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tagged: vj

la » lava at mandrake

fun night drinking old fashioneds at los angeles video artists monthly night at mandrake. good to see scrims going up and singers bathed in projection light.

diary | 26 apr 2011 | tagged: vj

la » latitude

straight from the rhythms and visions workshop to “levi’s film workshop” for a performance of latitude. the place is a bit like santa’s grotto for visualists, all sorts of equipment there to be borrowed and used. its also in the same building as moca’s street art exhibition, an embarassment of riches with some standout shephard fairey pieces (yes, its his constructivism cliché, but the textural qualities of the physical pieces was amazing/).

diary | 23 apr 2011 | tagged: dfuse · vj · live cinema

la » d-fuse workshop

as part of the rhythms and visions event, a day of workshops was organised. los angeles visual artists - lava had the morning, and covered the past and present of ‘visual music’ works. mike, matthias and i had the afternoon, which we nailed the four hours precisely with a tour through the d-fuse oeuvre and a journey through our particle production process. the latter was my main contribution, and its a tricky balance to give: lots of really cool stuff – shooting, taking crops, building abstracting effects – but with what can reduce down to a sea of noodles and buttons. pretty happy though, good feedback that the thread was there and it all tied up: people got it.

diary | 23 apr 2011 | tagged: teaching · talk · video-out · vdmx · quartz composer · dfuse · vj

la » endless cities

first d-fuse performance: a new cut of endless cities with live score from matthias and guest brian lebarton. me and mike have to stay on stage even though its press play on the visual side, so i spend 45 minutes in front of my laptop trying to not look idle while not touching it for fear of disturbing the playback.

update: footage of matthias interviewed on the radio is upload on youtube

diary | 22 apr 2011 | tagged: dfuse · vj

la » particle

endless cities over, the scrim is dropped and its time for particle. the last performance of particle – cynetart – had the sense of finally getting to a definitive, rounded piece. this, then, with the new season upon us should have been the start of particle phase two, starting with much upped audio-visual linkage and a higher-res two-up 16:9 format. the world has a way of conspiring sometimes, and instead for me it was one step forward and three back as the challenges of the format re-working and no time outside this trip ate any creative or rehearsal time just to get a functioning show. which isn’t to say that it still wasn’t quite an experience for the audience. as the photo shows, it was not the average film school evening!

diary | 22 apr 2011 | tagged: dfuse · vj · particle · live cinema

la » scott pagano

up before us: scott pagano with musicians brian king, trifonic, brian lebarton and mb gordy. with amazing works such as parks on fire to draw on, i was really looking forward to seeing scott play. it was a real smooth show. it was also one in which the vj wasn’t stuck behind a laptop screen: in the photo its not scott behind the laptop, he’s to the left, free to move around controlling the visuals with iPad in hand. the render muscle – which doesn’t skip a frame – is a tower under the table. rekindles my desire to build a hackintosh again: a black box of mac pro class power in a form i can bring on the plane.

update: some footage of the performance is up via brian king

diary | 22 apr 2011 | tagged: vj

la » rhythms + visions

onto the reason behind the trip: d-fuse are to headline the rhythms and visions: expanded and live event put on as part of the visions and voices initiative at the university of south california. arriving there, i do like seeing that magic photo printed up nicely and put around.

the tech check turns surreal as the campus is invaded by frat house types in swimming gear attempting to dip in all the fountains… except that the cinematic arts one is barricaded off as we set up around it. cue scenes of zombies at the gates.

diary | 21 apr 2011 | tagged: dfuse · vj

la » filming ii

and those wind turbines were placed there for a reason: keeping the tripods still wasn’t trivial.

diary | 20 apr 2011 | tagged: video-in · dfuse · vj

la » filming

to los angeles in d-fuse mode: what wasn’t prep for three shows, a workshop and a seminar was filming for the ongoing endless cities shot bank.

here we are outside LA nearing palm springs, wind turbines and freeway, and rail track just out of this shot seeming to also be transporting mile-long trains of new cars. the turbines, somewhat ironically, power las vegas. might be a cut too far for endless cities, but couldn’t help linking seeing pensioners acting out their retirement program, trundling around on golf carts in courses terraformed out of the desert with thoughts of america’s by-gone obsession with space… infinite expansion and resources on the new, intergalactic frontier.

diary | 20 apr 2011 | tagged: dfuse · vj · adventures

ctm.11 » cinechamber

in town for the ‘what is live’ symposium, and there’s also a 10 screen surround audio-visual environment round the corner? bring it on.

