Content

tagged: vj

Who is Bobby Lopez?

Essentially a ghost yarn, ‘Who is Bobby Lopez’ was inspired by a series of seances held in the basement of a crumbling hostel in the east end of London. “We were trying to reach the spirit of the legendary Victorian newspaperman W.T. Stead” Lopez explains. “We channelled this show instead.”

Who is Bobby Lopez was a theatre production that started at the vaudeville-era Hoxton Hall, did a run at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2002, and cropped up later posing as cabaret nights around London. Essentially a series of story-telling skits, by using audio-visual wizardry we expanded the range of the show massively, especially in allowing the sole actor - Jud Charlton - to interact with himself pre-filmed as other characters, and providing many a coup-de-théâtre messing with a cameraman’s live feed. We were agile in production and performance, thanks to it all running off the all-then-wonderously-new world of a Titaniun Powerbook with VDMX2 and a USB video input dongle, and a DV camera and Final Cut Pro v2. Technology has rarely worked so well since!

The website is archived at http://bobbylopez.tobyz.net/

project | 2002

AV & VJ Works 2001-2005

*SPARK: VJ++ is the vj showreel I made in 2005, four years of *spark in five minutes of clips. The music is Sable Taco by Tipper, licensed from Fuel Records.

EXPERIMENTAL LIVE VISUALS AND AUDIO-VISUAL WORKS [2001-2005]

VJ:TURIN [2002] [Promo Edit]
*spark live visuals at the club to club festival, Turin, Italy

AV: DAVE CLARKE LIVE [2003] [Promo Edit]
AV production commission by content creator Ed Holdsworth

VJ: PROSESSION [2002] [Photography and Content]
Visuals residency at drum'n'bass club ProSession

VJ: FUEL RECORDS [2001] [Live Feed]
Visuals residency on 'Sound Off' tour

AV: MANGLED MAX [2005] [Test Edit]
Film remix collaboration with Matt Fisher aka Fat Nurse

AV: CONTEXT IS EVERYTHING [2003/4] [AV Mix]
Studio remix of bespoke live performance with Mr Projectile

AV: TOUGH COOKIE REMIX [2004] [AV Mix]
Studio remix commissioned for Ben Sheppe's 'Hidden Partition' audio-visual DVD album

VJ: WHO IS BOBBY LOPEZ? [2002] [Promo Edit]
Theatre collaboration with recorded characters and av support

VJ: RBN_ESC [2004] [Live Footage & Mix]
Ongoing vj film project, premiered at the Big Chill festival 2004

project | 2005

rbn_esc » urban escape

‘rbn_esc’ is a project fusing cinema and live experimental visuals. Presenting a series of character scenarios, it invites the audience to construct narrative and cultural critique: rbn_esc >> urban escape. It is also a vj project of some development, with its premiere as a silent ‘vj film’ accompanying four tet in front of thousands at the big chill festival back in 2004. Thanks to a commission to perform at the 20/20 event in Newcastle as part of AV Festival 2006, 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 a prominent example of what ‘live cinema’ can be.

rbn_esc was my response to seeing vjing being stuck in nightclubs and treated as wallpaper when i knew the potential was so much more. It was self-consciously the ‘next generation vj set’ in my own personal development, but also a challenge to others to really push the idea of ‘vj works’, to create performances with identity and meaning… something that an audience might actually want to watch, centre stage. I’d also just been booked to perform at the Big Chill, alongside Four Tet and on a LED wall, which was a very big thing for me. It was 2004, I’d been vjing for a few years, it was definitely time to pull out all the stops.

From the promo edit I made at the time, here is what it was all about

it started in 2003

  • born in vj mixes in club night residencies
  • a project to make the next-generation vj set
  • crossing club culture with cinema

the plan

  • create episodes of different characters
  • sequence within and between episodes live
  • watch audience construct narrative

into the studio // the first four episodes completed july’04

  • from footage shot and acquired worldwide
  • achieving soho-grade production for vjing

onto the live machine

  • from individual clips to a flowing mix
  • guiding and reacting to the soundtrack
  • using advanced live compositing

premiere » big chill '04

  • headline slot with four tet
  • 22 sq. meters of LED screen
  • thousands watching

01_a_walk_in_the_park

  • is it nature? its a park
  • she seems happy away from the city
  • but who is watching her?

