tagged: vj

Resolume 3 & Freeframe 1.5

Also at Vision’r, and keeping the tradition of the vixid unveiling, were Bart and Edwin with Resolume 3 on their laptops, revealing the future of arguably the most popular vj software out there, and with Russell of VJamm and Freeframe also there, the future of the vj fx standard. Resolume and FreeFrame being both massive but a bit long in the tooth nowadays, this was quite a one-two.

Resolume: A sneak peak for a summer release, the big news is that its cross-platform. Yes, Resolume natively on OSX as well as Windows, and a new Resolume fit for 2008 rather than an incremental upgrade of Resolume as we’ve known it. One and a half years in development, its seen a complete re-write in c++, it now uses Open-GL for its rendering engine, and is now fully audio-visual: sample tight too, allegedly. The interface has also had a complete overhaul, and is not just constrained for a fixed three layers. Its also lost its trademark font and idiosyncratic colour scheme for clarity’s sake, which to me is a kinda shame but the price of progress (or maturation?). And when I started taking photos, Bart said to keep it a secret… there’s still more to come. If you want the spoiler…

FreeFrame: If Resolume is cross-platform and renders on the GPU using Open-GL, then what about all those FF1.0 cpu-bound effects that vastly expanded Resolume’s palette? The answer came from Russell, originally Mr VJamm and a leading member of the FreeFrame group who announced the FreeFrame 1.5 aka FFGL spec to the VJ/realtime video world, bringing GPU processing to the FreeFrame standard. It may have taken them a while, but FreeFrame is a broad standard and consensus based, so now they’re here, the form says it will be robust, adoptable and here to stay. If you’re a VJamm user, you should be able to get your hands on the latest, FFGL sporting, build.

• http://www.resolume.com/
• http://sourceforge.net/projects/FreeFrame
• http://community.freeframe.org/

diary | 22 apr 2008 | tagged: vj · writing · resolume

Vision’r: Festival VJ; 17th-20th April

Arguably, the first time the international vj community got together was at the “vjcentral gig” aka avit. A French duo called TZ-Team came, and while enthused by the experience, said it just couldn’t be done in France at that time; the club scene worked differently, the vjs that were out there were hidden in niches and there was no community to speak of. So it was a particularly nice experience to walk into the first Vision’r, effectively avit paris, and see a whole scene very clearly alive, very clearly doing great things. It was also the first time I’d seen frozen-chicken-porn visuals, totally arresting and different to the club clichés, and it was where the wonderment of the vixid mixer was unveiled in beta form. That was 2006, and now Vision’r is in its third edition. The feeling of being somewhere unique is still there, and it still feels slightly shambolic, but the the quality of work and exchange is better than ever. If I could explain why, I’d hazard a theory along the TZ-Team lines where isn’t so much clubbing and club-vjs but there is a strong culture of innovative live performance, which brings visualism and a/v trickery with it, but through a very different lens. Combine that with Vision’r having the feeling of a meeting of practitioners rather than showcase-for-others, and you certainly have an interesting weekend.

So in I walked, and saw Alchimie, a one-man show with narrator/poet/rapper riffing on graffiti (in French, I can’t say I got too much of the literal meaning, but such was the strength of the performance) amongst a minimal-but-effective virtual set made of projections, using prepared footage, live cameras and live drawing with a Wacom behind the mesh. And of course, it ended in the middle of the dance floor covered in paint, what else did you expect?

A beautiful example of a club culture cliché being taken to high-art while loosing none of the jump-up excitement of what made it good in the first place was ‘Projet RVB En Alpha’, which combined a dancing girl, light installation and vj feed into a sublime whole, with I surmise the alpha from the title referring to how the dancer’s movements become the (literal and metaphoric) key to the motion graphics. They even had the stagecraft that when the dancer fainted as ending, the geeks behind the laptops caught her.

And to tie Vision’r back to Mapping were SATI, gallantly performing at both festivals over this weekend. A duo of which one half is long-time VJ Jesse Lucas, and yep there are some brilliant visuals really taking advantage of a dual-head set-up, they are primarily a band, both in it together, both making the music and seeing where it can go… and its that attitude which really elevates them.

