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

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

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

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

• Jesse Lucas - http://www.eyehear.org/
• Mauritius Seeger - http://www.morishuz.com/

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

• Jilt Van Moorst - http://www.robotfunk.com/
• Olga Mink - http://www.videology.nu/

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

• Jasmin Jodry - http://www.sophisticatedmadness.com/
• Mauritius Seeger - http://www.morishuz.com/

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

• Jasmin Jodry - http://www.sophisticatedmadness.com/

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

• Inés Iglesias - http://www.pintaycolorea.com/

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

• Jasmin Jodry - http://www.sophisticatedmadness.com/

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

‘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

• adam baker - cutcorner.org
• nathan bainbridge - smallkid.co.uk
• andy kiell - kiell.com
• paul chatterton - leedsarc.org.uk

premiere thanks

• john rixon & co - bigchill.net
• kieran hebden - fourtet.net
• tim, nick, stephen - filming etc.

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…

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

*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

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

the talk that blew me away i did not see coming. its blurb launches with with “instrument”, in my experience a signifier not of expressivity, but of how far we are from it. but! masha had a beautifully simple concept, that makes beautiful visuals, and does so in a way you could really imagine being made into an expressive, hands-on interface.

Masha Rozhnova presents a live performance instrument developed in TouchDesigner that explores visual expression through 3D shadow casting. Drawing inspiration from early 2000s album covers featuring abstract light patterns, the system uses simulated lighting and moving occluders to create dynamic, analog-feeling visuals—without relying on hardware synthesizers or SDFs.

what’s more, masha has triumphed on something i’d tried and abandoned years ago. the basic idea of “i’m going to into an event with a bunch of stripes and other graphic bits and bobs, and with some audio-analysis and puppetry, make an event environment out of it” is kinda obvious, but she nailed it. shadow-play for the win!

(not just shadow-play as an idea, but props to touch designer for providing a rendering environment up to that – my experiments were in quartz composer, and that certainly couldn’t back then)

diary | 15 jun 2025 | tagged: vj · touch designer

in past times, i’d made pilgrimages to check out the state of the art and be inspired by people pushing at it. time to do so again; i have questions about what makes sense for “visual systems” in 2025.

i heard derivative were coming to london for a day of touch designer talks, far-flung friend owen was travelling in to give one, and at least one londoner friend would be there. so i got on the train.

unlike 2008, i didn’t get the sense of revolutionary possibilities. and like 2009, the value proposition of touch designer has the same broad outline to my eyes. which is to say, things are mature and powerful; nothing to be churlish about.

but most of all, what i found at that 2008 event was just as true –

attendees were invariably just as interesting and represented important bodies of work as those formally invited to present […] they made the festival

the photo is the embodiment of that, i could write an essay about each person and/or their work in that scene. happy days.

oh – i asked a question after one talk, and got a “are you toby*spark!” shout-out from the stage. my ego liked that.

diary | 15 jun 2025 | tagged: vj · touch designer

garry spacepope, cardinal of tomorrow. need i say more?

volta’s xrcam remains a wonder. like the diarama earlier, visuals that were perfectly fit for purpose.

diary | 17 may 2025 | tagged: insieme · xrcam · *spark · volta · vj

doing visuals at insieme has been a shared endeavour. henry rolls took care of friday, with saturday for “szolnok and *spark”. this is new! i’ve been collaborating with local friend and talent zsolt, it’s been a pleasure. we tag-teamed the night. he rocked it – shown. we rocked it – szolnok and *spark.

diary | 17 may 2025 | tagged: insieme · vj

did the fuel piece. nice memory of the crowd locked in to tipper’s ‘tug of war’, the fuel records 12” catalogue animating along, and in that moment connecting back to when i record-shopped one of them before i had any idea it was a fuel release, or what that might come to mean for my life.

lots of good feedback, beyond the specifics people really enjoyed the change of pace. or rather, the same pace / bpm, but a different focus and format; a kind of palate cleanser between two nights of djs.

plus, i often say part of the idea was simply to hear the music again on a club PA, and at insieme i got to live that: jumped down from the stage and grabbed half a minute of utopia in front of lawrence’s sweet soundsystem – “gramp’s hi-fi”.

diary | 17 may 2025 | tagged: insieme · fuel records · *spark · volta · vj

saturday night: time to get to work. early evening, three hours: terrain take over the festival. insieme had commissioned a skinny gud illustration for the poster, and it came out great. happily, the scene it showed wasn’t too far from the ‘camp out’ world we shipped with volta create towards the end, so a palette-shift and some tweaks later here it is. fit for purpose, i thought: branding expanded into a diarama; slowly animating, reacting to the music, live feed on the screen in-scene.

diary | 17 may 2025 | tagged: insieme · *spark · volta · vj

my interest was piqued when i found out a neighbour runs a micro-festival. i was sold when i saw a photo of the late-night barn: thick sound-absorbing stone walls, whitewashed and begging for visuals wrapping around the stage.

now having finally arrived in the dark wooded valley for a midnight rig, i’m looking very happily at two roughed-in projectors delivering on the promise.

diary | 15 may 2025 | tagged: insieme · *spark · video-out · vj

perhaps my favourite image of the performance. admittedly a single cherry-picked frame of video, not entirely representative of the moment, but nonetheless seeing this soft, painterly look inspires me.

diary | 27 apr 2024 | tagged: volta · fuel records · *spark · vj

…but the immersive room meant i could hold that immersion back. and what a reveal. being surrounded by the imagery is obviously transformational, but perhaps more visceral is the spatial movement. the virtual camera moves in the 3D scene, before devices to alter the composition of a flat, framed view, now make the world flow around you, moving to the music.

diary | 27 apr 2024 | tagged: volta · fuel records · *spark · vj

the piece starts flat, framed, 2D. it’s part homage to my visuals of the time, and part a pacing trick, holding back the 3D to come. that’s what you can see here, and in any other gig it being the whole wall behind me would be the talking point…

photo credit: elizaveta yudina

diary | 27 apr 2024 | tagged: volta · fuel records · *spark · vj

when this started i knew me talking was going to be a part of it, but didn’t really know whether it was like a dj namechecking the songs or something more. you can see here it’s something more.

part of that is my pose, but also: thinking about how my colloquial spoken english might come across, i have made italian “subtitles”. just they’re not subtitles. they’re “in-situ titles”. as you can better see later, they’re placed in the 3D scene, the letters solid objects. it’s a big thing, i think: technically, creatively, accessibly.

photo credit: elizaveta yudina

diary | 27 apr 2024 | tagged: volta · fuel records · *spark · vj

to rome, where live performers meeting organiser gianluca had invited me to play my fuel piece. even better, he said they had an immersive room. would i like to play that?

well, look at what i looked out at. hell yes.

to think that original fuel tour had vdmx2 running at 320x240px. to think that this contemporary revival happily runs at 11510x1080px in volta, and does so on a laptop not even breaking a sweat while pixel-mapping that onto 2x 4k outputs and running ableton.

diary | 27 apr 2024 | tagged: volta · fuel records · *spark · vj · video-out · live performers meeting

again thanks to mike for the photo. this is from later on, a story-telling part where the ability to be in a 3D engine and quickly build-up abstracted but understandable scenes comes into its own.

on the right you can see live transcription. to think they had to cope with the words falling out of my mouth, eeek. unquestionably progress, though!

diary | 13 apr 2024 | tagged: volta · fuel records · crux · *spark · vj