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.

As always, his arguments focus on the emergence of significant ideas in the past, from where he traces a path – to how they’ve impacted  the world today. And so, he explores the effects of Ayn Rand‘s ideas on American financial markets, looks into the selfish gene theory which holds that humans are machines controlled by genes, and examines how “the ‘ecosystem’ myth has been used for sinister means”. It’s fantastic as televisual essay, even if that essay repeats bits of his other essays, and occasionally feels like he may be stretching a point or ignoring others – so that his narrative threads can stay intact.

As ever, music features prominently (and if you like his style of music heavy editing, you try his even more musical co-production with theatre company Punchdrunk, It Felt Like A Kiss, featuring music composed by Damon Albarn from Blur.)

It also has an episode titled: “The Monkey In The Machine, and the Machine in the Monkey”.

But don’t trust me, try Adam’s blog at the BBC, which provides great background to his various research topics, or try these radio slabs of Jarvis Cocker interviewing Adam Curtis. As you might expect, Jarvis gives good interview. part 1, part 2, part 3 (via @emilezile). Bonus round Charlie Brooker show segment - How We All Became Richard Nixon ( aka paranoid and weird ).

And Then Comes The Parody

Above, The Loving Trap Of Pandora’s Nightmares, Written, edited and narrated by Ben Woodhams aka Psychonomy.

Narrates Ben, over the top of some creative commons licenced footage:

“This is a short film about a documentary film maker who made critically lauded films for the BBC, and about how, along the way, he proved that style always triumphs over substance. In 1992, a strange and brilliant That’s Life researcher with a Skinny Puppy CD embarked up on a career producing documentaries about how ideas can spark social movements. Adam Curtis believes that 200,000 guardian readers watching BBC2 can change the world. But this was a fantasy. In fact, he had created the televisual equivalent of a drunken late night wikipedia page with pretensions to narrative coherence.

Combining archive documentary material with interviews, Curtis filled the gaps by vomiting grainy library footage to the screen to a soundtrack Brian Eno and Nine Inch Nails. He had discovered, that it did not matter what footage he used, so long as he changed the shots so bewilderingly fast that the audience didn’t notice the chasm between argument and conclusion. This was especially effective when he simply cut the music mid-bar.”

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 .

Video it would seem, is slipping from the screen into the world around it. Increasingly we expect to see pixels sliding around us in three dimensional space – dripping down heritage building facades, climbing across weird geometric clusters surrounding a sound system, illuminating the edges of random urban infrastructure. Although we’ve long held the ability to use software for custom tailoring projections to suit specific shapes, Madmapper seems to have struck a chord because it arguably makes the process easier and more intuitive than anything else before it. (Above image: Madmapper makes easy work of industrial machinery at Cockatoo Island, during preparations for the Underbelly festival. More images. )

Vat Ist?
At its simplest – Madmapper is software for mapping textures to surfaces. This approach presumes the textures have been created elsewhere, or are being created elsewhere in real-time and piped into Madmapper. This avoids unnecessarily cluttering or slowing down the application, and allows Madmapper to focus purely on techniques for aligning textures onto surfaces. It’s a recipe which seems to serve it well, although means the application can at times seem undercooked when looking around for functions you’d expect in video software, that they’ve decided are best dealt with elsewhere. Below, the madmap used for the triple projector image up top.

The Basic Ingredients
That purity of focus is immediately evident in the spartan split-screen interface. In the left hand column, we get the ability to choose our source material textures ( real-time video from other software via Syphon, or images and movies drag and dropped into the column ). On the right side we can see what our textures look like, the shape of the surfaces they are going onto, or textures and surface side by side. Within that, there’s a careful attention to detail which makes the mapping process as seamless and non-complicated as possible. Below, zooming into the interface, first the triple screen map, then a closer view of the map for the industrial machine.

Interfacing
There’s a lovely level of refinement to the Madmapper interface – it’s simple, but it works as you’d expect, and sometimes better. For example, click-dragging the corner of each surface to skew it in a direction isn’t too remarkable, but by pressing the left, right, up and down arrows on a keyboard, that corner is nudged in tiny increments – perfect for tiny alignment adjustments. No weird menu bottlenecks, it’s just there in front of you. Click on the surface inside the corners and the arrows move the whole surface pixel by pixel, and for the surface’s very handy scale and rotation buttons, the arrows again provide incremental help.

Bonus Features?
Plug in a camera and use Spatial Scanner to turn your video-projector into a 2d scanner.
Grid warping ( similar to mesh warping in After Effects )
Ability to use existing photographs as a preview background, to test out a mapping design.
Ability to export your image as a PDF.