• Vision’r: http://vision-r.org/

diary | 22 apr 2008 | tagged: vj · writing

Mapping: VJing and Audio-Visual Festival; 10th-20th April

The first two Mapping Festivals quickly became legendary. An audio line-up worthy of a music festival, a cream of visualists married to a playground of seemingly a thousand projectors, and the whole programme rammed through one venue over one weekend. Complete with dormitories above and sofa-strewn cinema to the side, the party didn’t stop.

Now in its fourth edition, Mapping has changed into a two/three week showcase split between the original venue ‘le zoo, pour les animeaux nocturnes’ and Geneva’s modern arts centre hosting gallery installations and an audio-visual stage. Having left the particle systems, avant-garde interactivity and deep geekage of Node to come to Mapping, it was quite a jump to walk into a room literally full of arse-slaps with the Chicks On Speed inaugurating their gallery installation “Butt Slap Bongo” with a suitably frenetic performance. Another interesting installation, in entirely different ways, was “News Jockey“, an informatic spread tiling across a whole room. You typed in your headline, it did the rest. It was also the logical successor to last year’s “web-jockey” installation, delivering on the promise shown there: always nice to see generational progress, directly related or not.

Still in the modern arts centre, the audio-visual stage saw a beautifully contemplative performance by Scanner and Olga Mink that is hopefully the start of an ongoing piece, and also sees Olga breaking out of her graphic comfort zone. The last performance of the opening weekend was a journey into the mind of Raphaël, a renegade filmmaker and long time Narrative Lab favourite. Hard to describe, and as far as I’m aware only experienced at the odd festival (self-promotion, website? pah!), if you see Raphael [ES] on the programme, just go. Crazy, wonderful, not entirely to be understood, but definite in the feeling that you viscerally touched something.

With the first weekend over, and Vision’r clashing with the second, it was time to leave. And also, who would stay for both? Which is perhaps the issue Mapping faces, being effectively two mini-festivals without anything to make the week/two weeks a compelling whole. But if the organisers can do this, I’m sure they’ll work it out. No write-up, however subjective and under-representative, could go by without a mention of Mapping’s 8bit night, with bubblyfish/chika/akira/etc all rocking out beyond their laptops. The special mention has to go to Meneo however, an 8bit musician who tours with entter providing an a/v whole. As you’d expect, the graphics reinforced the 8bit theme and a Meneo identity, but there were real moments of something way beyond that, with a whole world being created and stories spun. Oh, and lots of nakedness at the end: A visual performance of other sorts, and what was it with nakedness and performance at Mapping?

• Mapping: http://www.mappingfestival.com
• Photos: http://www.ork.ch/mapping/mapping08/index.html

diary | 22 apr 2008 | tagged: vj · writing · mapping

NODE08: Forum for digital arts; 5-12th April

If there’s one page on the internet that simultaneously crushes and inspires me, its the projects page of the ‘vvvv’ environment. A node based software, free for non-commercial use, that has been developed at the cutting edge of both commercial events and artistic endeavour, it seems to time-warp its users and their computers five years into the future, realising the seemingly impossible. So when I found out that the users of the software were having their first get-together with the vvvv organisation organising a week long conference of workshops, galleries, a club-night, and so on… well it was simply a case of needing to be there.

Watershed Moment #1 - Hacking a night-club’s lighting rig via WiFi. The first day’s workshop I attended hadn’t been so good, a mix of nerds trying to teach and the subject matter being more basic than the description suggested. However, this was soon blown away when we found ourselves in the fairly deluxe club ‘Velvet’ with its already impressive myriad of lights and club-tech added to with LED tiles, strips and so on. DMX was the topic of the day, and with vvvv it was trivial to hack the whole rig, and thanks to Art-Net’s IP implementation of DMX, we were even doing it over WiFi. This was really a watershed moment for me as a VJ, as while I’ve been working towards making bespoke tour-vj boxes to be handed over to the lighting crew, and thinking about ways to break beyond the tyranny of the screen, whether 4×3 or not, this really broke the whole field open for me: watch out lampies, just as you’re getting video servers, we’re coming with co-ordinated light shows from our laptops designed as one with our video-visualism!