the rml cinechamber is a fantastic thing. yes they have technically assembled such a thing, but what excites me is their focus on content for such an environment and hosting artist residencies to develop that content in-situ.

signal’s live show – pictured – was compromised to the extent they held a free gig at the close of the festival with the visuals resolved, even so the simple effect of the spectrum analyser stretching far around you was eye-opening. the monolake show justified the ticket and then some. while not my aesthetic taste per se, it had moments of arresting majesty, whereaudio-visual sync combined with some immersive twist and you really weren’t sure where you were any more.

cinechamber is a long term project remade for 2011 and (re-)debuting at club transmediale, and so the hope is to catch it again: the overriding thought i kept having was that there finally is the true environment to actually experience the 11,000x1080px ‘dot from the void’ motion graphic piece d-fuse produced a summer or two back.

diary | 03 feb 2011 | tagged: video-out · vj

vjing research panel » live in live cinema

and onto me

In the 1970’s cinema was expanded; in the 1990’s it met ‘new media’ as soft cinema. In 2010 the technological landscape is ripe to combine these, siting cinema in a live performance context. As such a body of work is built, called ‘live cinema’ by its practitioners and curators, it is worth taking a step back and asking just what the value of the live in live cinema could be?
To examine this closely, we first need to address what live cinema could be, and what current practice is.
To address what live cinema could be, we will extrapolate from the aforemen- tioned expanded cinema as characterised by Gene Youngblood, and soft cinema as characterised by Lev Manovich. We will consider a ‘cinema of the imagination’ as practised by oral storytellers, and hear of directors such as Peter Greenaway and Mike Figgis who have experimented with live perfor- mance as well as enjoying Hollywood success.
The current practice of live cinema will be presented through an experimental documentary offering a novel approach to representing this overtly ‘broken out of a pre-determined, linear, framed practice’ in pre-determined, linear and framed video.
In summarising the characteristics that could make cinema live, we will con- clude that an analysis purely of production and medium does not provide suf- ficient differentiation from previous forms of cinema to justify any claim of live cinema to offering what could not be offered before. We shall instead turn to studies of other kinds of live performance and focus on the human interaction and ideas of audience. By identifying some unique qualities of storytelling, we shall arrive at a conclusion of what could truly make live cinema an art form with unique, compelling qualities: where core to the experience is that as well as a story is told, the story world is explored as a group experience.

full presentation: http://vimeo.com/17485334

photo by blanca: http://www.flickr.com/photos/whiteemotion/5189942616

diary | 18 nov 2010 | tagged: research · vj · live in live cinema · talk · live cinema

vjing research panel » party to fine art

always going to be slightly strange to hear a cultural researcher talk about a subject you’ve wound your life up in, as did dominik hasler in “party as art? antivj and the migration of vjing into the sphere of fine arts”. even stranger when the focus is on a project you’ve known since its inception and people you count as good friends: joanie and (his) antivj (label). looking back, joanie’s proto-mapping at avit>c23 precedes this blog, it was december 2006.

The paper considers the European visual label AntiVJ as an extraordinary case of the widespread practice of VJing. The example shows how VJing does not only connect music and the moving image but also the two sepa- rate worlds of the dance floor and the white cube. The recent orientation of art museums to performances and events as well as the growing interest in public art offer alternatives to the club for ambitioned visual artists such as AntiVJ.
My presentation concentrates on the way AntiVJ relates to classical themes from the history of fine arts. After tracing the history of AntiVJ’s visual vocabu- lary back to constructivist visuals I will discuss the way the group joins the modernist tradition of problematising the picture’s surface. Other important features of AntiVJ’s work are its remarkable spatial and sculptural qualities that result from a thorough reflection on the use of perspective. Before con- cluding, the paper takes up a development by which, from the Dadaist move- ment on to Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable, party has become a possible medium for fine arts. It addresses the question to which extent the art of VJing includes aspects beyond the screen.

full presentation: http://vimeo.com/17192497

photo by blanca: http://www.flickr.com/photos/whiteemotion/5189310465/in/photostream/

diary | 18 nov 2010 | tagged: vj

vjing research panel » documenting the ephemeral

the lovely ana carvalho - of http://vjtheory.net and abertura, amongst other things - gave a talk around her phd research, called “on the ephemeral in AV realtime practices: an analysis into the possibilities for its documentation”

