Visualist and 3D animator Josh Cardenas gigged 6 times in 7 days for the recent ‘Hard Sell’ tour with DJ Shadow + Cut Chemist, yet still had enough pixel gadget stamina to hook-up later with VJs in most cities too. And so..

What Went Through The Customs X-Ray Machine

2 x Edirol V4 video mixers,
1 x Pioneer SVM-1000 AV mixer for final mixing – “It was cool cause it handled both video and audio – as we had some pre-recorded animated ‘intro’ to the show that had a voice over track. With the mixer I could control the audio levels from my feed. Also, it had a nifty touch-screen to add some super effects! i used this a bit, but sparingly as they are pretty heavy handed. = ))”
2 x DVDJs ( VJs can scratch too )
Laptops ( Who’d have thought?)
Midi controllers.
Cable spaghetti, and inevitable sprawl of AV and international power adaptors.
Portable Battery the Size-Of-A-Laptop which supplies 8 hours of power.
Various tools and tech problem-solvers.

Oh – and 4 x ‘robocams’ which could be remotely controlled by midi, for panning and tilting on the dual DJ action, 1x DJ wristcam for the trainspotters and 2 x cams on mic stands.

Getting It Together
Josh met up with a few Melbourne visualists at Horse Bazaar, where we showed him the resident panoramic screen and the Dataton Watchout software which stitches together the 6 screen wide panoramics, and then he whipped out one of the robots for us ( after cycling through a range of power adaptors before settling on his ‘back-up’ 8 hours of power Size-Of-A-Laptop battery… ). Soon enough, with impressively fluid arcs of movement, the camera was swooping around via controls on the computer. Josh built the hardware himself, mounting each cam on some movable parts ( see MAKE / createdigitalmotion / instructables etc for DIY midi, motors + electronics ), then connecting that up with some patch based software ( eg VVVV, processing / max-msp / quartz composer ) which allows midi signals to control the movements.

Once the software was launched, camera movement was a simple task, gliding the mouse this way or that way to swing the camera’s focus around the room. More impressively, software based control also allows a range of audio analysis or sine wave oscillators to steer the camera movement – eg letting the bass levels control the tilt of the camera, or setting an oscillator to swing the pan back and forth at a preferred speed or frequency. Save a few of these movements as presets, map these to be triggered a midi controller, multiply by 9 cameras, and Dr.Versatile is in.the.house. Kinda handy when VJing for highly improvisational DJs. Josh showed the setlist which featured extensive cues where he was supposed to trigger various video clips, but said inevitably the shows were different each night as the DJs extended out various sections on a whim, keeping Josh on his toes at all times. And with his 3D background, Josh has plenty of ideas for spatial exploration with camera rigs, expect to hear more in the future.

Hollywood Bowling
For those who missed the show, it’s already a disc on the shelf of indie DVD distributors, microcinema.com. Whereas the “Freeze” and “Product Placement” shows were also recorded for DVD, the Bowl setting inspired a less spartan treatment for this disc – with a full behind-the-scenes story of how the show came to be, the live performance, visuals, a gazillion camera angles, more interviews and a 40-page booklet.

(( + hat-tip to Jaymis from CDM + Plug N Play Brisbane for hooking up Josh with the Melb video peeps.. anddddd UPDATE: vidi-yo interview just posted by Jaymis over at the CDM Brisvegas ranch))

You are total strangers, have never even seen each other before, and yet as you ride towards the man further up the road, at the very last moment, you both know the right thing to do at this point, the only thing to do, is to stretch out your palms, and as your bike whizzes past, let a satisfying skin-slap be heard by the late night congregators on the footpath nearby. You keep riding, don’t even turn around, that was then, this is now, and now you are on a different part of the road, and you are grinning.

Some storyboarded narrative film could try, but would have a hard time conveying what the rest of your bicycle ride actually felt like. Not what it looked like, but how it felt, the shift of internal gears, the slight electric buzz that comes with being in the right place at the right time. Nope, your best cinematic hope for conveying those feelings, would be to forgo the usual plot devices, transcend the usual visual techniques, and harness visual surprise as a way of describing your own experience.

