Even as the VJ software market matures, it’s refreshing to see with releases like CoGe – that there’s still room for new players and perspectives. From deep in his East European code-bunker, creator Tamas Nagy was kind enough to provide a review copy and an interview.

Features

“CoGe is a semi-modular, Quartz Composer® powered VJ application for Mac OS X®, designed for real-time media mixing and compositing.”

So – aside from the usual playback and manipulation of clips, what distinguishes CoGe? At first glance, the VDMX-like modular framework is immediately obvious, enabling CoGe to be easily customised for different performance styles or needs. Of the modules available, of notable merit is the very easily used sequencer.

A comprehensive wiki outlines the structure and approach ( the rendering chain / how the modular structure works / various automations+ mappings etc ) / clip synths, and a useful forum is fleshed out with fans eager to push it forward (At time of writing, CoGe 1.2.1 was just released, with significant performance increases ( lots more FPS on HD clips).

Quartz Composer is also quite deeply integrated into the software, which makes sense – given Tamas has developed a whole range of QC plug-ins which can be used within CoGe – eg PSD Brushes  / PSD layers Textfile readers / Webkit ( rendering webpages within CoGe )Beat Detektor / GPL reader ( reads GIMP palette files ) / Mouse co-ordinates etc. As well as possibilities for integrating customised Quartz files and effects, CoGe allows use of  3D animation meshes (Collada .dae format) and flash files alongside any movies and stills used for mixing and compositing. Want to build your own CoGe module using QC? Tutorial – how to create a simple effect for CoGe with Quartz Composer. And yes, rendering is through the graphics card for maximum performance, and double yes – syphon is well integrated too, for easy sending or receiving video to and from other applications.

Interface

It only took a little while to adapt to the CoGe world, and what initially seemed quirky, now makes some sense. The interface elements are easily moved, re-arranged and intelligently grouped together using what CoGe calls ‘aligners’ to “arrange other windows together into manageable organizational ‘buckets’”. It might look a little ravetastic, but it makes for easy navigation and visual feedback while performing, and the sequencer action is great.

Overall?

A welcome addition to today’s VJ software library, it’ll be interesting to see if CoGe manages to continue developing in some interesting directions, given what is being covered elsewhere.

Requirements:

$US99 (custom + educational pricing also available)
A Mac computer with 10.6.7/10.7 or later with a dual-core CPU and at least 1 GB of Ram.

**

Interview with Tamas Nagy, creator of CoGe VJ Software

Given there’s quite a range of existing VJ software – what inspired you to build CoGe?
It’s a kind of funny story I saw a first vj gig in 2001 in a music festival, and I fell in love with that thing. Never thought about being a vj, I made music before, so I’m from audio land. Then, when I got my first Mac in 2006, and saw Quartz Composer and saw how Quartonian works, I just think I can do something funny_ – never thought about to make a commercial application, haha – with a kind of sync with the music, so just tried it. It was the early version of CoGe, called LovQC, haha You can find some test videos made with it on Youtube.

Then I spent more time on the software, added lots of new features, and with 2 friends we just created a VJ team Luma Beamerz and CoGe was born. Anyway, the first version of the app was a 50mb QC composition with just an interface, then I started to learn Cocoa, Obj-C, OpenGL and other stuffs - Vade helped me a lot with the GL stuff, so CoGe now is a “real” application.

Anyway, I never used any other VJ softwares, I just created my own for my own wishes: triggering different points of movie on beat, sequencing still images, etc.

So, I think the big difference between applications is the workflow, so it depends on how you, the user think about creating things. All VJ software has a bunch of same features, triggering files, change speed, colors, etc., the big difference is the workflow, so I think an artist will choose software which works like his/her workflow. For an other example, modularity is a great thing, but a lots of users happy with built-in features in apps and never thought about it can be different.

It’s integrated into your app quite a lot – but what attracts you to Quartz Composer?
The great thing with QC is very easy to learn the basics and use for non-programers too, you shouldn’t be a coder to do a simple image rotation for example. On a developer side, the system integration – using QC stuff inside an application is easy – is a very important thing in my opinion.

It also have a lots plugins, and great media handlers, so a lots of things is possible with QC – basically, CoGe just connects QC stuffs under the hood, nothing magic.

What impact does Syphon have on how developers might approach VJ software today?
I think Syphon has a lots of potencial and its a very great stuff – connecting different sources into other applications is really opens some doors, just think about “sending” images from Max and Processing, and you can mix them in CoGe in a very simple way. That couldn’t be possible before Syphon.

Do you have opinions about whether VJ software should provide more advanced audio controls? And sequencing controls? Or is it better to sync VJ software to something like ableton?

I really like sequencing, using clips and stills in sequencing can provide really good things. With audio controls you can have some fun, but the really good choice is syncing with an audio host if you would like to make real AV things.

What are the challenges of making a good performance interface?
It depends on your workflow and what you wanna do in the performance. I recently just using 3 layers with a lots of media presets and some simple effects. If you using a lots of things the new Aligner stuff helps you to make smaller groups on the screen, I think its a very important feature.

What are you happy about in CoGe today?
CoGe 1.1 release makes me happy, i got a lots of positive feedback on it, and saw some really nice things created with CoGe. Also happy because i have a lots of ideas for the future

Thanks Tamas!

Reasons you might find yourself wanting to read this very long but very awesome Raquel Meyers interview:

- Because you love 8bit graphics and people who push them to their limits

- Because Raquel makes rad stuff ( eg her recent DVD of ‘fighting washing machines and killer lego ducks’, full of videoclips, remixes and collaborations with chiptune musicians and pixel pushers – Useless Yet Crucial).

- Because you want to find out about her ascii storytelling experiments with the C64 shredding musician Goto80.

- Because you love reading about how artists wrestle with their processes.

- Because you need a crazy and wonderful collection of visual links in your day.

Who knows, but I hope you enjoy these responses as much as I did. Thanks Raquel~!

- What’s inspiring you these days?

At the moment I am experimenting with storytelling and text-based graphics like Ascii, Ansi, Petscii and Teletext with Goto80. I’ve changed both the tools and the purpose of what I’m doing during the past months. I guess what I’m doing now is formally similar to text adventures, cartoons, silent movies, text art, demos…

I’ve been mostly inspired by animations and short movies from the 20th century, like “Little island”(1958) by Richard Williams or “Cowboys”(1991) by Phil Mulloy; and also, children’s books. Because of the brutal style of the “Simple storytelling”, the combination of a drawing plus a short phrase who builds a full dream up. This one makes me think about 2 frames animation, and how something simple it become even more brutal, especially working with the C64.

In the case of the short movies, the animation comes before the music, so the video is not the slave of the music (music video style). Sound effects increase the tension and the verve of the animation, and could be use in a shorter way like an interlude, or something longer. But the main thing is the story behind it, whit out it you cannot go further.

A cinematic new age terror is coming!. It operates in text mode, only using characters of the Commodore 64 and Amiga. This applies both to the graphics and the music.

[[ EDIT: Terror is now live - witness “2SLEEP1”, a "66-minute playlist of audiovisual performances in text mode, designed to make you fall asleep. Press play, go fullscreen and lie down. Made by Raquel Meyers and Goto80." screenshots below:]]

- What hardware and software do you use to create your animations?

I use several computers. A C64 with Letter Noperator and DigiPaint. An Amiga 1200 with DPIV, Brilliance, Prism and also an Amiga 600 provided by Archeopterix. A PC and Mac, with Flash, Photoshop, video editors and the (unreleased) petsciibrush software made by Linde. Soon I will add a Teletext device.

I’m not a gear freak. I don’t really care about the tools. I used to work primarily with Flash and Photoshop, which was a pain in the ass for the things I was doing. But I still liked it. Now I use old things (Amiga and C64), and that’s also quite painful sometimes. So to answer the question – I blend old and new technologies. It doubles the pain!

I am not a purist, I am a blender.

- How much of your creative process is defined by the limitations of such technologies?

I prefer to talk about possibilities instead of limitations. I think the technology is not the limited one, is the human behind it. It doesn’t matter how old or new the technology is, there is always something new to discover and learn. It’s not a such a big thing to use old technology, it doesn’t make everything more special, different or better. In my case, I use it because I like it.

But the things I do in Flash are different from what I do on C64. So the process is different. But I don’t really like to think too much about those things.

- Is there some cut-off line for retro computer graphics, where they are too new for you to use? What is it about 8-bit that manages to sustain appeal for you?

At least not for me, I’m not interested in the retro version of 8-bits, so I don’t think about if something is too new to use or not.

I remember playing pong with my brother in the TV console, meet my friends at ‘ la sala de máquinas’  and how I had stuck in my head every night before going to sleep the Tetris song. I grow up with arcade games and graphic adventures but, it wasn’t until 21 century when I discover a C64 music archive on Internet, and all these memories becomes something else because of the music.

It wasn’t a revival, it was something else, the imaginary frame in my head that before was a picture now become pixels looking for to be animated.

I don’t really know, but I think what keeps my interested in 8-bit is the brutalism. Big blocky objects, raw animation techniques, few frames, cuts, etc. I think it’s better if the animation method is brutal, because then it contains so much more than with some detailed video where there’s less room to think on your own.

- What do you find interesting about making live visuals versus production work?

A Live Performance is always open to improvisation and mistakes, meanwhile production work is always under control in the time line. You can rehearse or planning live visuals but at the end you don’t know what is gonna happen. Is really fun put yourself in a non control mode, keeps the spark. And since I don’t really use VJ-software to perform, it’s always a challenge.

- What work have you done on combining and compositing 8-Bit and recorded video together?

As part of Entter (2000-2007), the video clip Fantasy’ by Goto80, and ‘Dietetic Music’ by Eat Rabbit with graphics from Otro. Both of them were my earliest works in the 8-Bit, 2004 and 2005. Based on video recordings and post-production. In latest video clips, I mixed photo animations and graphics like the ‘Droidduck’ by Psilodump (2010), ‘Pink Snow’ by La belle Indifference (2010) and ‘Polybius’ by tr1c3 (2010), based on the main live cinema project ‘Polybius’ with Goto80. Also parts of the vj set contains video and graphics mixed. The reason of that is because my first background was Analog photography. I started when I was 14 years old, with black & white films and experimenting in the lab. The first thing jumping in my mind is always a static picture, a frame. My work is based in the movement or animation of such frames.

- Can you describe your AV set with musician Goto80, Polybius? ( and your aims behind it?)

Polybius …. the idea came from a post I read in my brother’s blog in 2007. The post was about an urban myth about an arcade game from the 1980s (Polybius) that created a sensory and cognitive deprivation in its users. So I started to talked with Goto80 about it and how much I would like to do something with it and with him.  The basic idea was explode the links between fiction and reality by encouraging a loss of senses. But it was not until 2009 when the french collectif ‘Homemade’ invited me for a 2 weeks residence at Le maki (Angoulême, France) when the Polybius experience become something else tahn talks. I developed there a first 20 min version, using a ‘cute’ character like a rabbit to hide my really epileptic and apophenic purpose, and Goto80 was working in the audio online from Sweden. The project was officially presented at the Cimatics festival the same year.

In the beginning of the 2010 we develop together in Berlin the second version who combines line vector aesthetics with video manipulation and 8-bit technology to induce feelings of apophenia, amnesia and panic. The Polybius experience – invented and created by us in the form of a white rabbit with a sectarian-politonic-track to be stuck in your head.

[[ Tangent alert! See also: previous 'C64 Shredding interview with GOTO80', and 'Cappadocia Skies' - a clip I'd made about a hot air balloon ride, with music by one of GOTO80's aliases, Extra Boy. ]]

- What’ve been the challenges of developing that, and what has worked or not, when performed live?

One of the biggest challenges was working in the distance via Spain-Berlin-Sweden thought Internet. Because we build the project together from the beginning and sometimes was really difficult to define and create the content without being in the same place. When we presented the project at Cimatics, we realized we need to meet physically to develop a second version and special place to performed it, out of the club experience. So in the beginning of 2010 we meet in Berlin for a week to prepared the second version, because we were invited by the PlazaPlus Festival in Eindhoven NL to performed it in january. We made a special pass before for the visualberlin collective at fh.meppen (Berlin) to test the extended version of 32min and got feed-backs from the public. The third and last version is pending, who icludes the physical game and an installation. But for this we need budget and maybe a residence to develop it. It’s one of the most complicated projects I have ever done.

