’re in double shoot mode here, flicking the lights and filming in HD and nightshot going for some frenetic cuts when it gets to post.

diary | 28 aug 2009 | tagged: *spark · vj · light surgeons · chase+status

onto jenna g for [in love]. this started off all warm orange fuzz, and ended up barely blue. strange how things evolve sometimes.

diary | 28 aug 2009 | tagged: *spark · vj · light surgeons · chase+status

into the studio with chris allen for a day’s shoot of chase & status vocalists. i’m pulling together the visuals for the chase & status autumn tour for the light surgeons. this was the first step: film four vocalists over seven tracks in one day. kano up first, though without the against all odds afro.

diary | 28 aug 2009 | tagged: *spark · vj · light surgeons · chase+status

seeing myself in print was definitely a theme for this trip: documenting your festival in really well produced books is something seemingly intrinsic to brasil, and so interest turned to delight when i was handed the 2008 annual from rio de janeiro’s multiplicidade and saw pages upon pages devoted to the d-fuse performance that took me there.

diary | 30 jul 2009 | tagged: vj · multiplicidade

reservations about file apart, its damn nice seeing yourself in print. their catalogue is truly something to behold.

i was also interviewed by mtv before my performance, talking briefly about rbn_esc and some of the ideas of live cinema. that hasn’t found its way to the internet as far as i can see, although somebody does seem to have uploaded some filmed excerpts: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71MDtdPm3bY&feature=related

diary | 29 jul 2009 | tagged: *spark · vj · rbn_esc · file · live cinema

the file exhibition had some nice pieces. i would link to them, but the file website is impenetrable (in marked contrast to their amazing catalogue, to follow…).

my favourite was a simple sound installation executed flawlessly. as you walked down a sterile glass corridor, you triggered a sonic world crossing the border at tijuana via a jumble of perspex stalks hanging in your way with slightly/suitably sinister looking sensors at their tips.
› nina waisman; with pd programming by marius schebella / between bodies (tijuana) / united states

pictured is something that had a little trick that transformed the whole thing. you trigger a game of life simulation spreading across the whole table by waving your hand over some part of it, which the artist’s statement elaborates on. but the magic was the oh-so-very-digital lights were sitting atop electro-mechanical relays, which give a really satisfying click as they turn the turn the led on or off, which imbued the ‘life’ in the installation a visceral, swarming, physicality.
› leo nuñez / game of life /argentina

i was also happy to finally see the mechanical recreation of arcade game world of mario in the flesh. the idea is nicer than the reality, but that doesn’t stop there be real wonder in pressing the NES game pad and seeing and hearing a meccano-like contraption scissor mario in the air, rather than it just happening as pixels on a screen.
› keith lam / moving mario / china

finally, as d-fuse, we stopped in our tracks when we saw a triple-head montage of an abstracted city passing by: not a million miles away from a description of particle. good that it was a) really well done and b) exploring a completely different, almost brutal, aesthetic.
› marina chernikova / urban surfing moscow / netherland

diary | 29 jul 2009 | tagged: vj · file

as it happened, the pretty reknown FILE festival was the following week, and we were in são paulo already. so an application for rbn_esc from me later, and some d-fusing from mike, and we’re staying on for particle’s second outing and rbn_esc’s debut outside of europe (somehow, thats true/).

it was a weird experience though. for all of the festival’s reputation and a hotel bursting with artists, it was a strangely empty experience. i’m happy to support festivals without proper funding, and itaú cultural who brought us over deserve a great deal of respect for allowing to perform particle again and dealing with the flights. i’m not so happy doing that and finding the festival is all facade, with no real reason to be there as an artist beyond getting the tick-box kudos on your cv, and seemingly no concern for building an experience for the audience either.

nice to cross paths with motomichi again, pictured, who participated in the avit vj festival in brighton, 2003. his performance at file hypersonica was a highlight for me, a vj set of his black/red/white trademark animation that never lagged, that was constantly moving forward.

diary | 28 jul 2009 | tagged: vj · file

…but all that fades away against the rift of paraisópolis and morumbi. o m g. to see this was why we’d hired the helicopter. just unreal.

urban conditions…? i would just stick this on a cinema screen for an hour and let people deal with thinking it through.

diary | 28 jul 2009 | tagged: vj · photo · dfuse · on_off

lots of urban visual goodness from the air in são paulo… great concrete vistas, modernism old and new…

diary | 28 jul 2009 | tagged: vj · dfuse · on_off

and then there we were. above the city, doors removed, pointing cameras wherever we could.

for the record, this is one of the more stress-full things i’ve done: knowing the cost per minute, not having a tripod fitting let alone the gyro stabilised camera of the newscopters, being blown around by the tremendous headwind, barely being able to see the screen in the glare, everything going too quick, and only having a car seatbelt type affair holding me in as i leant out. but it was amazing. just need to raise the money to hire a full HD filming equipped 'copter: having experienced the diy version and then looked at the real deal in its hanger, i’d say worth every penny. you just need something to justify it…

diary | 28 jul 2009 | tagged: vj · dfuse · on_off

são paulo is an interesting city for a number of reasons. statistically, its a big hitter in the d-fuse world of urban conditions: the first or second most populous metropolitan area in the americas with a cool 21 million, and with the rich escaping the traffic via the largest helicopter fleet in the world. and so, mulling on that, we found ourselves at the heliport…

diary | 28 jul 2009 | tagged: vj · dfuse · on_off

we’re such poseurs. the problem with loosing all the dvd-decks, v4 mixers and whatnot in favour of two laptops and a mini crossfader box, is that your stage setup looks somewhat less impressive. so seeing the shadows of the monitors on the mesh screen, it didn’t take long before somebody was recreating the old look with a bunch of cables…

diary | 25 jul 2009 | tagged: vj · on_off

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

latitude is d-fuse’s established live cinema piece, and the one that took me to rio last year. apple like it too: quicktime hd gallery

produced for twin dvds and a bit of optional laptop noodle, here at on_off is its first outing as an entirely laptop based performance. the change is to bring it in-line with the new HD-savvy live setup i’ve been developing, where adding ever more SD dvd streams won’t cut it. the benefit is we should get better quality content with twin 800x600 progressive outputs rather than twin PAL/NTSC, and we have far greater creative control now the performance sits in our vdmx setup. the try-it-for-the-first-time surprise was that we weren’t getting 100.00% smooth playback for the straight sequences, which on a cinema screen for a theatrical audience becomes an issue. so with some juggling with quicktime player, we had the best of both worlds and rocked it.

of course, now that we’re dvi/vga+progressive, and have spent the past year dealing with HD, we need to go back to the original sources and remaster it all!

thanks to itaú cultural for the photo

diary | 24 jul 2009 | tagged: vj · dfuse · on_off · live cinema

all i’m saying, is that the next day i was in hospital.

although that would be a disservice to one drink for a cheap joke: as far as i can tell it was the hotel breakfast that sent me retching. its one-way to get out of a four hour presentation you’re helping give, but not one i’d recommend. many thanks go to the staff at our hosts itaú cultural, and to the hospital staff for not quarantining me with swine flu - the fever passed, i was stocked back up with liquid (needles!), and the next day was ready to perform.

diary | 23 jul 2009 | tagged: vj · on_off

first day in são paulo was for filming. mike and matthias took the car mission, i took the bus+metro and delved into the centre of sp. so much to see, and i revel in sp’s love (experiment?) of modernist concrete, but it is sights like this that linger most.

diary | 22 jul 2009 | tagged: vj · on_off

arrive in são paulo. first morning, i’m awake at 5am with the time-zone shift. its dark, but the sun soon rises to a beautiful day, with the arts centre we’ll be performing in standing there reflecting the orange glow. and life is good: i’m being productive, the hotel has a cunning arrangement with free internet up to 64kb, and most refreshingly there’s no mirror in front of the desk.

diary | 22 jul 2009 | tagged: vj · on_off

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

herein lies a little story. when i met ilan a few years ago, it was obvious he was a good type doing good stuff. he handed me a dvd of one of his main projects, and some time later back at home, relaxing of an evening, i found it and put it on. shall we just say that thrash metal with eye-bending visuals wasn’t the right thing for that moment, and to my taste, i couldn’t imagine a moment when it would be. but the world is diverse, it was a product of love, and so we move on.

so there i am at abertura actually experiencing lance blisters live, and am loving every minute of it. the disconnect between those two is the answer, often asked, of why i bother trying to do all this in realtime, as performance. to tease that disconnect out into words is a tricky thing though, and probably impossible for exactly the same reasons: the media != the experience, whether samples, video or text.

diary | 19 jul 2009 | tagged: vj · abertura

unrelated to visuals but very much in the real media world there was a really interesting project shown at abertura, a ‘such an obvious idea why hasn’t this happened already’ project called fisheye. simply, if you install the browser plug-in, you gain annotations that people have written about the webpages you visit. pair this with a well structured critique taxonomy, and you have a powerful media criticism tool. photo is geoff, the developer, giving us the tour.

Fisheye is a media hacking tool which allows criticism of web pages. Links to criticism are embedded like footnotes and visible to other Fisheye users who visit the page.

