tagged: vj

as a warm-up to d-fuse’s trip to brazil, we performed a test of the new live piece “particle” at electrovision. it definitely felt like a test, as things were plugged in and loaded up to be used in anger in for the first time, and while i wasn’t so happy creatively with the form this first rendition took, that is secondary to what happened there: the dvi-mixer i’ve been dreaming of for years - and that my work turning transforming d-fuse’s live shows has been predicated on - worked as simply and unobtrusively as it should. all the sophistication and craziness lives in the laptop, where we have creative control as far as we’re wishing to configure and code, and we have hardware reliabiliy to ensure we can a) guarantee solid output signal to the projectors no matter what is going on with the laptops and b) mix together and tag team the performance between two visuals laptops.

i am working on getting this out to the vj world for a limited run, and a full announce will follow. it will cost somewhere in the range of a $1000 - £1000 , input and output VGA and DVI, and allow you to do what nothing else will: dualhead at 1600x600, triplehead at 1920x480, HD at 1920x1080@60Hz. it is based on a conference bit of kit that i have developed a controller for, and that i hope to get some extra vj-love put into its firmware. the trick to both those goals is to aggregate our demand into one order big enough for a production run of the controller to be made and for it to be worthwhile for the developers of the conference kit to spend some time enhancing it for our uses. so expect a full announcement once everything is locked down and orders can be taken.

diary | 18 jul 2009 | tagged: dvi-mixer · dfuse · *spark · vj · electrovision · particle

beyond visible things like keane3D, lots of work has been going on in the background with d-fuse this past year or so. some of it pitching, some of it pushing along internal projects, and at the moment a massive commercial job under NDA: all things which don’t really get to this diary. but i’m glad to announce a little preview of something i’ve been working on a while, which is transforming d-fuse live.

as part of electrovision on saturday the 18th july at roxy bar and screen, d-fuse will be performing for the first time with their high-def laptop live setup. it will be something between a test of the setup and a preview of the performance that will become ‘particle’, so all are welcome and beta-tester feedback appreciated!

there’s much more to say about what has been developed for this setup, but in the meantime here is the blurb i wrote for electrovision:

D-Fuse present a work-in-progress viewing of their new live performance, an experimental audio-visual triptych exploring urban conditions. Having mastered an HD production process for films such as Brilliant City and Surface, they have challenged themselves to bring this back into the live arena and with the graphical sensibility they are noted for.

pictured: vdmx work-in-progress setup, with amongst other things custom quartz composer 4x3 into 12x3 layer, backed by unreleased open-gl based qc plugins, and fronted by a native vidvox control layout.

diary | 09 jul 2009 | tagged: quartz composer · particle · dfuse · vj · electrovision · vdmx

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

after four days of being in a night-club complex, its time to not be there to the end and have a relaxed final drink on the way to collapse in bed. and just as i leave, this crazy character pitches up to the vj clash. looks super cool, but surely it distorts your sight? kinda important to a vj?

diary | 31 may 2009 | tagged: vj · live performers meeting

but you could say the performances are secondary. what lpm is really about, and is titled as, is as a meeting space. here a user of niche-gamebody visuals software (mary-ann aka outpt) meets the actual creator of that software (clément, aka pikilipita, and actually has the opportunity of time and space for it not to be a “omg! hello! but i’ve got to go and its too loud here” conversation.

diary | 31 may 2009 | tagged: vj · live performers meeting

thorsten e-gruppe giving it some vb represent. there was a beautiful moment earlier on the hack-bench, where he was staring at his laptop screen for five minutes in a zen-like trance, finally happy that his visuals were generating just right.

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

so here is my parable about the value of a community focussed event like lpm: in a world where there are only so many screens for so many hours, and open submissions for vjs, you’d think video-chaos could be the only result. it certainly happened, with different outputs on adjacent screens hurting artist’s feelings and my eyes. thing is, we’re an adaptive species, we’re social. enter the community aspect: a group of peers who’d largely never met before the festival got together as a sufficiently large group so that individually they’d take all the screens for the vj clash, but collaborated on a joint performance instead. it rocked, they all got much more out of it than performing alone, and from the audience perspective it was a revelation: the vj set commanded the space, not least of all for actually having an intro, all screens breaking down in sync with the music, performers energised as a team and so on. total win for everybody; organisers, artists, punters.

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

to pick one example of good vj practice seen at lpm, 14c0 caught my eye with a strong graphical sensibility and focussed aesthetic. to cliché his output, there’s nothing revolutionary in audio-driven-maths-surfaces and mirrored architecture, but amongst the chaos of lpm it was really refreshing to see something dialled in and done right.

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

why have one bottle when you can have two!

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

we should have some interviews filmed at lpm up on the vjtalks site, but it might take a while: they developed into hour long in-depth affairs, so there’s some editing to do, and in david’s case, a baby almost due.

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

anton dropped into the qc class to show how qc can be extended by installing custom plug-ins… which naturally featured a fair bit of glitch.

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

it felt funny there being a quartz composer workshop, me not giving it, and the copy being beyond something even i could even have pumped-up (world exclusive! creator of the most widely viewed online video tutorial series!). but definitely a sign of progress in this world, so props to graham (centre back) and lpm. the class had a good time, and the word was spread: hopefully more interesting work will happen because of it.

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

this was perhaps the most inspiring moment of lpm for me. to set the background, i’ve been planning a entirely new paradigm of vj interface for years now, have a subversion repository with a project to that end, and have had many discussions with people like anton about how flightdecks-of-buttons suck and where are we in our quests to make something better. the short answer is: years in, far from anything demonstrable due to the overhead of having to write such a thing from scratch.

enter david, who was kinda freaking out about a hip-hop gig he’d been asked to do, as he wasn’t sure how to get the scratch control and 'ting required. two hours later, he had a whole functioning gestural interface for vdmx using a tablet and the ultra-cool idea of tracing a line through a… er… control space along which pulsed the beat. a) genius b) rapid prototyped in two hours c) vdmx is cool because it can host qc, but the conceptual shift here is it works the other way round, a qc interface running in front of vdmx sending commands via open sound control.

awesome. watch the video: http://www.vimeo.com/5019365

diary | 29 may 2009 | tagged: quartz composer · vj · live performers meeting

the best bit was when one track just didn’t sound right. the singer, probably rightfully having a diva moment, stopped it and was trying to get it to his ear… meanwhile fabio / vjk suddenly looks busy, and a blink later the whole performance space is surrounded by flames. to continue the theme: thats live.

diary | 29 may 2009 | tagged: vj · live performers meeting

toby - “but you know you still had the fps on”
david - “yeah, its so they know its really LIVE”

diary | 28 may 2009 | tagged: vj · live performers meeting

david, as well as having the content worked out, also had the tools worked out. one laptop as render client, one laptop as controller, linked by ethernet. nice to see this in the wild, its the approach i’m going for with *spark cinema. but going back to the photo, check the number of buttons: truly a flight deck!

diary | 28 may 2009 | tagged: quartz composer · vj · live performers meeting