- To what extent are you able to adapt the visual side of that with each performance?

My set is manual. To be able to adapt to whatever happens in the live performance. Before I was only using one laptop running an aplication who host all the visual content (graphics, animations, videos …) controlling by hand with the keyboard. So the rhythm was build in the way I click on the keyboard and load the different content. Now I’m working in a new set, who consists in a C64 and an Amiga, still in process, so I used the laptop as extra support with the same technic. A video mixer is used to change the sources, but there is not so much effects involve. The thing that takes more time is making all the animations, graphics and videos. I only used my own material, and always try to made a special set for each performance.

- Have your computer / animation processes ever entered / filtered / affected your dreams in any way?

Yes it does, because I listen so many times the songs when I’m working with it and also I dream with the animations. But ‘Polybius’ was something really insane, I had one of the tracks stuck in my head, like a trance mode to my own sense deleting experience.

- At the ‘Artists-Who-Inspired-Raquel Meyers’ Award Ceremony, who gets the following awards? 

- Visual artist who most steps outside the echo chamber of contemporary styles?

Nam June Paik, the retrospective exhibition ‘The Worlds of Nam June Paik’ in 2001 at Guggenheim Museum Bilbao I saw, put him for me in this category, like the “Magnet TV”.

- Visual artist with the most exquisite and hard to understand technique? 

Poison, I know the technique, but is not enough, because even if you use the same software you cannot have the same results. As PETSCII graphician was really impress how he made ’2frames’ animations and graphics for the C64.

- Visual artist who best gets under your skin? ( transcends technique to grab your emotions ? )

Otromatic, he is my favourite 8 bit graphician. He become one of the reasons why I start to make Lo-fi graphics and animations.

- Best coherent, integrated audiovisual act?

Gangpol & mit. Really impressive performance, one of my favorites. I really enjoy the animations.

But wait, there’s more:

This is something really difficult to do because inspiration doesn’t come only from visuals. They are so many things involve in this process. Here there is some of them, older and newer inspirations:

- Visions of Frank. The dreamlike world of ‘Frank’ a comic by Jim Woodring converted in animations.

- Jan Švankmajer and his surreal animations like ‘Meat Love‘.

- Professor Balthazar, a cartoon series for children, created for television by the Croatian animator Zlatko Grgić. Watching this as a child build a surreal imagery, who come up when you become older.

- Poison, C64 graphician. The ‘Notemaker Demo II‘, all you can do just typing characters.

- Russian and Eastern Europe cartoons (like Suur Toll- Estonia), even if we don’t share the same language, I can feel the eerie atmospheres.

- Bernd and Hilla Becher and their industrial buildings photographies. The motives of my early photographies were the factories buildings from my hometown at night when I was 15 years old.

- Kohei Yoshiyuki and his soft-core voyeur’s manual.

- Stalker, film by Andrei Tarkovsky (1979). This one change something inside me in the 90s.

The Gertrude st Projection Festival

This grows nicely each year, transforming lots of shopfronts and buildings in Gertrude st for a week. Above, a nicely mapped facade by Olaf Meyer. There was apparently a pretty good opening night party of projections, which I missed due to projecting elsewhere for the Scattermusic label launch party. Below, a mapped sculptural piece by studio neighbour, Kit Webster, alongside a fancy dress store where peering into a camera projected your face onto that of a shopfront scuplture. (More projection photos).

Inherent Vice

The National Gallery of Victoria convinced some local comic artists (Pat Grant, Mandy Ord, Michael Fikaris and Simon Hanselman + more) to transfer their private studios into the the public spotlight for a few weeks. The results included a zine fair, 24 hour comic jams, tents and drum-kits set-up in the studio, drawing lessons, an Inherent Vice tumblr and a steady stream of bug-eyed kids and adults wandering through. Check the article in the Australian, or the artist interviews on the Age website.

Winterpark Exhibition of Artworks Inspired by Album

I went to this because local video artist Lucy Benson, now in Berlin, had a hypnotic piece in it - ’Gotta Sleep now’, but my camera phone couldn’t really capture her shimmery work. Below, a sculpture that nicely incorporates video and little people. Can’t figure out from the event page who actually made it though, maybe you can. Nice idea for an exhibition, and great to see the different interpretations of the tracks.

Nosaj Thing Live at Kensington

Hadn’t even heard of the warehouse venue Nosaj was playing at – Revolt – and arrived to a building crazily decked out with technical and bar infrastructure, including pyramid mapped video sculptures by Kit in the distance. Came complete with a 90s black light chill out room. The Nosaj set was great, the rest of it got a bit wonk-saturated after a while.

Audiovisual Performances

Zeal and Time Shield have been steadily honing their AV performances around town, and recently Zeal invited me to do an AV set at Bar Open in support of his threepiece Virtual Proximity (see above). I was quite happy with this set, playing with some ambient music, ocean footage and quartz patches in VDMX. Elsewhere, Sampology came down from the subtropics to do an AV show, and Naysayer and Gilsun more recently launched their new AV set. There be audiovisual things happening. (Often at Racket – first thursday of each month at Miss Libertines in the city, and Plug N Play – last Thu of each month at Kent st bar, Fitzroy. )

MÖBIUS by ENESS

MÖBIUS from ENESS on Vimeo. This ‘collaborative stop motion scuplture’ was the brain child of Benjamin Ducroz, an extension of his work with time lapse and physical sculpture – this time using lots of help from public volunteers in rearranging the pieces over and over throughout the day.

And yeah, Melbourne International Animation Festival and the 60th Melbourne International Film Festival just whipped past. Quite a few delights and surprises in there. Will bundle together a short post and some links to the films I liked in a while. This’ll have to do for now. Springtime!

End result: Lots of fun – and a new set of challenges to deal with. Spatial composition with video is getting easier and easier, and as we outgrow the novelty of seeing buildings lit up / architectural deconstruction by light, there’s such ripe terrain to explore with today’s software. And as the barriers to entry continue to lower, it’ll be the imaginative approaches that prove most successful.

[[ Oh yeah - and that video - not a manifesto for spatial video by any means, just some example snippets from a fun night with the Scattermusic Sound System.. still getting my head around how this can all work well. And there be photos too. ]]

After doing live video for 2 shows there last weekend with the Gotye band, I can add to that list:
- It is a rabbit warren under the sails.
- The salad sandwiches in the green room are very ordinary.
- The elevator under the concert stage is faulty (I was trapped there with a weary tech guy for 5 tense minutes.. )

I got roped in to do live video for Gotye’s tour for his just released Making Mirrors album, which has accompanying animations for most songs. There’s some pretty nice work amongst it – I’ll have to do a follow-up post soon with links to all the animation houses. For me, my work is mostly editing and formatting to suit the main screen and 2 vertical side screens, then while the band plays – triggering short sections of these clips to ensure the right visual moments are synchronised with the band playing live.

Despite an almost comical list of headaches – long fog delays at Melbourne airport, animations arriving at the last minute, software quirks, a compressed set-up time, hardware quirks, that elevator(!) and so on – the first shows of the tour ended up running really well. Having a crack team of musicians (and tech folk) definitely helps in that regard (including Tim Shiel aka ‘Faux Pas’ beside me onstage). Below, the band and my hard-drive covered laptop during sound / vision check at the Opera House.

And the VDMX interface spreading its wings up on the screen briefly during rehearsal.

And once again, with people.

( More Gotye gig photos )

The Graphic Arts festival

Awesome choice for tour opener – showcasing an album and animations within a festival dedicated to comics. Graphic Arts had some great highlights this year:

- Jim Woodring, the author of FRANK, did a pretty mind-expanding talk on DEATH-CAKE apparently, and fantastic inking masterclass (attended by comic-friend Gregory Mackay (Francis Bear)).

- Tekkon Kinkreet - fantastic animated film – with accompanying live soundtrack by Plaid (Warp) + Fourplay (strings) + Synergy (robotic rubber limbed percussionists). Really luscious sound, really luscious film.

- Silent Comics – a series of comic panels projected while musicians provide a soundtrack. This included sound foley artists, Captain Beefheart-esque carnival bands, Seekae, Wally from Gotye in splinter-sample mode, and probably nailing it best, Plaid. Great idea for a session.

- Scott McCloud – from ‘Understanding Comics’ (also used as a multimedia bible in explaining media and visual storytelling concepts ) did a great one hour presentation, which harnessed visual support material as effectively as you’d hope a guy like him would. Lots of interesting points, though I found myself laughing at his interface observation-  ”Why does Tom Cruise need a glove to do all that in Minority report?”. He also ended with this pretty funny reading of a scrolling comic that involved monkeys mutating into progressively crazier proportions.

- Pete Kuper – aka the guy who did Spy Vs Spy from Mad magazine.

- An assortment of Aussie comic artists doing talks and workshops – including Mandy Ord, Pat Grant and more.

Sadly Robert Crumb wasn’t part of the mix – but I was amused to learn from the Festival organiser about the communication process they had – “Yes, Robert uses email, but that involves….” –  his assistant scanning his recent emails, printing the interesting ones, highlighting the relevant bits, cutting those out and putting them in an envelope and mailing them to Robert, who replies on the back with his pen. When he’s around.

Above, Pattern Machine, the fruits of a recent fourway collaboration in a weeklong residency on Cockatoo Island ( a former prison and shipbuilding yard in Sydney Harbour), during the 2011 Underbelly Arts Festival.

By the end of the week, after much tech configuration, island sampling*, and software wrestling, we’d concocted a work in progress that was deemed seaworthy enough for 3 x 45 minute audiovisual sets during the public exhibition night. And during that day the space was filled with people wandering around the inflatable sculpture, while cocooned by a generative surround installation busy mutating captured island sounds into new species. Turns out the accumulated ferry rides, nautical rust and winter winds were worth enduring in the end, as the performance seemed to go really well, much of the pieces falling into shape on the very last evening before the event.

For myself, it was very satisfying to have an opportunity to explore video composition in a great setting, and in a more spatial way – using an external graphics card to send a different signal to 3 different projectors simultaneously, using madmapper to position and map the video from each of these, and having the luxury of returning each day to experiment with equipment that was already set-up. And it was super-satisfying to be doing that with…

These 4 People = Pattern Machine

Jean Poole: spatial video composition and live video manipulation with 3 projectors, vdmx, quartz composer and madmapper.
Dan MacKinlay + James Nichols: Quadrophonic soundscapes using field recordings, vintage synthesisers and heavily customised super collider patches. (They don’t have much vinyl, but their phd maths books weigh a tonne.. )
Sarah Harvie: inflatable sculpture, tailor designed for our space with lots of late night industrial sewing machine sweat.

(( *My Cockatoo Island photo set, Dan’s photo set, and Dan’s stereo field recordings. ))

Underbelly Artists Shout Out:

Aside from the audacious setting, part of what made the residency great was the motley collection of artists also spending time on the island, each struggling with their own peculiar set of problems to solve. And it was inspiring to see everyone’s work evolving over the week. This extensive  festival review gives a good taste of how the exhibition day unfolded, and these were some of my favourites:

Case Study - This was my pick of the bunch, 6 artists who had the aim of building a new colonial society in their allocated portion of the island. Which they built out of everything they brought in their suitcases, as well as using their suitcases themselves to build individual artist houses. There were telescopes and projected moons, ornate water features, mossy forests growing from open suitcases and test tubes, every step a new photogenic overload.

Younes Bachir and Strings Attached got the jaw-drop-spectacle medal – with their meat-suits, paint-splashy aerial choreography ( imagine a dozen people 4 storeys up dynamically moving about in space ) and flair in abundance. ( This gives a good taste of why it excited.. )

Brad Miller’s Data_shadow video installation was super-slick, an exploration of memory, technology and how lusciously you can make a database of photographs and video wander across 4 screens with motion detection cues from visitors. Biljana Jancic‘s wooden boxed shafts of light played beautifully with the smoke machines, silhouettes and the industrial space and  SWANBRERO used inflatable car sales dancers to great effect in their piece - INFLATE MY HEART WITH 1000 GUSHES OF WIND .

