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Diary…and laboral is full of nice details as well, from the modern sophistication of the cloakroom ticket rack in LABoral, to the tiling and signage around the theatre.
…and laboral is full of nice details as well, from the modern sophistication of the cloakroom ticket rack in LABoral, to the tiling and signage around the theatre.
diary | 30 apr 2010 | tagged: vj · lev
to spain for laboratorio de electrónica visual with d-fuse in full wives and girlfriends mode - who wouldn’t, seeing the venues. this was the central quad of laboral, complete with church hosting one performance space to the left, and the entrance to the theatre where we were performing particle to the right. laboral is simply the best setting to have a festival i’ve ever seen: a full campus of venues stretching from this architecturally beautiful and technically top-notch main space to modern art galleries, workshops, labs and allsuch spread around the perimeter.
diary | 30 apr 2010 | tagged: vj · lev
novak were in london doing their 3d disco show, so i dropped by to see how it had come on: i saw an early version - possibly the premiere even - back at the reopening of the tyneside in 2008. i was impressed with what i saw and what i knew about its development, so i put a line to create digital motion that there might be a good story in it. which, somehow, just got posted to their front page. read on, and the comments.
its been quite some time since november and nothing visible has been happening. this is a quick post to say that stuff is happening behind the scenes, albeit with lots of delays caused by my spare time being completely out of sync with people i’ve been trying to get things going with. but now the momentum is back, and here shawn bonkowski and i are choosing sliders from the seemingly limitless selection on offer.
being trained in product design and loving this book, i’d have said i have a fair understanding of how much work it can take to transform a prototype into something suitable for manufacture and the real world. but i have to admit, this has taken far far longer than i expected. though now, i think, i can say that the controller is falling into place: still far from having a final, manufacturable, design, but the road to get there is clear and doable.
the thomas dolby gig was a test for bringing in live photography as well as live video, and it was really rewarding to see it working. live video turned out to be appropriate for the songs, and then a slideshow of the recent photos for all the catching-up that was happening between songs. it was also good to run the screen and framing graphics at native res, giving strong, defined and intricate output, and see that completely mask - figuratively - the much lower quality PAL video feed.
special props to neil guy: testing the reception of the eye-fi card in his own 5DmkII, he took it apart and removed the shielding around the media slots!
thomas dolby had got back in touch saying he was going to have a reunion gig with his old touring band, and could i arrange some kind of live camera and screen for it? probably yes, but i was really interested by the idea for the show: somewhere in-between a masterclass and a candid first rehearsal as old friendships and old pieces were picked back up for the first time in years. and having a screen presence to really get in there on stage, almost like photojournalism, could be really illuminating, as well as having a camera picking out the fingering or whatever.
so i bought an eye-fi card, got in touch with avid photographer and dolby fan neil guy (whose photo this is), woke up on the day and went for it…
diary | 28 feb 2010 | tagged: *spark · vj
there’s no denying its like a flight deck of buttons, but props to vdmx’s configurability and plug-in friendliness. full playback control of both single screens and the dualhead spanning as quicktime sources, and a hardcore quartz composer patch wrapping a lot of custom openGL code, fronted by an interface builder laid out UI panel.
diary | 18 feb 2010 | tagged: quartz composer · particle · dfuse · *spark · vj · vdmx
in barcelona on a solo d-fuse mission: particle to audio by asférico, refactored down to a dualhead screen setup. good gig: refactoring prep worked out, no nasty surprises throughout, performance felt smooth.
diary | 18 feb 2010 | tagged: particle · vj · vdmx · video-out · live cinema
in reality, all very much a work in progress. but: if you wanted to track a radio control car around a room, and explode it remotely when it crossed its own trail, this is just how you might make the car.
diary | 17 feb 2010 | tagged: vj · physical computing · qmat · nort
d-fuse were asked to do something with the musion screen at kinetica art fair. particle was designed for a transparent screen layered in front of the cinema screen behind, so mike got to work on a 15 minute redux. playback was just hitting play on two laptops simultaneously, and even for this oh how i was reminded that i should write that basic show playback app…
diary | 06 feb 2010 | tagged: vj · dfuse
CDM, the blog about VJing and beyond that seems to have the best signal to noise ratio, has just picked up the live cinema documentary i’ve been deep in the production of since returning, and has said some very nice things:
Utter brilliance: finally, our friend toby*spark has documented live cinema and visualism with a medium that reflects the concept. Music and video are presented as frames within frames, manipulated and placed interactively. It’s part fiction and illusion, of course, but that won’t stop you from dreaming as you watch of interactive audiovisual software that did behave fluidly.