Node08 also had a very impressively curated day of lectures centred around the intersection of tools and art. There was something in there for everyone, but I especially enjoyed Paul Prudence putting his money where his mouth was by incorporating a small performance in his presentation on audio-visual feedback systems, and likewise seeing the super-cool architect / sculptors / mad-scripters theverymany demonstrate live their process of creating physical forms through experimental computation. And it would be rude not to mention the wonderful wild-card in the form of Regine from we-make-money-not-art talking about bio-tech art, whose cultural and ethical questioning in my opinion puts 99% of media art to shame.

Watershed Moment #2 - Mapping visualism to any space: Problem solved. The virtual architecture workshop again suffered from a lack of preparation and a lack of presenter / teacherly nous, but if you’ve ever wanted to break out of the paradigm of a big-tv on stage, this workshop was for you: not musing on what was possible, but just diving straight in with realtime, scalable, 60fps demonstrations on how you can map anything onto anything with vvvv, a 3D model of the architectural space and a bunch of projectors. We’re not talking flat facades here, but whatever curving sinuous spaces you want, and onto those surfaces mapping 2D media or animating realtime 3D through the space. Into this media/architecture/spatial simulation, you just bring up as many vvvv projector modules as you have projectors, type in their specs, and spread them around until you have the best coverage. And bam! wherever you point your virtual projector, out comes a renderer to supply your real projector with the exact imagery required to recreate the virtual in the real. They’ve even got shaders that compute in realtime which projector will give the best mapping for every surface. Unreal. Seeing this has brought forward a project many a project I’ve been wondering just how to achieve: “its possible but” has just changed to “c’mon lets go!”.

Having to leave half-way through to make my way to Geneva for Mapping, I didn’t finish my Arduino workshop, see the club-night and its multi-screen generative glories, and so on, but perhaps beyond such flashy stuff the most enjoyable thing of the festival for me was the three informal pecha kucha / patcher culture evenings. Node08 was a festival where the attendees were invariably just as interesting and represented important bodies of work as those formally invited to present, and so these show-and-tell sessions really were inspirational, diverse and fascinating. Yep, they made the festival. That, and having cake available on the reception desk as you walked in.

• NODE08: http://node08.vvvv.org/
• Photos: http://www.flickr.com/groups/node08/
• vvvv software: http://www.vvvv.org/

diary | 22 apr 2008 | tagged: vj · writing

Late at Tate: The AV Social; 4th April

As if a send-off for the vj pilgrimage, the night before leaving for Node08 saw an outstanding vj-related event in London, something surprisingly rare. The ‘AV Social’ took over the ‘Late at Tate’ evening and transformed itself from so-so bar effort to a near seamless extension of a bastion of the British art establishment. Integrated into the architecture of the Tate Britain’s empire-era halls and plethora of artworks were a number of semi-live installations and a dj/vj-esque performance space, all of which felt right in the space and none of which dropped the ball, quite a feat given their acclaimed and classical neighbours. Downstairs in a more utilitarian reception/bar space were the Narrative Lab screenings. While its a shame that the set-up felt somewhat jerry-rigged there, the curation was really impressive resulting in perhaps one of the most important bodies of vj-work I’ve yet seen put together. I have to admit a bias in having been involved with the Narrative Lab project, and having my big live cinema project represented as one of the works, but if phrased as of the collision of vj practice with ideas beyond aesthetics, I’ll stick to my assertion: it really was that good, and we need such things to document the scene, to etch an otherwise impermanent practice in history.

• The Av Social: Late at Tate - http://www.ne1co.info/avsocial_eflyer
• Decollage.tv’s photos - http://www.decollage.tv/blog/?p=298
• Narrative Lab screening - http://www.labmeta.net/wordpress/?p=48

diary | 22 apr 2008 | tagged: vj · writing

i’d like to pretend it was gonzo journalism to the fore, but i think subjective is probably as far as i could get down that road. and so it was that 2,500 words of mine ended up on create digital motion, the best vj related source i see at the moment.