Above, after much hair-pulling : VDMX merrily sending out 2400 x 600 pixels across 2 screens and 1 projector, via the set-up below.

ie – 2010 Macbook Pro –> mini display to DVI convertor –> DVI cable –> Matrox Triplehead2go Digital Edition –> DVI to VGA adaptors x 3.

According to Matrox, only the Triplehead2go DP ( Display Ports in/out) edition is compatible with the 2010 Macbook Pro. I wasn’t able to get that to send a signal to projectors, using display port to VGA adaptors. The DP-VGA adaptors by themselves worked fine on the ends of other cables, but when put after the TH2GO DP box, no signal. Weird science.

Was just about to sell the older Matrox Digital Edition, which ended up incompatible with my last machine, but aaaaaanyways. THREE SCREENS OUT. And with less than 3 hours til airport-to-Sydney time, for tomorrow’s video installing on Cockatoo Island, this is a good thing. Also good – the holy software trinity of VDMX, Syphon + Madmapper all worked perfectly across the 3 screens.

Below, Madmapper stretching across screens, even as computer leads are being stolen away from it and shoved into a bag.

Now that I’ve finished marking all of the respective assignments from classes at RMIT and Swinburne, am looking forward to biting properly into a few long neglected creative projects / overloaded bookshelves / learning curves etc. And that overdue skynoise overhaul so it better reflects the 2011 web and myself. Next up though, a video island adventure in Sydney harbour.

As part of the 2011 Underbelly Arts festival, I will be creating video projections to accompany long time audio wizard collaborator Dan MacKinlay, James ‘Dubtable’ Nichols ( that’s him in the photo), and Sarah Harvie whose specialty is inflatable sculptures! We’ll be doing this as ‘Pattern Machine’ in the space photographed above, which is one of the ancient ship building rooms at Cockatoo Island in Sydney Harbour. Pattern Machine has a tumblr and a twitter account, where we’ll be documenting our preparations and experiments, and also has a festival page, alongside all the other festival artists.

This year’s festival was pitched as an island residency for developing some works in progress. Looks like it’ll be quite an interesting collection of projects, with many artists practicing / building / tinkering on site in public view, followed by a performance  and exhibition day on July 16th, showcasing what has been explored during the residency.

For our part, the work in progress will mean explorations into location sampling and weird algorithimic audio with Super-Collider (eg “New No New Age Advanced Ambient Markov Music Machine” and attempts to intertwine inflatable tendrils around the machine relic within our inherited room. Pixel-wise – I’m hoping to do some projection mapping experiments onto that machine relic, re-animating it as it were, in real-time response to the sounds happening, and similarly try to create some kind of responsive visual designs on the inflatable structures. Aside from that, I’ll also be testing out a triple screen external graphics card ( matrox triple head 2 go ) to experiment with simultaneously projecting various scenes onto the wall behind the machine and inflatable sculpture. For the scenes projected on the wall, will be playing with some simple responsive graphics and some filmed / composed sequences of various events / stop motion / locations from around the island. My tools of choice : VDMX + Quartz Composer, with Madmapper for the projection mapping (Madmapper review coming soon).

Below, James and The Machine, moustache not to scale:

June 5th, 2011.

Due to a weird Sydney Opera House ticket mix up – I ended up at YO GABBA GABBA live this weekend – instead of the planned pilgrimage to Chris Cunningham’s triple screen live cinema assault. Priceless. Etc etc

More laters…

The downturn in advertising revenue was blamed variously on the GFC, a downturn in clubbing and an increasing shift by promoters to the internet. It was often weird writing a very net focussed column for a weekly print mag, but never more so than this week. And it has certainly been an eventful decade for a column about media technologies. ]]]

</TECHNOSCAPE>

1998: Remember when that new search engine came out, promising better results with it’s algorithmic interrogation of linked relationships online? That was Google, in its PRE-VERB DAYS. Paypal launched that year too.

1999:     Napster. RSS. SETI@Home

2000:    Blogger.

2001:     Wikipedia. Creative Commons. Bit Torrent. The first ipod arrived.

2003:     Myspace (remember that?). Skype. Second Life. the ITunes store. 4chan. Pirate Bay. Delicious. WordPress.

2004:     Facebook (Yep, it has only been that long). World of Warcraft. Flickr

2005:     Youtube. Google Earth.

2006:     Twitter, and a little site called Wikileaks.

2007:     Tumblr. The first iPhone arrived.

2009:     Kickstarter. FourSquare.

2010:     Instagram. Quora.

While I’d like to be able to say I was writing Technoscape since BEFORE GOOGLE EXISTED, I don’t think that was quite the case. 3D World on the other hand, goes back further, splashing it’s first club culture ink in 1989, before Facebook, before MySpace, before Youtube, before Google, BEFORE THE FIRST WEB BROWSER in 1993. Imagine – a time before the web even existed, and there were so many people dancing in dusty warehouses, that they needed their own magazine. In a time BEFORE STATUS UPDATES.

That loose timeline also shows we have no clue about what yet-to-be-invented internet services we’ll likely heavily rely on in only a few years time, and serves as validation for the ‘future proofing’ strategy of installing high bandwidth fibre optic under the NBN scheme. Less validating? Australia’s proposed net filter.

In 2001 some new fledgling software called Ableton Live was born in Berlin. You might’ve been using Photoshop 6.0, Final Cut Pro 3, After Effects 5.0, Cubase VST32 5.1, Pro Tools 5.0, Rebirth(!), Arkaos, VDMX and so on. And today, are we really much better, faster, stronger? A few quick keywords show how our tools and processes and possibilities have evolved: kinect hacks / serato bridge / maxforlive / processing / vvvv / syphon recorder / madmapper / quartz composer / touchOSC. More sophisticated, yepz, but arguably not much different.

3DWorld, it has been a fucking pleasure. Stay in touch via skynoise.net or twitter. I can’t believe this is the very last Technoscape sentence, and it is now exactly 400 words.

In Sydney

Chris Cunningham brings his triple screen live audiovisual performance to Sydney Opera house as part of the Vivid festival. To what extent his performance is live has already been debated, but the lure of this director’s back catalogue and the teasers glimpsed online mean that expectations are like that astronaut suited guy in the hot air balloon at the edge of the atmosphere. Who knows?

In Montreal

Already a fond pilgrimage for those wanting to worship at the altar of techno, drone, glitch and bass – this year’s Mutek festival promises a stellar collection of audiovisual related events:

- Mexican ambient-techno producer Murcof – teamed with Anti-VJ – co-performing a ‘three dimensional cosmos’ across 3 screens.
- Finland’s Mika Vanio ( ex – Pan Sonic ), debuting a new live audiovisual concert.
- UK’s Sculpture play their homemade zoetropic discs – “slabs of vinyl illustrated with otherworldly patterns that they play at various speeds and then film to create simultaneous cycles of analogue sound and looping, mind-melting imagery”.
- Women with Kitchen Appliances have a name that demands festival goers will at least wander in to check out what they might be doing.

Oh and ‘just music’? Amon Tobin debuts his new ‘live performance featuring an enormous stage set-up that promises otherworldly experiences’. And there’s Gold Panda, Mode Selektor, Siriusmo, Adam X, Plastikman, Fourtet improvising with UK jazzy house fusionists Rocketnumbernine, and so on. And a series of workshops including one by the makers of Madmapper, the much anticipated projection mapping software due for release shortly, and panel discussions about Augmented Reality as a creative playground. Mutek. Montreal. Daayum.

In Melbourne

Okay, so not strictly audiovisual, but visionaries like Sun Ra see with more than their eyes, and either these next few words will mean a lot to you, or they won’t, but the Sun Ra Arkestra is.playing.in.Melbourne. Also known as The Solar Myth Arkestra, His Cosmic Discipline Arkestra, The Blue Universe Arkestra and The Jet Set Arkestra etc. They’ve been kicking for six decades now, and although no longer fronted by afro cosmonaut and renowned composer Sun Ra (who passed away in 1993), this performance represents the Australian premiere and a chance to experience their unique and exhilarating, free-floating explorations of ‘tone-science’. At the Forum theatre as part of the Jazz festival, Space is the place, ladies and gentlemen.

And Then:
More babysteps with Quartz. I set about trying to make a split-screen effect quartz effect which would replicate any video 9 times within the same screen. (This was to fulfil a request for someone who wanted me to alternate between fullscreen and 9 videos on a video wall made up of 9 screens, where a hardware matrix switcher would usually be used, but couldn’t be on this for some reason.

Over at the quartz section of Vidvox forums, Vade answered my query with:

“Can’t you use 9 billboards and make them 1/3rd the size of the screen and position them accordingly?”
and even offered up an example file.. http://vade.info/9.qtz

Bingo! Coming from traditional video editing land, I hadn’t even been able to grasp that creating a new billboard effectively creates a new image that can be composited. So then, loaded with new brain juice, I set about transforming the patch so it would work within VDMX.

There were a few barriers:

1- For parameters within a Quartz patch to show up as visible, adjustible parameters within VDMX, a process called ‘adding a published input’ needs to be done. The above quartz patch was set-up to take a webcam input and replicate that 9 times. This needed to be changed to a ‘published image input’, which would mean when loaded as a VDMX effect, it would take any movie playing in that VDMX layer, and apply the replication and compostion effect to it. The adding a published input process is documented on the VDMX wiki.

2 - Although the webcam split evenly into 9 screens, when taken into VDMX the 9 clips had plenty of overlaps. This became a tedious process of working in quartz with webcam version, dimension mode on auto-height, adjusting the input parameters for each billboard a certain amount, then adding the VDMX input back in, importing to VDMX and testing what it looked like now. (If anyone has any advice on making composition arrangement in Quartz less painful, love to hear about it! ). Eventually, I managed to make a VDMX effect that can quickly turn any 16:9 clip into the desired 9×16:9 clips, in a 16:9 screen.

And here it is: http://www.skynoise.net/quartz/9screens16_9.qtz
( Dump that into your Quartz FX folder of VDMX and it should show up as an effect for any layer ).

Moving Along:

The transitions used in VDMX are available as quartz files to play with in the VDMX composition mode folder. Open them in Quartz, saving under a new name and playing around with them makes it fairly trivial to make new transitions. If you add something else useful from Quartz to them, or wish to have real-time access to any of the parameters of the transitions ( eg opacity / angle, etc ), these parameters can be published as inputs using the above methods, and then they show up as VDMX friendly parameters that can be mouse dragged or audio synced etc.

A Next Batch of Quartz Problems:

Planning to work through these over time, but figured I’d list them here, in case any pointers fly in…

- Is it possible to select an anchor point for rotating a clip in QC? (So that for example, a point well below the screen could be used as the centre of a circle that passed in an arc across the top of the screen.) I found the anchor.qtz example patch which seems more related to anchor points in HTML pages, but maybe there’s a way of using it?  And the ‘Image Transform’ effect has a rotation parameter, but no adjustible anchor point?)

- How can a slider transition be adjusted so that both clips move in sync, not just one sliding in over the other?

- Related to the slider sync – how to do seamless tiling? Am guessing once the sliding is figured out, use mirrored images at the edge of an image, to enable a seamless horizontal or vertical scrolling loop?

- Is it possible to include video masks on a layer, not just image still masks? Is it possible to use masks that effectively create blank / alpha channel space around pixels in a layer?

- Some day : separate photoshop layers with adjustible depth of field blur in sync with z depth?

- Some day II : sliders that create exponentially smaller (replicated) slices of a video.

- Some day III : more sliders, that create puzzle slider type FX, but with adjustible zooming and scaling on the pieces – so they stay the same puzzle size, but are more or less zoomed in.

So if you’ve got any advice, suggested reading / plug-ins etc about any of the above – please get in touch.