What’s Missing?
Sitting in a dusty warehouse with a projector pointed from a weird angle, projecting onto a weird industrial shape – is a fairly good test of it’s versatility, and once you get wrestling with very specific problems, it becomes evident how well thought through their interface and features are. On the other hand, this almost elegant sophistication makes it all the more jarring when some things are missing – Madmapper can feel a little too minimal at times – especially given its price.

Wishlist?
- an ability to create bezier curves
- ability to create lines or circles ( it only includes capacity to create triangles, squares and polygons )
- no ability to set shortcuts for keys / midi to trigger features, fade to black etc.
- no ability to switch between presets.
- can only receive one Syphon source ( it’s possible to provide multiple sources by making a collage in other software, but it seems like work that could be avoided )
- being able to control aspects of surfaces such as colour or outlines. Madmapper prefer that to be done elsewhere, but this would very conveniently streamline some aspects of mapping onto shapes.

(To their credit, some of these features are listed in their help forums for inclusion within future upgrades. )

Performance?
Given that the surface transformation ninja moves are likely happening on the graphics card, Madmapper seems to add hardly any major dent when running on top of VJ software. Haven’t seen a single crash yet and all of the interface seems really responsive.

Requirements?
An Intel Mac running Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.
To use the Spatial Scanner function of MadMapper, you’ll need either a QuickTime compatible Firewire camera
or Canon camera models that are compatible with the Canon EDSDK.
MadMapper v1.0 license for 2 computers €299
MadMapper v1.0 license for 2 computers for of owners of an existing Modul8 2.6 license €199
Educational pricing is also available.

Support?
Aside from their forums, Madmapper have cleverly published a series of very thorough tutorials that stretch from the basics through to integrating with a variety of VJ software, and detailing some quite sophisticated processes. In particular, a shout-out is needed to this post that deserves a parallel life on an avant garde architecture blog: Turn A Building Into A Giant Equalizer. See also: Using After Effects to prepare a map for a detailed building.

Overall?
There are other free and paid software choices for projection mapping, but the elegant focus of Madmapper minimises the amount of time spent bogged down in complicated processes. It’s expensive software, but by removing some of the technical barriers, it opens up projection mapping to ever more complicated futures. Super-like.

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.

Have been doing some experiments recently with Troy Innocent, involving laser cut characters, everyday scenes and projection mapped video. We’re trying to figure out what works well for us, with an eye to fleshing out something some kind of developed work later. Troy has access to a laser cutter at work, and obviously the attraction there is to play with the unique levels of intricacy that a laser cutter allows with materials such as plastic and thin plywood. Taking that a step further, we thought it’d be fun to develop some simple low frame animation loops with these physical characters and record them moving about in stop motion. We’ve done some simple tests outdoors which worked well, surprisingly popping to life when played in sequence onscreen, and most recently we tried an indoor shoot, which gave another chance to test out Madmapper.

Re-Routing Video in 2011

First up, the whole routing video clips between video applications thing, enabled by Syphon, is really fantastic. For me, this means VDMX to Syphon to Madmapper to the projector. Manipulate video in your preferred real-time software, then at the end of the chain remap this video onto what Madmapper calls ‘surfaces’, creating, positioning and reshaping as many of these surfaces as you like. This makes sense and so far the addition of running Syphon + Madmapper alongside VDMX hasn’t seemed to dent the performance of VDMX at all. That might change with more complicated projection mapping – we’ll see.

Some Madmapper Observations

As seen above, the Madmapper interface is minimal and intuitive, and this helps mapping happen super quickly. For our test mapping onto some paper skyscrapers, it was a simple process of selecting which part of the video to be sent to a surface, then clickdragging the corners of the virtual surface until it the video filled the actual surface of the paper skyscraper in front of the projector. Total time to line-up video on the sides of 3 buildings? About 5 minutes. This is a very simple example, and possible with other existing software – but this software certainly makes the process a breeze. Am going to post a full review of Madmapper soon, and discuss some of it’s strengths and weaknesses for dealing with more complex scenarios. In the meantime, it’s worth noting that although it’s pitched as a solution for reconfiguring 2D imagery onto 3D shapes – Madmapper’s ease of use also makes it a very attractive option for just even compositing imagery within 2D environments. From the close-up below it should be evident how straight forward it is to select portions of video, and quickly composite this into desired shapes.  More laters!

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…

Earlier Quartz Wrestling delivered a splitscreen effect which took any clip playing in VDMX, and replicated it 9 times to provide something like a video-wall. It also customised a few of the Quartz based VDMX transitions, and identified a new range of problems when creating in Quartz. After some more noodling, and helpful tips from both Dan Winckler and Joris de Jong (hybridvisuals.nl), I managed to solve some of these problems, and custom build an effect I’d wanted (attached below).

1. How to select a custom anchor point in Quartz, for rotating an image or video?
The idea here was to be able to generate rotations from a corner, or from create arcs of rotation, with the rotation centre being far below the image. None of the various Quartz patches I could find seemed to have an ability to adjust an anchor point.