“its been an opportune few weeks for visualists in europe, with a spread of three festivals all with their own take on the field. here’s a quick tour through the eyes and itinerary of one *spark.”

and so now i’m an official contributor there, and back here are those words, festival by festival. read on…

diary | 22 apr 2008 | tagged: vj

never one to stay still, my travel really has gone overboard this past year. so with environmental guilt, a hatred of airports, and commercial gains, i booked my itinerary to node08 (london - frankfurt), mapping (frankfurt - geneva) and back (geneva - london) entirely on trains. it felt good doing so; the actual travel was a pleasure; yes it cost more, but not actually that much more^[1].

the only complaint? the new german ice may be snazzy and fast (four hours paris-frankfurt), but there’s no such thing as a power plug in second class, so its reading books rather than working on laptops. come on, we’ve even got wifi on the london-newcastle route!

diary | 05 apr 2008 | tagged: vj · adventures

absolutely not what you want to see: your computer kernel panic during a live repartition of your drive. oh dear. that’ll be a multipass zero erase and restore from backups then. which would have been fine, if my eurostar hadn’t been leaving in a few hours for a week+ abroad where i would need my laptop in windows for vvvv at node08 and osx for on the road generally at node and mapping.

got to love the irony of my mac dying while preparing to put windows on it… as if it were windows, but no it was osx/hardware at fault.

diary | 04 apr 2008 | tagged: errata of life · mac · vj

i feel the screening programme made by paul and lara is a really important review of works to have come out of the “vj” scene, or rather the collision of vj practice with ideas beyond wallpaper. i’m also proud to be part of that, with rbn_esc and a hand in the story collector, but more so that such a programme has been assembled for posterity. bravo!

• the page on the nlab site is http://www.labmeta.net/wordpress/?p=48
• a copy and paste follows