One goal is to take all the great media criticism scattered across the web and index it in a single place - the story being criticized. Links are tied to specific text and color-coded by type. At a glance, you can see what types of problems people have identified with the story.

http://fisheye.ffem.org/

diary | 19 jul 2009 | tagged: vj · abertura

stay till end of electrovision, pick up triplehead lent for last set, taxi home, pack bag for two weeks in brasil, taxi to airport, take off 6am bound for lisbon.

flying to brasil is good: you can stop over in lisbon. stopping off in lisbon is even better if the lovely ana and elsa have organised abertura3 around the same time.

and so it was a really good day of old friends, new faces, climbing ladders, beer at lunch, sleep deprived siesta afterwards, not to mention quite some noodling of visuals.

diary | 19 jul 2009 | tagged: vj · abertura

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

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

…and i use the word awesome precisely, for making my first application was an awe-inspiring experience. i could make a better screenshot, i could work it untill i really do have plasma pong, but ffs it took two hours for a standing start! never having done any c++ let alone work with a fluid library before, let alone… yeah, i could go on. possibly the better route is just to try and sample some of my communication in the 24 hours since then…

twitter #openframeworks workshop: coded pong: http://img.ly/VN , got MSAFluid working: http://img.ly/VM . now to combine

twitter #openframeworks awesome awesome awesome. an hour for pong, ten minutes for the demo, fiften to combine: http://img.ly/VQ

› was going to come down to that, let me know how it is
btw the workshop was great, or rather the workshop was a decent enough workshop (memo is a great teacher, btw) but OF is really really great. i think i probably got a lot more out of the workshop that some others, as i’ve spent so much time coding this last year or two i was able to dive straight into c++ and OF, but really OF comes highly recommended: quick to code, fast to execute, and vast in its scope. if you can do processing, OF is pretty much processing for grown-ups.

› so how you finding OF? you know you can just recompile it for the iphone…
simply that i could write that from a standing start in a weekend OF workshop blows my mind.

› dude, are you saying what I’m thinking you are saying? Create a layer for openframeworks -> QCplugin!?!? so you can compile an openframeworks app as a QCPlugin!? cos that would be ace! lets do it!!
i am saying something like that =]
you either create a OFRenderer class that is patterned on QCRenderer, or yeah, you somehow get an OF app to impersonate a QCRenderer or QCComposition.
either of which would blow the doors off. OF wrapped and frame-driven from cocoa (ie. NSOpenGL, CV display link), coding rendering pipelines that go through both OF and QC, OF as plug-ins for all QC enabled apps… la la la le la shazaam.

note - a zip of the project is attached, frozen at the minute it first was alive as a working plasma pong. so its not to be taken as an example of coding best practice, but just to illustrate what two hours can get you. space bar to start, a/z and k/m for the paddles.

diary | 15 jun 2009 | tagged: *spark · vj · ofworkshop-ldnjun09 · open frameworks | downloads: TBZ-PlasmaPong-OFLondonJune09.zip

this was actually for a really nice first project from ian grant and two others, where they used openCV and box2D to drop computer rendered shapes from the top of the canvas and see them pile up on the ground, except that the ground was made by whatever shape was put in front of the webcam.

diary | 14 jun 2009 | tagged: vj · ofworkshop-ldnjun09 · open frameworks

electronics out the way, and a few beers later, we’re deep into philosophy, civilisation and disability. scott making the aspirational claim for devoting potentially disproportionate resources to niche concerns, to paraphrase him that what might seem extravagant now is where we want to be throughout society, so we need some excuse to trailblaze.

diary | 13 jun 2009 | tagged: vj · ofworkshop-ldnjun09 · open frameworks

pint-in-the-pub post workshop, look round to daniel and franz, and see the electronics have already been broken out. yep, its going to be that kind of weekend.

diary | 13 jun 2009 | tagged: vj · ofworkshop-ldnjun09 · open frameworks

i’m part of a open frameworks workshop, along with some very interesting other people. this means during a lovely sunny weekend in london, i’m geeking out in a dark room learning OF. as a lot of people there haven’t spent the past year or two getting deeper and deeper into code, it starts with the basics: “int r,g,b; // could be on separate lines but we are amazing programmers now”.

diary | 13 jun 2009 | tagged: *spark · vj · ofworkshop-ldnjun09 · open frameworks

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

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

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

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

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

why have one bottle when you can have two!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

lost the dvd drive, moved the hard disk into its place, and installed a super-fast solid state drive in the original’s slot. as philikon says, “you can have your cake and eat it, too. warp drive and good old V8 muscle.”… this not only makes the system “biblically fast”, but now means i can pull multiple high-def streams for vjing without the laptop breaking a sweat. more than that, with genuinely instant random access, i should be able to scratch, stutter, trigger to my hearts content. so… time to play!

diary | 27 may 2009 | tagged: *spark · mac · vj · i/o

back to london, and it’s mo’s vj night. back at the roxy too, the old-timer venue sporting an old-timer line-up with ben sheppee in from japan and scott amoeba up from brighton (pictured - a true ginger terrorist/).

also a shame to have missed tom blinkinlab’s first live set, having worked on a light surgeons project with him before, and it being audio-visual from the loop-up with an architectural bent.

diary | 23 may 2009 | tagged: vj · electrovision

nothing better than a week in and out of coding, performance and nightclubs, to see the night through to a beautiful sunny morning on the river. swimming in the crystal clear water was cleansing more than literally, even if for some it wasn’t quite the idea…

diary | 17 may 2009 | tagged: vj · mapping

my first mapping was marked by meeting franz and pier of exyzt, and it was great to see them back with a facade projection piece. using some custom playback/pinning software franz had rustled up (pictured, franz aligning it up - the outlines are lit on the building), it was both refreshing and surprising to see a true audio-visual piece, where the graphics and audio were two sides of the same thing. surprising that at mapping, a touchpoint of curated vj/av showcasing, this was the first i’d seen that did it for me in that way.

and while we’re at it, check their new venture 1024d

diary | 16 may 2009 | tagged: vj · mapping

beat torrent cancelled themselves in a fit of divadom, so enter “torrent de bites, un duo vj/dj aussi impromptu qu’enthousiaste” aka ilan and andré of le zoo. ably assisted by the vj exoskeleton craziness of vj lupin and oblivion, disaster turned to triumph and a real highlight of the festival. although it all pales next to this.

diary | 16 may 2009 | tagged: vj · mapping

this installation - “inside out” by klif - was really nice, cameras and cathode ray tubes feeding back on themselves but achieved with a beautiful restraint of motion and palette. the key was in the cameras being mounted on slowly oscillating platforms, so that with the projector canvas spread wide, trails of repeats would swing across in slow motion. i also noticed some video level-adjustments boxes, which probably are essential to getting such a refined collage.

diary | 15 may 2009 | tagged: vj · mapping

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

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

from rehearsal to the performance proper. one of the challenges for us of projecting onto a building rather than a cinematic screen is that you don’t have the clear frame for your ‘canvas’, rather you’re just lighting up bits of a facade: type in the void. this gives a problem for making an art-pad the backdrop of your canvas: you don’t want a bright white rectangle somewhere on your building, you want the lit pen-strokes floating in the wider surface. so here we are for one part of the performance proper with our illustrators experimenting with black paper and tipp-ex (correction fluid) type pens.

diary | 14 may 2009 | tagged: *spark · vj · kinetxt · mapping · live illustration

and here is the kinetxt cut-out submitter app, one button to make the tethered camera shoot and load it into photoshop, and the other to drop the photoshopped image onto for submission to the kinetxt canvas.

i was really happy having created it the night before, a few delays and furrowed brows but essentially a few hours work to make just what i wanted. this was, however, until i saw the artist’s laptop it was to sit on, which didn’t quite look right. "ah… its running tiger. and this is written using leopard obj-c grammar and frameworks. ‹expletive›”. cue legacy re-write on the morning of performance.

diary | 14 may 2009 | tagged: *spark · vj · kinetxt · mapping

its the day of the performance, and we set kinetxt up in one of the communal rooms of îlot 13 to rehearse.

we do a few ten minute tries, which really give some hope that this could go really well. my favourite memory is seeing one of these start with the outline of an island, and the performance takes the form of a kind of evolving map of utopia. that, and seeing the difference one of the innovations for this performance makes, the ‘cut-outs’ which allow the illustrators to draw characters and tweaked-through-photoshop-whatevers into kinetxt. having pen drawings cut-out and then soft-shadowed with vibrant colours, composited into the kinetxt canvas really opens things visually.

though, of course, it can’t always be rehearsal: kitchen coding called.

diary | 14 may 2009 | tagged: *spark · vj · kinetxt · mapping

the îlot 13 complex has the écurie bar, and what a perfect place. couldn’t resist this shot, seeing the guy reading the hardback comic they had lying there, roses behind and, well, it goes on. too perfect.

diary | 13 may 2009 | tagged: vj · photo · mapping

one of the ideas of kinetxt is starting off from a blank sheet of paper, story unwritten, and the way I see it one way of increasing the quality or interest in the resultant performance is using the context of the performance as catalyst or reference for whatever emerges. so mapping gave us a great hand in programming us as an outdoor projection in the courtyard of îlot 13, a place with lots of history and spirit. we were projecting on the back walls of one of the blocks, which instantly gives ideas of x-ray views through to the people living there, and the whole complex is a kind of utopia, being a former squat that came to an agreement with the city council, and instead of the standard cycle of demolition and profiteering redevelopment seen world-over, an association was formed to develop the block in the interests of its inhabitants. and what a wonderful job they’ve done, it is quite the urban oasis, both smart and informal.

and so we met there, talked through the history, looked at the wall we were to project on, doodled themes we could explore and so on, captured a little by the photo above.

diary | 12 may 2009 | tagged: *spark · vj · kinetxt · mapping

…and now having used it in anger, here we have

• Added bounds feature, to give you all the sizing information you need to block out your calligraphy renderers.
• Fixed a crashing bug triggered by sending a clear all lines signal mid-stroke
• Added an advanced example derived from KineTXT development. Use space to send chunks of calligraphy to the screen, as if you were writing on a horizontal scroll.