MODUL8 + Mapping Festival, Geneva (19-29 May, 2011)

As well as a thematic focus on video projections mapped onto non-screen surfaces and shapes, this year’s festival will see the official release of MadMapper, a new video mapping software created by GarageCUBE (Modul8) and 1024_architecture. There are plenty of impressive demonstrations of Madmapper on the 1024 blog, and it lokos like the final release will include ‘native communication with Modul8 and QC, unlimited mapped surfaces, masking and drawing, and much more’. Festival bonus points – Melbourne’s Kit Webster was chosen as one of the few selected from International applicants to show an installation. See more at http://kitwebster.com.au.

VDMX Beta 8 + LPM, Rome (19-22 May, 2011)

Meanwhile, another gaggle of pixel-heads converge in Rome for the annual Live Performer’s meeting. Notable this year will be the rare fleshy appearance of the VDMX coders from vidvox.net, crawling out of their bunkers briefly to describe some of the benefits of their new BETA 8 ( such as built in Syphon support, and a whole range of underlying improvements). Also of note – the launch of a book on Quartz Composer, written by VJ Shakinda and Surya Buchwald (Aka Momo the Monster).

Audiovisual Mayhem With Maxforlive

Melbourne audiovisualist, Zealousy, has been developing a series of interesting looking Max For Live patches, which he calls Vizzable VJ Plugins, and he recently joined forces with Fabrizio Poce who makes the V-Module suite, merging their projects “to provide a comprehensive suite of video, effects and real-time graphics tools for Live,” and, “If you’d like to become involved in testing and developing these plugins please join the discussion at http://groups.google.com/group/jitterinmax4live-”

But What Does It All Mean?

Berlin’s clubtransmediale.de held a symposium in February, with a spotlight on the practice of media-based audio/visual live performance considering what ‘liveness’ entails in the age of media technology. Luckily for those elsewhere, a nice long list of provocative people, ideas, links, transcripts, and videos has been generously compiled by someone in attendance – the UK’s Toby *spark, who is both a live cinema pioneer and currently framing his Phd on the topic. If interested in live video, plenty to chew on here: http://tobyz.net/tobyzstuff/diary/

Teeming Void + Transmateriality

Also well worth a read, the latest piece by Mitchell Whitelaw (resident Canberra theorist and practitioner in generative art, data visualisation, physical computing, digital materiality etc.), which explores our fascination with glowing rectangles in today’s media ecology, and how processes and techniques such as projection mapping have been offering some ways to explore digital art beyond the screen. Great project examples and plenty to think about.

UPDATE : The Syphon app (mentioned below) routes video losslessly between video software using the graphics card, and now the Syphon recorder can record the output of these apps. Send feedback, flowers to Vade and Bangnoise.

Free screen capture options:
PC – Camstudio /, Mac – Capture me. And Vade’s free screen capture tool (mac) allows you to ‘capture your entire desktop, or a portion of it, to an image and further process it within Quartz Composer or supported host applications. This can be used to sample other application’s windows as a source input for post processing, texture mapping on to models, etc’. Which means in practice, VJs can use it to grab screen content (eg games, DVDs, web, cams, other software output – whatever you can see on the screen ), and then process this feed in VDMX however they like.

More Broadcasty Tailored Options
Snapz Pro (mac:$69) and Screenflow (mac$99) offer simultaneous camera, microphone and audio capture as well as screencast options such as highlighting the mouse, key commands or certain windows.GrabberRaster (mac) allows sampling of any portion of the Mac screen for use as input for Quartz Composer, or as virtual camera input for QuickTime Pro, Skype, CamCamX or other QuickTime-compatible webcam software. $99 bundled with a bunch of other cam FX.

Sampling VDMX with Syphon and BoinxTV

Boinx TV is a custom video application for live mixing and recording of presentations / tutorials / news stories etc. Syphon (mac) not only samples the screen – but allows real-time sharing of full frame rate video or stills, with other applications. Future versions of Syphon are likely to have built in recording options. For now though, combining Syphon with Boinx, Berlin’s @fALk_g and Leon von Tippelskirch, one of the Boinx developers, came up with an effective way for recording VDMX – and it works in HD!

This could be a great workflow breakthrough for people creating motion graphics or doing compositing or visual effects. Being able to easily improvise with VJ software and midi controllers will never replace some of the detailed micro-level animation and editing done in dedicated editing and compositing software, but it should make it much easier and more fun to create certain kinds of clips for layering / visual effects / remixing and re-use etc. And who knows what kinds of new workflows (playflows?) and processes might follow from there..

Instructions via @fALk_g:

- Install Syphon and Quartz Syphon Plugins (free), and BoinxTV Home Edition ($49) ( see Boinx review)
- Activate Syphon Output in VDMX (beta 8 via vidvox.net)
- Load custom quartz project into BOINX, that can tap into the Syphon source. (download file 82k)
- Hit record. The custom project records with the Apple Intermediate codec (for best balance of quality and performance), but can be adjusted within settings. For best quality and framerate, Falk recommends playing clips from one drive and recording to a separate drive.

Bonus speed gain: Because Syphon is feeding video to Boinx, you can deactivate VDMX Output and use the Boinx 2nd monitor output to view your VDMX mixing – it actually seems to improve performance / frame rate.

The above instructions and file worked fine for me, but I haven’t really tested how far it can be pushed (eg lots of layers and CPU heavy FX in VDMX, while recording HD to a drive). Fun times ahead.

And finally on the screen capture front – a shout out to 9-eyes.com – an incredible collection of unusual moments captured by Google Street View, photographing every road in the world – For The Surrealist Win!

Vat Ist?
Video mixing software (mac only) set up for easy, intuitive real-time control over live cameras, recorded clips, slides, infographics, text and capable of streaming live as it happens.

The BoinxTV Interface
There’s almost nothing within BoinxTV that can’t be done with VJ software – with a lot of customisation and editing. The value of BoinxTV is that a lot of functions very useful for live video presentations, have been compiled thoughtfully into an easy to use interface. New features are selected easily and added as layers to the central interface component. Editing and refining for each layer is done in the left side panel, and the right panel shows the master output. Selecting between and triggering layers and events ( eg switching to a new camera, adding an infographic, doing a cross fade to a net based camera etc ) can be done onscreen, with user keyboard shortcuts, a midi controller or via an iPhone app. It’s a fast and efficient system and would greatly simplify the workflow for making video presentations, tutorials, podcasts or framing live event broadcasts.

Features
Aside from the basics (implemented well) such as video switching, camera switching, scaling and adjusting image quality, inserting graphics and text, Boinx also enables the use of high-grade AXIS network cameras, multiple cameras, the easy inclusion of video skype calls from others, integration of RSS feeds for ticker tape scrolls, as well as twitter feeds (allowing comments from viewers), drawing on screen and decent chroma keying (for an easy newsdesk feel or for the use of virtual backdrops). Users can also create their own custom layers using Apple’s Quartz Composer software.

One of it’s best features is the capacity to bundle all of this up and send all the final master out live online – although this isn’t as simple to access as the rest of the features and will hopefully get integrated into a future version. To stream live requires installation of further software ((either GrabberRaster($) or Camtwist (free)), which makes the Boinx signal compatible for the likes of streaming software such as quicktime broadcaster, ustream, stickam and justin.tv.

Bonus points: Using Syphon, Boinx can record real-time HD output from VJ software running on the same laptop (via @fALk_g in Berlin)

Requirements
Intel Multicore CPU based Mac with discrete graphics (MacBook Pro’s starting late 2007), Mac OS X Leopard (10.5.8) or later. QT 7.66 or later. Webcam or professional video camera with Firewire, SDI or HDMI.
And $49 for Home version, $499 for Full version. (See : http://www.boinx.com/boinxtv/home/compare)

Verdict:
The Home version will probably suit most people’s needs, and is a remarkably featured piece of software, which can greatly simplify the production of video presentations, video podcasts, screencasts, and tutorials. It’s also a very easy and convenient way to add a layer of professional depth to any live net broadcasts.

Vat Ist?
Stop motion ( or stop action ) animation creates the illusion of movement by photographing objects in new positions for every frame. iStopmotion is software dedicated to streamlining that process as much as possible, offering a range of previews, adjustments and relevant effects for monitoring a camera connected to your computer and ensuring accurate controls over the movement of your objects.

Features
While there are for more powerful (and expensive) animation software packages available, the beauty of iStopmotion is in it’s dedicated focus, and the feature set is tailored and trimmed to specifically suit the needs of stop motion animators, avoiding other animation complexities. Below, some of the ways stop motion life becomes easier:

- Image capture adjustments ( flip or rotate image / colour correction and presets / use of overlays and grids for guidance ).
( Note – in terms of image capture, most Canon DSLR cameras are no longer supported in Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.5 and 10.6.6. This is a result of Apple’s dropping of support for those cameras though, not a fault of iStopmotion itself, but hopefully it’s something that will be resolved soon. )
- Onion skinning ( overlays of each frame to allow understanding of how a sequence of movements will look )
- built-in chroma ( or green / blue ) screening
- Custom foregrounds and backgrounds can easily be inserted
- No in-built painting / editing of frames, but it does support easy transferral of frames to Photoshop for that purpose, and then adjusts the frame to suit the new edits.
- Support for using a soundtrack and/or other layers of video as animation guidance.
- Support for the Apple remote control, to capture images from your animation work-table.
- Support for multiple cameras at once
- Integration with Final Cut Pro
- Tilt Shift effect – for applying that miniature real world look.
- Time Lapse capture – create time based effects by capturing frames at specified gaps of time.

And cutely, there’s an option for printing animation sequences as a Flip Book.

Requirements
OS X ( it’s mac only software ), Snow Leopard recommended, but earlier versions still available for use on earlier systems.
Cash: $49 for home version, $99 for Express version and $499 for Pro version ( Major differences are the maximum resolution size, and integration with FCP. Free demo available.

Verdict
No, it’s not After Effects, but for stopmotion enthusiasts, this is a great way to streamline and focus animations.

Scattermusic East Coast Tour Highlights from jeanpoole on Vimeo.

Part of the reason I’ve been quiet on the blog this year, was because of a very busy November and December with video. So it’s good to finally reflect some of that. Back in November I travelled up the Australian East Coast with the Scattermusic Sound System. Which meant 5 guys with 5 laptops in a van for 3 weeks, a dozen gigs, bouncing from Melbourne to Brisbane and back in a space-age Tarago, foam parties, passing through schoolies week in the Gold Coast, realising that our Wagga Wagga gig was at the same time as a world bantam weight boxing match being screened at the same venue, burnouts in Ballarat (as savoured by French Fries who had come along for that gig), Mat Cant twittering away and getting shout outs from Rinse.fm as we travelled, a projector mount that clamped onto anything ( including hotel cabin doorframes for late night movies ), and of course, a never ending supply of great tunes (most overheard sentence in the van? “This track is sick.”)…

Being able to actually document projections in a half-decent way now ( thanks to picking up a Canon 7D last year ), means I’m going to publishing a lot more video online from here in. It’s something that has been a long time coming, and I’m quite happy about finally getting that ball rolling.

Video credits:
Music: Scattermusic soundsystem feat Serocee – east coast anthem (mat cant dub edit)
Video edit, camera work and tour VJing by Jean Poole.
( Geelong photo by The Cheap Assassin, Bin Juice cover art by Michael Cusack )

Sampology’s Super Visual Smackdown! taster on Vimeo.

A+V on NYE: Dec 31 will find Brisbane’s Sampology scooting away from the sub-tropics, to scratch up a video storm down south at the Fall’s Festival in Apollo Bay. Sam was kind enough to answer a few words about the art of ‘AV-DJing‘ while he prepares.

What were your inspirations for expanding from turntablism into live audiovisuals?
I felt like a new challenge and Audio Visual DJing seemed in a lot of ways still really undefined and I could do my own thing with it. I’ve always been into what guys like Hexstatic, DJ Yoda plus a lot of other amazing artist have done with cool technology, video content, big ass screens and lots of people in front of them.