02_a_man_a_foil/

  • pacing the streets
  • dancing on the rooftops
  • the cane his secret?

03_running_jumping

  • omnipresent technology
  • people breaking the rules
  • urban or over?

04_out_of_the_bunker

  • old concrete
  • older trees
  • escape?

rbn_esc thanks

  • narrative lab, avit.info
  • marion davies, london
  • grant davis, san francisco
  • jim henson’s creature shop

rbn_esc additional content

premiere thanks

The gig was great, there’s the cliché moments like looking up at the end and seeing thousands of people stretching out and the beautiful setting, but what was extra special was the approach Keiran aka Four Tet took to performing the music. Normally, whether a band or a dj, the set is formed from a series of songs. Keiran, rather, encompassed the same musical variety but by taking four songs and exploding them out into 15 minute remixes. So firstly its Four Tet, Rounds era, which is simply some of the finest music out there, and secondly its being remixed into four sections, for which I have four acts of rbn_esc. Totally special gig, and really inspirational for me.

In the 2006 20/20 event[1], I saw the opportunity to take this silent vj set and turn it into a fully audio-visual whole I always wanted, akin to cinema with soundtrack, sound design and the visual. This allowed me to take the vj footage to a sound designer and work in a studio usally dedicated to cinema to make the clips audio-visual, ranging from adding ambience and foley for the more straight film footage to out-there sound design for the vj loops. During all this, I had been searching for the right music to base my soundtrack on. Every time I had perfomed rbn_esc, there was a conflict between the musical arc I wanted for the narrative and the arc a musician will take for a gig, and just playing dj/vj didn’t allow for real audio-visual syncronicity I envisaged. So I’d scoured record collections, bought Ableton Live and learnt how to mix tracks and get midi out of it, but I still wasn’t happy with what I had. The thing was, nothing was coming close to my memories of the Four Tet gig, or rather, my imagination of what it could have been in a live cinema fantasy, and once I realised that the path was clear: it was going to hang together beautifully as an exclusively Four Tet soundtrack, and I was going to splice it all up into a resequenced whole to perfectly suit the narrative flow and fit the a/v loops to its phrasing exactly.

The sampler video below shows the results, five minutes of clips taken from a performance of rbn_esc___av with the exact same setup as 20/20. There was a jinx at 20/20 itself, however, with something happing to the feed after sound-checking which reduced it to something not far off white noise. Gutting, but at least it was nobody’s fault: the production was faultless otherwise, what happened to that cable since the soundcheck nobody shall know for sure. There’s more on the preparation and gig in the diary posts 119 clips, 76 scenes, one piece and 2020: beauty and horror.

Since then rbn_esc___av has been published, had a technological upgrade[2], and been performed all around europe, and even in the round. The sampler edit even got into the Tate.

The project is still alive, somehow it still hasn’t been performed internationally, and it will be the debut performance of my *spark cinema project, which should hopefully facilitate that international aspect. We’ll see…


  1. For what its worth, 20/20 and its organisers name deserve to have greater recognition in the UK, being pretty much unique in having commissioned a range of audio-visual works and then presented them to the highest standard and done it more than once. ↩︎

  2. Finally mixing at the SD resolution the footage was originally produced at, despite suitable vj software of the time being 320x240. I love this progress, where its gone from an iMac and laptop only producing 320x240, to one laptop doing it all at four times the number of pixels. ↩︎

project | 2006 | downloads: UK_SPK_IMG_RBN_SCREEN_10.jpg · rbn-screengrab-jhcs-shake-2.jpg · rbn_esc 2020.png · spark-vdmx5-avitc23-avsetup.png · spk-rbnesc-awalkinthepark.jpg · spk-rbnesc-citymanmontage.jpg

Ford VJ

I was the VJ Imagination, a world-leading communication agency, partnered with to develop the ‘Ford VJ experience’. This not only turned motor industry messaging on its head and took me around the globe, but shook the event world, reaping numerous industry awards including a Grand Prix.