diary | 11 may 2009 | tagged: quartz composer · live illustration · vj · code · mac os · kinetxt · release | downloads: SPK-Calligraphy-v1.2.zip

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

following teatrino were the erasers, which was a great thing to witness but fell short of the ambition i had for it watching the start. they had a great table full of things, all categorised into rows, and it started magnificently with a really nice motion graphic triplehead vj thing that looked like we were in for a real engaging narrative or development, and was all the better when you realised half the content was actually coming from live filming up front, with performers and cameras manipulating print-outs, ink and whatnot into a crisp graphic whole. trouble was, this was so perfect to my eyes that when their next ‘track’ was a real dive aesthetically and musically, and it became clear that it was going to be improvised chaos riffing against well-tread themes without saying anything new or interesting, i felt really let down despite many compelling moments of live action that followed.

its in their artistic statement to have an ‘open loop’ between the back-row vjs and musicians and front-row performers and cameras, but ultimately i think they would really benefit from an outside director coming in and creating a focused show out of their themed chaos.

diary | 10 may 2009 | tagged: vj · mapping

great performance by teatrino elettrico on the sunday night, in the zoo nightclub innovatively cut-up sideways into an audio-visual theatre.

an audio-visual performance in the truest sense, with all audio and visual generated by teatrino’s contraptions of wheels, nails, whirring electronics and so on, and captured by microphone and camera. its not a unique idea, but they did it really well. what really transformed the performance for me was their embracing of rhythm in the audio - i can only take so much electro-acoustic drone, and this turned drone to music for me - and the triplehead montage of cameras.

diary | 10 may 2009 | tagged: vj · mapping

who would have known that this year’s fashion is to have your vj name made into a big blingin’ buckle. hi-res meet mxzehn, face-off (or rather, well, what xxx-off would you call that…!)

diary | 09 may 2009 | tagged: vj · mapping

…and here is the bugfix release.

• fixed purge last object exception
• removed unused boilerplate methods
• added zPos to animator
• ordered ports (arrange in @dynamic line)
• fixed x,y mis-patch in sample qtz file

diary | 07 may 2009 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · live illustration · vj · code · mac os · release | downloads: SPK-Calligraphy-v1.1.zip

KineTXT has spurred many custom plug-ins, generally either esoteric or usurped by kineme or the next major release of QC. the latest however probably deserves to see the wider light of day, and so here is a snap-shot of it having just passed a notional ‘v1.0’. its two patches designed to capture and render handwriting and doodles from a tablet, but they should be pretty useful to anyone who wishes for some form of digital graffiti in their QC compositions.

if you want anti-aliasing, you’ll need to leave the QC app behind unfortunately, but if you can run without the patching editor window its just three lines of code to add to the qc player sample application and voila: this plugin and all 3D geometry become anti-aliased. vade worked it all out and outlines the territory here: http://abstrakt.vade.info/?p=186.

if you want different nibs, pen-on-paper-like textures or suchlike… well i have my needs and ideas, but the source is there. share and share alike!

the plug-in is released under gplv3, and is attached below.

diary | 28 apr 2009 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · mac os · vj · code · release | downloads: SPK-Calligraphy-v1.0.zip

after much shenanigans, keane3D did happen and d-fuse were part of it. no mapping-on-keane-artwork-triangles-with-antivj, no live layered-in-space reactive projections, either of which should have worked amazingly with the multi-3Dcamera filming setup, instead the program graphics. this meant on the day i was in charge of getting the content into the more-than-impressive and bespoke for the occasion outside broadcast rig - always be prepared to reencode everything squatting round the back of a rack of equipment - so always a nice moment when you actually see it going out live from the gallery.

diary | 02 apr 2009 | tagged: vj · video-out · dfuse

a little sneak peek of a quartz composer plug-in in development: spk-calligraphy, a set of patches for recording and playing back 2d strokes. the basic patch is equivalent to the kineme GL line structure patch, but draws the line as if it were a chisel nib at 45° and with a flow fade-out. the other two are what is going to enable a big part of the next kinetxt development: handwriting to go alongside the rendered text.

diary | 27 mar 2009 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · live illustration · vj · code · mac os · kinetxt

from boat trips, through a pub, to club transmediale’s daytime venue. amongst the madness, a laboratory table of improvised audio-visual tinker toys. very cutely, all leading off one power strip.

diary | 31 jan 2009 | tagged: vj · adventures

of course, it was all going too well: putting together all the separate elements hasn’t proved so straightforward.

diary | 30 jan 2009 | tagged: avit-vj-network · vj · web

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

would make jack a dull boy, except that you couldn’t stay in totally with transmediale around you for the week…? to maria club, where drill-in-your-head sonic experiments seem to be the thing in the main room.

diary | 27 jan 2009 | tagged: vj

fred and flux hammer it out

diary | 27 jan 2009 | tagged: avit-vj-network · vj · web

which also makes it beer’o’clock

diary | 26 jan 2009 | tagged: avit-vj-network · vj · web

home + all projects + scene archive + a project + about

…now why do i think it might not end up this simple?

diary | 26 jan 2009 | tagged: avit-vj-network · vj

in berlin for avit dev camp: there will be a new website, the door has been locked until its done. berliner kindl, meet todd’s kindle.

diary | 25 jan 2009 | tagged: avit-vj-network · vj · adventures

a nice performance i think: not that i could see the screen or a proper monitor, but everything largely worked as it should, and its not like i haven’t done this before. even on that, though, still many vj types who hadn’t seen it, even on home turf.

diary | 12 jan 2009 | tagged: *spark · vj · rbn_esc · electrovision · live cinema

…well courtesy of a projector’s pixel grid this would be your starting point =]

diary | 12 jan 2009 | tagged: vj · electrovision

nice to see mo’s electrovision night turning into a mini vj meet. strangely nice to be out on a monday too, in a venue with battered sofas and all that.

diary | 12 jan 2009 | tagged: vj · electrovision

Duncan with a choice quote in “Narrative and Experience Design: The influence of technological form on the shaping of narrative experience. The panellists will discuss the emergence of pervasive media and its effect on traditional narrative forms.”

diary | 24 nov 2008 | tagged: vj · pervasive media studio

to bristol for the “narrative/non-narrative/anti-narrative conference” held at the the watershed to follow on from the encounters film festival. never fails to amuse me that the watershed, forever home of the exploratory in my child’s head, is still relevant to my life.

while i am placeholder blog post mode, highlights to be elaborated are

• keynote by: stephen volk, film and television scriptwriter
• duncan speakman, sound artist
• faith collingwood, development producer, bbc radio drama
• hazel grian, film-maker, including web-based drama.
• better things by duane hopkins

diary | 24 nov 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · pervasive media studio

i started writing an essay about this gig - the light surgeons performed “true fictions” and d-fuse presented “surface”, both huge and important works shown to a sell-out audience on the biggest screen in europe - but the window of opportunity to get it coherent let alone finished has passed for now, so here is a placeholder to say at least to say it happened.

thanks to laura fiorio for the photo

diary | 15 nov 2008 | tagged: vj · dfuse · light surgeons · onedotzero · live cinema

mike recommended popping by this exhibition on the way home. glad i did: critics say playful and profound, i say yep nice idea but totally transformed in its execution. best bit of public space interaction i’ve seen in ages (and thats including just having been to a festival with that by-line…!).
http://www.barbican.org.uk/artgallery/event-detail.asp?ID=7879

diary | 14 nov 2008 | tagged: vj

not part of imageradio, but across the road in the now dwarfed original philips factory, was the re-ACT exhibition, combining light and interactivity. some beauty, like swarm pictured, but generally really disappointing interactivity - most of them were barely reactive. makes you wonder why you didn’t propose something.
…and the juvenile still finds “kunstlicht in de kunst” funny.

diary | 02 nov 2008 | tagged: vj · imageradio

so this lady is watching a film as if it were through her own eyes, and right now her hand is being slobbered all over by a dog. except that its obviously not, it is mamabert is mimicking that with a hand puppet. truly memorable, truly live and a performance, and such an obvious idea: why isn’t everybody doing this, its “the feelies” for real.

diary | 02 nov 2008 | tagged: vj · imageradio

the last ‘live cinema’ event, this was a complete surprise. looking at the little light-stage, i was charmed but could only imagine a few minutes of interest in whatever shadows it could produce. how wrong: a complete tour-de-force, taking a certain aesthetic and exploring it fully and brilliantly. http://www.opticalmachines.nl

diary | 02 nov 2008 | tagged: vj · imageradio

kinda kitch, but so well done.

diary | 01 nov 2008 | tagged: vj · imageradio

totally impressive: the status project. if anyone talks about sticking it to “the man”, well this is “the system”, mapped by heath bunting.

diary | 01 nov 2008 | tagged: vj · imageradio

“the times they are the changes”, and so there was a crazy opening party for their exhibition at mu gallery. fancy-dress a-go-go for those in the know, and standing around incredulously for those not.

diary | 31 oct 2008 | tagged: vj · imageradio

nik and adam of novak exchange cards with matthias kispert… somehow looks quite cold war shady.

diary | 30 oct 2008 | tagged: vj · imageradio

kinetxt over, onto the evening’s ‘live cinema’ performance ‘the nature of being’ by scanner and olga mink. two quality artists, some super-beautiful moments and a ‘state-of-flux-cinematic-experience’ achieved. as neatly summed up by nik tho’, the path well travelled.

