tagged: vj

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 · touch designer

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

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

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

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

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

…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

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

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

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

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

…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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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