A specially curated screening and presentation by the Narrative Lab, inviting the Editors of the VJTheory book to show and tell some experimental works alongside screened material from artists all over Europe including Solu, Visual Kitchen, Girrafentoast, Ben Sheppee, Visualnaut, Oxygen, ZooZooZoo, Spark and Lucidhouse.
The Narrative Lab is a creative network and group of friends, who love to VJ and make moving images. Our work, and the work we love, use narrative techniques to enrich our work and bring emotion and potency to it. We don’t think VJing should be like film, rather we see other VJs and AV performers using narrative structures and devices in creative and unusual ways, and we want to showcase a cross-section of performers using narrative to create a language of VJing, and to engage the audience in alternative ways.We have selected a screening programme which will run as follows. Information on the artists, where given, is included below.
The Narrative Lab - Screening Programme - Av Social - Late at Tate
April 4th 2008 - Tate Britain - 6.30 - 9.30
Marginalia 2
Dur: 10.00
Embolex (2007)
Marginalia 2 is an audiovisual remix of footage from the films Bang Bang, by Andréa Tonacci, and A Mulher de Todos, by Rogério Sganzerla, creating a dialog between two characters that were originally in different films. Spliced into these are new scenes inspired by the films, which reinforce this dialog according to the interpretation that unfolds in the live remake. The soundtrack was produced using selections from the original films and their respective remakes in a way that blurs the boundaries between soundtrack and dialogs. Ideas of low-tech are also explored through effects and textures produced with diverse non-digital processing techniques. Marginalia 2 explores the possibilities for re-contextualizing by applying original and non-original samples to recreate a story/dream of visual and sound textures.
Space-Travel
Dur: 1.15
Dr Mo (2008)
www.morishuz.com
During his performance, Dr Mo mixes video generated by a novel stop-motion technique he terms ‘space-lapse.’ This type of photography continually changes camera viewpoints to produce breathtaking perspective shifts. Material for this sequence has been shot around the world and reflects Dr Mo’s interest in architecture and photography. His shadow weaves through the narrative reflecting traces of the protagonist. This is the story of a traveller - finding that which is constant in a continually changing environment.
Brilliant City
Dur: 13.43
D-Fuse (2007)
www.dfuse.com
Produced during a stay in Shanghai with the British Council Artist Links program, Brilliant City was made with Axel Stockburger and the musician Matthias Kispert. The title refers to the location, a residential complex comprised of 25 high rises in the northern part of Shanghai, China. It is entirely shot from the 34th floor of one of the buildings and stages a peeping tom view of the city below, capturing everyday activities that can be observed from this vantage point, such as training soldiers, building activity, traffic, gardening. The camera hovers above the entire panorama and focuses on details in the everyday life of this rapidly changing metropolis.
Jack’s Back (Get Carter Redux)
Dur: 9.51
Addictive TV (2007)
www.addictive.com
Addictive TV are known for their audio-visual remixes and dynamic live shows. They’ve been twice voted #1 VJs in DJ Mag’s annual poll. The Addicitive TV duo were commissioned by The Northern Lights Film Festival and Arts Council of England to remix cult 1970’s movie Get Carter, one of the most celebrated British gangster films. Jack’s Back defies cinematic convention by applying audio-visual sampling techniques, creating a new breakbeat driven cinematic syntax.
Fire Organ
Dur: 6.37
Lucidhouse (2008)
www.lucidhouse.com
Morris La Mantia, aka Lucidhouse in one of Brightons most prolific VJs working with imagery that is always infused with a sense of narrative. In this short mix Morris took a spontaneous, dirty approach making 4 live recordings and then remixing the entire sequence to create a piece with a frenetic life of it’s own: a split up, multi threaded, abstract narrative with an angry, choppy rhythm, that induces a bit of discomfort.
Mixmasters Submission
Dur: 10.00
Girraffentoast (2005)
www.giraffentoast.de
Thumbnail Express
Dur: 6.12
Light Surgeons(2006)
www.lightsurgeons.com
The Light Surgeons debut documentary short film commissioned by onedotzero festival in 2000, the first chapter of “Gilligan’s Travels”, a series of experiemntal short films based around an interview with the Venice Beach street philosopher Robert Alan Weiser and his travels across America. This landmark project combines Super 8 and DV footage with motion graphics and has been screened as part of the onedotzero festival internationally. While Thumbnail Express is an old piece of work in our view it one of the most seminal pieces of narrative in live audiovisual performance to date, staking a position in this programme.
V.E.R.A. / TELEFON
Dur: 8.55
Secret Films (2007)
www.secretfilms.co.uk
Two separate video tracks edited and produced by Secret Films are remixed here ‘back to back’ for this special Narrative Lab screening. Together they form a study in both telephonic and televisual
hypnotism. “The woods are lovely, dark and deep but I have promises still to keep. I have miles to go before I sleep”
In Telefon a mass-hypnotism appears to take place via the telephone. Visual and audio phenomena act as forms of mind control. The riddle enunciated by a voice from afar acts as a potent trigger on those listening to it. It’s recipients seem under threat as something terrible is transmitted as if by a spell. Opening out to a void, the message becomes an undoing of the pleasure principle as the mesmeric voice evokes the links between sleep and death. In VERA there are further intimations of brainwashing and social control. Sound becomes the master of everything ..controlling perceptions of space, time and possibility. Man is mastered and
defined by his own technology in a succession of loops and fatal repetitions.
These themes are often explored by Secret Films in the format of a live AV show, usually ( as here ) through the use of appropriated film and sound. “Are you listening?”
Urban Nature
Dur: 10.06
Video: Olga Mink / Music: Michel Banabila & Eric Vloeimans (2006)
www.videology.nu
Urban Nature is an atmospheric audio-visual collage accomplished by visually dramatic movements and atmospheric sounds. Urban Nature observes public behavior in a post-modern urban environment. The individual almost becomes non-existent, whilst surveillance is part of a new social infrastructure. A ’sophistication of modern living’ becomes almost apparent, by use of images that appear as frozen moments over time.