diary | 30 oct 2008 | tagged: vj · vdmx · imageradio

the creative hub. props to all involved: you can see the energy.

diary | 30 oct 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · kinetxt · imageradio · live cinema · live illustration

with imageradio’s opening speeches over, we see crowds come through

diary | 30 oct 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · kinetxt · imageradio · live cinema

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

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

eek, slightly daunting: an hour interview to highlight how “the artist’s work” relates to the theme. and there’s me still not entirely comfortable with the idea of myself as an artist…

diary | 27 oct 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · kinetxt · imageradio · interview

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

this is during the ‘straight’ performance of latitude, essentially an edit. as i hoped, there was call for an encore and i had vdmx ready for a much more layered, graphical remix. its so gratifying when an improvisation like that goes really well, especially when the time you’d planned to rehearse and shape it was taken with dealing with after effects consistently crashing half way through the updated led renders.
thanks to multiplicidade for the photo.

diary | 14 oct 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · video-out · multiplicidade · dfuse · live cinema

weird to see the clarity of this photo against my blurred impression from within the performance. having been told there was upward of a thousand people out there waiting to see us, they are of course in pitch black it being a theatre/cinema and i couldn’t see anything… until the moment came to release the secret weapon, bathing the place in light when we got to the buddha-like moment before knocking it down to highlights of the imagery.
thanks to multiplicidade for the photo.

diary | 14 oct 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · video-out · multiplicidade · dfuse

ok so actually this is just being put up in the hour before the gig, but that didn’t stop 900 people coming to the gig. lets just repeat that: 900 people attended a live cinema gig. on a tuesday. rio and multiplicidade rock.

diary | 14 oct 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · multiplicidade · dfuse · live cinema

…and the laptop looking positively dwarfed by nasa* mission control, aka d-fuse live. setup finished the day before the gig, soundcheck and all: definitely the way forward. especially when your 45 minute render for the led panels crashes after an hour and a half right near the end.

• actually we’re european. esa!

diary | 13 oct 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · vdmx · multiplicidade · dfuse

…with the led panels on the side walls firing with my pixelmapped dfuse test sequence…

diary | 13 oct 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · video-out · multiplicidade · dfuse

thats two big projectors, a lot of seats and the beginnings of the live setup…

diary | 13 oct 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · video-out · multiplicidade · dfuse

definitely in brazil: carnival time. and lots of ladies with cocks, although this time of the kind you’d find at a massive gay pride truck sound system clash.

diary | 13 oct 2008 | tagged: vj · adventures · multiplicidade

what do you see if you head out the hotel after breakfast in copacabana then?
#1 - a marathon
#2 - a religous parade
#3 - a lady with a cock
and if #3 isn’t wtf enough, this is missing the hell’s angels procession, supertrikes and all, following a mini virgin mary in the back of a pickup.

diary | 12 oct 2008 | tagged: vj · adventures · multiplicidade

hello batman, director of multiplicidade, rio de janeiro’s festival of ‘unusual image and sound’. and quite something too, a marathon through spring, summer and autumn producing a new event every 15 days. and on tuesday, d-fuse will be presenting ‘latitude’ as the opening event of multiplicidade’s new strand presenting works in a theatre that takes their capacity from 100 to 1000. so between now and then, i’d better work on making assets to fit the led panels at the side of the theatre space, and working out an encore with musician si-cut-db, as for this trip, d-fuse is me.

diary | 11 oct 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · multiplicidade · dfuse

and to celebrate, the cinematic orchestra were reprising their ‘man with a movie camera’ live score at the wonderful roundhouse, and so i finally had the chance to catch up with it. and it was worth it. not so sure about their later stuff, but that is an absolute classic.

diary | 10 oct 2008 | tagged: vj

saw original aviteer dave green’s new installation at matter, the new club in the o2 - pretty impressive with twelve 6k moving mirror beamers. what was far more interesting than that though, was having talked a year ago about the needs to make our own vj software/setup, he’s actually done it, properly, glossy brochure and all. really super impressive: full touchscreen and dedicated control surface, with the interface even modelling in 3d the projector’s output in the club space.

diary | 02 oct 2008 | tagged: vj

…explaining the kinetxt idea to local creatives, hopefully we can gather a group of people to really take the storytelling and content-for-the-context beyond where we’ve had it before.

diary | 19 sep 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · kinetxt · imageradio

checking venues for the kinetxt installation. this is eindhoven’s town archive, far from a musty building it rings with cool modernity - the only file boxes in sight form the design for the fascia.

diary | 19 sep 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · kinetxt · imageradio

picked up in style from the airport by the lovely and talented olga mink, co-curator of imageradio which will be featuring kinetxt this year. sitting in this car, it feels like you’re in a ship.

diary | 18 sep 2008 | tagged: vj · kinetxt · imageradio

although it meant i had to forgo the celebratory beers-in-the-sun after the showcase, i managed to get the digimedia showcase onto the plasma screens at the reception - so we got to show some work as well as the film that yeast facilitated documenting the whole forum. that film really did the job: well done james.

diary | 11 sep 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · teaching · beijing paralympics · yeast

from our “moonbase alpha” out-of-town paralympic training facility, to the ambassador’s residence for a final showcase in front of prince edward, no less.
and on the way in, passing the crazy cctv building. not the best angle here, but: wow, and eeek!

diary | 11 sep 2008 | tagged: vj · beijing paralympics

here’s the presentation in pdf form that was built-up during the workshop, finished by me and shown to all at the final showcase. i’m quite proud of it, and watching your computer turn pin-yin into chinese characters for the first time is pretty cool.

diary | 11 sep 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · teaching · beijing paralympics · yeast | downloads: yeast-yap-dmshowcase-web.pdf

while excessive taking group photos seems is definitely endemic here, its nice to see all the group in one.

diary | 10 sep 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · teaching · beijing paralympics

the other play, caught in the moment.

diary | 10 sep 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · teaching · beijing paralympics

steve with the final day’s project: watch a 10-word play developed by another workgroup, and turn it into an animation. this is the moment when they realise that stop-motion is a long-haul game…

diary | 10 sep 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · teaching · beijing paralympics

no arms but want to play the piano? yes you can.

diary | 09 sep 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · teaching · beijing paralympics

and so it starts. 27 “young advocates” drawn from china, the uk and beyond, of mixed abilities, ranging from learning difficulties to physical impairment, representing those who’ve achived great things in their communities back home to those picked out of special schools… and in some cases all in those in the one person.
yeast culture ran the film making workshop and the digital media workshop, and i was a leader for the latter. in what could have just been a get media-savvy and learn powerpoint thread, we instead delved into the power of the image; communication beyond photos and text. and they learnt photoshop, and when to abandon photoshop in favour of print-outs, scissors and card.
here is kelly during our (ahem) ‘monkey see, monkey do’ afternoon of photoshop tutorials.

diary | 07 sep 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · teaching · beijing paralympics · yeast

its soo good. and this is with the reflection in the lake cropped out.

diary | 06 sep 2008 | tagged: vj · beijing paralympics

spectacular, it was. the paralympics opening ceremony might not have had quite the lavish and epic reach of the olympics that i saw broadcast, but it did have soul - and watching a wheelchair bound athlete pull himself up a rope to the top of the stadium to light the olympic flame was something both awe-inspiring and humbling: when he paused to get his composure back 50 meters up and still a little of the war to go, i’d wager there were 90,999 other people also experiencing a deep moment of reflection.

diary | 06 sep 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · photo · teaching · beijing paralympics

simply stunning. the best architecture i’ve experienced in the year, probably years. postcard from a distance, it simply gets better the closer you get into and through it.

diary | 05 sep 2008 | tagged: vj · photo · beijing paralympics

kelly and steve just having got their tickets - we’re going to the paralympic opening ceremony, school trip style.

diary | 05 sep 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · teaching · beijing paralympics

mmm. trying to eat a mould coloured lollypop with anonymous black goo in the middle, which was kinda funny until there was suddenly raw sewage in the air despite being in the vicinity of embassies.

diary | 04 sep 2008 | tagged: vj · beijing paralympics

…so how you going to take those ones back on the plane, eh nick?

diary | 04 sep 2008 | tagged: vj · beijing paralympics

30 desks… not quite filling the room. not your average digital media workshop venue, this.

diary | 04 sep 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · teaching · beijing paralympics

well, who said car parks have to have their sections numbered

diary | 04 sep 2008 | tagged: vj · beijing paralympics

…which is (to oversimplify) a british council project working with young people, hosted as part of the paralympics here in beijing.
young advocates programme: http://www.yaponline.org/index.jsp
yap youth forum in beijing: http://www.yaponline.org/youth-forum.jsp
oh - and just when you’d appreciated the scale of the beijing airport terminal, you take a shuttle train out and under a few more identical and identically sized terminals, eventually walk out into what you think is the outside, just to find yourself in another cavernous hall. scale… scale…

diary | 04 sep 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · teaching · beijing paralympics · yeast

beijing airport, on the other hand, doesn’t fail to impress with its sense of space and flowing roof, largely because its footprint is simply massive: no need to stack football pitches upon football pitches as in terminal 5. here is james, known for his work with the light surgeons, tasked with documenting the programme thats brought us out here…

diary | 04 sep 2008 | tagged: vj · beijing paralympics

heathrow terminal 5 isn’t the celebration of modern british design it could have been, but oh my is the structure impressive. these joints really elegantly buttress the arching span of the terminal^[1], and they’re HUGE: thats a simply massive wedge of metal the pylons are bolted to. that, and the last time i saw them, they were bright pink prototypes in the foster associates exhibition at the pompidou…

diary | 03 sep 2008 | tagged: vj · beijing paralympics

the pavillion is a day, park, outside thing. strange to see it misty at night as we walked away, project over.

