IF Felinology = the study of cats and their anatomy,
THEN: GIF-felinology = Kind of like the torture scene from A Clockwork Orange, where eyes are propped open by pins… and as a piercing cat midi loop blares, an avalanche of cat tumblr feeds scratch away at the poor researchers eyes, until nothing remains but twitching and furballs.

I survived though – and am now a semi-professional animated cat-gif expert (contact me for rates). Catch the clip below ( or over at the projects page, where I now archive + document my video activities), or see it on the big screen during Sampology’s upcoming Apocalyptic AV tour.

Next up: more apocalypse, preparing ‘post-apocalyptic visual backdrops’ for upcoming TZU tour…

Elsewhere: holy felines, batman!

Warning: playing around long enough with 2D billboards and sprites (to display images) inside Quartz Composer, will eventually lead you to a third dimension. Fear not, inept explorers before you have survived, and they’ve even left some string at the edge of the cave:

Playing with 3D in QC

1. Create a new clear patch. This creates a blank background, choose colour in its inspector.
Type ‘clear’ into the library window, drag and drop a ‘clear’ patch onto your editor window.

2. Drag a ‘cube’ onto your window too.
Drag a movie from your hard-drive, into your window. Attach the image output to one of the image inputs of the cube.
Play with the rotation and x / y / z values of the cube in the inspector, and you should see video on one side of the cube.
( Tip - When adjusting Quartz parameters, adjust at 10 x speed by pressing shift at the same time, helpful for quicker compositing.)
You now have video playing on a 3D object in QC. Woo!

To easily put video on all surfaces – create an input splitter – by right clicking on the cube. Select ‘Insert input splitter’ and choose the the cube image input you’ve been using. Drag from the output of the input splitter, to as many of the cube image surfaces as you wish.

3. For easier 3D space manipulation try using a trackball. Drag one in from the library. Click and drag to select your cube(s) and movie files, then press command + x to cut them. Leave the clear patch. Double-click the Trackball patch to go within it. Paste (command + v) your cube here. Now try clicking and dragging on your QC viewer window – the trackball enables this more intuitive navigation / perspective alignment. (Click edit parent in the editor window to go back to your upper layer patches at any time.)

(Similarly, the 3D Transform patch can be used to allow easier control of 3D space. For example, placing several 3d objects inside a 3D transform, allows easy perspective adjustment of the whole scene by changing the 3D transform parameters.)

4. To add complexity – drag a ‘Replicate in Space’ patch from the library into your editor window, and place beside your cube. Again select your cube(s) + movie(s) + cut these. Double click to go inside the Replicate patch, then paste these inside. Play around with the Replicate parameters and watch the results.

3D experiment quartz patch ( Update the movie location to match a video file of yours, or delete the included movie link, and drag a movie into the editor)

Playing with your 3D QC file inside VDMX

Option 1: Drop it into the media bin and it should playback the 3D model with pre-connected movie.

Option 2: To use the QC file as an effect – allowing any clip being played in VDMX to appear on the cube – we need to do a few things :

- So that the video input is user defined rather than pre-defined, the root macro patch needs ’an input splitter of type ‘image’ set up receive the incoming video stream‘.

- To enable any of the QC parameters to be adjusted live inside VDMX, we need to adjust the relevant parameters in the QC patch. This is called ‘publishing an input in quartz’ ( and enables that QC parameter to be adjusted within VDMX -  see instructions). However – slight complication – these need to be published in the topmost layer of quartz ( ie the root macro patch) to be accessible in VDMX. So if you’ve published an input within a subpatch of your main patch, this won’t show up in VDMX. To solve this, publish the input at the layer of QC you are in ( eg inside a replicate in space patch), then go up one level – this published input will now appear listed in that patch ( eg replicate in space). Repeat the process of right clicking to publish again, and it will appear in the next patch up, and so on until it appears in the root macro patch.

- Save the QC within your VDMX QC FX folder. Select it from assets ( if needed, refresh via VDMX > prefs > User paths ). Whatever VDMX clip is playing will now be composited onto the cubes. Dude! OH: and click-dragging in the VDMX preview window works for the trackball navigation, the same way it does within QC.

3D experiment quartz patch for VDMX  (Drop into VDMX QC folder. Change parameters in this QC patch, save as new name in the same QC FX folder, and you’ve got as many new 3D compositing tools as you want.)

Playing With 3D Models

Download and install Vade’s v002 Model Loader - which allows you to “load 35+ 3D model formats into Quartz Composer, including animation data.”

Drag the v002 model importer into your editor. For ‘model path’, enter the address of a 3D model. (Drag a 3D model to the editor, click it, select path in inspector, copy and paste into v002.)

Connect an image or video to the v002  Model Importer ‘image’ input, to texture your model.