Which leads us, down an unnecessarily windy garden path to the back shed of cinematic tinkerer and visual explorer, Joel Schlemowitz. If in doubt of just how busy Joel has been, how dirtily his fingers have been covered in film chemicals over the years, check his dot com, for a huge list of short experimental films, ‘cinepoems’ that explore the everyday in efforts to reach beyond them.

microcinema.com, bless their independent distributor socks, have been amassing a gigantic collection of experimental DVDs for distribution and recently added a triple-disc set of Joel’s work to their swelling catalog. “Joel Schlemowitz : short experimental films” gives what it suggests, 45 of them even, showcasing the scope and terrain of Joel’s work over the years. Definitely some room for improvement with the DVD authoring though – differences between the booklet and what appears on each disc, no easy menu that allows continuous play of all films, only a clumsy bottleneck of an interface to access each film and as it turned out on my copy – disc 3 containing all the same films as disc one, despite what was printed on it. But that’s not the point… that’s computer accountant land. We need the smell of a pine forest, a chimney with smoke rising out of it, homemade window sills, tool benches, vintage equipment, a film explorer’s den.

Disco One : Short Experimental Films 1 Through 20

Some favourites?

Abrasions – a bound and blindfolded man stands before the camera, and the film of this event is slowly scratched to oblivion.

Bacchanale – Characters wearing masks, that moment before a party goes to another level. Warbling, perspective warping camera.

Bagatekke Biolique – A animated beating heart, various anatomical imagery filmed, and the film itself hand painted to create motion through a body, complete with sound effects.

Bagatlle in Neon – Playful long exposure explorations of city lights, then hand painted over with a soft limited palette. (Technicolour vibes! )

Doris’ Garden – A baby’s voice wandering, a song. Buddhist garden statues and images baby superimposed over explorations into a near junglish backyard.

Extemporized – Wild camera movement wandering in a city of snow, sound effects added to suit mime artists who are performing in various parts of the city.

Eye Music – Silent film zooming in on an old turntable, using hand-painted splashes to convey the sonic scratch of the jumping needle.

Disc 2 – Short Experimental Films 21 through 40

Invitation to a Voyage – fast overlaid shapes elegant silhouettes extravagant fonts… solarised image of a naked man… zoom in…

slowly avalanching sound… curious little piece.. exactly what should be found somewhere on an experimental video compilation.

Little Nothings – poem by Wanda Phipps.. nicely overlaid footage, on top of the poet reading her work… reaching for cinepoetry…

Morris Engel Time Sculpture – gorgeous close-ups of weird timepieces… visual aesthetics associated with that weird human trait of measuring time.
the closer we zoom in, the louder the sounds get, until finally we zoom out, sound softens, and the piece’s time has run out.

Pillowbook – Black and white scene. the book is opened – we get red tinted flickery imagery suggesting entangled limbs, skin sliding over skin, panning vertically fast, images overlaid densely enough so that what feels lurid and pornographic, is also able to wash over the eyes like some gentle breeze.

Poem for the Past – Film strips twisted, decayed, overlaid

Purple Candle Poem – colour painted film, scratches, overlaid on footage of candles… lot more compelling than that suggests… flair for composition, motion… colour control… limited palette…

Reverie – more candles, statues in candlelight, old classical nude drawings given a perspective warping… offset by exotic string and percussion instruments in an echo chamber.. a hand, a desk, spectacles..

Silo – time lapse… of people at some filmic event, old projection systems, complete with burnt holes in film, accompanied by various laptop noodlers, guitarists… hey look – its an audiovisual happening… lying in the grass, the vividness of the colours in the outdoor projections are flanked deliciously by the silhouetted tree branches…

übel – fast flickering overlays of machinery turned abstract – metal scraping sounds in background hypnotic in their choreography over time… a pendulum of light playing on machinery to form shapeshifting shadows… shapes blended in.

Disc 3 – Collaborations and Experimental Documentaries – sounded interesting in theory, but in practice, turned out to contain the same data as disc one, which is a shame, because one of the shorts, Teslamania, like all good films exploring the aesthetics of tesla coils and violent bursts of electricity probably deserve a good viewing. (( UPDATE :: Joel writes in to say “This was a problem on a small number of “rush” pre-release copies and the problem was corrected before the the DVD collection went into distribution. ” ))

Close the door, leave the shed, the cine-laboratory concoctions still bubbling away, smell the air, blink anew at the world and wander away. And if you want to hi-5 Joel..