The performative moment is a unique narrative, defined as a gathering of multiple elements of varied origins, a point in time, which is no longer past, neither is future yet, which stands between biography and fiction. We will at- tempt to approach the performative moment within the context of audiovisual practice and the philosophy of process. We narrow down our subject of study to collective practice, consisting of two basic components: audio and video.
The uniqueness of an audiovisual realtime performance is the point of de- parture from where to elaborate on the subject of documentation. This point where we stand is a location of questioning. Defined by its uniqueness, the moment is an artistic, collective, momentary manifestation; its documenta- tion does not replace it. What is, in this context, the document? Which criteria should describe this documentation?
We put forward the possibility that audio and visual data are source material only capable of constituting meaning through the momentary construction of narrative. The relationship between moment and construction of memory is in documentation. Photographs, souvenirs and memorabilia are examples of objects that help the construction of social memory. Objects constitute ways to extend our thoughts (individually and collectively) in the attempt to expand memory in time. Parallel to the institutionalized frame of the museum, we propose the collective to create its own ways to document activities, using the practice ́s tools and knowledge, in order to leave traces that will allow future memory construction.

full presentation: http://vimeo.com/17192234

photo by blanca: http://www.flickr.com/photos/whiteemotion/5189891874/

diary | 18 nov 2010 | tagged: vj

cynetart » particle

live audio-visual projects are hard to take a measure of. its something that only exists in the moment, but in that moment you, as the performer, are as far removed from a position to judge the work as possible: you’re not in the audience experiencing the whole effect, but on-stage in the middle of those screens locked in a specific mindset… if you’re lucky you get to look up from the laptop screen to the monitors, which themselves are no real representation of the final projected whole.

so its all very subjective. the first gig of particle was a triumph - or felt that way - and i think that was a combination of the release of something that you’ve worked on turning out good as it came into being for the first time properly, along with some more-than-we-realised luck with the staging, and a lot of simply mentally editing out the bad bits. at least here i can qualify it somewhat with comments on the [quick edit i made] from our recording of the gig, pretty much all of which are great.

since then, lots of ups and downs; starting to concentrate on the weaker sections, lots of juggling the content around, spending too much time trying to get the midi-sync working (particle is jinxed there, i know not why), and finding out that the particular geometry of stage, auditorium, projector and screen is much more critical and subtle than at first it seemed.

so it was really good to finally have a performance where it felt like we’d really smashed it, a true high. the above image are frames from a ten second excerpt from our recording that in itself forms such a satisfying loop. we don’t have a full recording, but we certainly have the footage to make a proper promo edit with that as the base. huzzah.

comedy bonus: there’s a video podcast from the festival with us in it. the footage is a rum selection, but yes, it really happened.

diary | 16 nov 2010 | tagged: dfuse · vj · particle · live cinema

cynetart » impeccable production

straight on the heels of the ‘holotronica’ onedotzero d-fuse performance, to dresden for ‘cynetart: international festival of computer based arts’. after the experiment of holotronica - more diversion and distraction in the end - this was the return to the real thing, and the chance to up its game with a refined set of footage.

the festspielhaus turns out to be an immense room, but moreso their technical production turns out to be impeccable. setting the staging for performances like particle is always tricky as the immersive effect we are after for the audience is so dependent of the geometry of the space, and at cynetart it all came together. the projection onto the front screens was able to fill the front screen fully while bathing the whole seating area in the spill-through projection, yet without the audience being blinded by that projection’s source, looking down the lens. rigged for a ‘trip’, rather than as cinema.

check the attachment too, the whole space was quite special, not to mention cycloid-e behind us.

diary | 16 nov 2010 | tagged: particle · dfuse · vj · cynetart · video-out | downloads: dfuse-cynetart-setup.jpg

onedotzero » holotronica particle

having been well received at the ‘holotronica’ screenings at kinetica art fair, d-fuse were invited back to perform live as part of onedotzero’s london festival on the musion setup there.

as the musion setup is a transparent (pepper’s ghost screen in front of a ruffled curtain to set a depth cue for the audience, and the d-fuse piece ‘particle’ we were to perform is an explicitly multi-layered projection, we needed to replace the rear curtain with a screen. at kinetica, the effect wasn’t what we hoped for, so we went to musion’s vair old-money hq in the week beforehand to experiment. after testing some combinations of screens and projector placement, the real breakthrough was just how transformative a performer’s presence was between the screens. having a body on stage, even if stuck behind a laptop, transformed the imagery from something easily flattened into a composite to something that had depth and mystery as the straight lines typically projecting across the stage to screens behind would wrap around the organic form, dipping in and out of the void. that was partly to be expected, but i think there was something also more subtle where it grounded the scale of the piece, adding back something that was subtly set by the texture of the curtain in a straight musion setup.

