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Diaryperhaps my favourite image of the performance. admittedly a single cherry-picked frame of video, not entirely representative of the moment, but nonetheless seeing this soft, painterly look inspires me.
perhaps my favourite image of the performance. admittedly a single cherry-picked frame of video, not entirely representative of the moment, but nonetheless seeing this soft, painterly look inspires me.
diary | 27 apr 2024 | tagged: volta · fuel records
…but the immersive room meant i could hold that immersion back. and what a reveal. being surrounded by the imagery is obviously transformational, but perhaps more visceral is the spatial movement. the virtual camera moves in the 3D scene, before devices to alter the composition of a flat, framed view, now make the world flow around you, moving to the music.
diary | 27 apr 2024 | tagged: volta · fuel records
the piece starts flat, framed, 2D. it’s part homage to my visuals of the time, and part a pacing trick, holding back the 3D to come. that’s what you can see here, and in any other gig it being the whole wall behind me would be the talking point…
photo credit: elizaveta yudina
diary | 27 apr 2024 | tagged: volta · fuel records
when this started i knew me talking was going to be a part of it, but didn’t really know whether it was like a dj namechecking the songs or something more. you can see here it’s something more.
part of that is my pose, but also: thinking about how my colloquial spoken english might come across, i have made italian “subtitles”. just they’re not subtitles. they’re “in-situ titles”. as you can better see later, they’re placed in the 3D scene, the letters solid objects. it’s a big thing, i think: technically, creatively, accessibly.
photo credit: elizaveta yudina
diary | 27 apr 2024 | tagged: volta · fuel records
to rome, where live performers meeting organiser gianluca had invited me to play my fuel piece. even better, he said they had an immersive room. would i like to play that?
well, look at what i looked out at. hell yes.
to think that original fuel tour had vdmx2 running at 320x240px. to think that this contemporary revival happily runs at 11510x1080px in volta, and does so on a laptop not even breaking a sweat while pixel-mapping that onto 2x 4k outputs and running ableton.
again thanks to mike for the photo. this is from later on, a story-telling part where the ability to be in a 3D engine and quickly build-up abstracted but understandable scenes comes into its own.
on the right you can see live transcription. to think they had to cope with the words falling out of my mouth, eeek. unquestionably progress, though!
diary | 13 apr 2024 | tagged: volta · fuel records · crux
finish talk, straight into performance. quite the shift, happily it was a smooth transition.
thanks to mike for the photo. this early part of the piece is a revival of my “video fused motion graphics” from back in the early noughties, a faithful recreation of the sound-off tour visuals i was making at the time. and with its big fuel logo, hard not to be the poster image for the whole piece, even if represents the old-school to now. ahem, sorry, fuel was “nu-skool” at the time =]
diary | 13 apr 2024 | tagged: volta · fuel records · crux
i’d imagined the 45 minutes as a masterclass, but at some point realised the greater good would be promoting some of the ideas volta is built upon. so i made a deck full of videos showing volta in action, structured around –
why? because if you put these all together, you get
the iffy idea, after the volta part, was my thinking around ‘why go see live a/v’. what are the formats that might be both entertaining and fast to make? as the production behind things like rbn_esc is, nowadays, simply prohibitive.
and so: the fuel records piece
¯\_(ツ)_/¯diary | 13 apr 2024 | tagged: volta · fuel records · crux
to crux festival, a two-day event that has come out of an ongoing series of audio-visual-ish nights in london – “a meeting space to experiment, collaborate and be entertained”.
i’d approached them looking for a scratch-space to trial my fuel performance. they said, hang on, this would suit our festival next year. so i waited, there was some confusion about whether it was a talk or a performance (understandable, it’s not a format i’ve seen around), and finally: i’m here, splitting the difference between day-time workshop and night-time performance.
Join toby*spark for a masterclass in Volta leading to an a/v performance using it – the story of Fuel Records. It’s a fun show, and will definitely put the PA through its paces.
Volta is a visual creation engine and interaction platform, the product of a London-based startup backed by Deadmau5 and Richie Hawtin among others. You’ll learn how to quickly set up 3D visuals, bring AR live cameras in, and then let the audience control it.
photo credit: guy smallman
diary | 13 apr 2024 | tagged: volta · fuel records · crux
i’d finished(ish) the piece in time for a friendly something that didn’t work out, and then got busy again. so hadn’t actually played it out. thinking i should fix that, i thought: we all play synth. but it was now longer than the 15min fixed slots there. well, ask, and answers sometimes present themselves. going last, there was no hard cut-off. and so, a full test.
also, microphone technique / placement. i did work on that – note now i’m using a headset mic – but it’s still so easy to get wrong (but that’s why you test, in front of a “home” crowd).
diary | 23 feb 2024 | tagged: volta · fuel records
to volta retreat #3. being summer time, and not bringing a facade-grade projector with me this time, i decided to ride my bike there. or rather, take the train to the right part of the uk, and then ride.
