splice, as a punter, before waking up at the crack of dawn for a weekend of endurance cycling… yikes. wasn’t going to go before seeing eboman, a hero of mine whose audio-visual antics made computers do things that are still on the edge twenty years later.
of course, it’s always dangerous meeting your heroes, but a sense of humour and love for the craft goes a long way it seems: his set was a riot. not my taste, and just a guy and a laptop – no wearble sampling suit! – but so much fun.
diary | 11 may 2018 | tagged: vj · splice festival
some days, it all just works: smooth setup, time to rehearse, packed house, nailed performance. boom. d-fuse at emaf.
diary | 21 apr 2018 | tagged: vj · dfuse · resolume · tekton | downloads: Angela_180421_50.jpg · Kerstin_180421_084.jpg · Kerstin_180421_109.jpg · Kerstin_180421_114.jpg · Kerstin_180421_139.jpg
was part of the live cinema panel, with chris allen, sally golding and lisa brook. chris, sally, and i have talked on this before, but new and outside-of-our-scene is lisa’s live cinema org.
here’s a moment from the talk, as i recall it:
lisa – come to the sheffield doc fest, we’re curating live performances and there’s budget
chris – what! they’ve been turning down live work for years. it’s been maddening.
i mention this as it might mark the point where live cinema pieces (a wide definition per lisa, but including what i’d say and like to see) might start to be commissioned and appear in more mainstream contexts.
diary | 27 may 2017 | tagged: vj · live in live cinema · splice festival · talk · live cinema · *spark
what might the final part of a trilogy be, when the first part was so definitive? is there anywhere else to go?
the answer, of course, is something different, something bonkers. not the mise-en-scene and future-props (neon-tube-guitars, anybody?), but a journey through a warped world. a more conventional setup, but much more mind-warp. nice moment afterwards when franz goes “narrative, yes. who was talking about that the first? you.”
good to see old friends continuing to push it. what they were doing the first time i met them, a decade back, is still something i talk about.
diary | 26 may 2017 | tagged: vj · splice festival · live cinema
the discovery of the festival for me was alba corral, whose generative graphics were captivating and didn’t tire or jar like so many do – i’ve tried a few things, but never crossed an expressive barrier which she has quite wonderfully. it was quite inspiring, and leads me back to ideas of a visualist band, with people passing around live drawing in realtime.
the performance was a pair-up with tim cowie, who is silhouetted on the left. you can just make out alba in the dark on the right.
diary | 26 may 2017 | tagged: vj · splice festival
i wasn’t going to miss the ninja tune tour when i was a student in '98, and the show did not disappoint. scratching audio-visual samples? crazy. and there’s the let us play album, which came with a cd-rom that was a year ahead of me having a computer powerful enough to actually run it.
but, sometimes, it’s hard to escape the past. their latest visual collaborator, matt sharp, had updated everything using oh-so now style transfer techniques. this was perfect: bang-on homage to coldcut’s ethos and actually stylish!
diary | 26 may 2017 | tagged: vj · splice festival
Performed Latitude last night at @splicefestival - great setup, booming bass... https://t.co/SKoMqmnVEM
— toby*spark (@tobyspark) June 5, 2016
— Splice Festival (@splicefestival) June 5, 2016
...and an amazing audience, on home turf to boot. Thanks to fellow @d_fuse M & M, organisers and all who turned up. https://t.co/bHSe53HRIp
— toby*spark (@tobyspark) June 5, 2016
— Splice Festival (@splicefestival) June 5, 2016
Oh! That's me. Pre-gig projector worship? https://t.co/9ghL8sF4xi
— toby*spark (@tobyspark) June 5, 2016
— Splice Festival (@splicefestival) June 5, 2016
diary | 05 jun 2016 | tagged: vj · dfuse · splice festival · live cinema
being asked to revive rbn_esc begged the question: will the software still run, can i even remember how to handle the complexity? it was an amazing milestone back in 2006 going from two laptops linked by midi to running the complete performance off one laptop. but there was a lot to that integration, and my license of ableton live was long expired. i wondered whether there might be a simpler way, now that resolume avenue effectively had ableton’s session view – in which rbn_esc’s basic structure and audio-visual links are laid out – and was built to be an audio-visual software from the ground up.
turns out, resolume does make this possible, and it’s great to perform from just one software. but, i needed to ‘outboard’ quite a lot of functionality. it’s great that’s possible – to the extent i was able to make my own render stack fed by the individual layers in resolume – but not all of it was me being fussy. the audio side has a long way to go: elastic audio, setting bpm from a column trigger, pre-fade / post-fade effect processing.
video: https://vimeo.com/148427383
diary | 10 dec 2015 | tagged: *spark · vj · rbn_esc · resolume · quartz composer
was invited to perform ‘rbn_esc’ at vjlondon’s first big gig: ‘av depot’. to the organiser, it’s a piece that stood out from times past as something deeply audio-visual, considered and executed as one. so it was nice for the invite to be motivated like that, and it was nice – if surreal, somehow – to go through the process of resurrecting the piece, seeing what my former self had been up to, some ten years later.
photo credit: fabrizio d’amico
diary | 05 dec 2015 | tagged: *spark · vj · rbn_esc · live cinema · resolume
friend kate genevieve had been asking about live drawing and going in to space. back from our (interstellar journey)[/diary/2014/09/starshiphackcircus], it was time to resurrect some old code for a live drawing experiment with will scobie at Transmute – Digital experiments for sensory beings. Loved the quote on the flyer: “The night is a tunnel… a hole into tomorrow…”, Frank Herbert, Dune.