Another round-up of visual treats. Some with fangs.

Recent Work From Soda Jerk

Following on from their epic, feature length, I mean really, epic, compositing job in Pixel Pirates II, Soda Jerk have made a couple of shorts that again transcend most mash-ups with their pro-level recompositing of characters into various scenes. ‘Picnic at Wolf Creek’ ( as you may guess ) combines a whole swagger of iconic Australian cinema ( guest stars : Mad Max, Steve Irwin, Russell Crowe, Ned Kelly, Lindy Chamberlain, the drag queens from Priscilla Queen of the Desert, Skippy the Bush kangaroo and a few high school girls at Hanging Rock. Some greatly combined scenes here. More details and pics at the Soda Jerk HQ.

‘Astro Black: A History of Hip-Hop [episode 1]’ kicks off a hopefully long running series about the intergalactic origins of hip-hop turntablism. I haven’t seen this one yet, but there was something about the way the blurb was batting it’s eyelids at me:

“Set in the Bronx in the mid seventies, this video remix kicks off with the alien abduction of the three pioneers of the hip-hop “old skool”: DJ Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Baambattaa. Once on board the Mothership with Sun Ra and George Clinton, the three DJs are transported to Planet Rock where they are skilled in a secret alien technic – the scratch.”

Tokyo Streets

via microcinema.com

If the names Shibuya, Omote-Sando, Harajuku, Yoyogi, Shinjuku and Meguro light up neon-bells inside your head like some winning sequence in a Daft Punk poker machine, then it’s feasible this disc from fashionshow.ch will provide some amusement, and or satisfaction, in your life. The premise holds potential – a snapshot of life on the streets in one of the largest, densest and most colourful cities in the world, and given Tokyo’s range of crazy cosplay characters and weird-fashionites already well documented in the likes of the Fruits books / magazines, given the fact that well – it’s Tok-(e)-YO! – one of the world’s best examples of the future wedged firmly into the present, then surely, it’d be possible to edit together an exhilarating snapshot of super-sugoi critters wandering about in their natural terrain? Editing however, would suggest the makers had a range of decent footage to start off with, and some overarching threads / ideas or just flair for weaving this together. Unfortunately the DVD comes off as really flat – poorly shot ( not a sin in itself, but it doesn’t help the disc ), and badly edited – extended sequences of drab audiences looking on meekly at amusingly half-assed street-performers, a few random camera wanders past colourful characters, some live bands on the street, dreary pan and tilts over up-market building facades, etc etc. There are a few nice sections, but it would’ve been vastly improved by being edited down to 5 or 10 minutes. Get your hands on the classy ‘Tokyo Noise’ feature length doco instead.

Ryuke

Also from Tokyo, and the latest release from VJ label Light Rhythm Visuals, Ryuke provides a collection of works by native Tokyo pixelists VJ Reel and K-Mixx, a whirlwind of ‘experimental 3D animation and explorations of virtual space’ – a description which admittedly makes me feel queasy straight away – possibly limiting the disc to being another collection of motion graphics for some information technology current affairs program, with a little science fiction thrown in for good measure. As it turns out – only some of the disc is like that, the rest is densely packed with visual ideas and it’s nice to see Light Rhythm Visuals continue their tradition of including visual remixes on each disc, as well as keeping the discs region free and including quicktime clips ready for use within VJ software. The disc also loops without returning to the menu screen, savvily positioning the disc as a possibility for various venue owners or acknowledging that it can run continuously in the background occasionally provoking interest rather than needing to be watched all in one sitting. The stand out piece on the disc for me was the angle 2 remix by Kevlar of VJ Reel’s “illmatic chopper” – it playfully extended VJ Reel’s obsessive look at horizontal movements, adding plenty of innovative variations over time, used masks and black space fantastically, shifted to a tasteful 3D section ( ie – it wasn’t doing some generic object deconstruction / reconstruction, or moving camera around some mechanical 3D object ) and managed to be both beautiful and visually surprising. It helped I guess that VJ Reel’s original piece was quite strong, especially the nice overlayed silhouettes against the fast panning and chopped up horizontal movements.