I could say more, but just watch it. The video says it all. I hope toby and others pick up on this ideal and develop it more – both this narrative presentation, and the imaginary software it conceives.
ego massaged, what then happens: [vimeo staff pick](http://vimeo.com/channels/staffpicks#9065736)! a fairly niche documentary gets picked up and -- writing this retrospectively -- daily viewing figures go from the tens to the thousands, likes start pouring in and really positive comments appear.
[on the writing this retrospectively theme, the next day [intellectual hero](http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail717.html) of mine bruce sterling [even posts about it](http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2010/03/a-documentary-on-live-cinema/). like being touched by the hand of god!]
the world likes it!
diary | 05 feb 2010 | tagged: *spark · vj · live cinema documentary · qmat · live cinema
such seems my life: christmas day means a largely clear day to crack some of the live cinema documentary. not quite the idea!
diary | 25 dec 2009 | tagged: vj · live cinema documentary · qmat
denis, the next day, the fortnight of opus vj over. comatose and content.
diary | 20 dec 2009 | tagged: vj
i met denis at the first vision’r, which i thought was the first french vj festival. not so he said: he had organised opus vj, down in marseille. schedules have aligned finally and i’m sky crowds and snow at gatwick to fly down there for opus vj #4. its also likely the last, denis wanting to move onto something more meaningful than what club contextualised vjing seems to lead to. definitely end of an era for a certain generation there: the first straight-up club vj set i’ve actually done in a year or two, i’m on a nostalgia voyage through *spark past myself: rocking it like its 2003.
diary | 19 dec 2009 | tagged: *spark · vj
my phd has this first year not doing phd stuff. which isn’t all bad: i have to make an “experimental documentary about a contemporary arts practice” to hone my media production skills. i think the brief was “make sure they know how to use a camera”, props to the film department at queen mary for challenging us with something a bit more interesting.
so here i am, mike’s EX3 in hand, spending a day or so running round london on a slightly gonzo mission to talk about live cinema with my practitioner peers. big thanks to chris, mike and paul for the interviews and sarah for the assistance and interested-outsider perspective. and this photo.
diary | 16 dec 2009 | tagged: live cinema documentary · vj · liveness · qmat · live cinema
part research, part curiosity, part embarrassment at just not having been before, i mounted a solo reconnaissance of secret cinema. and was impressed. if i’d known the film was going to be bugsy malone, i probably wouldn’t have bothered, but it was great: hundreds of hipsters in 1920’s chicago dress, and a moment of sheer audience electricity as they all realised there really was going to be a giant custard pie fight, and they were not just in the middle, but the only way through was to embrace it. that, and grab and put on a plastic poncho in the ten remaining seconds…
diary | 27 nov 2009 | tagged: vj · liveness
second of two installations i’ve really enjoyed recently, re-rite is a multitrack recording of the philharmonia orchestra performing stravinsky’s the rite of spring, played out across 25 screens and the three floors and many rooms of the wonderfully dilapidated bargehouse. i’d have gone to see such a mediated-live-performance-with-lots-of-screens type thing anyway, and doubly so as the philharmonia partnered with friends yeast to make this (props, pulled it off to a really high standard/) but it really got under my skin: the experience was unique, beyond the goal of somehow giving the experience of being inside an orchestra on stage.
easy to explain would be the thrill of hearing a percussion crash somewhere else in the building come reverberating through while you were isolated with an entirely more delicate section of the orchestra. harder to convey would be as you explored the different rooms there was almost a touch of a haunted house rather than the known jigsaw you’d see on stage. at the heart of it is something that could only be delivered through such an installation, that wasn’t about the orchestral unit you see on stage, but was still very much about the orchestra, the music, the players. which is also why there is no photo from the installation above, just a production still i cullled from the website.
here’s an update on the dvi-mixer project; i’ve been through the replies to the expression of interest, am working on some things that have come up, and here are a load of answers to common questions that came up.
Tap buttons: This is something a fair few people have asked for, and yes, I’m planning on adding this in.
Some kind of switch to route A or B to the output: Apart from temporary overrides of the tap buttons, the crossfader will be the only control for this. Its the hardware angle of just knowing that whatever the crossfader is set to, is what is actually happening. That said, I understand the concern of guaranteeing a solid output of A or B, not a flickering mostly A and a bit of B, and there’s already some logic in there to only start crossfading after a certain movement away from the extremes.
DJ-style faders: A single crossfader is all the control an over/normal or multiply blend mode needs. When you have additive mixing, you might want the A and B levels to be more than simply what is on either side of the crossfader’s knob. I’m thinking about this, DJ-style faders is probably overkill (expense, signal noise, break-ability and loss of simplicity of control surface), a fader curve setting at the back alongside the resolution setting is what I’m preferring at the moment.
Still button: I’m in the fence but looking into this. Displaying a preloaded still is possible, but then why not just full-screen an image on your laptop? A button to hammer on each channel while mixing live is probably not doable with the hardware as-is. We’ll see.