The solution? “Reposition the clip so what you’d like to be the anchor point is in the center of the screen, then place it inside a 3D transformation patch, and use the rotation Z property of that patch to rotate it.” (via Joris)

Understanding three dimensional space is best done when you have at least a slithery grasp of 2D first, and it took me a while to figure out why the width of a quartz patch always seemed to fill the screen when it had a value of 2.

Welcome to the Quartz Composer coordinate system:

The width of a Quartz Screen is always 2, because Quartz treats the centre as 0, and gives the left and right borders of the screen the coordinates of  –1.0 and +1.0. The coordinates of the top and bottom borders depend on the screen aspect ratio (AR). In the case of a 4:3 aspect ratio, the values at the borders are +1.0 / AR = +0.75 and –1.0 / AR = –0.75. ( From the Quartz Guide written by Apple’s basement dwelling engineers. See also: Quartz Composer User Guide (PDF))

Ok. So rotating a video and changing the anchor point.

The 3D transform patch that Joris suggested placing the clip inside, is a macro patch (which in Quartz have square borders, unlike the rounded corners of most patches). Macro patches can be created as usual in the Quartz editor window, but can host subpatches within them (after double clicking them. Clicking ‘edit parent’ takes the user back up the hierarchy to the editor window containing the macro patch). Below, the anchor patch with the 3D transformation macro patch:

Some notes from that screenshot – the viewer window is showing the combined result of 3 layers – each of which is contained within the macro patch. One of those is an image of red manga speed lines (set as the top layer, with blend mode set to add), and the others are a VDMX input, and a mask image to frame the VDMX input. As you can see, the centre of the image is black – because there is no VDMX input at the moment. Creating quartz patches for VDMX seems to involve a weird workflow of using say a webcam ‘video input’ while building a patch, and then swapping over the ‘VDMX video input’ when saving, then testing to see how it works in VDMX, then going back to Quartz and reconnecting the webcam and making adjustments, before reattaching the VDMX input and saving again.

Previously I’d only been working with Billboards in Quartz, which helped avoid 3D space – billboards ’render a quad positioned with 2 coordinates and which always faces the viewer’. I’d been routing clips and effects in patches to a billboard, which generally meant  the viewer was filled with my video. So to create this anchor patch, I put a Billboard inside the 3D transform patch and set about trying to adjust the subpatch. This didn’t work, and Joris explained why:

“Billboards don’t work in 3d space, so you need to work with sprites. Sprites are basically the same as a billboard, but you need to do some of the height and width calculation yourself. I’ve attached an example of how to offset the anchor point, and how to size the sprite correctly based on different input images.”

The example included the image dimensions patch, which “gives you access to info about your current rendering environment (resolution in pixels and QC measures). You can then use the Math patch to further process this info to fit your needs. This way, when your output changes from 4×3 to 16×9 for instance, your patch will update accordingly. The QC coordination system takes a bit of getting used to, but using the RDD patch to keep things dynamic is a good practice.”

Rotations applied to the 3D macro patch, transform all of the sprites inside it, so I figured I’d try and add a few sprites and create a layered result that could be rotated at will within VDMX. Clicking on a sprite patch reveals in the settings, blend modes of ‘reveal’, ‘add’ and ‘over’. And I figured PNG images with transparency, or videos with alpha channels would allow masking and compositing within Quartz. After a bunch more trial and error, some blending tips via Dan came in handy:

“PNGs with transparency: alpha channels aren’t respected when the Blend Mode of Billboards and Sprites is set to ‘Replace.’ Choose ‘Over’ or ‘Add’ and you’ll see your black backgrounds disappear.

Blending in general: The drawing order of renderers (layers) is determined by the little 1,2,3,n… dropdown box at the upper right corner of blue Renderer patches. Make sure your Clear patch is set to 1 (first/bottom).

Other blend modes: if you type ‘blend’ in the Library search box, you’ll see all the Photoshop-esque blend modes. Again, it’s not like a video mixer — play with the patching order (the Image and Background Image inputs) some. Better yet, make your compositions into plugins and do your mixing/blending in VDMX or another QC host app!”

And eventually, I ended up with this custom masked anchor rotation effect for VDMX – which composites whatever video VDMX is playing, underneath the speed lines, masked by a circle, into the centre of the screen and allows real-time control rotation. Which is really satisfying – custom tuning an effect for a particular purpose. I’ve included the patch below – click on the image sources to replace them with your own, play around with the 3D transform values to create your own rotation variants, and for any parameters you’d wish to access inside VDMX, publish the relevant inputs and splitters.

Download the patch (with inbuilt masks. 2.3 mb) here to play in quartz, and here to use in VDMX ( place it in your QCFX folder and it should show up).