Also worth a mention – the Ben Sheppee remix of K-mixx’s “Beautiful destruction”, taking the stock 3D disintegration to new places by nicely overlaying glitched masks and stripping back the palette to a less garish black, white and pink – simultaneously enhancing the effectiveness of various silhouettes blacking out portions of the screen. VJ Anyone’s remix of VJ Reel’s ‘gravith’ also has merit, with a wealth of fine edits and sophisticated compositing techniques on show – even exquisite in places, but the overall piece suffering by lapses into information age visual cliches and the addition of some unfortunate text that reeks of a transhuman bent that surely even sci-fi readers find hard to swallow today ( Advocating uploading of the human psyche to machines as a solution to global warming? C’mon … ). It’s an accomplished piece despite these shortcomings, but could’ve been that much stronger.

Disc 002 on Sydney’s Demux label, Peter Newman’s DVD debut covers an hourlong documentation of his audiovisual practice from 2003-2007. Cutely for a DVD, it’s tracklisting offers both a Side A and a side B, each covering material from Newman’s exhibitions, performances and installations. From the get-go we’re left swimming in abstract textures, Newman’s style reminiscent of the flickery film pioneers such as Stan Brakage or Len Lye ( a New Zealander with a major retrospective including kinetic sculptures coming up at ACMI next year ). Whereas these filmmakers sought to produce cinema by directly interacting with the actual material of film – by scratching and painting on it, by applying processes of decay and physical mutation to it – Newman explores some of what is inherent to digital cinema – the blending modes available for overlapping pixels, the fuzziness and grain found with various compression methods, the masking and keying out of colours, the blending of layers. While youtube demonstrates that the moving image doesn’t have to have glossy high resolution to be compelling, Newman reminds us that the types of compression artefacts usually associated with youtube, and typical of digital video, can also be played with and celebrated, a textural avenue of exploration in themselves.

( see also : wade marynowsky dvd review )

Experiments in Real Time Audio Visual Performance 2002 – 2007

Another experimental DVD available for click-purr-chase, hailing from Sydney label DeMux. Label founder, Wade Marynowsky, is no stranger to the live manipulation of screen and sound. Way back in the twentieth century he used custom made applications built with macromedia director to bang out sets of speaker crunching live cinema – lo-fi graphic animations married fantastically to the language of layered audio loops. Future explorations using software such as NATO, Max/MSO and Jitter delivered ever more sophisticated processes and audiovisual relationships, but the Demented Australiana theme stayed with him : native flora and fauna reinterpreted through the noise of the digital.

It’s a disc of gorgeous stuff, and so even though the boy’s shunning the AV limelight for a while (to pursue an obsession with building robots), the disc neatly encapsulates his diverse mutant flavours spawned over the last 6 years. Rewinding to one of the earlier pieces, ‘Apocalypse Later’ feeds us Australia’s history of violence in a haze of abstraction and digital decay. Landscapes ebb and flow in and out of comprehension, close-up plant textures scratched up and layered as though to reveal their underbelly of corrupted data. The building sonic tension never relents, albeit in a Gameboy edition of ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock’ kinda way. With the visual crackle of bush campfire, we are surrounded by flapping birds squawking to each other through vocoders. Convicts are lashed ( video footage from the now defunct convict theme park ‘Old Sydney Town’ ), stormy skies are mustered, and nature’s cruelty and splendour is displayed in equal measure.

The ‘Uranium Country’ and the ‘ISEA Baltic Sea’ performances document further interrogations of the above palette, as does ‘The Geek From Swampy Creek’ though attempting to transcend laptop performance limits by introducing live imagery of a costumed Wade into the mix. All three pieces exude Wade’s strong sense of both musical and visual composition, fluid manoeuvring providing ethereal transitions through his material. The boy has obviously mixed a lot of audio and video in his time ( and indeed, spotted some of my own footage in there from video jams with Mr.Wade ).

‘Autonomous Improvisation’ eliminates the performer entirely. First exhibited as an installation in Artspace in 2007, it exists as a stand-alone piano, which has been programmed to generate a random series of notes, each of which triggers a pre-recorded video of a Sydney artist playing their instrument. It’s a stellar cast of sonic freakery – featuring Singing Sadie, Toecutter, Wade, Lucas Abela, Shannon O Neill, clown turnablists, saxaphonists, celloists and a variety of surreally costumed performers. In other words – a ghost pianist in a saloon bar is triggering a fast sequence of holographic musical performers above the piano. Bring on the robots!