What are some of the challenges in producing and performing live audiovisual material?
That Audio and Visual have to relate together in each section as well as the whole set. There’s no point in asking a crowd to party as well as pay attention to the screen – if you aren’t doing anything engaging or creative with what you’re giving them. It’s always a difficult but extremely fun challenge in the prep work as well as the performance.

What kinds of qualities do you think live audiovisual material needs, to work well in on a cinematic dancefloor?
I try to lace a portion of the set with content that people will know, and then remix it in some way using humor/ emotion/ turntablism to try and do something creative. What I like about AV shows is that they aren’t defined to a set of rules and expectations, so I think there’s still a lot of avenues to take AV performances in.

Audiences tend to watch films a small number of times, yet are happy to hear the same songs over and over. Do you find that audiovisual songs have a shorter shelf life?
Sometimes. A lot of people request certain routines so they end up staying in the set for longer than I had actually planned! I’m going to trying and get more into using content that’s in headlines, but there’s a lot of prep work so you want to make it worthwhile if you’re going to only play the routine once.

What artists currently interest you?
There’s heaps of Caribbean influenced sounds that are exciting me, and I’m heavily into a certain movie genre at the moment but won’t let on as it will give away the theme for the 2011 Super Visual show. As for Live Audiovisuals, I saw this Japanese Opera recently, shot and performed live on this massive blue screen, it’s pretty gnarly.

What technologies are you currently excited about?
Mostly I’m happy with Serato Video-SL plus my trusty MPC. I’m more excited about pushing forward with what I’ve got, to make something as entertaining and unique for an audience as possible!

What’ve you got planned for your Super Visual Smackdown, and to what extent does narrative fit into your production?
I’ll preview the brand new ‘Super Visual’ show at the beginning of 2011. Until then I’ve got a really fun Summer themed festival AV set made for Falls & Southbound festivals as well as a couple of other special shows around oz.

Syphon Teaser from vade on Vimeo.

Syphon
Syphon is “an open source Mac OS X technology that allows applications to share frames – full frame rate video or stills – with one another in realtime. Now you can leverage the expressive power of a plethora of tools to mix, mash, edit, sample, texture-map, synthesize, and present your imagery using the best tool for each part of the job. Syphon gives you flexibility to break out of single-app solutions and mix creative applications to suit your needs.”

Out of the box, this means you can send live video signals between these applications: quartz composer, max msp jitter, Freeframe GL and Unity 3D Pro ( a game engine ). Within a short while of release though, this list has been extended to include Modul8 and the MadMapper mapping software, Resolume Avenue, built-in support within the new beta of VDMX, Isadora, CoGe, Open Frameworks, Cinder and Mix Emergency ( software for scratching video with a Serato turntable set-up ).

It all happens on the graphics card, not the CPU, which means HD video can be shuffled between applications at 60 frames per second. This is a great boost for live video flexibility ( lossless live video mixing in and out of 3D game engines? No problem. ), and when it evolves to include being sent over networks, awesome collaborative possibilities await.

Kinect
Another splasher in the visual tech world has been the recent release of the Kinect camera add-on for the XBox. The device features “an RGB camera, depth sensor and multi-array microphone running proprietary software”, and enables 3D motion capture, facial recognition and voice recognition. Being such a hacker’s delight of a device, within a week of release there’s already a growing range of software written that enables it to be used outside the Xbox. Some of these include the ability to draw in 3D (and rotate the image) using gestures, visual FX applications and thanks to Syphon, there’s already a way to include Kinect 3D depth images within Quartz Composer – by first using it within OF and then sending it through Syphon to your visual app of choice.

Notable Kinect shout-outs: real-time light sabers(love the use of the little mirror to frame and juxtapose the original footage here), kinect puppet shows and instant fat-suits.

And there’s a nice extended Kinect round-up of projects over at Creative Applications.

So there you go, the future is already here – *and* it is starting to become more evenly distributed…

Velcro + Laptops

Attaching spare portable Hard-drives to your laptop lid with velcro is a super-win. Not only does it save precious performance space and avoid drives being bumped, it also extends to three, the list of questions VJs will most likely asked at venues.
1- ‘Can you play a track by Another tip? Minimise external drives cutting out when firewire cables move or get unplugged, by using cable ties to tighten the firewire cable to an ethernet cable plugged into the port beside.

Hardware Mixer-Free Zones*
Hardware mixers have become a luxury (or an insurance policy against computer crashes) rather than a necessity, as most clip mixing and blending is preferably done through software and a midi controller. If tight on budget / space, mixers can be avoided. Need a live cam? Use a USB webcam to mix within your VJ software. Other USB capture devices open up worlds of lo-fi video capture, play-through and mixing. Portable midi controllers? My two favourites are the Novation Nocturn and the set of Korg nano controllers… which give the best value in terms of buttons and sliders per buck.

(*At least until *SPARK’s tiny DVI mixer is released! )

Projectors
Projectorcentral.com is a fantastic resource for comparing different projectors, and provides a great overview of what to look for in a projector.

Lumens: (brightness ) – aim for minimum 2500 for a small room, and get as many as you can.
Contrast ratio: ( eg 2000:1 ) Higher is better, richer blacks.
Zoom range: The difference between minimum and maximum sizes, which enables flexible distance from screen.
Resolution: Aim for a minimum of 720P (1280×720), which is the smallest HD size, or WXGA (1280×768). Full HD of 1920×1080 will avoid any scaling, and delivers the best image.
Aspect ratio: 16:9 native is preferable over 4:3
Inputs: VJs will want VGA inputs, and HDMI if available. Most will include RCA / composite.

eBay offers 15m VGA cables for around $30, and if you need more distance between projector and your laptop – maybe consider entering the world of baluns ( connectors / convertors that allow video signals to be sent over the much cheaper ethernet / coax cable for much longer distance without signal degradation. )

Need to build a Projector Mount that will go anywhere? ( http://vjkungfu.com/archive/build-projector-mount ) Clampalicious! Allows a projector to be easily and very securely mounted to lighting rigs, poles etc. Before and after shots below..

Got any other portable touring / rig shrinking / making-video-life-easier tips? Send them along..

[[ UPDATE: Extra tips in the comments:
via the well oiled touring machine-human hybrid, Filastine: "for VJ’s that work from stage, or for solo audio/video performers like myself-project from stage into an automotive sideview mirror clamped to a mic stand, no ladders or long cables needed"
via uDart: a more compact solution to VJ Kung Fu’s mount.
"For that reason I always buy projectors hat have a 1/4-20? camera fitting. Also the ball joint can be substituted with a ‘magic arm’. That gives you countless positioning possibilities."]]

The Executive Summary
We Made Our Own Disaster, A study of fascism in late 20th Century democracies : By Robin Mahoney and Si Begg, out now through Optronica (UK group founded in 2004 by artists/producers Addictive TV and curators Cinefeel ).
DVD, Dolby 5.1, 66 minutes.

Rewinding to The Noodles Foundation
If unfamiliar with the turn of the millenium era ‘Death Of Cool’ compilation series, browsing sibegg.com/noodles should give a good indication of what goes through the head of Si Begg when he’s not sculpting monster basslines and synth earworms (Actually, one step better – listen to 30 second snippets from each track on ‘The Complete Death of Cool’, which combined the best Noodling via the Leaf label ). Somehow those compilations managed to blend sonic sophistication, chunky basslines and quirky British humour into some sort of lovable mutant electronica. And at some point, they also released ‘a blitzkrieg assault of scratchpunk videos to feed your desktop’ entitled Ho-FuN – ‘The Smallest Film Festival In The World’.

Live Cinema and Dancefloor friendly DVDs?
Inevitably then, this study of fascism is more Ali G than Adam Curtis ( famed BBC documentary maker ). It’s best moments harness the curatorial judgments of the editors ( digital crate diggers, represent! ), their technical flair ( there are some captivating sonic and visual transitions) and the underlying dry British humour which milks televisual moments for every absurdity, horror, and occasionally sublime flavour. Midway through for example, a TV cabaret snippet is transformed beautifully, loop-stretched, as a zoom zeroes in, until eventually cross-fadeing into a clip of a cat spinning in zero gravity with a trainee astronaut. And some of the material is great by itself, such as a series of everyday characters staring awkwardly into the camera. There are many such golden moments, but on the flipside, the continual leaning to the dancefloor ( letting faster music and beats drive the editing, overly repetitive sample use etc ), diminishes its appeal as a DVD ( given the inevitable comparisons with cinema grade production levels and screenwriting ).

As a DVD, this is a notch above many of the video mixtapes now abundant online – you don’t get to be veterans of collage without learning a few tricks. That said, the idea of a remix compilation based around mostly archival footage and nostalgic tv commercials is a less compelling idea today than it was a dozen years ago, and the ability to lure eyeballs away from fragments online to something longer form, really depends on the quality, coherence and originality of the overall vision. There’s plenty of adventure to be had on the disc and Sibegg’s soundscaping for the most part plays a great part in binding everything together, but some of the disc’s techniques are quite dated, such as mixing of badly keyed footage, certain visual effects and a stuttery on/off approach to vocal samples that becomes annoying after a while. Why the repetitive triggering and re-triggering of samples, when there can be much more sophisticated and fluid sequencing possibilities used in the live terrain ( eg final scratch / Serato / Ableton Live sequencing video clips with midi, max for live used with jitter etc )? Maybe this is a result of the DVD being edited with traditional editing software, rather than explored with real-time processes? Who knows? Anyways, yes, more Nom Nom than Noam, but a fun and commendable effort, and another reminder that creating live cinema, or ambient cinema that can be tuned in and out of like music, is actually pretty difficult.

What’s a DVD again?

a) “Another Useless Ironic Colourful Object In The Long List of Items Produced By The Falling Western Empire”
b) Plastic taking up room on shelves you wouldn’t need if you didn’t collect plastic
c) A great way to support independent visual artists and musicians
d) A snapfrozen piece of the internet, a medley of fragments and crosswired influences
e) All of the above, ie Faits Divers by Gangpol & Mit, published by Pictoplasma publishing, beautifully packaged and designed by Wiyumi.

“Sonic and Visual in Love”
Faits Divers finds my favourite French audiovisual duo heading off into a more narrative driven direction than previous animated efforts. Sure, the sugarbuzzy pop charm is still there, and they are still farming the possibilities of blending nostalgic sounds and visions with a caricatured cutting edge tech. Where this once presented itself as mutant rhythmic AV probably best suited to a live environment, we are now treated to extended explorations in their cartoon worlds – where deviant plots unfold over time and the music doesn’t try to fit so much in at all times.

“Many of the characters in the clips are easily read as extensions of the creators themselves, battling it out on the ping-pong table, aloof deities on a tiny cloud, lusty beings united in tantric embraces, or sailors stranded on a distant shore, on the verge of embracing cannibalism”

The DVD comes in 4 flavours: Clips/Stories (eg The Hatred Boat), Activities (eg Stand on Waste) and Art with Heart (Interviews with fake artists) and Archives. There is no option to play the soundtrack by itself, which is maybe deliberate, but there is available:
“A special free gift mp3 package delivering 4 new edits of its soundtrack, alternative versions especially reworked to animate your new years celebrations, wedding parties, mystic choirs, ethnic orchestras and goat skin percussions etc”.

“In times where digital media and low-cost travel shrink the globe to the size of a pixel, we are haunted by the computer generated nightmare version of this carnival. The man-eating feast is taken place just millimetres below your computer screen – slaughter on the motherboard.”

“Gangpol & Mit’s message is subliminal: Eat technology before technology eats you!”

Everything in quotation marks has been nabbed from the French horse’s mouth… ie the DVD liner notes*, “The Cannibalist Ethos of Techno Cannibalism,” by Lars Denicke and Peter Thaler, or the G+M website, where many treats await you.