Thanks again to Joris and Dan, who provided insights at just the right times!

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.

Measured in net years, Wacom’s Intuos 4 graphics tablet is already a sleek, sleepy dinosaur, having been released in 2009. On the other hand, given today’s infatuation with touchscreen tablets and their gestural capabilities, it’s worth reinvestigating what benefits a traditional graphics tablet can offer.

Straight Up
Touchscreen tablets are great media browsing devices and provide lovely accessible software interfaces. No argument there. But when it comes to fine, detailed control, touchscreen tablets can only manage the tiniest fraction of a graphics tablet’s input sensitivity.

But wait – your friend has paid money to a kickstarter project which will be sending them a newly designed conductive texta pen for use on their ipad. Or they’re getting a Bamboo stylus for the iPad. That’s awesome, but it’s still effectively only fingerpainting resolution. Fun to apply direct to the screen (and much cheaper than Wacom’s direct to screen Cintiq Interactive Pen Displays), but still very limited when it comes to precision and detail.

And when it comes to precisions, the Intuos 4 has the highest sensitivity of any graphics tablet available today (5080 lpi resolution, and 2048 levels of pressure). It also comes with a precision pen (60 degrees of detetctable tilt), customisable shortcut buttons and a radial menu system (think ipod) with LED labels (visible in the photo above). So when you’re ready to shift from fingerpainting little animated flipbooks on your touchscreen tablet, to creating highly detailed worlds, the graphics tablet is your new best friend.

Special Features
I’ve owned an Intuos 2 in the past and was skeptical there’d be much difference, but a range of carefully implemented design changes make the Intuos 4 noticably better to use. The physical shape has been slightly adjusted to feel more comfortable, the USB cable can be attached from 2 locations to suit left or right handers (there’s also a wireless Intuos option), the pen has been made more ergonomic (it actually feels better), and the express buttons and a touch ring have been nicely integrated beside the drawing surface, for easy access to whichever software menu items you set them up for (on a global or application by application basis).

What really brings it all together though for this version of the tablet though, is the addition of LED labels that accompany the express keys and touch ring, as these lit up labels help enable easy navigation of complex customisations and menu layers, which makes it possible  to avoid your keyboard for long periods of time when manipulating software.

The four mode Touch Ring for example, can be used for accurate and intuitive control of actions such as scrolling, zooming, changing brush size, rotating the canvas, flipping through layers, and more. Click the ring to select a mode such as brush size (which is LED displayed), then slide around the ring controller to change the actual size of the brush. Use one hand to modify tool properties, while the other continues on the tablet with the pen. It’s an effective combination, and can be customised to suit whatever combination of onscreen tools and menu items you need.

Whether seeking an alternative to the mouse or just seeking to avoid RSI, the precision and comfort of the Intuos 4, along with its newly lit-up custom shortcuts, make it an attractive input device for those wishing to manipulate their graphics, animation, audio or video software. Well worth a look!

Requirements for Intuos 4 tablet (USB Version):
Windows: Microsoft Windows XP with Service Pack 2 or 3 or Windows Vista
Macintosh: Mac OS X 10.4.8+
Cashola: The Intuos 4 Medium is $449 from buywacom.com.au

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.

Above: Batgirl on a Bangkok rooftop, mixed with Tasmanian coastal footage and some quartz gradients and transitions in VDMX. This is a still from a series of recent video experiments that have involved recording video clips of live mixing with Syphon, then immediately bringing those clips into the mixing process, and repeating. And repeating. (Hats off to Vade and Bangnoise for enabling this workflow!) Will upload some sort of crash edit of video fragments to vimeo when time permits.

Below: More stills from this process, uploaded as a batch to Flickr.

Aquatic menage a trois: coral reefs, technology and underwater art.

Reef Beefs

While coral reefs have existed for over 200 million years, humans playing with technology have been causing them some grief in the last wee while. Coral is made by millions of tiny carnivorous animals called polyps that live together in colonies, and while coral reefs can sometimes take a battering from nature (damage to the Great Barrier Reef from the recent cyclone Yasi will apparently take 10-20 years to recover), it’s our use of fossil fuels that is their greatest threat – recent science reports predict that due to coral bleaching caused by increased temperatures, up to 95% of the Great Barrier Reef could be lost by 2050. That lust for fuel is also the reason for current controversy over Shell’s proposed deep sea drilling near Ningaloo Reef in Western Australia. Under the waves, a few artists are taking up the fight:

The Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef

Hoping to draw attention to the plight of coral reefs, the LA based Australian artist and scientist combo of Christine and Margaret Wertheim decided to crochet some as a ‘woolly celebration of the intersection of higher geometry and feminine handicraft, and a testimony to the disappearing wonders of the marine world’. Apparently helpful things to have in order to crochet a coral reef: ‘Knowledge of non-euclidean geometry*, Interest in embodied forms of reasoning, and A global sewing bee of serious science communication”. (*More at Believer magazine, and it turns out that Latvian crocheting helped solve a decades old mathematics problem of building a model of non-euclidean space.)