diary | 30 aug 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · bbc blast @ serpentine · teaching

and on performance day, the sun comes out. aaaah.

diary | 30 aug 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · bbc blast @ serpentine · teaching · yeast

i’d happily forgotten about things like this in an age of solid state. managed to rescue what was needed, but the last minute stress quite apart from the glitches wasn’t welcome at all.

diary | 28 aug 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · bbc blast @ serpentine · teaching

i came to fully test all sorts of interactive patches, but the old classic had to be tried blatted up around the dome.

diary | 24 aug 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · rbn_esc · shambala · dome · live cinema

bitbasic with his monome dj patch dj64: quite awesome. cheesy but brilliant: it even scrolls 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 to the beat if needs be.

diary | 24 aug 2008 | tagged: vj · shambala · dome

the destroyers on top form, even expanding their allready impressive line-up with the dhol blasters. got them some lovely shots. such a good gig.

diary | 23 aug 2008 | tagged: vj · shambala

yep, thats a crowd

diary | 23 aug 2008 | tagged: vj · shambala

if there were a central force to the destroyers, it would be louis

diary | 23 aug 2008 | tagged: vj · shambala

after arriving well after dark to a dome in full swing, emerged the next morning to find a wedding taking place in there. the vows were brilliant: “if she has, like, all her limbs broken and is needing the toilet, will you wipe her…”

diary | 23 aug 2008 | tagged: vj · shambala

instant supercool visuals for young people #1: ride the dlr, apply mirror effect. ref cityscan to see it taken the highest level, and arrive as the piece that started it all.

diary | 21 aug 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · bbc blast @ serpentine · teaching

not just playing with a live camera feed and kaos pad, but shaping the dance through the control of graphic elements: a simple cross can become a character, a circle shape the movement

diary | 20 aug 2008 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · bbc blast @ serpentine · teaching

working as part of yeast culture for bbc blast on a two week project for young people that encompassed film, vjing, soundscape, spoken word and dance culminating in a performance at this years summer pavillion at the serpentine gallery. frank gehry, no less.

diary | 18 aug 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · bbc blast @ serpentine · teaching · yeast

not just three hot air balloons: there were a gzillion of them, all taking off from the fields in the distance as part of the annual festival. it was really nice to experience a good quality of life for a working age - after work drinks in a calm yet interesting location - and at the same time nice to be taken back to my childhood here - i learnt to sail in that basin there, and such balloons are synonymous with bristol in my mind.

diary | 08 aug 2008 | tagged: vj

atari-esque asteroids. planentarium. geddit.

diary | 08 aug 2008 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · dome · pervasive media studio

spiralling text… not quite as easy to solve as i thought if you look closely.

diary | 08 aug 2008 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · dome · pervasive media studio

patching away… been waiting a long time as a visualist to finally have an immersive output, and here i was at 9am having had no sleep due to the slot coming forward from the evening and a non-cooperating field-of-view, camera placement, and clip plane.

diary | 08 aug 2008 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · dome · pervasive media studio

and the reason for being here, is it has a planetarium next door and antivj headquarters in it.

diary | 07 aug 2008 | tagged: vj · pervasive media studio

the pervasive media studio is a good thing, as if a GOOD KING from 1066 and all that had set up a mini-utopia for all stuff interesting to me. the office space is wonderful, taking up all the upstairs of this building right in the heart of bristol docks, and is the kind of place where you can say you’re making asteroids to play in a planetarium, and seconds later you’re being shown the finer points of geometry wars. its full of interesting people doing interesting things. aaaah.

diary | 07 aug 2008 | tagged: vj · pervasive media studio

hello nico and co-cuisiner. years ahead of their time, but not quite in the normal dj sense: is this my generation, old man preview edition? the sight made me laugh anyway, somehow felt like those old men you see sitting around on benches in mediterranean climates, amusing themselves with stories of old and watching the world go by.

diary | 06 aug 2008 | tagged: vj

a productive weekend: after yesterday’s dome-fu, spent today working out how to tether a camera to quartz composer and from that made my contribution to a friend’s wedding: a kind of digital signing-book, taking and displaying group photos atop a slideshow of the couple’s history.

also heard that polaroid have now stopped producing their iconic format i’ve appropriated here as a visual device… which while slightly sad though inevitable, makes me wonder just how long the iconic form of a photograph will not just be the polaroid, but any form at all.

diary | 03 aug 2008 | tagged: quartz composer · vj · photomatic

voila. animating, and distorted for projection via the you-don’t-need-a-boutique-fisheye-setup-anymore technique that uses a standard projector and a spherical mirror bought from a security store. all hail paul bourke and the pbmesh patch

diary | 02 aug 2008 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · dome

ah. always a silly gotcha in there. quirk fixed with the realisation that quartz composer uses degrees as its rotation unit, but the maths functions i used for the trig deal in radians.

diary | 02 aug 2008 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · dome

finally making something of a long-talked-about spark project: immersive and interactive visuals in a dome. hoping to start with some basic ‘chuck a ball about in the crowd’ type stuff, and get to a fully playable asteroids or missile command.
first test: can i tile small sprites in 3d space as if they were placed on a sphere? answer here: only sort-of. they are on a sphere, but they’re certainly not in neat rows like they should be, or aligned to the surface.

diary | 02 aug 2008 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · dome

the serpentine gallery has - yet again - come up trumps with its summer pavillion. while appreciation is subjecting, from the perspective of what could be done with a night-time visuals mesh+projector fest, its a wonder.
which is interesting, as i’ll be part of a two-week arts education project based there. i’m won’t be surprised ‘health and safety’ type concerns will render plans down to a fastfold at one end, but i’m certainly going to try…

diary | 29 jul 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj

steve was followed by label mate and fellow los angelite rena jones. good stuff, and so nice to see and hear a real instrument alongside laptop electronica.

diary | 25 jul 2008 | tagged: vj

steve nalepa over this side of the pond for some festival spots, with a call into london for a chilled gig at the inspiral lounge, sometime home to london vj meetups too. some good people, a nice night, a long night bus home…

diary | 25 jul 2008 | tagged: vj

the led wall was made of the latest barco tiles, and i haven’t seen anything as amazingly made in a long time. they are like a vision from the future, amazing machining, materials, structure, interconnect… and as a theme of tonight, i didn’t quite manage to nail the photo that illustrates what i saw. but hey. gives faith in the world, seeing quality like that.

diary | 24 jul 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · video-out

and here is chris, chief surgeon himself, via the new camera. first outing of camera: mixed bag… see the potential, need to tame it.

diary | 24 jul 2008 | tagged: vj

just finished a week production making the video content for the blackberry bold launch in the uk. while not the first time i’ve made stuff for led screens, its both amazing and terrifying seeing your seemingly perfect after effects composition playing out so big and so bright… any tiny mistake becomes crystal clear. also a test for live camera + laptop, combining band ‘the feeling’ with the neon backing comps. not as sucessful as i’d like, but still good to see and a good proving ground.
we rocked it tho’, with the goalposts changed at the last minute due to a sudden corporate influx from worldwide headquarters we pulled off a really nice balance of brand and bespoke imagery, to the point where said corporate types were overheard talking about ‘messing with the brand’ as a wonderful and mysterious thing: in short, london did itself proud.

diary | 24 jul 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · vdmx · video-out · video-in · light surgeons

…and tim looking at the nth blackberry shot.

diary | 23 jul 2008 | tagged: errata of life · vj · light surgeons

…huzzah!

diary | 12 jul 2008 | tagged: *spark · mac · vj · southwark lido

…vinyl stickers cut to a very exact spec…

diary | 12 jul 2008 | tagged: *spark · mac · vj · southwark lido

gonzo, my laptop and the cutting machine…

diary | 12 jul 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · southwark lido

aka the building that framed the lido to one side, a perfect 4x3 canvas.

diary | 10 jul 2008 | tagged: vj · southwark lido

bon anniversaire

diary | 09 jul 2008 | tagged: vj · southwark lido

time to build the washing machine club for franz’s 30th: the lido’s PA and a small brick room under the arch.

diary | 09 jul 2008 | tagged: vj · southwark lido

…boris of modul8 playing with franz’s mapping patch, drawing lines on the scaff.

diary | 08 jul 2008 | tagged: vj · southwark lido

…the strobe had to be in the back reflecting forward really, nice to come back the next day and see the tweak.

diary | 08 jul 2008 | tagged: vj · southwark lido

gonza tying the crowning banner, and the fire just getting going.

http://southwarklido.exyzt.org
http://southwarklido.wordpress.com
http://exyzt.net

diary | 07 jul 2008 | tagged: vj · southwark lido

yes to having a cutting machine tied to illustrator. and this is just their portable one.

http://southwarklido.exyzt.org
http://southwarklido.wordpress.com
http://exyzt.net

diary | 07 jul 2008 | tagged: vj · southwark lido

crazy vj gig thanks to swinhoe industries. the green room we made our own had the most pimp toilet i’ve seen in years, and these chairs outside. special.

diary | 04 jul 2008 | tagged: vj

i am standing where they used to tie jet engine to the ground and turn them on. thats where the thrust went.
strange gig, and not entirely in a good way.

diary | 28 jun 2008 | tagged: vj · adventures

up to newcastle’s cuture lab for a day workshop: a phd student is investigating vj performance as a vehicle for innovative hci. int_er_est_ting.

diary | 11 jun 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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/

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

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: 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