More : “>http://marynowsky.net ( includes 8 x early mp3 demos. )

( see also review of : Peter Newman’s Demux DVD release )

Also by the Atak label, the nicely chopped intro to this, positions 4 different video artists and crews against each other in a battle of AV sampling skills. Quite varied styles on the disc and a bunch of interesting extras to wander through. Worth a look.

fame fame ( toronto )

The Fame Fame disc portion showcases clips from another label who exist for the ‘production and promotion of the aggressive, intense and volatile..’. So when Elvis & James Dean appear, it’s not long before they are whipped and sliced into an AV frenzy. Actutally works well, and followed by a more splattery stroboscopic piece by – cheerfully titled ‘i die u die’ by Jubal Brown. ‘In the eye’ by Tasman Richardson plays with surveillance cameras, mirror effects, layering of extreme close ups, tv glitches, all nicely composed then blending Robert De Niro in with rapid-fire micro-samples. Tasman follows this by remixing vintage guitar concert footage with white stripes drums, Ice cube, Public Enemy video samples..

eclectic method ( london )

Bill themselves as DVJs… “mixing music video and film snips like a DJ mixes records…”. Funny thing is – add together music videos by Blur, Prince, Snoop Dog, Beastie Boys, Aphex Twin, Metallica & Britney Spears etc etc all beat-matched and mashed together in a glossy high value production style, and you end up with a glossy, banal jukebox. Some cool moments, but they should be able to use their talents for far more interesting things than this.

madame chao ( new york )

“Everything is illegal’ – proclaims the intro by madame chao to a video described as ‘Violent slapstick’ best watched with a sword in one hand a drink in the other…’. The title sequence is quickly followed by a fast flickering density of hyper-speed collages, kaleidoscope warping, asian tv edits, and a text announcement that ‘copyright infringement is your patriotic duty’. Some genuinely inventive parts, bit relentless for myself though.

atak ( paris )
The label releasing the DVD leave a quarter of it for themselves, being a ‘hybrid mix of Vjs, movie makers and musicians’. Thusly, we get fed an initially sophisticated blend of medical experiments, horror movie special effects, motion graphics… with film sound bleeding through layered on a bed of industrial beats. Soon becomes a barrage, and a couple of high-speed carnage clips by Rko continue that pace.

Atak hails out of Paris, an audiovisual label with a quite a few releases under their gallic belt by now. ‘Meat’ features a series of clips by 3 artists on their roster, on a DVD boasting to be ‘DVJ ready’ – ready for looping and scratching by those with access to DVD turntables. The disc’s cover is a good clue to the content within, an eye-popping collage of photoshopped flesh in various states of life, augmented by various bolted on bits of electronic technology.

Cinemassaker start off with various close up screen textures, layers of surveillance cameras and jolts of colourised tv news, punctuated by beeps and glitches. It’s nicely done, with mostly restrained palettes, and quite hypnotically edited, up to and including the introduction of footage from John Carpenter’s legendary ‘They Live’ movie, where the main characters discover special sunglasses which enable them a capacity to decode all public advertisements ( put the glasses on and a billboard for a car now reads in stark black and white : ‘work, consume, die’ ). Overlaid barcodes and pixelated animations, along with burnt colours help their editing condense the film’s samples down to a bare repetitive essence, and they manage to lock into some kind of ambient audiovisual groove. Next track follows the same recipe, gradually introducing a film I didn’t know and paring it down over time, and the final track is a sequence of ever bloodying hi-speed martial arts chops.

Mutation continue the gore with a chicken killing scene that comes off as some weird voodoo circus scene the way they’ve colorised and framed it. Some wasted human dominates the next clip in eerie close up, and their final clip plays with highway panoramas and nicely overlaid motion graphics with sound on top of footage of overhead power lines sweeping by.

Lifesteak start off in a much more ambient vein, overlaid layers of light streaked plant close-ups, building up in slow intensity, the next clip musically editing and layering the squawks of birds flying from clifffaces. Factory machine close-ups are sequenced in the next clip, getting denser over time and it closes with butcher footage interlaced with motion graphics and some lab hand analysing a human brain.