Jason deCaies Taylor’s Incredible Underwater Sculptures

Hoping to draw attention to the plight of coral reefs, and actually make some in the process – Jason has made an amazing series of concrete sculptures for the ocean floor. By themselves the statues are great but forgettable, but when viewed half covered in coral, with fish swimming past and starting to age with the ocean, they transform into enchanting otherworldly creatures. (In other, otherwordly news – did you hear the lost city of Atlantis may have been found?! The legendary metropolis believed swamped by a tsunami thousands of years ago might’ve been found in mud flats of Southern Spain ((And this via Reuters, not some UFO pamphlet..))

Coral Work

(Above image by Thea Beaumann)

Hoping to draw attention to the plight of coral reefs, by staging an underwater concert (!), artists at Aphids have begun creative development for their project, which they hope to perform later at the Great Barrier Reef. Recent filming tests utilised the 62,000 litre tank the Artrage complex has in down town Perth (Your local Art Complex has a 62,000 litre tank too, right?). (Also on the underwater concert tip – check out Nightswim, a Canadian pool party from sunset to sunrise with underwater microphones (were condoms used?), underwater speakers and specially composed works by Tim Hecker, FM3 and Hrvratski!)

And Maybe If We’re Good To Them..

Coral reefs could have a role to play in helping us identifying the next likeliest place to expect a quake (mapping where previous ones have split helps map faultlines and identify high-risk locations).

Girltalk, AudioMulching
It’s true – live performance software aside from Ableton Live, does exist. The makers of Melbourne based Audiomulch have been getting their blog on lately, posting news and tutorials about various Audiomulch features, as well as posting a series of video interviews with mash-up artist Girltalk, who discusses some of his workflow and techniques. Developer Ross Bencina also recently published some interesting thoughts about the state of live streaming. Also on the Girl Talk tip – check out some of the luscious screen and projection design for his recent tour (via tour VJ, David Lublin, one of the developers of VDMX.), and download his recent album for free ( interestingly for an album based on the unauthorised use of samples from others, it’s available with a Creative Commons licence.. )

69 Love Songs, Illustrated
Attempting to illustrate all of the Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs, is: ‘How Fucking Romantic‘. Found via comic author Scott McCloud, who recently helped contribute to Google’s Will Eisner tribute. (See Mar 6th Will-modified logo here: google.com/logos)

Herzog’s 3D Cave flick steps closer to release.
And who better than New Scientist to preview Herzog’s descent into the Chauvet cave, capturing cave paintings that are almost 35,000 years old. As always, Herzog manages to uncover hidden eccentrics on his travels, including this time – a flute playing archaeologist dressed in animal furs and a former parfumier, ‘sniffing the hillside for the whiff of an undiscovered cave’.

That’s the trailer for MachoTaildrop above. But what do these films below have in common?

1. Werkmeister Harmonies [2000 - Bela Tarr's Hungarian feature with only 39 shots]
2. The Holy Mountain [1973 - Jodorowsky's South American psychedelic epic - due on Blu-ray, April 26 2011]
3. A Zed and Two Naughts [1985 - Peter Greenway - twisted threesome timelapse?]
4. Miami Vice [2006, Michael Mann, 2006. What's to say?]
5. The Saddest Music In the World [2003 - Guy Maddin's depression era musical set in Winnipeg]
6. Contempt [1963 - Jean Luc Godard, starring Brigitte Bardot and Fritz Lang as himself]
7. Brazil [1985 - Terry Gilliam's tragicomic rabbithole adventure in a world of technocrats]
8. Stardust Memories [1980 / Woody Allen's black and white pardoy of Fellini's 8 and 1/2]
9. City of Women [1980 - Fellini's dreamy exploration of attitudes towards women.]

They’re apparently(and what a great collection!), the favourite films of Corey Adams, who along with Alex Craig, made the enticing skate-feature Machotaildrop. Pitching itself as a blend of Willie Wonka, Wes Anderson, Terry Gilliam and Michel Gondry, their trailer promises a particularly novel and immersive world – with art direction that seems destined for outputting 25 frames a second to that recently bookmarked quirky tumblr blog your cousin makes now that they’ve dropped out of 2nd year visual arts. No word on a DVD release as yet, but turns out they have a range of other shorts and skate-infused odyssey’s available online. More Corey + Alex : vimeo.com/user5048671.

Bonus round: here’s a crazy trio of very whimsical skate videos, found over at Kottke, each with their own quirky home brewed take on weird tricks. And then there’s Killian Martin’s Sublime skateboarding, a possible heir to the street skating flair of Rodney Mullen?

