tagged: vj

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

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

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

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

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

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

…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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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