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

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

nice to find inés outside in her natural habitat, even if it did involve 300 vj name badges…

diary | 27 may 2008 | tagged: avit-vj-network · vj

the programme for rome’s live performers’ meeting has gone up, featuring rbn_esc____av and a vj talk session a day.

diary | 25 may 2008 | tagged: *spark · avit-vj-network · vj · rbn_esc

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

1. 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

2. quartz composer 101
   your first patch
   dynamic controls
   the key idea of time
   common pitfalls

applying it and getting advanced

1. qc and vdmx
   qc as dynamic clips
   qc as filters
   qc as rendering stacks

2. shaders
   image kernels
   glsl

3. 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

…and look up. check: we’re in berlin.

diary | 23 may 2008 | tagged: vj · adventures

kinetxt in action: no storytelling at this point, but the audience starting to feed the event into the installation. i’m looking forward to seeing what our photographer for the two evenings comes up with.

diary | 22 may 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · kinetxt · live cinema

…also at the baltic, needless to say.

diary | 22 may 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · kinetxt

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

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

stepping out of character, no oyster card surveillance subversion for us. instead, a trip to the fun fair for the group i was in. we made dr dimaglio a dice maestro, betting punters on the classic game of chance. except that dr dimaglio being inside the computer, he needs you to throw for him, and he can see inside the shaker due to each side of the dice having an embedded rfid tag… suffice to say, he isn’t quite sure your throw was quite vigourous enough until he’s confident of winning.

diary | 14 may 2008 | tagged: vj · i/o

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!

• http://www.visualberlin.org/
• http://dmy-berlin.com/
• http://www.liveperformersmeeting.net/

diary | 22 apr 2008 | tagged: avit-vj-network · vj · writing · visual berlin

Resolume 3 & Freeframe 1.5

Also at Vision’r, and keeping the tradition of the vixid unveiling, were Bart and Edwin with Resolume 3 on their laptops, revealing the future of arguably the most popular vj software out there, and with Russell of VJamm and Freeframe also there, the future of the vj fx standard. Resolume and FreeFrame being both massive but a bit long in the tooth nowadays, this was quite a one-two.

Resolume: A sneak peak for a summer release, the big news is that its cross-platform. Yes, Resolume natively on OSX as well as Windows, and a new Resolume fit for 2008 rather than an incremental upgrade of Resolume as we’ve known it. One and a half years in development, its seen a complete re-write in c++, it now uses Open-GL for its rendering engine, and is now fully audio-visual: sample tight too, allegedly. The interface has also had a complete overhaul, and is not just constrained for a fixed three layers. Its also lost its trademark font and idiosyncratic colour scheme for clarity’s sake, which to me is a kinda shame but the price of progress (or maturation?). And when I started taking photos, Bart said to keep it a secret… there’s still more to come. If you want the spoiler…

FreeFrame: If Resolume is cross-platform and renders on the GPU using Open-GL, then what about all those FF1.0 cpu-bound effects that vastly expanded Resolume’s palette? The answer came from Russell, originally Mr VJamm and a leading member of the FreeFrame group who announced the FreeFrame 1.5 aka FFGL spec to the VJ/realtime video world, bringing GPU processing to the FreeFrame standard. It may have taken them a while, but FreeFrame is a broad standard and consensus based, so now they’re here, the form says it will be robust, adoptable and here to stay. If you’re a VJamm user, you should be able to get your hands on the latest, FFGL sporting, build.

• http://www.resolume.com/
• http://sourceforge.net/projects/FreeFrame
• http://community.freeframe.org/

diary | 22 apr 2008 | tagged: vj · writing · resolume

Vision’r: Festival VJ; 17th-20th April

Arguably, the first time the international vj community got together was at the “vjcentral gig” aka avit. A French duo called TZ-Team came, and while enthused by the experience, said it just couldn’t be done in France at that time; the club scene worked differently, the vjs that were out there were hidden in niches and there was no community to speak of. So it was a particularly nice experience to walk into the first Vision’r, effectively avit paris, and see a whole scene very clearly alive, very clearly doing great things. It was also the first time I’d seen frozen-chicken-porn visuals, totally arresting and different to the club clichés, and it was where the wonderment of the vixid mixer was unveiled in beta form. That was 2006, and now Vision’r is in its third edition. The feeling of being somewhere unique is still there, and it still feels slightly shambolic, but the the quality of work and exchange is better than ever. If I could explain why, I’d hazard a theory along the TZ-Team lines where isn’t so much clubbing and club-vjs but there is a strong culture of innovative live performance, which brings visualism and a/v trickery with it, but through a very different lens. Combine that with Vision’r having the feeling of a meeting of practitioners rather than showcase-for-others, and you certainly have an interesting weekend.

So in I walked, and saw Alchimie, a one-man show with narrator/poet/rapper riffing on graffiti (in French, I can’t say I got too much of the literal meaning, but such was the strength of the performance) amongst a minimal-but-effective virtual set made of projections, using prepared footage, live cameras and live drawing with a Wacom behind the mesh. And of course, it ended in the middle of the dance floor covered in paint, what else did you expect?

A beautiful example of a club culture cliché being taken to high-art while loosing none of the jump-up excitement of what made it good in the first place was ‘Projet RVB En Alpha’, which combined a dancing girl, light installation and vj feed into a sublime whole, with I surmise the alpha from the title referring to how the dancer’s movements become the (literal and metaphoric) key to the motion graphics. They even had the stagecraft that when the dancer fainted as ending, the geeks behind the laptops caught her.

And to tie Vision’r back to Mapping were SATI, gallantly performing at both festivals over this weekend. A duo of which one half is long-time VJ Jesse Lucas, and yep there are some brilliant visuals really taking advantage of a dual-head set-up, they are primarily a band, both in it together, both making the music and seeing where it can go… and its that attitude which really elevates them.

• Vision’r: http://vision-r.org/

diary | 22 apr 2008 | tagged: vj · writing

Mapping: VJing and Audio-Visual Festival; 10th-20th April

The first two Mapping Festivals quickly became legendary. An audio line-up worthy of a music festival, a cream of visualists married to a playground of seemingly a thousand projectors, and the whole programme rammed through one venue over one weekend. Complete with dormitories above and sofa-strewn cinema to the side, the party didn’t stop.

Now in its fourth edition, Mapping has changed into a two/three week showcase split between the original venue ‘le zoo, pour les animeaux nocturnes’ and Geneva’s modern arts centre hosting gallery installations and an audio-visual stage. Having left the particle systems, avant-garde interactivity and deep geekage of Node to come to Mapping, it was quite a jump to walk into a room literally full of arse-slaps with the Chicks On Speed inaugurating their gallery installation “Butt Slap Bongo” with a suitably frenetic performance. Another interesting installation, in entirely different ways, was “News Jockey“, an informatic spread tiling across a whole room. You typed in your headline, it did the rest. It was also the logical successor to last year’s “web-jockey” installation, delivering on the promise shown there: always nice to see generational progress, directly related or not.

Still in the modern arts centre, the audio-visual stage saw a beautifully contemplative performance by Scanner and Olga Mink that is hopefully the start of an ongoing piece, and also sees Olga breaking out of her graphic comfort zone. The last performance of the opening weekend was a journey into the mind of Raphaël, a renegade filmmaker and long time Narrative Lab favourite. Hard to describe, and as far as I’m aware only experienced at the odd festival (self-promotion, website? pah!), if you see Raphael [ES] on the programme, just go. Crazy, wonderful, not entirely to be understood, but definite in the feeling that you viscerally touched something.

With the first weekend over, and Vision’r clashing with the second, it was time to leave. And also, who would stay for both? Which is perhaps the issue Mapping faces, being effectively two mini-festivals without anything to make the week/two weeks a compelling whole. But if the organisers can do this, I’m sure they’ll work it out. No write-up, however subjective and under-representative, could go by without a mention of Mapping’s 8bit night, with bubblyfish/chika/akira/etc all rocking out beyond their laptops. The special mention has to go to Meneo however, an 8bit musician who tours with entter providing an a/v whole. As you’d expect, the graphics reinforced the 8bit theme and a Meneo identity, but there were real moments of something way beyond that, with a whole world being created and stories spun. Oh, and lots of nakedness at the end: A visual performance of other sorts, and what was it with nakedness and performance at Mapping?

• Mapping: http://www.mappingfestival.com
• Photos: http://www.ork.ch/mapping/mapping08/index.html

diary | 22 apr 2008 | tagged: vj · writing · mapping

NODE08: Forum for digital arts; 5-12th April

If there’s one page on the internet that simultaneously crushes and inspires me, its the projects page of the ‘vvvv’ environment. A node based software, free for non-commercial use, that has been developed at the cutting edge of both commercial events and artistic endeavour, it seems to time-warp its users and their computers five years into the future, realising the seemingly impossible. So when I found out that the users of the software were having their first get-together with the vvvv organisation organising a week long conference of workshops, galleries, a club-night, and so on… well it was simply a case of needing to be there.

Watershed Moment #1 - Hacking a night-club’s lighting rig via WiFi. The first day’s workshop I attended hadn’t been so good, a mix of nerds trying to teach and the subject matter being more basic than the description suggested. However, this was soon blown away when we found ourselves in the fairly deluxe club ‘Velvet’ with its already impressive myriad of lights and club-tech added to with LED tiles, strips and so on. DMX was the topic of the day, and with vvvv it was trivial to hack the whole rig, and thanks to Art-Net’s IP implementation of DMX, we were even doing it over WiFi. This was really a watershed moment for me as a VJ, as while I’ve been working towards making bespoke tour-vj boxes to be handed over to the lighting crew, and thinking about ways to break beyond the tyranny of the screen, whether 4×3 or not, this really broke the whole field open for me: watch out lampies, just as you’re getting video servers, we’re coming with co-ordinated light shows from our laptops designed as one with our video-visualism!