Meanwhile… over in Skateistan..

(Watch Skateistan full size for better effect, and don’t forget to visit skateistan.org/​content/​donate)

(( Previously… Skateboard Vidi-yo ( & Animal Chin’s Stacy Peralta ) and Skateboarding vs Architecture (one of my favourite interviews ever) ))

Bookmarks are particularly useful when they can be found again. This is part of what makes the social bookmarking service, delicious.com, such a natural extension of memory – there are many, messy pathways to trace back your steps ( find a site by the date you bookmarked it, by tagged topic, by combination of topics, from suggestions by friends etc). If you can even vaguely remember a site previously bookmarked, chances are it can be found again. That plenty of people recognise delicious.com as a great service – and can access each other’s bookmarks / research / interests in a variety of convenient ways, means that people are inevitably distraught that Yahoo are looking to sell delicious and have stopped developing it. Pinboard.in ( lacking the social functions of delicious ) and diigo.com seem to be the 2 highest profile contenders for people to jump ship to so far.

Telephonics
Turns out I can’t find the bookmark I want today though – which is a great photo essay of sorts, looking at all the technologies behind making a mobile phone call, detailing the wider processes and components involved, and displaying photographs of the landscapes where each of these elements have originated from. Something along the lines of sourcemap.org – who believe ‘that people have the right to know where things come from and what they are made of’. Or a bit like storyofstuff.com, or the behind the scenes look at the Foxconn plant in Shenzen, China – where the people who assemble iPhones have been committing suicide, or even a href=”http://goo.gl/DeMZK”>’where cellphones go to die’. Or maybe like a collection of photos at chrisjordan.com (as well as industrial waste, he’s also famous for documenting a haunting series of bird skeletons with stomach cavities full of plastic debris). Or like a web-doco version of that Manufactured Landscape documentary by Ed Burtnsky, who manages to capture the alien proportions of our industrial processes and discards.

“Where is all this natural material going, where does it get formed into the products that we buy? .. That’s when I became interested in photographing the industry itself, the first point of contact for these materials and where they coalesce and turn into these products that go around the world,” said Ed, a while ago in Wired magazine.

To be sure, to be sure.. it’s a compelling essay. Figured it might’ve been somewhere at everyone’s favourite imaginatively extrapolating about architecture blog, but can’t seem to nail the right keyword for it. Do you remember it?

(Above, sunset Buka Ball near Bangkok's Siam district.)

That Novel

- is The Wind Up Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi, and it’s quite an engaging ride, vividly portraying what a Thai metropolis would look like through a Mad Max filter. Street ingenuity and cultural traditions mix and match in uniquely Thai ways to deal with the problems of a post peak oil city suffering from biotech plagues. And the problems are many, including – heat (Bangkok is the world’s hottest city according to the World Meteorological Organization), the threat of floods (from monsoons, rising ocean levels, and because the city is built on slowly sinking swamp land), and the need to feed (the novel offers a bleak future where biotech diseases have wiped out most of our biodiversity and provide a small number of disease resistant options to keep us from starving. Most of the book’s conflict and drama centres around battles for control of the city’s food chain). A cheery read then, when en route to Bangkok to have a dentist poke around in your mouth.

Those Teeth

True stories: dentists and surgeons in Bangkok have managed to cultivate a reputation and niche for medical tourism, offering high quality service at super competitive prices. It’s a reputation probably owing in part, to the popularity of gender switching in Bangkok, where billboards show cowboy hat wearing doctors offering their sex change surgical specialties. A taxi driver claims the high degree of microsurgery specialty is from the toughness of Thai women, and severed organs having to be re-stitched onto cheating husbands. Whatever the reasons for the abundant dental infrastructure in Bangkok, it means their dentistry is cheap. A sufficiently mangled mouth in Melbourne, for example, could find it half as expensive to get teeth fixed in Bangkok – even with the price of airfare included.

Of course, to avoid that drowning, dystopian version of Bangkok, probably requires that people aren’t flying halfway across the world to fix their ailments. According to carbonneutral.com, a return trip from Melbourne to Bangkok (16005kms) produces 1.58 tonnes of CO2, and the burden of this can be lifted by paying carbonneutral $24.81 to offset that CO2 in one of their renewable energy projects. Or just buy 20 toothbrushes and floss and give them to your friends.

Bonus Bangas: Sars Wars: Bangkok Zombie Crisis ( 2004 )

Bonus Bangas II: Comics made by a Bangkok artist, who also does a kind of spoken word with projected comic panels thing..

Bonus Bangas III: May Kaidee’s Cooking School does a pretty rad half-day vegetarian Thai cooking course for cheap. And they have great cookbooks.