Awards

  • British Interactive Media Association (BIMA) award ‘Best B2C Project’ 2007 »
  • Event Awards Gold ‘Best Exhibition Feature’ 2007 »
  • AV Awards ‘Best Interactive Media Project’ 2007 »
  • AV Awards ‘Best AV/IT Project’ 2007 »
  • AV Awards ‘Grand Prix‘ 2007 »
  • ICVA Live Comms Award for Innovation 2007 »

Geneva’07

A phone call from Imagination: combine vjing and ugc with us to realise ‘feel the difference’ at the Ford stand, Geneva motor show. Nobody had done anything like this before: Non-trivial, no sleep, NDAs. It was only the combination of my ableton+vdmx structured improvisation audiovisual work in rbn_esc, with the then private-beta vdmx5 combining arbitrary sized hi-res output with user-programmable plug-ins that allowed me to say yes. Integrate with database of text, images and voxpops, display those in the mix in a designed manner, whilst vjing together a live music video which in itself is a real test for a performer: a tall order, even in an ideal world. Rinse and repeat, for a fortnight. Big thanks to Jesse for helping with the Quartz Composer side, and Mo for coming through with the local footage.

Partner VJs

Amsterdam’07

The geneva project was deemed a success, the AutoRai, a smaller show in Amsterdam was just around the corner: so off we went. Setup was to-plan, we got great Amsterdam footage from Dr Mo, we made some tweaks. We had it down, we worked it through, the mixes we smooth: it was a good experience all round, and I knew exactly what I wanted to do with the VJ setup to really dial it in to our needs.

Partner VJs

Frankfurt’07

Frankfurt gave the opportunity to take everything that I had learnt through the baptism-of-fire that was Geneva to refactor the VJ setup. Not dissimilar on the surface, but underneath was a custom patch that was a live equivalent of an after effects project: it contained all the compositing, effects, animations and transitions we needed, and exposed just functionality needed through VDMX. Perhaps just as importantly, it hid the things that could cause any nasties!

Partner VJs

Los Angeles’07

For the American circuit, Imagination had commissioned Jasmin to art direct and produce four ‘vj’ style tracks. As the setup side for Geneva had swallowed so much time, it was a real gift to see somebody be able to start from scratch and devote all the resources to the content and aesthetic.

Partner VJ

Bologna’07

The Italians really know how to do a motor show. Despite being a small show in the grander scheme of these things, it was the only show that actually had really cool car things like… a racetrack! 4x4 assult courses!

Partner VJ

Geneva’08

Back to Geneva, one year on. With memories of still working on the to-do list on the plane out there and then things that should just have plugged in but somehow lost us days of the build instead, it was a pleasure to walk in to a known setup, load the fresh content and just play.

Partner VJ

project | 2007 | downloads: spark-ff-QCdoco-MXRpatch-00.png · spark-ff-QCdoco-UGCpatch-08.png · spark-ff-QCdoco-UGCpatch-17.png · spark-ff-vdmx-preprod-interface.png · spark-ff-vdmx-preprod-output.png · spark-fordvj-01.jpg · spark-fordvj-02.jpg · spark-fordvj-03.jpg · spark-fordvj-04.jpg · spark-fordvj-06.jpg · spark-fordvj-07.jpg · spark-fordvj-09.jpg · spark-fordvj-13.jpg · spark-fordvj-14.jpg

KineTXT

KineTXT is story-telling and text messaging experiment by Novak and myself as *spark. You could say we’re taking the cinematic form but taking the precisely opposite production process: rather than a singular directors vision, the film is an emergent property of that specific audience, in that mood, in that context, at that time. If you put a question such as ‘what do you want’ up on the wall of a bar, and ten people in that bar have the means to reply, and any one of those replies catches the interest and participation of a further ten people, can you create a chain reaction of participatory entertainment? This area is what KineTXT explores.

At the heart of KineTXT is the act of interpretation, receiving short pieces of text from the audience and transforming them into an ongoing narrative that in turn inspires further input from the audience. As such, KineTXT is both an installation - of text messaging infrastructure, display screens, animation and so on - and act of performance - the live ‘herding’ of text messages into a linear flow, the annotation of that flow with handwritten prose developments and illustrations.

Implementing this creative environment for writers and illustrators, we have had a successful run in 2008: KineTXT was a self-commissioned pilot for the after-dark strand of AV Festival, and was hailed as one of the highlights of the whole festival. From this we were commissioned to realise that pilot for the reopening of the Tyneside Cinema, developing the relationship between the texts and debuting a full-screen interactive for the audience - effectively a mini-KineTXT for them to manipulate from which the results are fed to the main canvas. We ran KineTXT at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Arts, programmed into the Thinking Digital conference, and at the Designed and Made gallery to help launch their PRISM exhibition. The year was rounded off by being selected for ImageRadio, a festival of new media in public space in Eindhoven, Netherlands. For this we held a performance with local writers and illustrators as part of the opening gala, with the KineTXT system recording its state and then replaying this throughout the festival incorporating further SMS submissions.

