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Diarytoby - “but you know you still had the fps on”
david - “yeah, its so they know its really LIVE”
toby - “but you know you still had the fps on”
david - “yeah, its so they know its really LIVE”
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!
silly artist name, absolutely great work.
having met david through visual berlin and his offering to help make the vjtalks happen at lpm, it wouldn’t have done to miss his set. so, early on the first night of lpm we were there, and in that next 45 minutes pretty much the festival was topped: serpendity was a great work. it held together. it felt complete. it carved its own line between abstraction and representation, music and noise. the visual was the audio and vice versa, conceived and engineered together.
i say engineered, as the visuals were rendered live using quartz composer using audio-analysis to really great effect. i had seen david’s early sketches on flickr (curly code), and while pretty and kinda interesting my “meaningless abstract 3d filter” turned on. what a difference the focus of a performance makes: worked up with music, animated and paced with the set, and there as a triplehead composition over nine screens with an energised figure at the centre, commanding it.
jaromil roio was at this year’s lpm too (see vjtalks last year), and gave a really good talk in which he said something i will be repeating for years to come. probably not verbatim, but “if a community has trust, it can invest in its future”. which is a nice way to sum up a lot of what i’ve thought in trying to push the vj (and post-vj!?/) community on. a simple example would be a “live performer’s meeting club”, where you pay some amount to become a member, which lpm can then invest into securing the next festival, up to which you then rock up knowing you helped make it happen, with your workshop fees already paid. jaromil used the example of blender, where the users contribute in advance to help facilitate not only to its development, but the production of a work made with it.
[edit] having just found the note i wrote at the time, it was something like “community trust to pay for what you’re about to do”
the slides are here - http://jaromil.dyne.org/journal/creazione_dal_basso_e_p2p.html
anton aka vade seeing whether he make his quartz-composer leveraging app v002 ready for live-use… in a few hours time. coding at the venue: a dangerous thing, but a few hours later there was a very happy anton bouncing around saying he’d nailed the weird bug and was going to perform with it for the first time.
lost the dvd drive, moved the hard disk into its place, and installed a super-fast solid state drive in the original’s slot. as philikon says, “you can have your cake and eat it, too. warp drive and good old V8 muscle.”… this not only makes the system “biblically fast”, but now means i can pull multiple high-def streams for vjing without the laptop breaking a sweat. more than that, with genuinely instant random access, i should be able to scratch, stutter, trigger to my hearts content. so… time to play!
back to london, and it’s mo’s vj night. back at the roxy too, the old-timer venue sporting an old-timer line-up with ben sheppee in from japan and scott amoeba up from brighton (pictured - a true ginger terrorist/).
also a shame to have missed tom blinkinlab’s first live set, having worked on a light surgeons project with him before, and it being audio-visual from the loop-up with an architectural bent.
diary | 23 may 2009 | tagged: vj · electrovision
nothing better than a week in and out of coding, performance and nightclubs, to see the night through to a beautiful sunny morning on the river. swimming in the crystal clear water was cleansing more than literally, even if for some it wasn’t quite the idea…
diary | 17 may 2009 | tagged: vj · mapping
my first mapping was marked by meeting franz and pier of exyzt, and it was great to see them back with a facade projection piece. using some custom playback/pinning software franz had rustled up (pictured, franz aligning it up - the outlines are lit on the building), it was both refreshing and surprising to see a true audio-visual piece, where the graphics and audio were two sides of the same thing. surprising that at mapping, a touchpoint of curated vj/av showcasing, this was the first i’d seen that did it for me in that way.
and while we’re at it, check their new venture 1024d
diary | 16 may 2009 | tagged: vj · mapping
beat torrent cancelled themselves in a fit of divadom, so enter “torrent de bites, un duo vj/dj aussi impromptu qu’enthousiaste” aka ilan and andré of le zoo. ably assisted by the vj exoskeleton craziness of vj lupin and oblivion, disaster turned to triumph and a real highlight of the festival. although it all pales next to this.
diary | 16 may 2009 | tagged: vj · mapping
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
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
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
…and now having used it in anger, here we have
diary | 11 may 2009 | tagged: quartz composer · live illustration · vj · code · mac os · kinetxt · release | downloads: SPK-Calligraphy-v1.2.zip
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 -
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”