Bonus Bangas IV: Turkish Batwoman still eludes me, but while scouting for rooftops, ran into Thai Batgirl on the 23rd floor of a building that had no security on their elevators.

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 )

Augmented Billboards 2: The Artvertiser @ Transmediale 2010 from Julian Oliver on Vimeo.

They Live!
Indeed, as might be expected from a project that seeks to detect and replace billboards with other imagery in real-time, there is some inspiration expressed on Julian’s site for the great cult classic by John Carpenter, They Live – which features rebel sunglasses as a major plot device ( they decode the ‘real’ message of a billboard when worn ).

Developing the Artvertiser as a software platform that can detect advertisements viewed through a device, and replace them, Julian and Damian Stewart consider their work as an example of ‘Improved Reality’, claiming “The Artvertiser situates the ‘read-only’, proprietary imagery of our public spaces as a ‘read-write’ platform for the presentation of non-proprietary, critically engaging content.”

In practice so far, this seems like it works best within their own custom built device, which they’ve dubbed the Billboard Intercept Unit. Key qualities of that beast include a high-quality wide-angle lens, fast CPU and GPU, powerful wireless adaptor, long battery life and plenty of solid state storage space. Interestingly though they seek to develop versions for Linux, OS X, Google’s Android OS, the Nokia N900 (Maemo 5) and the iPhone and a single shot photo substitution version for the Symbian OS ( used by the great bulk of the world’s camera phones).

The software works by users training it to recognise individual advertisements, which can then be replaced by alternate images or videos. Then whenever that advert is encountered – “It doesn’t matter whether the advertisement is on a building, in a magazine or on the side of a vehicle” – the ad will be replaced within the viewer, by the alternate image or video. If an internet connection is available, the scene and substituted image can be immediately documented and published online, ‘providing an alternative memory of the city’.

See selectparks.net/~julian for more, including Escape from Woomera ( a 3D game set inside one of Australia’s refugee detention centres ), Packet Garden ( watch your daily net traffic generate a visual garden ), Levelhead (Augmented Reality spatial-memory game and tangible interface prototype) and Fijuu, his 3D music AV experiments.

( See also, Julian Oliver: The Art of Gardening, a piece I was asked to write for an exhibition of his, many a moon ago. )

Hugh Farrant and Giordano Nanni uploaded Episode 4 of Rap News to youtube in July 2010, a funny overview of wikileaks and the issues it raised. Their witty editing earned an invitation to meet Julian Assange, resulting in his cameo appearance in Episode 5 (Oct 27), nobody yet aware of the political chaos that would unfold a month later. (Photo above on the day of their video shoot )

How difficult was it to co-ordinate shooting a video with ‘the world’s most wanted man’, Julian Assange?
He managed to fit us in to an extremely hectic schedule. We were pretty sure he’d only have a couple of hours to spare, but at the end of the day’s shoot he told us he’d be happy to come back the next day and re-shoot some of it. Messing around in front of the camera definitely helped get his mind off more serious things for a few hours. He’s a great guy with a wicked sense of humour, and the calmest demeanour of any person we’ve ever seen.

Did you glean any insights about Wikileaks from the contact?
We got to see the project as it was about to enter this current Wiki-Trickle phase. We could tell that they were building up and unleashing progressively larger and more impacting data, but we have to admit that we were blind-sided by this ‘Cable-gate’ phenomenon. I mean, this is a real game-changer. It’s gigantic, and it’s just not stopping.

Given you’ve tallied half a million YouTube views, why refuse their offers of revenue sharing from ads?
We loathe advertising so passionately that the loss of a potential revenue stream is a small price to pay to keep the channel free of marketing. We have a donations system for people to visit, and since episode 5 dropped, plenty of people have been expressing their support with some cash. Donations keep Rap News going, and let us pay for ever more elaborate wigs and make-up.

What do you think of Auto-tune the news?
Seriously talented musicians, extremely funny, and Hugo has something of a man-crush on Michael Gregory. That guy’s got a lot of soul.

What other media inspire with it’s blend of politics and entertainment?
We both enjoyed Starship Troopers – hilarious and kick-ass sci-fi action movie, with some excellent calls about humanity’s interplanetary relations. We love South Park, and Team America is a high point of culture. Koyaanisqtasi – by Godfrey Reggio and Philip Glass – is a film which really inspires and opens one’s eyes to the world we live in. Videos of comedians Bill Hicks and George Carlin definitely taught us a few things. The greatest example of combining entertainment and politics is Jonathan Swift’s masterwork Gulliver’s Travels.

Good news – have we had any lately?
There’s never been a better time in history to be creative with access to a global audience. Wikileaks is excellent news. It was about time things got shaken up a bit. Evo Morales is excellent news for South America. Local band [Me] just signed a UK record deal. Also, Tool are visiting Melbourne in January. Very good news indeed.