In 2009 we developed the storytelling and visual capability of KineTXT a lot further, giving a writer a graphics tablet so handwriting prose could interpret the story a level further (not a new idea - we had tried with fax rolls and markers for the pilot, but it was just too clunky and got lost in making everything else work nicely), and allowing the illustrators to capture and cut-out their illustrations from the artpad and into the kinetxt animation system itself. With calligraphy and photoshop-colourised characters now in the mix, the visual ante was upped considerably. This was all done as prep at the Mapping Festival in Geneva, where we also had the great privilege to run KineTXT as an facade projection in a housing complex laced with radical history, a theme the local artists we worked with readidly took up.

The video below is from the pilot, in March 2008. Mapping Festival have uploaded an edit of the much-developed KineTXT performance also on video: http://vimeo.com/9598830.

project | 2008 | downloads: kinetxt-ir08-v1.png · kinetxt-mapping-5892.jpg · kinetxt-mapping-5932.jpg · kinetxt-mapping-5935.jpg · kinetxt-mapping-5940.jpg · kinetxt-v2-1.jpg · kinetxt-v2-10.jpg · kinetxt-v2-11.jpg · kinetxt-v2-12.jpg · kinetxt-v2-13.jpg · kinetxt-v2-14.jpg · kinetxt-v2-15.jpg · kinetxt-v2-16.jpg · kinetxt-v2-2.jpg · kinetxt-v2-3.jpg · kinetxt-v2-4.jpg · kinetxt-v2-5.jpg · kinetxt-v2-6.jpg · kinetxt-v2-7.jpg · kinetxt-v2-8.jpg · kinetxt-v2-9.jpg

Particle

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

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

D-Fuse, Particle Press Kit

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

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

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

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

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

To make Particle work, I –

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

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

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

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

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

Fuel Records

Berlin Love Parade, late nineties: amongst the floats drive two American muscle cars with Funktion-One horns rising up on hydraulics out of the boot. A stereo speaker pair, rolling in front of Tipper’s float, his bass-fueled breaks spinning on the decks. If you missed it… well, tough, it’s gone now. Or has it? Join toby*spark as he dusts off a zip disk from back in the day, and puts your speakers through their paces.

That’s the pitch for this performance project. As that suggests, there’s history here. The blurb for a Fuel Records sampler I made twenty+ years ago is a good place to start –

fuel records should have been huge, but somehow never caught the wave, or the wave somehow didn’t pick them up… depends on how you look at it, but man they had something: the music that drum’n’bass and electro should have become, artists like tipper and si begg as buckfunk 3000, and an identity light years ahead of anyone else. i was there in a field in liverpool when they bought the trailer to tour their dragster and dual dodge challenger '70 soundsystem (like, one car for left, one car for right: the 10k rolling muscle car sound system), complete with dj booth to break out the side. and i’ll never forget that trailer costing less than my £3k laptop… some deals going on, back then.
from the flyer: prepare to be disturbed. this will be played at high volume, preferably in a residential area.

so this is a bittersweet video for me, but it was the tour that set me up solo and gave me the confidence both in myself as a vj and that you could vj with just a laptop.

— *spark - fuel records [2001]

Now, years later, if I were to tell you about Fuel, you probably wouldn’t believe me. You’d turn to the internet, and see it’s just not there. That came as quite a shock, undermining a lot of what I hold dear, from the digital revolution of the time to the sheer gumption of those involved. And that’s the genesis of this project: even if the internet might not have this stuff, I have an archive, and there’s a story to tell.

So: an experimental documentary performance? A DJ set with anecdotes? I’m not quite sure what the form is, but it’s going to be me on stage, trawling that archive, with music that’s going to give the PA a work-out.