Node08 also had a very impressively curated day of lectures centred around the intersection of tools and art. There was something in there for everyone, but I especially enjoyed Paul Prudence putting his money where his mouth was by incorporating a small performance in his presentation on audio-visual feedback systems, and likewise seeing the super-cool architect / sculptors / mad-scripters theverymany demonstrate live their process of creating physical forms through experimental computation. And it would be rude not to mention the wonderful wild-card in the form of Regine from we-make-money-not-art talking about bio-tech art, whose cultural and ethical questioning in my opinion puts 99% of media art to shame.

Watershed Moment #2 - Mapping visualism to any space: Problem solved. The virtual architecture workshop again suffered from a lack of preparation and a lack of presenter / teacherly nous, but if you’ve ever wanted to break out of the paradigm of a big-tv on stage, this workshop was for you: not musing on what was possible, but just diving straight in with realtime, scalable, 60fps demonstrations on how you can map anything onto anything with vvvv, a 3D model of the architectural space and a bunch of projectors. We’re not talking flat facades here, but whatever curving sinuous spaces you want, and onto those surfaces mapping 2D media or animating realtime 3D through the space. Into this media/architecture/spatial simulation, you just bring up as many vvvv projector modules as you have projectors, type in their specs, and spread them around until you have the best coverage. And bam! wherever you point your virtual projector, out comes a renderer to supply your real projector with the exact imagery required to recreate the virtual in the real. They’ve even got shaders that compute in realtime which projector will give the best mapping for every surface. Unreal. Seeing this has brought forward a project many a project I’ve been wondering just how to achieve: “its possible but” has just changed to “c’mon lets go!”.

Having to leave half-way through to make my way to Geneva for Mapping, I didn’t finish my Arduino workshop, see the club-night and its multi-screen generative glories, and so on, but perhaps beyond such flashy stuff the most enjoyable thing of the festival for me was the three informal pecha kucha / patcher culture evenings. Node08 was a festival where the attendees were invariably just as interesting and represented important bodies of work as those formally invited to present, and so these show-and-tell sessions really were inspirational, diverse and fascinating. Yep, they made the festival. That, and having cake available on the reception desk as you walked in.

• NODE08: http://node08.vvvv.org/
• Photos: http://www.flickr.com/groups/node08/
• vvvv software: http://www.vvvv.org/

diary | 22 apr 2008 | tagged: vj · writing

Late at Tate: The AV Social; 4th April

As if a send-off for the vj pilgrimage, the night before leaving for Node08 saw an outstanding vj-related event in London, something surprisingly rare. The ‘AV Social’ took over the ‘Late at Tate’ evening and transformed itself from so-so bar effort to a near seamless extension of a bastion of the British art establishment. Integrated into the architecture of the Tate Britain’s empire-era halls and plethora of artworks were a number of semi-live installations and a dj/vj-esque performance space, all of which felt right in the space and none of which dropped the ball, quite a feat given their acclaimed and classical neighbours. Downstairs in a more utilitarian reception/bar space were the Narrative Lab screenings. While its a shame that the set-up felt somewhat jerry-rigged there, the curation was really impressive resulting in perhaps one of the most important bodies of vj-work I’ve yet seen put together. I have to admit a bias in having been involved with the Narrative Lab project, and having my big live cinema project represented as one of the works, but if phrased as of the collision of vj practice with ideas beyond aesthetics, I’ll stick to my assertion: it really was that good, and we need such things to document the scene, to etch an otherwise impermanent practice in history.

• The Av Social: Late at Tate - http://www.ne1co.info/avsocial_eflyer
• Decollage.tv’s photos - http://www.decollage.tv/blog/?p=298
• Narrative Lab screening - http://www.labmeta.net/wordpress/?p=48

diary | 22 apr 2008 | tagged: vj · writing

i’d like to pretend it was gonzo journalism to the fore, but i think subjective is probably as far as i could get down that road. and so it was that 2,500 words of mine ended up on create digital motion, the best vj related source i see at the moment.

“its been an opportune few weeks for visualists in europe, with a spread of three festivals all with their own take on the field. here’s a quick tour through the eyes and itinerary of one *spark.”

and so now i’m an official contributor there, and back here are those words, festival by festival. read on…

diary | 22 apr 2008 | tagged: vj

never one to stay still, my travel really has gone overboard this past year. so with environmental guilt, a hatred of airports, and commercial gains, i booked my itinerary to node08 (london - frankfurt), mapping (frankfurt - geneva) and back (geneva - london) entirely on trains. it felt good doing so; the actual travel was a pleasure; yes it cost more, but not actually that much more^[1].

the only complaint? the new german ice may be snazzy and fast (four hours paris-frankfurt), but there’s no such thing as a power plug in second class, so its reading books rather than working on laptops. come on, we’ve even got wifi on the london-newcastle route!

diary | 05 apr 2008 | tagged: vj · adventures

absolutely not what you want to see: your computer kernel panic during a live repartition of your drive. oh dear. that’ll be a multipass zero erase and restore from backups then. which would have been fine, if my eurostar hadn’t been leaving in a few hours for a week+ abroad where i would need my laptop in windows for vvvv at node08 and osx for on the road generally at node and mapping.

got to love the irony of my mac dying while preparing to put windows on it… as if it were windows, but no it was osx/hardware at fault.

diary | 04 apr 2008 | tagged: errata of life · mac · vj

i feel the screening programme made by paul and lara is a really important review of works to have come out of the “vj” scene, or rather the collision of vj practice with ideas beyond wallpaper. i’m also proud to be part of that, with rbn_esc and a hand in the story collector, but more so that such a programme has been assembled for posterity. bravo!

• the page on the nlab site is http://www.labmeta.net/wordpress/?p=48
• a copy and paste follows