Future musical projects for Hugo?
Regular gigs on the North Side. One day – some form of live Rap News format, initially within solo shows and build up from there – a full live touring Rap News musical extravaganza would be amazing. Keep your eyes out for new Branksome film clips, and the sci-fi farcical epic film clip ‘We Are The Humans’.

Future writing / journalist projects for Giordano?
Finishing touches to a book I’ve just completed, and embarking on a theatrical project – Coranderrk – in collaboration with Ilbijerri Aboriginal Theatre. And of course, future episodes of Rap News. Robert Foster’s could become an important voice. Stay tuned.

Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon ( see also: Snow Crash, The Diamond age and The Baroque Cycle ) is more than a decade old, but its themes of information security and encryption ( wrapped up in a swashbuckling adventure ) are particularly resonant this week, with the escalation of activity around wikileaks. The latest release of documents by wikileaks, dubbed ‘cablegate’, have Canadian politicans calling for the assassination of Wiki-leader Julian Assange, have Sarah Palin crying ‘treason’ (Julian isn’t actually a citizen of the United States), had U.S. politicians pressure Amazon into removing it from their hosting ( “If Amazon are so uncomfortable with the first amendment, they should get out of the business of selling books.”@wikileaks on twitter ), and they’ve provoked endless column inches in the world’s biggest newspapers and magazines dissecting the ramifications of the releases, as well as the philosophies, motivations and early writings of Assange.

Swordfighting
Anyways, back to the clashing of swords – and also in the historical fiction vein, Neal has been developing Mongoliad, an online experimental fiction project, which seems to have spawned from a bit of medieval sword fighting research slashed about with a bunch of his Seattle coder and writer and friends (including Greg Bear, another award winning sci-fi author). And so – an online serial novel, delivered to subscribers over the web and via iOS, android and kindle, with a strong emphasis on reader participation.
“Up until now novels have been defined by the technology of the printing press, and we don’t have to use that definition anymore unless it suits us. Some of the things that show up here will be chapters of the novel, some will be character portraits, some will be background articles about topics raised by the progress of the narrative, some will be maps.”

Julian Assange HipHop
Like an Aussie hiphop version of Auto-Tune the news, The Rap News uses the form of musical news broadcast to dissect and analyse current affairs. The brainchild of MC Hugo and editor / director Giordano Nanni, and made in a Melbourne bedroom studio, it’s impressively choreographed ( lots of different characters / costumes / accents / news graphics ) and manages to pack a dense analytical punch. Their video on wikileaks gained this tweet from wikileaks in response: “Hilarious Wikileaps rap gets it right. Is comedy the only honest commentary?” See for yourself.

PS. If lured in by swordfighting rap, hoping for new Wu-Tang hotel sheet shredding gossip, allow me to recommend instead, Iron Fist Pillage – a kungfu feature film with overdubbed vocals from the Wu crew ( and beats during the fight scenes).

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."]]

Kickstarter
This is the mother lode when it comes to leveraging social media to gather funds online. Kickstarter provides a central location where creatives can direct their friends to pledge financial support for a project (with various rewards) and Kickstarter takes care of all of the transactions. While relatively fresh, it has already financed a huge range of creative projects and is becoming increasingly visible online. They boil their success and approach down to 3 things:

- A good idea, communicated well, can spread fast and wide.
- A large group of people can be a tremendous source of money and encouragement.
- Every Kickstarter project must be fully funded before its time expires or no money changes hands.

It’s a formula that seems to work, the threat of not reaching a goal spurring fans into publicising projects wide and far. Blue Like Jazz raised $345K to cover a shortfall in producing a film of the book by Donald Miller. Glif raised $120K to produce an iphone tripod mount stand combo. Comic artist James Kochalka raised $11k to develop a computer game. An Eco-Volunteering Documentary raised $7.5K. Swimming Cities raised $6K to build a floating island of boats to take art to India. The best stoner-action film since “Pineapple Express” raised $671. Adventures in being small has managed $67 so far. Not all succeed though, but it remains a useful platform for gauging support for projects. Some failures are more special than others though, such as this attempt by Nicholad Gurewitch ( author of the fine Perry Bible Fellowship comic book ), to ‘erase the national debt of the USA’. Their goal of 15 trillion was unsuccessful.

Notably though, as Kickstarter’s transactions are handled by Amazon payments, project creators currently must have a US bank account and address, although International project support is promised for the future.

Fundbreak
Entering the void then, Australian based Fundbreak enables local creatives to join in the action. Format and approach is pretty much identical, though it currently features a smaller range of projects. One notable project seeking / deserving funding is well respected investigative journalist magazine New Matilda, which seeks $175K to stay alive and build foundations for the years to come. ($37K raised at time of writing.. ) Visit Fundbreak.com.au to see more, or start your own project fundraiser.