Software Aided Innovation
A stoner sitting on the edge of a rooftop tells you: “Y’know what? I really looooove software.” Grinning insights follow, some of which make sense, some which don’t. Software can permeate so much of our interactions today, our existence, that it’s easy to take for granted that effectively we live with swarms of robots in our midst. Robots that automatically pay our bills, robots that share communications with friends, robots that search for us, robots that play back media for us. When it comes to robots that might aid us in the creative disciplines though ( be it art, music, design, architecture, etc ), in what ways are we limited by their design? In other words, in a question that’s at the heart of the Form + Code book, and aimed directly at creatives who use computers – to what extent do we wish to be limited by the constraints of any particular software system?

Defining Form as visual and spatial structures and Code as computer programs and non-computer instructions ( eg IKEA furniture building instructions, or instructions for knitting a scarf ), the book wanders through a history of computer aided creative work, and attempts to meaningfully categorise the different ways code can be useful. The book is definitely aimed at non-coders, an attempt to encourage more creatives to explore the options they have available for customising and creating code to make their work. For someone only recently dipping toes into the visual programming / patch based environment of Quartz Composer, the book provides a nice framework for thinking about image manipulation, and removes some of the ( … well, let’s just say it.. ) fear surrounding abstract coding.

Some general core coding principles are presented simply, which is followed by examining how the computer relates to form – through defining co-ordinates, shapes, and colour, and then the extra layers of light, printing and fabrication bringing the form to life. It’s an approach which works well, demystifying the possibilities, and illustrating them well with a range of provocative contemporary and historically important examples ( in graphic design, typography, data mapping, digital fabrication, interactive media etc ).

Naturally there’s code to play with ( via the companion site ), and the aims behind the book are reinforced when it is understood co-author Casey Reas has also co-authored (with Ben Fry) the programming language Processing ( free for mac, linux, PC), which is described as ” a software sketchbook.. an open source programming language and environment for people who want to create images, animations, and interactions”.

( Out now through Princeton Architectural Press )

As with all self-publishing though, technical hurdles are only one part of the challenge to survive, and while their are some self-publishing success stories, getting word out there can be incredibly difficult and time consuming. It’d be great to see Francis Bear become a self-publishing phenomenon ( if only so it means we get to read more of these books ), so I offer a twin pronged attempt to convince you to purchase: In one window, stare into this image, and with your credit card ready in the other window…

(See also: Francis Bear reviews Scott McCloud’s Making Comics, Francis Bear reviews Larry Gonick’s Cartoon Guide To Physics, and Francis Bear takes on Sylvester Stallone.)

World War Gay

Also hailing from Melbourne’s Silent Army era (it’s comic veteran day at skynoise), Clint Cure ( Q-Ray) and Kieran Mangan are in the midst of raising funds to produce a short video series for the web. Loosely framed as a John Waters meets John Carpenter / sci-fi / action adventure about the development of an anti-gay serum, at time of writing they’ve raised $426 of their modest $1000 goal. Says Kieran: “Why does a film cost $3 million? Well, I know why, but I also know it doesn’t have to. ” And something that may increase or decrease your likelihood of offering some small support – Clint recently finished a short zombie remake : ‘Hanging at Picnic Rock’. And interestingly, this fundraising is all powered by the new Australian micro-fundraising site Fundbreak, an Australian version of kickstarter.

“Insights for Search aims to provide insights into broad search patterns. Several approximations are used to compute these results. (And it has to be said – their secret sauce yields a few surprising results) The Insights for Search map is intended for general analysis of volume patterns. Borders are an approximation and may not be accurate.”

( Remember, the map is not the territory, Google said so. )

VJ as a search term? Down slightly, but still flying along. Most popular by far, by people searching from countries in South East Asia, topped by Indonesia. Top search? MTV VJ, followed by Burma VJ. Couldn’t find the part where they listed ‘cool people squinting into laptops’.

VJ Software?

Arkaos lovers are most likely to live in Portugal, then Belgium, Argentina.
Resolume: Portugal, Czech Republic, Austria.
Quartz Composer: Japan, Austria, Switzerland (*Australia 4th!)
Modul8: Esp Switzerland then Austria, Italy.
VDMX: Esp Germany then UK, US.

Of note – Portugal and Austria seem to be pixel hotspots! The Arkaos graph is on a sharp decline over time, and if the search is restricted to just 2010, the numbers tilt a little differently. And also – *why do more people in Australia search for Quartz Composer, than all of the people in the United States?

And for less off the shelf VJ related packages, in order of popularity: Isadora (by a fair margin), VVVV, processing + video, max msp + jitter, pure data + gem.

Questions People Ask VJs
“What software are you using?” +300% (Bedroom VJs are on the up )
“Can you play this song?” -57% (People are getting better at distinguishing DJs / VJs, or are just sending their requests through twitter and facebook )

‘Video Jockey‘ as a search term, is thankfully on a decline. ( Most popular by far, in India.)
‘Scratch video‘ peaked in late 2005, declined, and seems to have stabilised since then. ( Most popular in U.S. )
‘DVDJ‘ – by far most popular in the U.S., on a slow decline.
‘Video mapping‘ – on the up and up, esp in India.

And In the Wild: What’s it like for practicing VJs? Are conditions improving? A few more search terms:
“Goddammit! I’m VJing from a milk crate on the side of stage again, drowning in foldback.” -24%
“This venue has built-in projectors, as well as preview monitors and cameras for use in our in-house digital mixer.” +6%
“Your VJ rider includes meals, top shelf drinks and professional shoulder massages on the hour.” +1.7%

MIDI vs OSC: Midi canes, and is apparently searched for the most in Madagascar, 4 times the nearest search-nation, France. Something to do with evolution and volcanoes I suppose. Germany loves OSC the most, followed by the Taiwanese.

Adobe After Effects Vs Apple Motion : Unsurprisingly, AE is the gorilla here, and especially in the Philippines.
Final Cut Pro VS Adobe Premiere : Premiere well ahead, though in decline. Australians are the 2nd biggest searchers for FCP ( after the U.S.).
VJ iPhone vs VJ Android: One side gets steamrollered. Guess which has the flat graph.

VJ Styles:
Worryingly, kaleidoscope is on the increase (esp in UK) and fractal remains high. Tunnel effect sacred geometry and lens flare remain threatening. ‘Data moshing’ is not yet searched for in high enough volume to warrant google graphing.

[Update: From the heart of pixelated heart of Berlin, Lucy confirms in the comments, that indeed, Google's aim is true - Germans love beer, hiking *and* VDMX. And confirmed again via Kyle, searching for VJ Loops -"Seems Portugal is the mecca!"]

[[ Update 2 (aka newsflash) : Apparently people who play behind laptops making real-time video - seem to really like statistics. The comments keep on coming - from India, Germany, Austria.. y'know, all the pixel powerhouses... ]]

A quick guide to using photographs for making time lapse movies (or rubbery timed stop motion animations).

Nutshelly
Sequence 24, 25 or 30 ( for film / PAL / ntsc ) photographs after one another, and you’ve got yourself a one second movie. Stitching these photos together can be as easy as naming the files sequentially, keeping them in a folder, and then opening them with Quicktime Pro on mac or PC. Choose File > Open Image Sequence, then select the first image within the folder, choose the frame rate when the option appears, and then Quicktime will open all of the images as a playable movie. You can also do this within most animation and video editing software, and even from within photoshop, but the quicktime method is most painless, given the often huge number of photos involved.

For those who like shooting RAW (here’s why you should), After Effects unfortunately can’t process RAW files directly, but Creative COW shows you how to import a .jpeg or .tiff sequence into Adobe After Effects with Adobe Camera Raw development settings applied. Regardless of which method you choose, the high resolution of many photographic cameras means using photographs to create a time lapse can deliver a much higher resolution movie than most video cameras are capable of. Fun times ahead.

Timing Your Photographs
An intervalometer is a cheap device ( from $30 on bay + amazon, which effectively mimic more expensive options that can run into the hundreds ), that allows cameras to be programmed to open their shutters at timed intervals (or you can make your own). Experiment with different time, exposure and shutter settings to see the results they give.

Learn from the BBC Nature Dept.
Who better to trust on a time lapse tutorial, than someone from the BBC documentary division? Some take away tips from a lengthy and insightful post on DIY time lapsing by Timothy Allen:

1. Use manual settings on your camera
2. Set your ISO to its lowest if shooting in daylight without ND filters
3. Solid tripod = no camera movement
4. Longer shutter speed = more realistic movement (up to a point)
5. Set your interval according to how fast you want the action to move
6. Check that your memory card has sufficient free space for your images
7. Make sure you have enough battery power to last the duration of shooting.

The whole article is worth reading for more detailed insights into exposure, reducing flicker, equipment tips and how to approach panning time lapses – with a link to a particularly mind boggling behind the scenes video from the BBC’s Life documentary.

Volcanic Time Lapses
Sean Stiegemeier’s time lapse of the recent Icelandic volcanoes, utilises a motorised dolly to provide a graceful and awe inspiring look at the spewing ash clouds ( and nice soundtrack from Iceland native, Jonsi of Sigur Ros).

HDR Time Lapses
And then there’s HDR time-lapse techniques. High dynamic range imaging involves taking three separate photos at separate exposure values then combining the highlights, midtones and shadows of these into one image. HDR time lapse video then requires three sets of photos to be first combined, and then imported as sequence.

Also worth a look? dragonstopmotion.com, a “premier capture software for stop-motion animation, motion design and visual effects,” with quite a range of features, including direct control of Canon + Nikon DSLRs.

[[ Previous DLSR related posts: stabilisation and steadicams, an introduction to DSLRs, macro photography and video and a Canon7D review ]]

{{{{ And no, the image up top isn’t a time lapse, but a video still from some experiments with the ‘time echo’ effect. For time lapse purists, just imagine a series of fluffy clouds rolling in over the horizon, behind the old man krumping… }}}}

Under The Dome
The Melbourne Planetarium (at the Scienceworks Museum in Spotswood) features a ’16m domed ceiling, reclining seats, a stereo surround sound system and has recently been upgraded to incorporate Sky-Skan’s DigitalSky projection system’. In practice, this means craning your neck around everywhere to see what’s happening beyond your peripheral vision. MIFF featured 3 compilations of dome films, and I opted for the experimental collection – which could’ve been called screensaver collection and only a couple of films would’ve suffered by that description.

Domefest / Elumenati
Part of the compilation came from Domefest, an annual screening curated by Artslab, an interdisciplinary arts centre in the New Mexico desert. A big of googling reveals that festival to be connected with another group, Elumenati, virtuoso specialists in the field immersive projection design. Which also happens to be a group that Johnny De Kam ( founder of VDMX and vidvox.net ) has done a lot of work with. Small world dome thingy.

Anyways, best film of the evening? Celestial Mechanics by Scott Hessels (2005), which aimed to visualise the manmade aerial technologies between us and the heavens, starting from police and news helicopters, and working through a range of transmitters and satellites, beautifully evoking their processes as it unfolded. Less good? Cosmic Dance, self-described as ‘astrophysics meets Bollywood’, and a painful 48 minutes of a patronising female host, who when not speaking down to the audience, was being washed in cliched special effects and dancing with the universe. Or something.

DIY DOMING
“DomeXF is a content plug-in for Adobe After Effects, Windows version. For fulldome producers, it is a key tool for transforming flat-screen content to the dome. The DomeXF plug-in for Adobe After Effects is available from Sky-Skan for $395USD”.

DomeXF offers the three standard Full Dome video transformations: standard, panoramic and fisheye.
• Standard transformations give the artist the ability to represent true geometry on the dome allowing the composite layer to appear flat and undistorted.
• Panoramic transformations force the bottom of the composite layer to align with the horizon, even when resized.
• Fisheye transformations give the composite layer depth, akin to the traditional all-sky transformation.

And a vast array of potential filming and projection transformative possibilities await you at Paul Bourke’s site of maths and video surfaces.

Fulldome ANAT Masterclass Opportunity
Dome Lab 2010 wants you, applications due Friday 3 September 2010, masterclass to be held 31 October – 5 November 2010 :: Perth, Australia.

“… most fulldome content to date has been educational and comprised of computer-generated animation, data visualistion, or a combination of both. Now, however, there is a shifting focus, with producers turning their sights to the entertainment potential of live-action story-telling for large-formats such as fulldome. Dome Lab is a world-leading intensive workshop investigating this potential and the specific challenges involved in creating compelling live-action narrative content for large format and frameless screens.