A specially curated screening and presentation by the Narrative Lab, inviting the Editors of the VJTheory book to show and tell some experimental works alongside screened material from artists all over Europe including Solu, Visual Kitchen, Girrafentoast, Ben Sheppee, Visualnaut, Oxygen, ZooZooZoo, Spark and Lucidhouse.
The Narrative Lab is a creative network and group of friends, who love to VJ and make moving images. Our work, and the work we love, use narrative techniques to enrich our work and bring emotion and potency to it. We don’t think VJing should be like film, rather we see other VJs and AV performers using narrative structures and devices in creative and unusual ways, and we want to showcase a cross-section of performers using narrative to create a language of VJing, and to engage the audience in alternative ways.We have selected a screening programme which will run as follows. Information on the artists, where given, is included below.
The Narrative Lab - Screening Programme - Av Social - Late at Tate
April 4th 2008 - Tate Britain - 6.30 - 9.30
Marginalia 2
Dur: 10.00
Embolex (2007)
Marginalia 2 is an audiovisual remix of footage from the films Bang Bang, by Andréa Tonacci, and A Mulher de Todos, by Rogério Sganzerla, creating a dialog between two characters that were originally in different films. Spliced into these are new scenes inspired by the films, which reinforce this dialog according to the interpretation that unfolds in the live remake. The soundtrack was produced using selections from the original films and their respective remakes in a way that blurs the boundaries between soundtrack and dialogs. Ideas of low-tech are also explored through effects and textures produced with diverse non-digital processing techniques. Marginalia 2 explores the possibilities for re-contextualizing by applying original and non-original samples to recreate a story/dream of visual and sound textures.
Space-Travel
Dur: 1.15
Dr Mo (2008)
www.morishuz.com
During his performance, Dr Mo mixes video generated by a novel stop-motion technique he terms ‘space-lapse.’ This type of photography continually changes camera viewpoints to produce breathtaking perspective shifts. Material for this sequence has been shot around the world and reflects Dr Mo’s interest in architecture and photography. His shadow weaves through the narrative reflecting traces of the protagonist. This is the story of a traveller - finding that which is constant in a continually changing environment.
Brilliant City
Dur: 13.43
D-Fuse (2007)
www.dfuse.com
Produced during a stay in Shanghai with the British Council Artist Links program, Brilliant City was made with Axel Stockburger and the musician Matthias Kispert. The title refers to the location, a residential complex comprised of 25 high rises in the northern part of Shanghai, China. It is entirely shot from the 34th floor of one of the buildings and stages a peeping tom view of the city below, capturing everyday activities that can be observed from this vantage point, such as training soldiers, building activity, traffic, gardening. The camera hovers above the entire panorama and focuses on details in the everyday life of this rapidly changing metropolis.
Jack’s Back (Get Carter Redux)
Dur: 9.51
Addictive TV (2007)
www.addictive.com
Addictive TV are known for their audio-visual remixes and dynamic live shows. They’ve been twice voted #1 VJs in DJ Mag’s annual poll. The Addicitive TV duo were commissioned by The Northern Lights Film Festival and Arts Council of England to remix cult 1970’s movie Get Carter, one of the most celebrated British gangster films. Jack’s Back defies cinematic convention by applying audio-visual sampling techniques, creating a new breakbeat driven cinematic syntax.
Fire Organ
Dur: 6.37
Lucidhouse (2008)
www.lucidhouse.com
Morris La Mantia, aka Lucidhouse in one of Brightons most prolific VJs working with imagery that is always infused with a sense of narrative. In this short mix Morris took a spontaneous, dirty approach making 4 live recordings and then remixing the entire sequence to create a piece with a frenetic life of it’s own: a split up, multi threaded, abstract narrative with an angry, choppy rhythm, that induces a bit of discomfort.
Mixmasters Submission
Dur: 10.00
Girraffentoast (2005)
www.giraffentoast.de
Thumbnail Express
Dur: 6.12
Light Surgeons(2006)
www.lightsurgeons.com
The Light Surgeons debut documentary short film commissioned by onedotzero festival in 2000, the first chapter of “Gilligan’s Travels”, a series of experiemntal short films based around an interview with the Venice Beach street philosopher Robert Alan Weiser and his travels across America. This landmark project combines Super 8 and DV footage with motion graphics and has been screened as part of the onedotzero festival internationally. While Thumbnail Express is an old piece of work in our view it one of the most seminal pieces of narrative in live audiovisual performance to date, staking a position in this programme.
V.E.R.A. / TELEFON
Dur: 8.55
Secret Films (2007)
www.secretfilms.co.uk
Two separate video tracks edited and produced by Secret Films are remixed here ‘back to back’ for this special Narrative Lab screening. Together they form a study in both telephonic and televisual
hypnotism. “The woods are lovely, dark and deep but I have promises still to keep. I have miles to go before I sleep”
In Telefon a mass-hypnotism appears to take place via the telephone. Visual and audio phenomena act as forms of mind control. The riddle enunciated by a voice from afar acts as a potent trigger on those listening to it. It’s recipients seem under threat as something terrible is transmitted as if by a spell. Opening out to a void, the message becomes an undoing of the pleasure principle as the mesmeric voice evokes the links between sleep and death. In VERA there are further intimations of brainwashing and social control. Sound becomes the master of everything ..controlling perceptions of space, time and possibility. Man is mastered and
defined by his own technology in a succession of loops and fatal repetitions.
These themes are often explored by Secret Films in the format of a live AV show, usually ( as here ) through the use of appropriated film and sound. “Are you listening?”
Urban Nature
Dur: 10.06
Video: Olga Mink / Music: Michel Banabila & Eric Vloeimans (2006)
www.videology.nu
Urban Nature is an atmospheric audio-visual collage accomplished by visually dramatic movements and atmospheric sounds. Urban Nature observes public behavior in a post-modern urban environment. The individual almost becomes non-existent, whilst surveillance is part of a new social infrastructure. A ’sophistication of modern living’ becomes almost apparent, by use of images that appear as frozen moments over time.
Synken
Dur: 10:00
Video: Transforma / Music: O.S.T. (2007) Producers: Visual Kitchen
http://www.synken.com/
With a mix of abstract images, graphic animation, digital image effects and complex film sequences, Synken creates a fantastically spaced out, darkly romantic image-world. Forests filled with distorted organic forms are contrasted against an architectural abyss, as strange and fantastic characters try to make sense of their surroundings. A mysterious vagabond works as a medium between these parallel worlds, transporting artefacts that become recurring symbols in the dual system and means of communication between the creatures which inhabit them. As sound and image merge and fall apart again over time, they form a synergy that opens up subtle leads which can never be read only as linear. As plot fragments refract and reoccur, Synken continuously confronts the viewer with a modular narrative that can be potentially combined to create any number of interpretations.
RBN ESC
Dur: 5.00
Spark Audio Visual (2006)
www.sparkav.co.uk
*spark is an audio-visual producer and performer, the alter-ego of Toby Harris. Spanning art, design and engineering, Toby is interested in anything that uses media to make people interact or think in unexpected ways.
‘rbn_esc’ is a project fusing cinema and live experimental visuals. presenting a series of character scenarios, it invites the audience to construct a narrative around the key theme ‘urban escape’. The clip library has been worked over in a Soho sound house, a soundtrack selected and resequenced, and the means to perform a refined, multichannel audio-visual whole developed. The resulting 45 minute performance work rbn_esc___av is an example of what ‘live cinema’ can be, and presented here is a five minute sampler.
Autometa
Dur: 8:50
Labmeta / Paul Mumford (2007)
www.labmeta.net
Paul Mumford is a director and designer currently working through the fields of VJing, motion graphics, animation and special effects across a range of music promos, live audio visual performances, short films and commercials with various London based companies. At the heart of his work though is a love for stories, people and dreams, something that has driven his research and personal work; manifesting itself as intricate, sensitive and contemporary motion graphics for live audiences and audio visual lovers. Building on early works and collaborations with the Narrative Lab, Paul’s intentions were always to continue building graphic narrative films. This is the first of his solo attempts to create a feature length audiovisual performance. Autometa is the story of a corporation, one that we see running a sinister machine, that operates upon the people of the city, taking their dreams and hopes, harvesting them and selling them around the world in a global economy. In a politically unstable landscape what happens when the public uprise? The world of Autometa erupts, forcing a world of the hybrids and dreamy constructions to collide and recombine in impossible ways.
KAAMOS
Dur: 5:25
Video: Solu / Audio: Circle: Jäljet (Traces), Kontackto : Mustikkaa Silmissä (Blueberries in the Eyes)
Mika Vainio : Kotiin (On the Way to Home) (2008)
www.solu.org
A journey into the heart of darkness. Kaamos is a Finnish term for the darkest period of the year in the north, when the light turns into shades of grey and sun is a rare visitor. Two women travel to a spring in the middle of the forest. This spring is known for its magical healing powers, that can cure from blindness. On their return it becomes obvious that the way back home is not what it used to be.
Insects
Dur: 3.43
Ben Sheppee (2007)
www.lightrhythmvisuals.com/sheppee
A tightly synchronized text based work based on ideas of modesty and genuiness. This hip hop electrock sound palette produced by “Back Ted n’ Ted” provides a rich audioscape for the evolving 3d graphic narrative executed by Tokyo based Ben Sheppee. A premiere screening for the UK - set for release on Lightrhythm Visuals label – Notations 02 - Autumn 2008.
1+1=3
Dur: 6:49
Rafael (2008)
www.leafar.be
In our view Rafael is one of the european stars of narrative performance, always witty, challenging, senstive and engaging in a way unlike anyone else we’ve ever come across. This is an extract from his latest audiovisual project that takes the form of an audiovisual puzzle. What more can we say apart make sure you see this.
Latitude
Dur: 3.43
D-Fuse (2007)
www.dfuse.com
Latitude [31°10N/121°28E] follows the emotive qualities of the space that surrounds us. Fragments of conversations, crowds, journeys, lights, deserted spaces, architectural contrasts are reconstructed to form a unique live performance that traces the multitude of paths, identities, encounters and influences that constitute everyday life in the city.
Les Projections Aléatoires
Dur:3:43
Stéphane Abboud - Le projectionniste (2003)
Les Projections Aléatoires (”the chance screenings”) are multi screen projection works made with several projectors (super 8 and 16mm). The movie combinations are realised live with found footage (family movies) and also original movies. Over the period of many years Stéphane Abboud has performed them with sound performers Plimplim and Philippe Fernandez.
The Story Collector
Dur: 15.02
Narrative Lab (2006)
www.nlab.org.uk
The Story Collector is the project that originally brought together the Narrative lab group. The performance shows Blake, an urban city dweller whose alienation with his surroundings prompts him to start collecting stories. VJ-ed graphic overlays help to build and explore the new world Blake creates as he layers multi-sensory information over the gritty cityscapes that are his home. In the performance jigsaw pieces demand narrative interpretation, activate memory, search the mental database and compare structures to give rise to a periodically shifting map of shared cultural meaning. Follow his character’s growth through the development of a magical second sight through which all the events in his life become connected.
True Fictions - Organised Lies
Dur: 15.02
Light Surgeons 2006
www.lightsurgeons.com
The result of a year long digital performance art project produced and directed by Christopher Thomas Allen and commissioned by EMPAC, The Experimental Media and Performing Arts Centre in Troy, New York. The final piece was completed and presented in September 2007 and has begun touring to festivals internationally.
It is an audio visual spectacle fuses documentary film making, music, animation and motion graphics with cutting edge digital performance tools. A stunning collage of music and narrative film making which explores the themes of truth and myth through a multitude of American and Native American voices; with a original musical score created through the collaborations of 25 New York based musicians and vocal artists.

diary | 04 apr 2008 | tagged: *spark · narrative lab · vj · rbn_esc · live cinema

an outstanding vj-related event in london, something surprisingly rare. for one evening the av-social transformed itself from so-so bar effort to a near seamless extension of a bastion of the british art establishment.
integrated into the architecture of the tate britain’s empire-era halls were a number of semi-live installations, all of which felt right in the space and of which blackout arts really hit the jackpot - although in the true nature of installations, you really had to be there to appreciate the transformation of dust and so on into graceful plays of light and shadow.
downstairs was the impressively curated narrative lab screenings, not such a nice space and with a fastfold somewhat jerry-rigged, but a really important body of work shown in my opinion. of course i’m biased, as a rbn_esc sampler formed part of it, but hey: i was in the tate!
for photos, the best i’ve seen so far are at decollage.tv’s blog post

diary | 04 apr 2008 | tagged: vj

me and sean aka jean poole have only been kicking about an interview since, oh, july, some eight months ago. but as of this morning, its online in full form of 2k words and was printed in australia’s 3d mag around christmas.

behold: http://www.skynoise.net/2008/03/13/sparkin-it-up/

diary | 13 mar 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj

always a pleasant surprise when you wake up the next morning and a photo from the (late) night before actually did capture the moment…

diary | 13 mar 2008 | tagged: vj · photo

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

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

…and what a difference a nice view from your hotel makes. so refreshing. even if for these first few days it is in a different city to where you’re working.

diary | 05 mar 2008 | tagged: vj