tagged: vj

find eloi at the most cool ‘la fabrica’, a converted factory now full of dance studios and suchlike, having a beer after documenting his video feedback installation coded with open framworks. its processing for people who want c++ performance.

diary | 11 jun 2007 | tagged: vj · adventures · sónar

in barcelona rendevous with todd thille / synesthete.com and sean of skynoise.net; hire mopeds, head upcountry with the mission to find eloi of telenoika’s country retreat. most importantly, via a maximum of crinkly bits. 2km of curves? bring it on.

diary | 11 jun 2007 | tagged: errata of life · vj · adventures · sónar

here is ‘re-engaging reactive graphics’ from a post or two ago, in its final projected form (or at least, one frame of one of the permutations i delivered). its on tonight too, as part of the south bank’s overture event, the re-opening of the royal festival hall. 10.30

diary | 09 jun 2007 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · photo · light surgeons

here is a prototype/demonstration of using your own image kernel in vdmx. rather than being an effect, this is an A/B mixer that means you can use vdmx in the ‘old skool’ way, by mixing together two video streams rather than rendering the whole stack of layers. it also has controls like a DJ scratch mixer, so as well as a crossfader, you’ve got a fader for each channel, and a fader curve control.

to use, make a layer or group for the A channel and another for the B channel, and a layer at the top of the stack for your output. trigger the qc patch in the output layer, and assign the A and B layers/groups to its video input drop downs.

if you open the qc patch, you’ll see the video inputs get resized to the output res, as image kernels don’t handle different sized inputs too well, and then all the inputs are fed into an image kernel, ie a little filter written specially for the graphics card. in that there is some basic maths for applying a variable crossfade curve, and a line that adds the two inputs together. take a look, its not so hard; i have far more trouble with doing things like translating the crossfader curves into a mathematical expression than with the code itself.

so take this as a starter for ten if you’re interested. attached below.

i have my own mixer now that does three channel mixing just how i want, and its really cleaned up my vdmx interface^[1] let alone the directness of the processing. sweet.

diary | 08 jun 2007 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · vdmx · release | downloads: spark-DJmixer-v3.qtz

back in the early days of visuals in brum with the most talented stef lewandowski, computers could barely hack video and so the dynamic stuff was a combination of flash and good old mixer twiddling. flash was cool for making loops, at a basic level if you had a few layers, you made them different lengths and they would loop independently pretty much always giving you a new combination with each frame… do that with a pre-rendered loop and it becomes clear you’ve only got a second or two worth of frames pretty immediately. then you could bring in text read on the fly into your graphics and allsorts.

all that pretty much got left behind when i went to the single laptop with the vdmx video based vj setup, quicktime loops or nowt. much richer, much more interesting capabilities for mixing that video, but no dynamic/generative content.

so continuing the theme of the vj platform really delivering on the mac nowadays, with dual-core/decent-gfx-chips and osx/vdmx-in-cocoa, it was nice to have a commission to make a graphic layer for the light surgeon’s contribution to the reopening of the royal festival hall, a commission where keyframing it all would be madness, and new the visual identity of the south bank centre lent itself to a generative machine.

so not quite hello flash again like the days of old, but quartz composer parsing the audio spectrum and turning that into reactive combinations of the sbc’s weave. and given the pain of editing a 4xSD wide canvas from a huge media library, its actually a shame the whole thing couldn’t have been a prototype for the innovative live setups coming into view.

diary | 06 jun 2007 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · light surgeons

saw the bassline circus at paradise gardens, my local park transformed into a free weekend festival by those lovely arts-funding folks at the local council. bassline have got a mini-paradise in certain ways, the big top infiltrated with club-culture-esque tracks and technology. i really enjoyed it, there were magic moments, but it seemed to be kinda stuck between being a circus show as in a sequence of stunts and piece of theatre, and didn’t quite pull of either as well as they need to be. what is really good, though, is that there are people out there actually doing it, and proving that there are environments that can deliver the potential. and hopefully down the line there will be a newer show, where they’ve been able to take a step back and make a show centered around a journey for the audience, rather than an assemblage of the troop’s latest skills. and there are two projects being worked on here that will hopefully see the light of day in a similar space…

diary | 27 may 2007 | tagged: errata of life · vj

today i programmed my first image kernel, another step on the journey of making custom technology to fulfil what i want to do artistically. and this one was with real, low-level code: its basically writing a shader for the graphics card, eek! actually not so hard at all, the code was pretty easy, it was the process of working out the maths required that took time to wrap my head back around.
osx is developing so well for video: you can write your image kernel in the appropriate quartz composer node, load that into a layer in the vj app vdmx, and then find all your kernel inputs natively displayed in the vj interface. so now not only do i have the exact kind of mixing i want processing at maximum efficiency, i’ve simplified my vdmx setup no-end with just one panel with all the controls, instead of a mish-mash of filters and blend modes spread around the different layers.