of course, we arrived at the bfi and were shown to our performance space… front of house. it was a compromised gig in many ways, testing out a dual 1024x768 setup and content redux instead of our well developed triple 640x480 setup and media bank, but that really killed it for me. c’est la vie.

there was some consolation in that we had a top-spec mac pro waiting to be returned off the back of a commercial project, and so i got to test how particle runs on a machine that isn’t my four year old laptop. you can guess the answer, mmm! first, however, to get the solid-state drive in there… courtesy of a lollipop stick, some tape, which wasn’t much short of a wing and a prayer. and with the lack of a musion hq test shot or crowd-sourced photo of the gig, thats what sets this entry.

diary | 13 nov 2010 | tagged: vj · dfuse · onedotzero

DFD [d-fuse/dynamic]

there is now a mac pro in china running DFD, something that has been consuming my time for a while now. the roadshow d-fuse have been developing is our first big foray into automated dynamic content, lighting and audience interaction, and so without us being there for every gig holding it down with a hacked-up vj setup we needed something that you could just power on and the show would start. and so d-fuse/dynamic was hatched, a quicktime and quartz composer sequencer which reads in presets and its input/output functionality from a folder we can remotely update, and essentially just presents a “next” button to the on-site crew.

what i think is particularly novel about DFD is it was designed to output a consistent framerate, rendering slightly ahead of time so the fluctuations in QC and QT frame rendering are buffered out. i’m not sure is the effort/reward of this was worth it, but it will be an interesting code base to come back to and re-evaluate.

for the roadshow, it is playing out any number of four sources at 1280x576, including the generative, controlled by iPads in the audience and LED balls on stage, audio-reactive core of the show, sending the central 1024x576 to the main screen, driving 10 LED 72x1px strips from the remaining 576x128px on either side, and sending DMX back out to the stage lighting and LED balls.

big thanks to vade, luma beamerz, and memo for helping me one way or the other grok anti-aliased framebuffer rendering.

having spent much time i didn’t have trying to get 64bit QTX giving me openGL frames at QuickTime 7 efficiencies, life saving thanks also to vade and tom for v002 movie player 2.0, for which there is patch back with them giving it the ability to play the QT audio to a specific output.

lastly, a perennial thanks to kineme, couldn’t have gone this direction without knowing their DMX, Axis Camera, and audio patches were out there.

i’m not sure what to do with the code at the moment. it was made as a generic platform, but its current state is still very much tied to that specific project. or rather, the inevitable last minute hacking as it hit china needs to be straightened out. it has been made and funded as a tool for d-fuse to build on, so that needs to be taken into account too. in short, if anybody has a concrete need for such a thing, get in touch and we’ll see what could be done.

diary | 27 oct 2010 | tagged: quartz composer · vj · video-out · code · mac os · dfuse

SPK-LEDBall

happiness is twelve hex bytes, generated by a pocketable custom LED fixture on detecting a bounce, transmitting that via xBee, receiving into the computer via RS232, being parsed correctly, outputting into a QC comp, doing a dance, and commanding back to the fixtures via Artnet via DMX via xBee.

diary | 16 oct 2010 | tagged: quartz composer · vj · code · mac os · i/o · dfuse · embedded

av:in contributor

  • What is AV:in — Introduction To Audiovisual Arts
    Audiovisual Culture is rapidly gaining momentum with new technology and information resources quickly aiding the drive. In 2010 more and more people are seeking and acquiring the skills required for audiovisual production and interactive creation. This global movement is spreading into screens, phones and other commercial applications as well as providing a rich source of culture for digital communities inspiring new trends in design and art.
    AV:in is a new media course for this market. We have designed AV:in as a comprehensive online educational program for audiovisual studies. It follows a trend of regular workshops and lectures and professional training, which have continued to grow in popularity all around the world on the subject of audiovisual production and performance.

…and it has me in it, as d-fuse we filmed a pro-tip section and my live cinema documentary is part of the curriculum.

http://audiovisualacademy.com/

diary | 15 oct 2010 | tagged: *spark · vj · dfuse · live cinema documentary

100 gigs on a system diagram

the iPad-screens interaction isn’t even half of it, though. the project is to be a roadshow travelling through china, a modular setup of stage and staging reaching out into the club. two ‘hero’ videos with dance choreography and interactive props (hello LED balls/), a video feedback piece, a live drawing piece, the backbone of the evening as the iPad interaction and audio-reactive graphics, all feeding out onto the mains screen, duplicated onto any in-house video system each venue might have, with LED sticks extending the video canvas out from the stage and video controlled stage lighting effects.

…it makes for a nice diagram.

diary | 15 oct 2010 | tagged: vj · video-out · i/o · dfuse

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