Not for the squeamish then, but some worthwhile moments on the disc.

Managed to acquire a few discs of bent-pixel booty recently… First up is the tasty piece available for order/download as ‘Umfeld’..

Rotterdam is both the home of musician Jochem Paap aka Speedy J, and the visual source for much of the industrial textures used on this luscious high end DVD. High-end both because it’s an audiovisual production in HD with 5.1 surround sound audio, and because of the sophisticated graphic treatment it is given by the visual half of the producers – Scott Pagano ( who also co-curated the excellent Reline DVD series of clip compilations – reviewed previously). Nicely, the DVD is also available as a free downloadable dvd disk image at umfeld.tv ( though it’s quite a hefty download). The DVD comes with many extras though, including a documentary with Jochem explaining how the step from mono to stereo was much smaller than the step from stereo to 5.1, and how the project was based upon that from the ground up, while Scott explains some of the visual processes he employed to create ‘an abstract graphic piece that is an hour long’.

Admittedly I’m without a 5.1 system to listen to it ( Jochem insists the project should be listened to in the sweet spot of a 5.1 sound system ), but the sound quality is quite impressive even on a stereo system – a gnarled, moody, quickly shapeshifting soundtrack of quite some grunt and density. Matching the sound’s intensity, the visual overload plays the industrial look of Rotterdam well, meshing the geometries of rusted buildings with flickering close-ups, textures that morph from into another, sharp angular layering and machine-speed masking out of imagery. The aim for the DVD was to draw on the dynamic arc of a feature film, but one hour is a long time for such a dense abstract visual style to maintain interest, so it’s to their credit that for the most part, Umfeld remains an engaging experience.

Beaming in from Japan, International in flavour, a new DVD compilation of pixel-twisters from Lightrhythmvisuals(.com).

( Suryummy on left, actop on right )

What is a DVD by VJs?

Tricky to produce that’s for sure. Performing live a VJ tries to stay responsive to sound, the ambience of the setting, and the audience, and generally keeps it dynamic with constant refinements, manipulations, cutting and blending, effecting etc. In a live setting, a lower resolution of image is accepted and various errors and over adjustments are easily forgiven as part of the live performance. Once recorded to disc however, and played back in some home theatre system, the VJ is in competition with all of Hollywood and it’s production values, up against all the storytellers and their attention to narrative craft, compared with all the motion graphics artists and agencies, all the animators, cinematographers, and all the directors and their abilities to tie everything together. Still, up against all that, a compilation of real-time video wizards can still stand out with force of personality and quirkier experimental visual explorations.

Spinning The Disc

Promo compilation blurb said the DVD was “inspired by the book ‘Notations’ (compiled by John Cage)”, and aimed to “explore the new techniques in visualization of sound in the same way that Cage explored new forms of written music.” And so, on it spins and we are introduced to a variety of visual experiments over the course of 12 clips set to electronic music, followed by remixes of the same 12 clips – the artists included all shared their source files for other artists to visually reinterpret. Also cool – the DVD multi-angle function can be used to switch back and forth between the original and the remixed video. Overall the disc flows well, and while sometimes suffering flat spots, or descending into dated cybernetic visual cliches, has enough moments of visual surprise and polish to maintain interest. The remix section seemed to stand stronger, that extra layer of process lending them a more sophisticated feel.

Highlights

Global Giraffe by Suryummy : Nice cinematography, tasty compositing of complex moving 3d elements onto urban train lines. Some nice mask transitions too, nice elements, but combined lacking something to make the piece compelling.

Shabondama by Ben Sheppee : Smoothly realised 2D graphic overlays and transitions in train station. Well edited.

E of Bwe by Alien-Eye : Sumo wrestlers given the scratch video treatment.

Global Giraffe (remix) by actop : Fantastic recompositing into sequenced slices, enhancing the original clips colours and masks well.

lake (remix) by Alien Eye : Weird and wonderful visual distortions of the 3D objects, nice light overlays.