Synken
Dur: 10:00
Video: Transforma / Music: O.S.T. (2007) Producers: Visual Kitchen
http://www.synken.com/
With a mix of abstract images, graphic animation, digital image effects and complex film sequences, Synken creates a fantastically spaced out, darkly romantic image-world. Forests filled with distorted organic forms are contrasted against an architectural abyss, as strange and fantastic characters try to make sense of their surroundings. A mysterious vagabond works as a medium between these parallel worlds, transporting artefacts that become recurring symbols in the dual system and means of communication between the creatures which inhabit them. As sound and image merge and fall apart again over time, they form a synergy that opens up subtle leads which can never be read only as linear. As plot fragments refract and reoccur, Synken continuously confronts the viewer with a modular narrative that can be potentially combined to create any number of interpretations.
RBN ESC
Dur: 5.00
Spark Audio Visual (2006)
www.sparkav.co.uk
*spark is an audio-visual producer and performer, the alter-ego of Toby Harris. Spanning art, design and engineering, Toby is interested in anything that uses media to make people interact or think in unexpected ways.
‘rbn_esc’ is a project fusing cinema and live experimental visuals. presenting a series of character scenarios, it invites the audience to construct a narrative around the key theme ‘urban escape’. 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 an example of what ‘live cinema’ can be, and presented here is a five minute sampler.
Autometa
Dur: 8:50
Labmeta / Paul Mumford (2007)
www.labmeta.net
Paul Mumford is a director and designer currently working through the fields of VJing, motion graphics, animation and special effects across a range of music promos, live audio visual performances, short films and commercials with various London based companies. At the heart of his work though is a love for stories, people and dreams, something that has driven his research and personal work; manifesting itself as intricate, sensitive and contemporary motion graphics for live audiences and audio visual lovers. Building on early works and collaborations with the Narrative Lab, Paul’s intentions were always to continue building graphic narrative films. This is the first of his solo attempts to create a feature length audiovisual performance. Autometa is the story of a corporation, one that we see running a sinister machine, that operates upon the people of the city, taking their dreams and hopes, harvesting them and selling them around the world in a global economy. In a politically unstable landscape what happens when the public uprise? The world of Autometa erupts, forcing a world of the hybrids and dreamy constructions to collide and recombine in impossible ways.
KAAMOS
Dur: 5:25
Video: Solu / Audio: Circle: Jäljet (Traces), Kontackto : Mustikkaa Silmissä (Blueberries in the Eyes)
Mika Vainio : Kotiin (On the Way to Home) (2008)
www.solu.org
A journey into the heart of darkness. Kaamos is a Finnish term for the darkest period of the year in the north, when the light turns into shades of grey and sun is a rare visitor. Two women travel to a spring in the middle of the forest. This spring is known for its magical healing powers, that can cure from blindness. On their return it becomes obvious that the way back home is not what it used to be.
Insects
Dur: 3.43
Ben Sheppee (2007)
www.lightrhythmvisuals.com/sheppee
A tightly synchronized text based work based on ideas of modesty and genuiness. This hip hop electrock sound palette produced by “Back Ted n’ Ted” provides a rich audioscape for the evolving 3d graphic narrative executed by Tokyo based Ben Sheppee. A premiere screening for the UK - set for release on Lightrhythm Visuals label – Notations 02 - Autumn 2008.
1+1=3
Dur: 6:49
Rafael (2008)
www.leafar.be
In our view Rafael is one of the european stars of narrative performance, always witty, challenging, senstive and engaging in a way unlike anyone else we’ve ever come across. This is an extract from his latest audiovisual project that takes the form of an audiovisual puzzle. What more can we say apart make sure you see this.
Latitude
Dur: 3.43
D-Fuse (2007)
www.dfuse.com
Latitude [31°10N/121°28E] follows the emotive qualities of the space that surrounds us. Fragments of conversations, crowds, journeys, lights, deserted spaces, architectural contrasts are reconstructed to form a unique live performance that traces the multitude of paths, identities, encounters and influences that constitute everyday life in the city.
Les Projections Aléatoires
Dur:3:43
Stéphane Abboud - Le projectionniste (2003)
Les Projections Aléatoires (”the chance screenings”) are multi screen projection works made with several projectors (super 8 and 16mm). The movie combinations are realised live with found footage (family movies) and also original movies. Over the period of many years Stéphane Abboud has performed them with sound performers Plimplim and Philippe Fernandez.
The Story Collector
Dur: 15.02
Narrative Lab (2006)
www.nlab.org.uk
The Story Collector is the project that originally brought together the Narrative lab group. The performance shows Blake, an urban city dweller whose alienation with his surroundings prompts him to start collecting stories. VJ-ed graphic overlays help to build and explore the new world Blake creates as he layers multi-sensory information over the gritty cityscapes that are his home. In the performance jigsaw pieces demand narrative interpretation, activate memory, search the mental database and compare structures to give rise to a periodically shifting map of shared cultural meaning. Follow his character’s growth through the development of a magical second sight through which all the events in his life become connected.
True Fictions - Organised Lies
Dur: 15.02
Light Surgeons 2006
www.lightsurgeons.com
The result of a year long digital performance art project produced and directed by Christopher Thomas Allen and commissioned by EMPAC, The Experimental Media and Performing Arts Centre in Troy, New York. The final piece was completed and presented in September 2007 and has begun touring to festivals internationally.
It is an audio visual spectacle fuses documentary film making, music, animation and motion graphics with cutting edge digital performance tools. A stunning collage of music and narrative film making which explores the themes of truth and myth through a multitude of American and Native American voices; with a original musical score created through the collaborations of 25 New York based musicians and vocal artists.