Image Credit – Props to Vice, who do have a 2001 article archived on-line. Even more unusually, it’s one where the image isn’t a dead link. And it’s a good image, project defining even. So that’s what used here. Except that the one on the website is so low-res that you can’t read the text. But – aha! – in that archive of mine was a scan of the print article. And so the salvage starts.

project | 2022

vision’r - a parisian avit

i’m heading over to paris on thursday for vision’r, a vj festival holding the avit-the-international-vj-network banner. so nice to be able to take the train.
will be performing the narrative lab storyteller set, and talking a bit about what we’re up to, including the key question - do you sit or stand to live cinema?

http://vision-r.org/

diary | 16 jan 2006 | tagged: *spark · avit-vj-network · vj · vision'r

mode selektor

saw mode selektor at the rex with jess and co, and had a funny conversation about performance… where we’ve gone from orchestras to the single dj, and from instrumentalism to, er, dancing: mode selektor flip faders as they bounce around, its not quite the same thing.

and no matter how many laptop live sets i see now, in my head its still a battle as to just what a live, solo, audiovisual performance could or should be… but there’s only one way to find out, and its going to be march 4th.

diary | 21 jan 2006 | tagged: errata of life · vj

narrative lab live

probably performed one of my best sets ever at avit paris, representing narrative lab. sometimes things are just right, and you find yourself in a beautiful bubble. not only did the ‘story collector’ set really capture the audience - props to paul for the vision and david last for the audio mix i used - but it seems a lot of vjs watching it stayed for the presentation and have been inspired by the ideas we’re developing.

diary | 22 jan 2006 | tagged: avit-vj-network · narrative lab · vj · vision'r · live cinema

vv.mod.midi.hack = a/v ok

you can have a deadline in your head, but theres nothing like it viscerally hitting you as you make your nth cup of tea, seeing it scribed coldly in the best before field of your milk carton. some kind of techo-primordial early warning system. works for me, anyway.
and so it was today that with joy and relief chasing each other round my head, finally watching the pieces of my audiovisual ideal slot into place and the proverbial engine stutter into life, that i saw that date on the milk and thought - yup, its a week from this very moment.

so i now have ableton live with the music cut up and laid out alongside midi clips corresponding to vj clips. that midi control goes to the visuals program, so i can mix the visuals with the material synced to the flow of the music i’m laying down. the sound work laid into the vj clips will then flow back into ableton to be tweaked as part of the audio mix. a rich audiovisual brew, an indistinguishable whole… cinematic motion graphics. fingers crossed.

the two visuals apps i feel are suitable for the long-form video-fused-motion-graphics i’m doing both don’t quite a the midi control i specifically require, but today i got the fruits of a little commission to retrofit my midi spec onto vdmx 4.2, and ye gads its working - i can actually do this for real now! the other contender, grid pro, will smash vdmx4.2 for me once they’ve got two features down, but as i write this they’re not quite there yet - but they’re working on it, and working on it as in right now - we’ll see which app makes it to the post! the picture is the moment of genesis, jdk’s hacked vv.mod.midi piping ableton control into each movie player. oh, and where did jdk code and send this? in a car on a 18 hour journey down america armed with powerbook and gprs phone, naturally.

so now the pieces are in place - music, vj clips with sound effects, sequencer, audio and visuals apps… its time to create the whole setup for real, and time to ensure all the remaining production tasks get finished - a chunk of the performance finished is not the whole thing!

diary | 25 feb 2006 | tagged: *spark · vj · rbn_esc · vdmx · ableton · 20/20

no sleep, newcastle and lumen

with the final vj clips rendered and no sleep for 36 hours, hit the train to newcastle. passing durham is one of my favourite scenes, i somehow caught it perfectly at sunset despite being comotose the rest of the time… but that is one confined to memory alone, so heres a final render grab instead.
been worrying about playing a set at lumen, a kind of monthly partner to 2020 that showcases established vjs alongside encouraging first-timers… a social, i guess. turns out, its good to be challenged, as i rediscovered some of vdmx’s flexibility and audio-reactive complexity, not to mention a few clips in the back-catalogue as i went for minimal and refined motion graphics suitable for a bar.
by the time i got to bed, it had been quite a day - powering through content creation on paul’s twin-view G5 tower, hitting the final render, dying on a train but waking up to castles, cathedrals and the dramatic entrance to newcastle, having fine, fine tapas with equally fine fellows of name, a set that surprised me, and all rounded off with the discovery of sailor jerry rum.

diary | 02 mar 2006 | tagged: *spark · vj · rbn_esc · 20/20 · name · novak

painted green, somehow ok?

breakfast on the day of 2020 at the council cafe set in the manor house cunningly just down the road from the two-up-two-down terraces i’m staying in. no escape from the cctv iconography though, from dreams of cctvs cameras outlined in vj clips to these in the landscaped gardens. somebody thinks painting them green makes them invisible, acceptable?

diary | 04 mar 2006 | tagged: errata of life · vj · rbn_esc · 20/20

119 clips, 76 scenes, one piece

4.30 am on the day of 2020, and rbn_esc__av is at v1.0.

