tagged: volta

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 · vj

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.

diary | 21 mar 2023 | tagged: volta · engaging audiences · code

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 · code

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 · *spark · vj

“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 · *spark · vj

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 · *spark · vj

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 · *spark · vj

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 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 · *spark · vj

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 · *spark · vj

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 –

• be 3D-first
• embrace remote
• embrace audience interaction
• embrace yourself

why? because if you put these all together, you get

• XR artists sustained by their fans

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

• a classic rock album documentary for the rave generation
• friday night on BBC4, with a club PA
• ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

diary | 13 apr 2024 | tagged: volta · fuel records · crux · *spark · vj

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 · *spark · vj

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 · *spark · vj

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.

diary | 27 apr 2024 | tagged: volta · fuel records · *spark · vj · video-out · live performers meeting

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 · *spark · vj

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 · *spark · vj

…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 · *spark · vj

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 · *spark · vj

saturday night: time to get to work. early evening, three hours: terrain take over the festival. insieme had commissioned a skinny gud illustration for the poster, and it came out great. happily, the scene it showed wasn’t too far from the ‘camp out’ world we shipped with volta create towards the end, so a palette-shift and some tweaks later here it is. fit for purpose, i thought: branding expanded into a diarama; slowly animating, reacting to the music, live feed on the screen in-scene.

diary | 17 may 2025 | tagged: insieme · *spark · volta · vj

did the fuel piece. nice memory of the crowd locked in to tipper’s ‘tug of war’, the fuel records 12” catalogue animating along, and in that moment connecting back to when i record-shopped one of them before i had any idea it was a fuel release, or what that might come to mean for my life.

lots of good feedback, beyond the specifics people really enjoyed the change of pace. or rather, the same pace / bpm, but a different focus and format; a kind of palate cleanser between two nights of djs.

plus, i often say part of the idea was simply to hear the music again on a club PA, and at insieme i got to live that: jumped down from the stage and grabbed half a minute of utopia in front of lawrence’s sweet soundsystem – “gramp’s hi-fi”.

diary | 17 may 2025 | tagged: insieme · fuel records · *spark · volta · vj