diary | 04 apr 2008 | tagged: *spark · narrative lab · vj · rbn_esc · live cinema

an outstanding vj-related event in london, something surprisingly rare. for one evening the av-social transformed itself from so-so bar effort to a near seamless extension of a bastion of the british art establishment.
integrated into the architecture of the tate britain’s empire-era halls were a number of semi-live installations, all of which felt right in the space and of which blackout arts really hit the jackpot - although in the true nature of installations, you really had to be there to appreciate the transformation of dust and so on into graceful plays of light and shadow.
downstairs was the impressively curated narrative lab screenings, not such a nice space and with a fastfold somewhat jerry-rigged, but a really important body of work shown in my opinion. of course i’m biased, as a rbn_esc sampler formed part of it, but hey: i was in the tate!
for photos, the best i’ve seen so far are at decollage.tv’s blog post

diary | 04 apr 2008 | tagged: vj

me and sean aka jean poole have only been kicking about an interview since, oh, july, some eight months ago. but as of this morning, its online in full form of 2k words and was printed in australia’s 3d mag around christmas.

behold: http://www.skynoise.net/2008/03/13/sparkin-it-up/

diary | 13 mar 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj

always a pleasant surprise when you wake up the next morning and a photo from the (late) night before actually did capture the moment…

diary | 13 mar 2008 | tagged: vj · photo

been dragged into facebook to get a peek at the photos, digital politics aside, it’s certainly good when you see the festival director write “this was such an amazing event!”. huzzah!

diary | 11 mar 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · kinetxt · name · novak · live cinema · live illustration

meanwhile in newcastle, it was the kinetxt evening. and according to the photo and text message i got, it all went really well. huzzah, what a relief: definitely an experimental project, and one with a fair amount of risk given the experimental technology and audience participation. can’t wait to hear more and see some real footage…

diary | 05 mar 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · kinetxt · name · novak

…and what a difference a nice view from your hotel makes. so refreshing. even if for these first few days it is in a different city to where you’re working.

diary | 05 mar 2008 | tagged: vj

back again at the salon d’auto, and what a difference a year makes. smooth setup, new content, all good. even when walking straight in off the plane, having had a gig in newcastle the night before… eek!

diary | 02 mar 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · ford vj · imagination

a kinetxt self-portrait, with the isight camera on me rather than our bullet cam on graffiti writers. more importantly, this is my contribution to the kinetxt event working, the interactive text messaging display ready to hand over to novak for tuesday’s installation / performance. huzzah!

diary | 01 mar 2008 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · kinetxt

atau on the geiger counter, others on other… as per the original, there were 64 sources in the piece so they were never short of something to fiddle with. the event was sold out, and almost a victim of its own success, with people crowding the tables so the optical sensors were often swamped by shadow, and perhaps people didn’t move around as much as they should… the effect was was one to savour, hearing the shifting balance between the amplified and effected sources against the smorgasbord of stuff, whizzing and whirring away.

diary | 29 feb 2008 | tagged: vj

genius bit of visual design, and some sub-bass with it. variations vii was set in the round, tables full of stuff, with these two horns in the middle. and atau on the left, one of the four performers and digital media professor new to newcastle and the culture lab. interesting person, interesting operation…

diary | 29 feb 2008 | tagged: vj

nice touch in the evening’s main attraction: a performance (staging?) of john cage’s variations vii, complete with appropriate fodder for the shredder.

diary | 29 feb 2008 | tagged: vj