Gravith (remix) by VJ Anyone : Super, strong introduction… and transition into splintery slowly panning graphics, that unfortunately devolves later into cyber-fare, but maybe the clip only seemed to get much worse because he seems to have added or emphasised some embarrassing text overlays – let me paraphrase, and imagine this text on top of 3d wireframes of a glitching human – “because of global warming, if we don’t find help from extra terrestrials, soon our only hope is to download the human psyche onto micro machines… ” Uhuh.

Brologic (remix) by Jasper Vader : Some nicely added mask elements, but still missing something.

Hoofprints in the sand (remix) by Ben Sheppee : Recomposited and re-layered to create some nice light and dark interplay.

Full details of all tracks, artists and musicians (and ordering details ) etc included at Lightrhythmvisuals.com

Mythic religions and deepest science use quite different language to say the same thing : the world we leave our little footsteps in, is a shimmer of light and vibration. Zooming in and out on that vibration, Semiconductor present a compilation DVD of their animations to date: “Worlds in Flux”.

Getting To Here And Now

Semi-Conductor = Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt and their PR blurb claims ‘obsessive interests in landscape, architecture, geology, geography, chaos / systems theory and artificial intelligence’. In practical terms (over the last 5-6 years) this has encompassed:
– exploring a large array of digital and analogue animation techniques and processes, combining where possible.
– many residencies, installations, exhibitions and live cinema performances
– ‘Hi-Fi Rise’ – an art DVD compilation in 2001 with an innovative interface, and featuring the work of many artists including People Like Us and Amon Tobin.
– 3 music videos, 4 live cinema pieces and 6 short films.

Spinning The Disc

‘Brilliant Noise’ is perhaps the highlight of the “Worlds in Flux’ DVD, featuring gorgeous black and white time lapsed animations made from close up photographs of the sun’s flicker and dance. That these photographs were sourced from a solar observatory and left unmanipulated was quite a surprise to read, a conscious decision to let the sun’s crackling glory stand on its own. 11 possible soundtracks can be chosen to accompany this dazzling monochromatic display, from artists including Cristian Vogel, Max Richter and Antenna Farm, each adding it’s own sense of atmosphere.

200 nano-webbers is another delicious animation, this one created as a visualisation for Japanese act ‘Double Adaptor’ using custom-made scripting to generate a lovely hybrid of seemingly drawn squiggles and complex structural behaviours and movements. The tangle of elements oscillate with the music and shift towards density interconnection as the song washes along. Very re-watch worthy.

Hooking up with the British Geological Survey nabbed a range of seismic data for Semi-conductor, which they exploited to great effect within ‘All the time in the world’. Converting the data into sound, they used this to jolt portions of a coastline into life, animating segments within a scene and slowly shifting from one location to another, drawing attention to the crust of the earth along the way. Particularly captivating were the fluttering sparks of light that hovered above one section of coastline, illuminating nooks and crannies as they travelled in and out of coastal rock formations.

As well as with my favourite pieces above, the clips on the rest of the disc string together nicely as a range of experiments, each showing a different side of Semi-Conductors fascination with the micro and the macro, the buzzing life within structures that we take for granted most of the time. Notable mentions go to ‘The Sound of Microclimates’ which nicely superimposes animations on top of urban surrounds, ‘Inaudible Cities’ which reaches a stroboscopic, shuddering climax, Green grass of tunnel’ for mum, and ‘Earthquake films’, an earlier piece which reanimates a series of earthquake photos with a variety of masks, 3D experiments and collage play.

On another note, Fatcat records who are releasing this DVD, have of course made it region-free. What makes any larger label believe someone should have to buy another copy of a disc to watch it in another country is beyond me.

Next up on the coffee table >> VJ : audio-visual art + VJ culture, edited by Michael Faulkner / D-Fuse, published via www.laurenceking.co.uk, with bonus 130 minute DVD.

“For many, vjing is a dirty word. artists view it as eyecandy for the clubbing generation; musicians view it as a secondary accompaniment to their music. at best, vjing is regarded as audio-visual wallpaper, not worthy as a serious consideration. yet to my eyes, the best vjs are creating a new fluid interface between sound and image – one that is genuinely mould-breaking and aesthetically invigorating, and one that deserves to be recognized as a 21st century art form.” – Michael Faulkner

Michael Faulkner aka D-Fuse is primely perched to edit/curate a book on VJing – well travelled as visual performer and graphic designer, an extensive array of profile gigs under his belt, and well hooked into the sprawling VJ networks. Coming from an artist inside the ‘scene’ then, the book is packed with useful insights, laid out with visual flair that respects the work ( and in full colour throughout too! ).