diary | 24 may 2007 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · vdmx

photo shows the end of kaamos. the night went on to a superbly crafted electronica set from point b accompanied by solu in vj mode; b’s sound took me back to tipper and my fuel records days, really good separation of sound, beautiful bass.

diary | 19 may 2007 | tagged: narrative lab · vj

haunting a/v set from solu, even the waitresses were commenting. twenty minutes into the finnish night, it quietly captivates you and really communicates a feeling you couldn’t literally describe. a must-see.

diary | 19 may 2007 | tagged: narrative lab · vj · live cinema

its not the greatest photo, but it captures a moment i’m sure many vjs have wished for: instead of the vj following the dj, here is the dj consulting his notes we’d all worked out to make the show build and flow as one. huzzah!

diary | 19 may 2007 | tagged: narrative lab · vj

for the nlab remix of people on sunday i made a generative titler, though it didn’t quite work out how i expected as the final patch didn’t want to load in the vj app despite some earlier testing. so vjing for me was largely reduced to changing the section number directly in the qc patch with its output running fullscreen, seen on the preview above. was cool though, seeing the titles drawing together from the bag of words i made from watching the clips: just like you don’t exactly know which way the vjing of the clips is going to go, you don’t know exactly what the titles are going to imply in it…

diary | 19 may 2007 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · narrative lab · vj · live cinema

this saturday, the 19th, we’re hosting another narrative lab night at the roxy bar and screen. they’re nice nights, come down.

Point B [Live] and Solu [VJ] www.point-b.co.uk …… www.solu.org
We are delighted to be bringing together two of our favorite artists for a 1hr 30min live performance delivering the finest blend of electronica that bustles with energy and evocative beats from one of Londons Sharpest electronic muisc producers, Point B and the bissfull, sensitive yet glitched out visual explorations of Solu. This is a performance not to be missed, and will be Solu’s first appearance in London.
Live AV Set - KAMMOS by Solu (20 min)
As an additional special treat this month Solu will also be performing her latest audio visual work titled KAMMOS: An intimate 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. Light is the main protagonist of the performance: flashlight, car light, fluorescent light, the cathode ray light of the tv screen, all function as a consolation service for the “night butterflies” flickering endlessly around a light bulb… All images and audio are from Finland.
Narrative Lab and Matthew Oldham: Live remix of “People on Sunday” by the Siodmak Brothers www.nlab.org.uk
The narrative lab will be presenting a re-cut version of this early German film in collaboration with our resident DJ, Matt Oldham, looking to redramatise its fiction for the live screen. A classic silent movie featuring talent that later went onto direct critically acclaimed movies both in Germany and the US. A summer day in Berlin, 1929 sees Berlin empty as a ghost town everyone flees to the countryside to while away their sunday. In an unchained fashion the camera watches upon all their activities.

diary | 16 may 2007 | tagged: narrative lab · vj

so here i am editing on the latest apple laptop using the latest final cut pro, and yet as the flow of the work goes, it feels just like 2001. editing in fcp2 on my beloved tibook. however, thats not to say the edit is equivalent: this is a motion graphic’d promo piece in sexy hd. amusingly enough, not even my cinema display has enough pixels.

diary | 16 may 2007 | tagged: errata of life · *spark · vj · ford vj

epic all-nighter in nottingham, ably abetted by the amsterdam crew of jilt, the pantoffeldiertjes vjs and v-king. travelling back by train on a bank holiday: not recommended.

diary | 07 may 2007 | tagged: *spark · vj

why does trying to make cool stuff involve half the train journey to the gig writing a shell script to batch treat your 80 graffiti cuts…

diary | 07 may 2007 | tagged: *spark · vj

…struggled out of super-comfy last night hotel bed to the airport, to find the flight delayed by four hours. urrrrrrrrgh. anyway, big props to all involved for a really well run festival with many delights. i had a great week and things have been pushed forward. onwards!

diary | 04 may 2007 | tagged: errata of life · vj · mapping

every participant at the festival gets the in-house software, m8. in a box. proper.

diary | 03 may 2007 | tagged: vj · mapping

cheaper than a laser engraving machine, you can get a machine that will cut paper as if you were just printing something from illustrator. pass t-shirt transfer material through it, and you can make custom t-shirts for everybody. which they did, supercool. and the left-overs make a nice sideline in their club nights too…

diary | 03 may 2007 | tagged: vj · mapping

heroic all-day performance by ilan katin, based around live drawing. magic moments with with kids in the audience shouting out their suggestions and guessing the form taking shape, ilan writing and rubbing out responses… this dragon wasn’t a crocodile, but you had to be there.

diary | 02 may 2007 | tagged: vj · live illustration · mapping

a four hour talk by the man behind the core, yves, although my french doesn’t go that far by a long way. my interest is that they haven’t solved the magic ‘how do we deal with alpha in vj clips’ either, there just isn’t the right codec out there. an open source project for the mac vj world?

diary | 02 may 2007 | tagged: vj · mapping