diary | 17 jul 2023 | tagged: volta · adventures
i’d had a version of the dj set sketched out all along, but for the longest time the full a/v work was a strong opening and then some loose ideas. no more: there’s a full set there now. finished. well, ish. it’s more the full first pass that allows you to see what the thing might be…
diary | 22 jun 2023 | tagged: volta · fuel records
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
artists can not just offer control to their audiences, but they can charge for it. this is a development shot of the first test – it had to be the archetype volta element, the pulse ring. 10 bits to trigger.
these may be baby steps, but they’re crucial: conceptually, audience interaction is what differentiates a live stream from playback of one. economically, micro-transactions from fans could sustain the artist (c.f. 1,000 true fans).
diary | 28 mar 2023 | tagged: volta
been working on audience interaction for volta, and this is a happy moment: our twitch extension in production, publicly available, working not just on desktop but mobile too.
just as an artist can link to up a midi controller to control their volta world, they can link to audience control. i.e. if you have a button in volta, you can give that button to your audience.
at some point many years ago, i had to write a list of my favourite vjs. i think it was for dj magazine. pfadfinderi were high up there. they have split since, but that comes with its advantages: i am stoked that honza is excited by volta and is helping art direct.
this is good, for volta to have mass-market appeal, it needs attractive worlds people can use straight away. i’d be hard-pressed to think of anyone better.
i took this screenshot during development of honza’s cloud world. there’s something that tickles me about the pre-art-direction webcam placeholder i made sticking out of the work-in-progress art-directed future.
diary | 17 mar 2023 | tagged: volta
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.
[update: ironically for a piece about reviving something forgotten, the video was subject to a rights take-down]
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.
keynote’s magic move transition remains a wonder of the modern world, perhaps my favourite product feature ever. ↩︎
the actual performance has the deck exported into video clips, which live inside ableton thanks to the new-to-me and well-executed videosync. i’d like syphon-out per channel, but i’ll live with going via returns. ↩︎
diary | 05 dec 2022 | tagged: fuel records · volta
long term, volta will need a web platform, for example artists might have pages listing performances, or there be some kind of content marketplace. and that web platform should scale for the mass-market volta is aiming for, and be able to cope with the inherently spiky demand of something based around events or performances.
so i’ve been building that, or rather building the things we need in the short term with a view to that. thinking more akin to a platform than the expedient one-off services volta had made before i joined. i’d landed on sst as the best way to do this, effectively a developer-experience do-over of writing serverless apps on amazon web services.
the work had started on sst zero-point-something, and since sst had launched v1. upgrading to that turned into a near complete re-write, but it was time well spent. javascript → typescript, raw dynamodb calls → electrodb, integration tests… to me, serverless development finally felt coherent and sane.
diary | 14 nov 2022 | tagged: 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
it’s upside-down and the colour ain’t right, but it’s the proof of my proof-of-concept: we can stream ourselves from within unity, no need to rely on third party solutions with different priorities and unresponsive support. using a c# wrapper around the libav ffmpeg libraries, volta stream engine lives!
diary | 14 jun 2022 | tagged: volta
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 some fun working with dj yoda. on twitch, he streamed with a photoshopped kitsch tv layout. volta could turn that into a cinema, a venue. so what could that look like?
a playful first step on the way, i thought, might be a riff on the 2D→3D work i’d just done. like he could get his kids to make a kind of cardboard cinema in volta, just drawing on some paper and scanning that in. and the abstraction would then work well with our audio-reactive 3D elements around. and so this was our first draft, cooked up in his studio.
diary | 25 mar 2022 | tagged: volta
…continued from last post; 4 of 4
This this is me, this visual source down here and that, and you can see here that this is another take on the kind of dot cloud kind of idea. This is an element that early, early early adopters will know as the chroma key billboard and more recent adopters will know as the Volumetric FX. This is us doing volumetric effects to what would be a flat 2D surface.
One of the problems we’ve had with this before was that you couldn’t have it cut out, you couldn’t have it so that the dots were just on you.
Another problem we’ve had with it was that it was introducing different colours. So now the colours are locked to the the colours of the source that, that you give it. But if you want, you can give it another visual source and now it will kind of on some of these, it will take highlight colours from that and we can get rid of that just by taking it back.
You’ve got all of these nice things to play with like bubbles. So hello again, that’s make his bubbles go up, up, up, up, up, up, up anyway.
Another thing here is that with these image masks… let’s set the volumetric effect surface, back, maybe just to that place holder image, we’ve we’ve seen so much now. I was masking with a still image before, but of course, we’re masking with visual sources so we can do anything. There’s a Volta logo bouncing along. Let’s add that as an image key. There it is. And so now you can see, you know, we’re starting to get some really nice 3d things going on there where the trails and the particles.
So that was a quick tour. Volta Create 0.12. You can do a lot more with your 2D sources.
diary | 19 mar 2022 | tagged: volta
…continued from last post; 3 of 4
Everything so far, we’ve been taking 2D images and putting them in 3D, but we’ve kind of been keeping them as those flat images in some way. They’re not kind of natively 3D.
