tagged: volta

the sound system cars are so central to the fuel records story, surely a 3D app like volta had to have a 3D model of one.

i was pretty good at 3D modelling back in the day, but that was a long time ago and even if i could remember half of it i simply don’t have the time. but the internet is a wonderful thing, and lo –

”1970 Dodge Challenger R/T" (https://skfb.ly/6C8YE) by floh is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

props for the model and thanks for sharing floh!

i gave the model a fuel paint-job, and added it to volta’s internal testing content library. that was good enough for a while, but it needed those horns rising up out of the boot and over the roof. with guidance from ari, that’s now done and the project so much better for it.

diary | 17 jun 2023 | tagged: volta · fuel records

“thank you for that. no really, thank you. i needed that. i play si begg when friends get new speakers. it’s amazing, they love it, but they’ve never heard of it before”.
— guy in the audience, afterwards

well, there’s some unexpectedly on-point validation!

also: microphone technique / placement. i need to work on that (but that’s why you test).

diary | 12 apr 2023 | tagged: volta · fuel records

four months later than planned, but finally got to this position: set up in front of an audience, ready to feel what it is to perform it… and see how it goes down.

diary | 12 apr 2023 | tagged: volta · fuel records

deadlines are good, event ones doubly so. happily, there’s a kind of electronic music open-mic night locally, so i booked a slot. and then… was ill and couldn’t do it. blurgh.

so instead of the scratch performance it was going to be, here’s a scratch… recording. well, a teaser. all very first draft, but at least now there’s a thing, and it can be iterated on.

diary | 12 dec 2022 | tagged: volta · fuel records

there’s a 2006 diary entry i keep on coming back to professionally – showing my live cinema piece rbn_esc, or rather, what’s on my laptop screen when i perform it. ableton live and vdmx5, side-by-side. audio and visual, although it’s not quite that simple.

i have this as my basic template for whatever this new piece around fuel records may be. ableton will certainly be sequencing. but then things get… unsure. ultimately, this is an exploration of the terrain around volta – 3D worlds, hybrid performance, artist presence. but in the meantime, there’s a lot of stuff i’ve built my visual career on that’s very 2D, and very… vdmx.

cue thoughts that get very complicated and very custom, very quickly. plus the almost existential wrangling of my happily 2D, happily framed visual style into an open, 3D one.

i may yet get back to where i was going with that, custom camera engine and all, but i had a moment of realisation. this piece is, in some way, like me giving a talk, so let’s sketch it out like that, using a deck in keynote. could i actually just perform an a/v show with ableton and keynote? start there, feed it into volta. keep it simple.

this was a good call. it’s also good for the democratisation pitch of volta: i’m still going for the *spark style of video-fused motion graphics, but there’s a decent first pass achievable with standard stuff: those motion graphics are courtesy of the deck’s builds and transitions^[1][2]. oh, that and my luma-crossfading *spark mixer i smuggled into volta create the minute i was on the team.

diary | 05 dec 2022 | tagged: fuel records · volta

my experiments with cameras and cross-reality stage sets used in-development ‘xr cam’ features we’re prototyping. important, hard stuff, that really sells the artist presence premise i think is central to hybrid events and ideas around performing-to-the-internet. it’s unclear whether an iOS app to take advantage of lidar depth imaging is mass-market enough at present, and this shot doesn’t help as that flat orange is showing no depth… but it certainly sells what it was like to be there.

diary | 25 jun 2022 | tagged: volta · glastonbury

…no longer in the front-of-house booth, now on-stage with them.

diary | 25 jun 2022 | tagged: volta · glastonbury

next night: fumez for me. we’d had problems with the feeds from the on-stage cameras, so i plugged them in directly… (con’t)

diary | 25 jun 2022 | tagged: volta · glastonbury

grove rocked. i loved their music, their energy, their whole thing. icing on the cake: got a shout-out for the ‘amazing visuals’. alas, those visuals are lost to time, and wouldn’t translate to the non-360° here.

the above stills aren’t that, then. more interesting though, as a clearer distillation of a possible future. of hybrid events, either experienced remotely, or feeding the event back to itself, intensified. that’s why I was “experimenting with cameras and AR stage sets”; visuals yes, but trying to make the live act live-er, seeing how xr might pump the performer–audience feedback loop. and having made the test the stills are drawn from, that isn’t just lofty ideal: it’s the moments when the real audience flash into the virtual venue that really stand out to me, that make me feel rather than just see the performance.

diary | 24 jun 2022 | tagged: volta · glastonbury

shangri-la’s gas tower stage before the onslaught – we as volta had ⁦six slots over three days, with founder alex kane vj’ing it up in 3D and me experimenting with cameras and cross-reality stage sets for the live acts.

…arcadia got there first for a warm-up gig. and that grass ain’t going to look like that for long.

diary | 22 jun 2022 | tagged: volta · glastonbury

volta is mostly remote; there is value in being face-to-face. also a chance for people to get a feeling for visuals beyond the screen in their office, i thought. and so turned up with a facade-grade projector.

diary | 19 may 2022 | tagged: volta

had flu, and for once managed to get something out of the liminal recovery days: finally watched the endless summer, and played around with the idea of a fuel records dj set.

the latter being noteworthy publicly; there is something in that music, the imagery, the history that could make for something. working at volta by day, it would be good to be using it by night. dog-fooding our product, and exploring the terrain.

diary | 31 jan 2022 | tagged: volta · fuel records

volta is one of the best inventions of 2021, according to time magazine.

i haven’t been there long enough to have any claim of having helped achieve that, but it’s a nice bit of external validation nonetheless.

diary | 10 nov 2021 | tagged: volta

also, quite the way to come out of the run of lockdowns! this was the first time i’d been with more than a handful of people in over a year.

diary | 04 sep 2021 | tagged: volta

something came my way mentioning video streaming and back-end web stuff. not my passion, but something i’ve dived deep into – and not too many other people have. so i sent a cursory email, and it got interesting quick.

fast forward a few months, and here i am as a permanent employee of volta, doing more or less my first day running our product, volta create, at a festival… vj style.

diary | 04 sep 2021 | tagged: volta