Alongside various new media / video art / motion graphics books that squeeze VJing into a few pages, ‘VJ : audio-visual art + VJ culture’ also slips onto the bookshelves next to a few books dedicated to documenting the global VJ practice. The VJ Book ( from Feral House ) included many interviews by a journalist with an outsiders view, but suffered from a lack of visual displays of the culture and processes it discussed. Live Cinema Unravelled ( available as a free PDF ) managed much sexier design, was written by someone immersed in VJing and came bundled with a lot more theory – aiming to dissect the role of the VJ against such topics such as ‘technological mobility, audience, environment, and codes of the medium’. Thumbs up, full review later.

Interviews with VJs the globe over makes up the bulk of VJ : audio-visual art + VJ culture, artist interviews from a significant spread of nations complemented with a range of live performance photos, and video stills, laid out stylishly and vividly demonstrating the diversity of aesethetics and approaches with live video. The DVD immerses even further, with a range of live performances, videos and documentaries of The Light Surgeons, Cold Cut, Hexstatic, D-Fuse and more. It’s a compelling package, the artist interviews supplemented by a range of specialist articles written by various VJs.

Bram Crevits whirlwinds us through an historical overview of ‘the roots of VJing’, taking in the expanded cinema of the 1960s, fluxus video art of the 60s and 70s, the ‘magic lantern’ (an oil lamp, with lens and pictures painted on a glass plate, creating live animations back as early as 1671 ), live animation devices of the 1800s, the development of cinema, the evolution of music videos, concrete music, electronic media, the graphical user interface in 1984 and gives good context to today’s pixel manglers.

Adrian Shaughnessy, further contexualises contemporary VJing (Last night a VJ zapped my retinas) :

“The digital artist is really an editor. We can generate imagery ad infinitum; the skill is to know what is good, what should be kept and what should be discarded. This is the art of editing and it is also the art of VJing. .. VJs often have to do their editing live, in front of an audience. It is one of the factors that makes VJing such an exhilarating ride for both the audience and the VJ.”

“Science and technology multiply around is. To an increasing extent they dictate the language in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.” – J.G Ballard ( as quoted in Live Cinema Unravelled )

Chris Allen of the Light Surgeons scribes a piece on sampling, arguing it is a technique that “allows us to see the components of our language in isolation – the bricks that then may be used to construct new meanings.”

The overview of technology and creative process by Vello Virkhaus is comprehensive and insightful, documenting processes from storyboarding with clients / collaborators through to venue design and live performance.

Elliot Earls, who looks like he has an intriguing live show, talks of need for VJs to work more closely with musicians, or better yet, to compose music themselves, if they are to move beyond merely being in service to musicians in a manner resembling ‘info-burger flippers’. Robin Rimbaud’s (aka scanner) article “listening to pictures” might provide some help in that regard, offering tips on a/v from a sound perspective.

The book rounds out with a decent coverage of hardware issues – different screens ( shapes, sizes, materials ) , advice on projectors, mixers, midi, computers, and graphics cards etc, a less potent software overview (only 8 of the dozens available profiled ) and an excellent selection of personalised diagrams profiling a dozen or so onstage-set-ups for major Vjs around the world. These are especially fascinating, usually a blend of hi and lo tech, expensive and cheap gear, to help create their custom look and processes.

Live Audiovisual DVD labels are few and far between, so it’s a pleasure to note the recent launch of Sydney based demux, who aim to promote ‘live audio-visual performance events, documentation and experimental works for screen’. The Performance Space in Sydney hosted the launch party in early March with 4 ‘live synaesthetic’ works by Samuel Bruce, Andrew Gadow and label co-founders Peter Newman & Wade Marynowsky ( aka Spanky / aka AC/3p / aka The Pink Gimp, aka The Geek from Swampy Creek etc etc), each represented on the initial demux DVD sampler ( available for $AU15 at www.demux.org – DVD PAL / all regions / stereo / 35 mins ). Stay tooned for a review…