Single controller, multiple processors: This would fit what I want to do with a v2 controller.
Ethernet / OSC / Midi interface: This would fit what I want to do with a v2 controller.
Fader response time: Currently, this isn’t as I’d like it. Its been fine for D-Fuse or *spark use, but a scratch mixer it isn’t. Talking to the manufacturer turned up a technique that I hope should sort the communication side, and we should be shipping with a crossfader with much better electro-mechanical qualities. Regardless, there’ll be a demonstration video showing exactly the kind of response the shipping models will have before taking anybody’s money.
Higher resolutions: The hardware can only go so high. There is a bandwidth limit and a line length limit, so while it can do 1920x1200, it can’t do 2400x600 which is actually fewer pixels. I’d love it to be otherwise, I have a major project that really needs that Triplehead at 800x600, let alone the requests for 3072 x 768 I’ve had! Still, triple 640x480, dual 1024x768 and straight 1920x1080 are such a leap from 720x576. Addressing this seems the obvious next step for a version two of the processor.
Different resolutions: The twelve timings I settled on (six resolutions at 50 or 60Hz) were what seemed the most useful in my experience of AV work. Now bear with me: the processor has stored many more resolutions, but to get the plug’n’play ability I want the EDID info transmitted on the inputs needs to match. The tweaked firmware should increase the number of EDID memories, but this isn’t finite and we might not even get twelve. So as shipped, I haven’t had feedback that changes what the six common resolutions would be. The good news is that they should be reassignable, the bad news is that it won’t be trivial - lots of fiddling at your end.
Dual-link DVI: See above, the unit cannot process dual-link resolutions. There is a bonus here in that single link DVI cables are nicer, they should bend easier and weigh a good chunk less than dual-link ones. The dual-link cables I have are the single thing I really don’t like about the setup.
DVI-I sockets: You get DVI-D and VGA in the same socket, done right. Mix and match DVI or VGA inputs or output. EDID transmitted on the inputs that can be independent of what the output is doing.
Additive blend mode: The good news is that this should be happening! This is supercool, a great win. Also I’d had a blind-spot in not asking for multiply as well, so thanks to the feedback this is on the list as well: in terms of implementation, they’re pretty much equivalent, so the omens are good.
Photoshop-style blend modes: No chance. From my personal perspective, this is where you want to be doing stuff in software, the mixer is there to guarantee your signal to the projector, to give a hardware controlled fade to black, to allow seamless switching between between laptops outputting an image already fully composited in the modern vj app of your choice.
Audio In/Out: I’m not touching audio for a load of reasons, but would like to make a v2 controller that is controllable externally, so you could link an audio mixer with this via Midi / OSC for instance.
Split/Preview output: Its just two in, one-out. If you want to split anything, you’ll need separate DAs. Typically for me this is downstream of my TripleHead anyway, splitting the three VGA projector feeds to have a monitor preview of each.
TripleHead: Any TripleHead is separate to this. Bring your own if you want to use one in conjunction with the mixer. I’ve tested with a TH2Go Digital Edition only.
Latency: As per the fader response time, there’ll be a demonstration video showing exactly the kind of response the shipping models will have before taking anybody’s money. While we’re at it, the processing is in 24bit 4:4:4, so there should be no quality loss because of the mixing.
Internal power supply: It sucks, but its an external power supply for both the processor and controller I’m afraid. I did work through an all-in-one version, but the cons outweigh the pros.
What a great saying; hat tip to Mikael. Once I have a processor running the tweaked firmware, and a controller representative of what will ship, I’ll make a video to show it all in action, and have the purchasing terms all laid out. And hopefully, you won’t just have my word to take for it… more to come soon.
this friday i will be doing my vj thing together with mike, matthias and sarah of d-fuse, paul of labmeta, and mo of electrovision. we have the run of the london transport museum, who are opening late with a bar. its the first time we’ll have done something there, so it will be baby steps but i think there’s real potential with the victoriana building with the spatial feel their scale of exhibits gives, the covent garden location, and the real gem of their proper screening theatre downstairs.
- Sounds of the Suburbs, Friday 6 November 2009
Tune in to a multi-sensory journey of light, image, colour and sound with D-Fuse, Labmeta, *spark and Electrovision and their collaborative set - Urban vs suburban with VJing, audio visual performance and screenings complete with silent disco. Check out Designated Area artist Andy Morgan’s live illustration of a classic cityscape with a suburban twist.
photobank couldn’t have happened without novak’s curation of the opencity event. talking about our joint project kinetxt and things like memory bank led to the idea, and being given a development fee and the host event made it possible. they also did a great job in finding some local writers to be the masters of interpretation for the weekend, of whom alex is pictured above, scribbling around his notes for the final haiku-like selection.