Filmmakers and artists excited by the chance to leap beyond the frame and into the expansive creative potential of large-format, immersive screen experiences are invited to apply. Participants will work alongside a team of creative and technical luminaries including Academy-Award winner, Ben Shedd, 2010 Peter Rasmussen award-winner, Peter Morse and international fulldome pioneer, Hue Walker Bumgarner-Kirby.”

In an alternate universe you have been asked to do some live remixing of Tim Burton related films. However, in that universe, inter-universe messaging systems are commonplace, and your alternate self received the following, hopefully helpful note about possible films to sample.

Take Me Back To Wonderland
Congratulations on your assignment, you are going to have fun – there’s plenty of room to move here, from the whimsy of Pee Wee Herman’s Big Adventure through to much more macabre and grotesque cinema. And this little known fact should help: Bit Torrent works the same in all known universes.

Alice in Wonderland is a great place to start digging. Try the Ravi Shankar soundtrack soaked 1966 BBC production (one of the most psychologically engaging Alice films), with Sir John Gielgud and Peter Sellers. And there are twenty or so other versions, but Jan Svankmajer’s stop motion Alice packs more invention than most. His short film Ossuary, about visiting a cathedral of bones will cross-edit nicely too.

If you lived in a universe where Prince wasn’t a newly religious recluse who complained about the internet killing culture, you’d probably find the combination of his Batdance music video ( half joker face, half batface, 80’s music video aesthetics representing) and the unaired pilot episode of Batgirl irresistible. Especially say, when paired with matching shots of his purpleness on the rain era motorbike, and Batgirl swaying on her batbike in front of a green screen, while a presumably expensive blow-drier makes like wind with her hair.

Hit Tim Shiel / Faux Pas up ( iamfauxpas.com = alternaverse friendly) for some Major Beetle Juicy Lazer file transfers. Sadly, Tim is unavailable in other universes for live soundtracking and sonic manipulation of video clips, but if you’ve got the bandwidth, he’ll bring the Day-O / Beetlejuice dinner / remix party – with Harry Belafonte and the muppets, karaoke dreamers, ableton live splinter video cut-ups, and a Major Lazer infused Day-O for dessert.

Tim will also remind that Janelle Mondae’s ‘Wondaland’ is great accompaniment for Alice’s rabbithole comedown. He’ll also likely recommend a deluxe edit of Janelle Mondae’s The Archandroid album – “delete tracks 9, 10, 11, 18 and try again – another bloated over-ambitious r&b/futurefunk record saved by some judicious editing. 78 mins of blah becomes 47 mins of pure gold!”

In your universe, Ed Wood wears budgie smugglers and complains about boat people refugees while he directs films – and the Political Opposition leader of your country, Tony Abott, slinks about Parliament after hours in a blouse and skirt, with matching stockings and heels. Work with that.

In this universe, The Tim Burton exhibition runs until Oct 10 at ACMI, Melbourne.

[ Above, Craftwife @ Horse Bazaar, Melbourne, Wed Jul 28, 2010. ]

How do you describe your show?
It’s an audio-visual performance and it looks like a techno pop music live. But I combine many elements in a show with many thoughts. So I’m very happy if audiences can see my performance in different, various way.

Kraftwerk liked machines playing notes, claiming it freed them up for composition… What have Craftwife been freed up to do?
Making music with computer is something special for me. I found many musicians are still following the traditional way, i.e imitating a physical phenomena with machine. I’m not interested in it, I’ve been trying to find the new way to play music with computer programming and technology. I really don’t like keep on doing a same thing, “Practice”. So that I’m happy I don’t need any sweaty practice to perform as Craftwife.

How does a circuit bent Pikachu fit into your show?
I have a project called “Craftwife + Kaseo + “. Kaseo (is the author of Pikarumin – bent Pikachu) plays powerful and loud noise music. The style of our music is very different, but we have common thoughts about the sound and music. And visually, you may find some Japanese “Kawaii” or “character” culture. Also I love the contrast of my “clean” programming, software and his messy, physical hardwares.

What has been your favourite / ( or would be your ideal?)  place to play a Craftwife gig?
Craftwife plays everywhere if audiences are waiting for us. I had played in different places such as a small cafe to a nice club or fashion museum  even at an academic conference. I cannot choose which was the best, we’re going to have a show in planetarium of my small town in this September and I’m really looking forward it. Hopefully, it must be fantastic if we can play with my favourite German band someday.

What do you enjoy about super collider?
It’s difficulty. Memo: sometimes people are used….. to be used by technologies. bababa .. too sleepy…..

[ Above, Craftwife + Super Collider + custom software + iphone + bonus Kristin... ]

[ Side-note: First discovered Craftwife via a blog post by David Lublin, one of the VDMX head-coders. Popped off an email to see if Takeko would like to do an interview. As well as agreeing to one, Takeko mentioned she was touring Australia soon. Which later turned out to include Melbourne. On my birthday. Thereby continuing the weird sensation that VDMX pulses somewhere near the centre of a cult universe, an electromagnetic conduit for a small but growing band of dispersed pixel gypsies.]

3DTV
Wheeeeee! For those with 3DTV sets, SBS and some broadcasters from other countries beamed out select games on a 3D channel. That’s all fine and well, but the mammoth production needs of 3D meant the World Cup was both a test and a serious step up in live 3D production. Broadcast Engineering summarises the technical achievements well ( for both on-ground filming and MPEG4 compression and beaming to each country), and notes that each game uses 8 cameras ( Sony HDC-1500 ), mounted on Quasar 3D rigs from Element Technica ( for mobility, and built in motors that allow for remote focus/iris/zoom control.), and are fitted with Canon HJ22ex7.6B lenses ( 7.6mm to 336mm with 2X Extender, f1.8 ). Pro-tip: After some quick googling, better keep aside $30K for the lense, $67K for the Quasar rig and $90K for the camera when budgeting for this kit.. )

3D Cameras Under $200
Available for pre-order through Amazon : the Aiptek 3D HD (720P) camcorder for $199. $199. USB, SD card, HDMI connect to HD-3DTV – and “additional software for the camcorder should allow you to upload the stereoscopic 3D videos you made directly to YouTube 3D. And you’ll also be able to watch the recorded content on your PC with the help of anaglyph red-cyan glasses coming with the device even if you don’t have a better solution like 3D Vision, 3D TV or anything else that is better.”

3D on YouTube
Apparently this has been available for a year, the fruits of Pete Bradshaw’s spare “20%” time at Google. Stereoscopic 3D clips can be uploaded to Youtube, which will mix in real-time in your browser, and which allows a 3D pull-down menu to choose 3D options ( eg red/cyan glasses / mirror split etc ) Tag your video with yt3d:enable=true to enable the pulldown menu of 3D-viewing options. Example clips?

360 Degree Cameras
Available since January, and a weirdly named competitor to the portable Flip cameras, SONY’s ‘Bloggie’ camera comes with a 360 degree view attachment, and software which translates this into an extremely wide panoramic video.

3D or Not 3D?
As Brazil prepares for hosting the World Cup in 2014, they may do well to heed Mark Pesce’s advice: “Keep doing that and you’ll go blind“, where he notes that humanoid depth perception requires 10 different cues, and that the slightly different imagery in each eye ( parallax vision ) is just one cue. Watching 3D means we eventually ‘turn off’ these other depth cues while watching, and with lots of 3D viewing, this can cause serious problems ( known as binocular dystopia ). Watch those banana kicks!

Car Sharing
Taking a leaf out of Kurt Vonnegut’s book, and looking at civilisation from a distance – we do seem to be a species of oil crazed demons, intent on paving the planet over, and shuffling ourselves around in vehicles that weigh a whole tonne all by themselves. In cities with better urban planning and public transport, it’s obvious to citizens living there that not every single person needs to own a car to survive. Extending this idea another step, car sharing is about renting out cars for short periods of time and thereby reducing the amount of cars needed for a suburb. Some people need a car daily for various reasons, but for others who only need the occasional trip, the car sharing service can save a lot of money ( and other problems such as maintenance etc ). If you drive less than 15,000km a year you will probably find carsharing will save money. There’s three main car sharing groups operating in Sydney and Melbourne, each blowing their own eco-trumpet about the benefts of having access to a newer, fuel efficient car when you need it, and through sharing it with others, effectively reducing the amount of cars needed.

Flexicar, phone 1300 36 37 80 GoGet, phone 1300 769 389 Charter Drive, phone 1300 135 358

Renting Two Wheels?


Like car rentals, daily bicycle hire has long been an available option for visiting tourists and wandery folk. Arguing that the short trip rental could appeal to the general public, and potentially encourage them to leave cars at home, the Victorian Government has launched a $5 million scheme which will see 600 bicycles available to pick up or drop off at 50 different bike stations across Melbourne. Subscriptions cost $50 a year, $8 a week or $2.50 a day – and the first half an hour of every trip is then free, $2 for the next half an hour and so on. A credit card is needed to participate, and helmets aren’t included, so it’ll be interesting to see whether people find bringing a helmet into the city more convenient than bringing a car. [ Yet to see a single blue bike 'in the wild', though plenty of them seem missing from their racks around the city... ]

Buzzkill
Audio nerds the world over must love soccer, because there’s been a huge outpouring online of ways to filter out the drone. Create Digital Music have done a pretty great round-up of these, tackling everything from EQing with onscreen TV controls ( get rid of 233, 466, 932 and 1864 HZ if you can), free VST plug-ins for mac and pc, acoustic engineers explaining the science of why vuvzelas are annoying ( I actually enjoy the medieval carnival / sacrifice kinda vibe they add ), vuvuzela orchestra ( yes, really ), vuvuzela radio ( uhuh ), and how to re-route audio signals using JACK or Soundflower into another application that has better audio filtering and VST capacities.

Audio Re-Routing
Wormhole2 – allows routing of audio between machines on a network. Now you can make use of all the processing power in your studio. For example; set aside a machine for complex instruments or effects, route audio out to it, then back into your favorite DAW. Or route audio between your PCs and Macs to get the best of both worlds. Or share audio between laptops on stage.

Soundflower is a Mac OS X (10.2 and later) system extension that allows applications to pass audio to other applications. Soundflower is easy to use, it simply presents itself as an audio device, allowing any audio application to send and receive audio with no other support needed. Soundflower is free, open-source, and runs on Mac Intel and PPC computers. IS often used for podcasting to combine tow different audi streams, or to combine skip interview voices etc.

Jack (the Jack Audio Connection Kit ) is a low-latency audio server, written originally for the GNU/Linux operating system, and now with Mac OS X support. It can connect any number of different applications to a single hardware audio device; it also allows applications to send and receive audio to and from each other. Jack is different from other audio server efforts in that it has been designed from the ground up to be suitable for professional audio work. This means that it focuses on two key areas: synchronous execution of all clients, and low latency operation.

Video Re-Routing?
But let’s say you want to send a video signal from one program into another program – how to do that? No such re-routing software currently exists, but there is at least a work around through Vade’s excellent ( and free ) Screen Capture utility. This is a Quartz Composer patch ( and therefore mac only) which allows a portion of the screen to be selected, then sent into another compatible program. This can mean web browsing / web-flash games / computer games etc can all be displayed in one corner of a screen, and then accepted within VJ software such as VDMX and used as a live signal, and filtered, mixed or processed to your heart’s content. ( Be warned : Removing plastic horns visually is likely a bit trickier… )

But Wait, There’s More..
Vade has more in the pipeline, a video re-router that will work fast, and on the graphics card rather than CPU. Tests so far allow easy re-routing between Max MSP / Jitter / Quartz and VDMX. Bookmark his site for announcements to come. And in other news the Auvi Objects have been updated for Max 5, which will please live visualists who remember it.. )

“Auvi was designed with an attitude of sympathy towards beginners. Even now, Auvi can be a lot of fun for those who are less technically advanced — for example, those who don’t want to mess about with shaders and GL. I like to think of Max as a haven for artists whose needs aren’t met by standard software. Auvi was my attempt to increase the fun-factor for these newcomers.” Kurt Ralkse

Soccer Video Remixing
Because you need something to do with all those pipes, right? Recommendo : the 1981 Escape to Victory starring Sylvester Stallone, Michael Caine + Pele in a German prisoner of war camp. Or maybe? Pele’s viagara campaign, where he offers these last smiling words to the camera:
“Talk to your doctor, I would..”
An amusingly careful phrasing, which allows Pele to retain all suggestion of athletic virility, but let anyone else know – Pele says it’s ‘ok’.