119 mostly audiovisual vj clips in vdmx.spk
76 scenes in ableton live
7 channels of sound
3 channels of video
one spark

the week has been a blur, 24/7 production is pretty accurate what with two nights without sleep at all, but i’m here in newcastle, noodled some ambient bar visuals back at lumen on thursday and even managed to get the opening gala of the wider av festival that 2020 is a part of. but all that is by the by: i’ve got to the magic 1.0, with less than 12 hours to the sound check, cutting it fine but so happy…if a little tired.

diary | 04 mar 2006 | tagged: *spark · vj · rbn_esc · 20/20 · live cinema

2020: beauty and horror

its still a bit sharp, but there were beautiful things at 2020 and there was horror. the horror bit was coursing through my veins when after i finally stood up, walked to my equipment, took a breath and proverbially hit ‘play’… the screen, the image, well, it wasn’t right.

i’d soundchecked first, everything had been fine - i even had a dj mixer to tweak my somewhat untested levels on. my ‘cinematic’ visuals were cinematic, and the crazy section certainly was full-on with such a big screen and booming PA. so it was distressing to the core that when mid-event it became my turn, that ideal audiovisual environment turned to a nightmare, my clear, tuned pallette turning to grey fuzz. if you’ve ever seen ntsc on a pal tv, think that. and as you couldn’t really see any of it properly - and you certainly couldn’t read the text, which is central to the experience - all i could do was wince and crash through it all as quickly as possible. to compound things, this meant there was no time to massage the audio as i went along, and so the piece largely became a series of jolts between audio sections. it was so disappointing, on so many levels.

unbelievably, people still applauded and apparently there was still a really positive reaction - though i still haven’t quite got a handle on that. i wasn’t around to hear it first hand, as all my seething mind could do was trace the source of the failure… i had rebooted after the sound/vision check, which kinda breaks the golden rule and meant i was too afraid to try and really troubleshoot as the performance started, but it turned out to be some interference on the cable as it was routed around the stage, somebody must have tidied it up against a transformer or a lighting signal passing nearby with some voodoo frequency turned on when it wasn’t before.

the bottom line though, is that shit happens, there was nothing that could be done, and the work, the commission, still stands. its not cinderella territory here, this has been my ongoing project for two years, and it now exists as an audiovisual whole - a paradigm shift not just for it but my practice. the technology to realise my approach is now there, and my concept and visual production has matured to be able to really exploit the potential. suffice to say, its like having entered the golden kingdom having seen it glimmering over the horizon for so long.

and so a thousand props to the organisers of 2020, for the commission is what it took, and they built an outstanding event on a series of them. their piece was also stunning, a meditation on memory and feelings, and perhaps appreciated even more by myself as it fits perfectly with the narrative lab agenda. andrew and nik - respect!

diary | 04 mar 2006 | tagged: *spark · vj · rbn_esc · 20/20 · name · novak · live cinema

rbn_esc >> urban escape

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

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

stavanger » numusic

to norway for the best part of a week as a guest artist of the numusic festival. for the nuart strand, i’m a multimedia man-who-can, documenting the interventions and melding the daytime art activities into animated backdrops for the nighttime venues.

diary | 07 sep 2006 | tagged: *spark · vj · nu-music

stavanger » graf - moona lisa

great graf by nick walker: mona lisa pulling a moonie right on a harbourside corner. its a very clean, serene town. i wonder if there’s been any accidents yet?

diary | 08 sep 2006 | tagged: *spark · vj · nu-music

stavanger » graffiti research lab

simply, too cool. they’ve figured magnetic, conductive paint for integrating electronics with graffiti, and these little numbers: led throwies.

diary | 09 sep 2006 | tagged: *spark · vj · nu-music

second nlab night

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

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

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29