If you look at this, you can see that this is a bit different. This is that same webcam placeholder image, but you can see that this is somehow more in 3D. We turn the pixels into dots.
If I go to dot Cloud, which is what this new element is called, you can see I can change those dot sizes from something really small up and up. But the real thing here is that we can play with a displacement slider.
The way this is working at the moment, it’s taking the displacement from the brightness of each pixel. You can imagine there are ways that we’re gonna take this in the future. But yeah, let’s just explore how we can use this artistically for a moment.
You’ve seen this with the webcam placeholder image. But I commute in, I mean, I work remotely but I commute into the office every now and then. So I have these kind of early morning, late night trains and I look like looking out the train window. And so here you can see this is just that sideways, scrolling out of the train window, passing through stations. But look, you know, we can really ramp up the displacement and you can start to be in it.
Also if we just bring that back, you can see that we’ve kind of got all these black pixels here that we’ve still got this kind of rectangular frame in the space, which is kind of somehow, yeah, we, we, we want these pixels just to be, we don’t want them in that black frame. This would be a good time for a luminance key, a luma key. So I need to add that to the source.
Here’s the visual source. I’ve got a luma key on it and I’m going to turn up that threshold for keying out. It’s going to take out anything that’s below almost black. It’s gonna take out total black.
Now all of a sudden we can see that we’re kind of creating abstract 3D art, truly 3D in that 3D space.…continued in next post
diary | 19 mar 2022 | tagged: volta
…continued from last post; 2 of 4
We’ve been working with DJ Yoda and here he is mixing and and so we need to key him out. He wants to appear in front of the visual output that he’s scratching. So how do we do that?
We have got a human segmentation thing. This will, using machine learning, find the person in the visual source and key them out.
So there we are, we can see it’s pretty good and you can see actually if you look down in the corner, there we are. That’s me, I’ve got, that’s a webcam running with human segmentation on it too.
But machine learning, look, it can’t be perfect in these things. And as you might have noticed Duncan actually has got a little green screen behind him. So let’s see if we can use that.
We’re going to add a behaviour.
Now we’ve got a chroma key. This the hue will find the colour and the tolerance is kind of the smoothing around that. Slide the the hue slider around till it just homes in on the colour you want to take out. There we are, we’ve got it perfectly do that with a tolerance down at zero.
Then you bring the tolerance up just until those crunchy green edges kind of go away, but don’t do it too far ‘cos otherwise things will start going semi transparent. So it’s just just about there.
But you can see that it’s a very nice key. Problem is of course, we can still see his room, but we know how to fix that because we can add an image key to that. So we can just mask that out there.
It was already set to this visual source here, which is just a manual mask I made in a black and white image in my kind of image editor program. So there we are.
That’s so now, here we can put Duncan into a 3D kind of stage set, into a 3D world around him. We could have audio reactive generator elements, we could have his big screen behind him. So that’s good.…continued in next post
diary | 19 mar 2022 | tagged: volta
volta is a 3D app, coming from immersive VR. i find that so interesting. it’s not what I’m used to, VJ software like vdmx and resolume are 2D, like photoshop. so how to leverage what I know into this new world?
this isn’t just a me-thing. 3D is hard, and what people bring to volta is 2D, say a logo or folder of videos. seemed to me there’s a real product challenge here, in getting people to do cool stuff in 3D with a kind of 2D skill-set. the latest release has a lot of work from me on that. and so with the release, a ten minute demo from me. here in the diary, as a transcript and four stills.
Volta Create 0.12
One of the focuses of this release is doing more with 2D imagery. Getting you, with your webcam, your images and your videos, into the 3D world.
Here I’ve built a little kind of stage set out of three images. In this case a webcam, you’re seeing the webcam placeholder.
The first new thing here is that we have an element that’s suited for getting your stuff into the world. It’s called the surface.
And so the first thing to say about the surface is that it respects transparency. So I’m going to take that one at the back, copy it, paste it and now I’m going bring it to the front.
I’m using the Gizmo feature that’s also new in 0.12.
And now on this surface we can set to a PNG that I’ve got in here that is transparent. Already that’s looking nice in 3D.
That’s just a transparent PNG. You can make those in your image editing program, to make frames and all sorts.
But we can do more than that…
I’ve got these two surfaces on the side, and I’m going to set these to a different visual source. I’ve got that webcam but on these, you can see that there’s some transparency too.
So we have in 0.12 a whole new kind of image keying, masking kind of thing going on.
On this visual source, it’s just a webcam again. But here I’ve got an image key on it. I’ve added this image key and I’m using another visual source as the mask. That’s just a black and white image that’s masking it up.
And so all of a sudden, we’ve got this whole kind of thing that really truly exists in 3D, but we’ve built it just out of simple flat images.…continued in next post
diary | 19 mar 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