To DSLR or not to DSLR?
The benefits of digital image recording ( cost / workflow etc ) combined with the advanced light controls of a SLR camera – make DSLR cameras great for photographers, and now that they’re often capable of good quality video, DSLRs are lluring in a lot of film-makers too. It’s not all win though – videomakers expecting DSLRs to have the same ease of shooting will be disappointed. Weighing it up for those interested in video, David Torcivia has summarised the pros and cons over at Poetzerofilm.com:

Nay
Ergonomics – too light / small / awkward screen and controls
Moire and Aliasing – skipped lines in video, during process to shrink large image down to video size
Shutter Rolling – fast moving objects can be in different places in the same frame
Resolution – they don’t actually shoot as well as advertised
Compression – Canon records to lossy H264 format ( which needs processing before editing )
Audio – terrible on DSLR, need to record externally ( eg with Zoom H4n) + sync (pro-tip: Plural Eyes! )

Yay
Ergonomics – The small size can also mean shooting easily in cramped spaces, and more discreet filming.
Depth of Field – Hey look, it’s blurry in the background! Beautiful, but as the web fills with it, David helpfully notes:
“Don’t wear out the effectiveness of a shallow shot by making an entire “test” film filled with nothing but micro DoF. Shallow depth of field is just another tool in the cinematographer’s box to better tell a story. It is not a crutch or a gimmick to sell a shot or a product, an idea which cheapens the art.”
Low light – Zowie! For the price, DSLRs can shoot in hearts of darkness that video cameras cannot even see. Believe.
Price – Fantastic quality and value.
Photos – Oh yeah, do they do those too – 10 stops of dynamic range, full RAW files, 18 or 21 Megapixels – all great for timelapse .
Lenses – The variety of glass available for DSLRs vastly outweighs that possible for video cameras ( hello eBay, or hello rent-a-lense for important occasions )
Media – Tapeless workflows. Drag n drop, rather than slowly capturing footage.

Plunging In…
So in the end – disregarding all the science and numbers, you’ve found yourself swooning over luscious, colour-ripe non-grainy video shot by someone in such low light conditions that you’d packed away your video camera an hour ago. THAT’S OKAY, you’re with friends.

And if being the new owner of a DSLR finds you bewildered by the array of options available – Wikipedia’s photography page is incredibly useful for getting up to speed with photographic terms and principles, and pointing to a huge range of future learning. For starters you’ll be needing to understand :
Aperture – the lens opening, measured as the f-number ( eg f2.8 ), which controls the amount of light passing through the lense.
Shutter speed – time the imaging medium is exposed to light for each
ISO speed – The higher the ISO, the greater the sensitivity to light.

There’s plenty more, and plenty more starting points too..

Which Lenses To Get?
If you need, you can actually mount cinema lenses to a DSLR, using add-ons from hotrodcameras.com. For most people though, the existing range of photography lenses will be a vast enough jump in quality from handheld video. Things to note? Lenses with lower f-numbers are preferable ( and more expensive ). Aside from lenses specific to your camera, there are also a wide range of cheap adaptors that can be fitted to any DLSR, which will enable lenses from other manufacturers to be used ( functions like auto-focussing can be lost with some of these though ). And one more complication – the Canon 7D doesn’t have a full frame sensor, and it’s smaller proportion of a frame means you have to multiply the below numbers by 1.6. In other words, a 50mm lense on the Canon 7D is the equivalent of a 80mm lense (50 x 1.6), and the perspective it brings.

50mm - The classic lense. A lense this size renders perspective in a way similar to a scene is perceived by the human eye.
Wide Angle Lenses ( Below 35mm ) – allow you to fit more in frame from closer range ( think fish eye), but exaggerate distance between objects and can distort.
Telephoto Zoom Lenses (Above 70mm ) – allow magnification of distant objects / skateboarders / small furry animals etc ( though tends to compress distance between objects ).

Macro lenses – Want to shoot close-ups? These are the lense for you – or – seek out extension tubes or adjustable bellows ( both which are placed between another lense and the camera, changing the dynamics so that close-up is possible ), or get an auxiliary close-up lense to attach to the front of a lense, or get a reversing ring ( an adaptor that allows the lense to be attached to the camera backwards, which creates extreme close-up vision ). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macro_photography

( See also Tamron’s guide to lenses, and Cambridge in Colour about lense focal lengths, zooms vs primes etc )

A range of trick filters which can be added onto existing lenses for various effects ( find out what diameter your lense is ( eg 72mm), to find appropriately fitting add-ons ). And then there’s the tilt-shift lenses ( see also lensbaby ), and other trick lenses… ( on it goes.. ).

Time Lapse?
The image quality is significantly higher quality for photos in DSLRs, than it is for video. Correspondingly, animating a series of high quality photos in sequence for timelapse bumps the ‘video’ quality up even higher. Strangely the Canon 7D doesn’t have an automated sequencing function built in, and needs an external ‘intervalometer’ to do this. Canon sells one for around $200. Hong Kong vendors on Ebay sell adequate imitators for $30. There’s also an iPhone app for remote triggering / viewing of photos – but it requires the camera to be attached to a computer ( not great for out and about shots.. )

Stability… Later…
Someone walking around with a handheld video camera, will produce jerky footage, no matter the camera… but especially so with a small camera like a DSLR,, and then there’s the additional desire to avoid troubles like the Jelly Vision mentioned above. The image quality is good enough though, that a whole industry has spawned in providing ways to minimise trouble. And so…

Next DSLR Update : Stabilisation, active filming + Steadicam Systems ( from pro to DIY )

Massive Attack @ Myer Music Bowl, Melbourne
Enhancing Massive Attack’s recent sublime musical performances during their Australian Tour, was a very elegantly integrated lighting show designed by United Visual Artists. The kind of gorgeous, restrained and stylised light show you’d hope to see while visiting Blade Runner Town. The lighting set-up was deceptively simple – over the course of the evening, every one of the limited parameters available was gradually tweaked, revealing further variation where it seemed all avenues had been explored. Pulsing dots, became horizontal lines, and then combinations of dots and horizontal lines. From the palette of mostly white, red was sporadically and only very occasionally introduced, and very effectively. Occasional smoke bursts and white lights to reveal on stage depth behind the main plane of pulsing lights. And gradually, the dots are clustered closer, so we can approach something like ascii video playing through the spread out LED wall. Cycling through ascii characters, cleverly varying font sizes and cycling methods to effect the overall image. And again, occasionally using red as individual spotlights. While lighting rigs and lighting pre-visualisation and sequencing tools are getting increasingly sophisticated ( ie crazy ), this show worked because of the restraint shown, its thoughtful choreography and pacing over the evening, and because of its tight integration with the music ( they nearly became inseparable at some points ).

Chris Cunningham’s new Audiovisual Show
This is an exciting prospect. News that one of the most acclaimed music video directors of the last decade, is working on a 75 minute live audiovisual show certainly presses buttons.

“It’s a work in progress really. It’s three giant screens, lasers and a soundtrack that will be like a big mixtape. It’s the closest I can get to what I want to do: the visceral sound of a live show but with massive screens like a cinema,” he explained in the Guardian recently, arguing, “what I do is more experimental and the visuals usually come first. That’s why the live performance is exciting. It’s not film, it’s not a gig, it’s not an installation, but it has elements of all three.”

While it’s undoubtedly an impressive show ( what a great body of work to play with! ), unfortunately the comments on the Guardian article suggest that the performance seems far from live, a sidestage witness suggesting there wasn’t much meaningful being done by Cunningham on stage, others suggesting it seemed like a linear showreel. On the one hand thats fine, the show is a stepping stone, on the other – it’s a reminder that visual technologies tend to lag behind audio in terms of power ( it’s necessarily more computer intensive to manipulate 1 minute of video than audio ). And no doubt, given that the music world has decades more behind it with manipulating loops sequences and processes, it is likely also advanced more conceptually for dealing with time based media in performances. Looking at how someone like Autechre (touring Australia shortly, and themselves with a fine Cunningham video) approach time and samples, might illuminate other approaches to video than ‘jukebox compilation’.

[[ UPDATE ]] This review sounds a bit more promising. And an amusing anecdote from William Gibson about Chris potentially directing a version of Neuromancer:
“Chris is my own 100 per cent personal choice…My only choice. The only person I’ve met who I thought might have a hope in hell of doing it right. I went back to see him in London just after he’d finished the Bjork video, and I sat on a couch beside this dead sex little Bjork robot, except it was wearing Aphex Twin’s head. We talked.”

Weimar in The House
Max Neupert explores great and granular audiovisual compositions using the free software pure data, and now runs ‘Breaking The Timeline‘, a great course at the Bauhaus University of Weimar, which is dedicated to exploring ‘performative audiovisual artworks and experiments’.

“The third dimension of the moving image is time. Manipulation of the timeline means taking control over the creative potential of this dimension. Editing film or video transforms footage into a movie, thus film and video aren’t necessarily linear, but stay static in their determined timeline. Video made analog real-time effects popular but todays graphics processors in computers make it possible to fully explore the real-time potential of digital image and sound.”

Max also makes available patches which demonstrate audiovisual programming techniques in Pure Data and the Gem library.

And let’s not confuse Max with Max for Live – another exciting Audiovisual prospect – complicated max patches ( including jitter video parameters ), controllable from inside Ableton Live and it’s sophisticated sequencing possibilities.

Actually Making Stuff From Within Your Browser
How about that! Again, just a convenience in some ways, and not meant to replace your more powerful desktop tools, but sometimes there’s more than enough power right there in your browser.

aviary.com – First shout out must go to Aviary – where from within the browser you can use a variety of their software to do – Photo-editing, adjust vector logos, play with web templates, filters, color palettes, screen captures, edit audio files and more.

looplabs.com – An online music mixing application with an impressive list of features in the sidebar.
online jamming : ninjam.com + jam2jam.com

soundcloud.com – Increasingly popular hosting service, which notably allows comments on specific parts of audio timelines, has convenient dropboxes for easy file sharing, and has many more musician-friendly features. (See intro video for more )

skype.com – Screensharing options for comparing software production notes / techniques / debugging. Voice chat, audio recording.

xtranormal.com – your text + their audio + button to publish = auto generated and published animated movie

pixton.com/uk – Templates for generating online comics.

slideshare.net – Easy development and publishing of slideshows with accompanying audio.

Need Files to Play With?
The popularity of Creative Commons has meant a continued growth of sites legally offering media files for creative re-use :

ccmixter.org – Huge collection of mostly musical sounds, including song parts, and full tracks by the likes of Chuck D and the Beastie Boys, DJ Vadim etc etc.
freesound.org – Giant library of atmospheric, FX and musical sounds.

flickr.com/creativecommons – Flickr’s creative commons collection is ginormous.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain_image_resources – Also ginormous.

archive.org – Noble San Fran cats with an abundance, an overload of audio and video work available for re-use. Lots of high quality and unusual vintage material, as well as contemporary netlabels etc.

And What To Do With It All?
Maybe something like this? starwarsuncut.com – where Star Wars is being remade by fans, in 15 second chunks – there are still a few scenes left – sign up and make yours, to be part of the final edit!

Get some print on demand books happening via lulu.com – upload a PDF and no-one pays a cent until a book is ordered online, then it’s printed and delivered to them, money put into your account, and all why you lie in your hammock.

Upload your work to bandcamp.com – and have them offer a variety of free to expensive downloads and even VINYL options!

Make $19,000 in ten hours on Twitter. ( Yes, this may work easier if you are Amanda Palmer )