Perhaps, perhaps of course, even with a nice dualhead projection setup, what we did was outshone by simple pen, paper and a very long corridor.
diary | 28 sep 2014 | tagged: vj | downloads: TRANSMUTE_flyer.jpg
friend kate genevieve had been asking about live drawing and going in to space. so, we boarded starship hackcircus and (made some art)[http://www.hackcircus.com/blog/2014/9/15/starship-hack-circus-the-elephant-has-landed]. Loved these posters leading you into the hack circus venue.
diary | 14 sep 2014 | tagged: vj
a screenrunner client wanted an animating tiled layout. it’s surprisingly non-trivial to code, at least if you want to go beyond hard-coding a few grid layouts. thankfully, the problem is academically interesting too, and lo! there’s a paper on spatial packing of rectangles, complete with MaxBinRectPack algorithm and c++ implementation. respect to jukka jylänki.
getting this working for me was time worth investing, and i’ve released the results: a quartz composer patch and animation technique. it’s up on github, and is something best seen in action, so check the quick demo video on vimeo.
diary | 18 nov 2013 | tagged: code · mac os · quartz composer · titler · vj
friends who made a cinema camera out of industrial cameras are getting excited about gig-e vision for live video work. as am i.
more on this will come. in the meantime, hospitality at brixton academy was round the corner, had a friend running visuals, and i’d just got our plug-in running at 60fps.
while i’m here, justin has done a fine job with the hospitality staging - the massive ‘h’ fixture is proper class, and the visuals were perfectly designed for a judicious minimum of LED panels.
diary | 27 sep 2013 | tagged: code · mac os · video-in · quartz composer · gev · vj
If you’ve been keeping your finger on the VJ pulse as close as we do, you couldn’t have missed the arrival of the Spark D-Fuser. However, we appreciate the fact that some of you are busy touring or designing wicked content. Or even may actually have a social life. Either way, you could have missed it getting that elusive ‘Buy Now’ button earlier this year.
Or it could be that you’ve seen the button and the hype, but are wondering if it’s really all that it’s cranked up to be. It could be that you want to know more about this mysterious magic box that will solve all your problems, before you part with your hard-earned VJ cash and actually press that ‘Buy Now’ button.
Either way, we’ve had the pleasure of working with that little bad boy on various occasions, as well as seen it in use by quite a few touring VJs. So we figured it was high time to give a first hand experience of what the D-Fuser actually defuses.
it’s a fun and informative review, and who doesn’t like being told they rock.
above the detail and any quibbles, there’s two meta-comments about the mixer that i really appreciate resolume making. the first is that “the *spark d-fuser is a new mixer for a new age”, with the review leading the reader from the act of vjing where the hardware mixer is the central instrument to where we are now: the sophistication and breadth of software is the prime driver, and so everything should be built around that. second, is that the *spark d-fuser is in many ways a hardware equivalent of resolume - it is a carefully designed product with a honed rather than expansive feature set, a product entirely built around the user experience for the user.
Now go press that ‘Buy Now’ button, everyone.
http://resolume.com/blog/review-hands-on-with-the-spark-d-fuser
diary | 12 aug 2013 | tagged: dvi-mixer · vj
a milestone in post-retail *spark d-fuser life - there are compelling new firmware revisions for the controller, and a support website that backs that and more.
notably, i’ve assembled a guide based on people’s experience beyond the getting started video, so now there is an extensive document that details use, what you need to know around mixing with DVI/HDMI/VGA, and what to try if things aren’t working out.
headline features from the controller firmware v25 to v29 are
keying - tweaked keys are now remembered, you can key right-over-left as well as left-over-right, and the menu / user experience is much better.
resolutions - better user experience; fit/fill/1:1 implemented for mismatching sources and output; 24 and 25fps HD modes are listed by default.
network - better implementation of OSC / ArtNet / DMX modes, plus detailed OSC how-to document.
diary | 30 jul 2013 | tagged: dvi-mixer · vj
to manchester for the premiere of manchester international festival ‘film-gig’ commission massive attack vs adam curtis. well worth the train.
thought one: amazing talent behind one show doubled upon with horace andy, liz fraser, and the powerhouse of uva.
thought two: amazing audience numbers, 1,200 people each night for eight nights has to be a live cinema record?
thought three: if you deliver a two hour single screen edit while talking up ‘a new kind of event’ something went wrong
hope to see the piece develop, such potential between curtis threading of story and the multi-screen presentation of archive.
diary | 04 jul 2013 | tagged: vj · live cinema · massive attack
doing a phd is a strange thing, and perhaps most strange is the extremely long reward cycle involved. so it was a joy to give a saturday daytime to the campaign against arms trade: bust in, give your all, and get that good feeling of seeing your work out there and appreciated within the confines of the day. also nice is reading the guardian write-up and knowing the majority of the ideas mentioned bore your fingerprints!
diary | 22 jun 2013 | tagged: vj
leaving the desert sun behind desert sun we’re now deep into the night: ali demirel tripping the light fantastic for richie hawtin’s enter stage at EDC las vegas. photo taken by the perfectly portraited barbara klein.
diary | 22 jun 2013 | tagged: dvi-mixer · vj
happiness is seeing photos like this: prototypes and factories far behind, a d-fuser out in the wild. truly the wilds here, courtesy of sean healey and his audio-visual performance ‘desert engines’. was it almost a year ago he was interviewing me as this whole endeavour was announced, prototype to pre-order?
diary | 16 jun 2013 | tagged: dvi-mixer · vj
prompted by the vidvox feature, a guest tutorial video showing vj use of the d-fuser, complete with a demonstration of how you can link the d-fuser controller with your laptops for better audio-visual integration when performing as a group.
http://vdmx.vidvox.net/tutorials/using-the-spark-d-fuser-with-vdmx-with-toby-harris
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