Read the included notes for more fun – including models with embedded 3D animation parameters.

Recording Your QC Experiments

Install Syphon Recorder.
Install the Syphon for Quartz Composer plug-in.
Put ‘Syphon server’ into your toplevel Quartz editor window. To use the OpenGL scene as the source, set this patch to be the last (top) layer rendered. ( ie – click on the right of your syphon server box, and ensure it’s number is higher than other layer.) This enables the Quartz output to be displayed within Syphon Recorder.

Open ‘Syphon Recorder’. Your quartz video should be already visible. Adjust recording preferences to suit (it handles 1080P fine on this 3 year old macbookpro), and hit record. It seems to manage 1080P HD recordings fine, and it even records alpha channels ( ie you can record audio-responsive 3D models on a transparent background, for easy compositing later into the likes of After Effects.

(See also: QTZ Rendang - Free software for rendering out quartz patches. Potentially useful for non-real-time rendering out intensive patches that give slow playback. Haven’t tested that yet though.)

Special shout-outs:

- to Vade for providing both the v002 model importer, Syphon and the Syphon recorder, which makes a lot of the above possible.

- To VJ Shakinda ( co-author of a forthcoming book on QC with @momothemonster) for his trilogy of 3D tutorials on youtube, which really helped me get to grips with 3D in QC. If you found this stringy guide helpful, wait until you’re bungee jumping with this fella:

Above, 3d objects moving to music in 4 mins. Also tasty: 3d beat reactive scenes – part 1 / part 2 / part 3.

Previously on Breaking Bad:

Learning With Quartz Part 3: DIY Anchor Rotation FX for VDMX

Learning Quartz Composer Part 2

Learning Quartz Composer Part 1

Aphex Twin played in Melbourne recently, which also meant a chance to catch the pixel mutations of his regular tour VJ, Weirdcore. After a summer of stage screens saturated with glossy, void-of-personality motion graphics templates, it was refreshing to catch live tour visuals that were ambitious, sophisticated and raw – very obviously being generated and manipulated live, mistakes and all. Probably not many other ways to approach a set for Aphex, and apparently he does improvise a different set every single time.

Below, a diagram from Weirdcore’s artist profile at vidvox.net, explaining his video set-up**.

“With additional FX programming from Andrew Benson, Flight404, and Vade this is one of the wildest tour setups we’ve seen in a while… but you wouldn’t expect anything less for the worlds most known electronic musician. Pitchfork may have said it best, “First, we can’t really talk about anything until we talk about the visuals.”

[[ **"UPDATE: Weirdcore mentions that diagram is now dated (was for his 2011 set-up), and he intends to shift everything to jitter, with one computer direct to LEDs, much simpler and less likely to fuck up." ]]

Above : 1 x Richard D. James + 1 x Kinect, flanked by L.E.D. Screens of the face-replaced crowd at the Palace, Melbourne.

Below : The Kinect in action at The Future Music Festival ( Bonus Melbourne software plug : kinectar.org ).

Aside from general pixel mangling and the fast and fluid Weirdcore style – I was curious to see how effective the live face-replacing would be (snippets of it in live Aphex shows have been glimpsed online for a couple of years now). The software and camera set-up seemed to take a while to tune, but when it locked in the effect was mesmerising, updating fast enough to cope with panning cameras of a boisterous crowd, all while being relentlessly modified and further manipulated.

The face-tracking was also put to work in a section of the show that is customised for each location. Weirdcore had asked for feedback on the list of Aussie celebrities he’d compiled, so I threw him a few more names, including 1 x Wally. Crowd reactions varied, but were probably loudest for the photo below of Julia Gillard, and Weirdcore mentioned later that for whatever reason – unlike most other countries, the response had been loudest for politicians at Australian gigs.

Aphex + Die Antwoord Live

[[ Die Antwoord? If needing a crash course in South African cartoon-rave-gangsterism - spend 15 minutes of your life inside the short film, Umshini Wam made with Harmony Korine ( Gummo, Kids, etc). ]]

If the Aphex Palace gig wasn’t overloaded enough, 3/4 through the set  - on top of a cacophony of Aphex – Die Antwoord burst out from backstage in orange flouro suits and rapid-fire a couple of tracks, one of which has ninja rapping from above the crowd he has stage-dived into. There are almost enough camera phones in the air, for ninja to get back onstage by walking across a bridge made of gadget. Another highpoint of weirdness is reached when ninja + Yo-landi rasp in their South African accents, ‘Aussie, Aussie, Aussie’ and the crowd eats it up, barking enthusiastically back ‘Oi, Oi, Oi!’. Somehow it all makes sense, including the ideas that future Die Antwoord videos are to be made by Weirdcore and later by Chris Cunningham. One extended global mutant franchise. And yes, after Die Antwoord depart, Aphex still has plenty in reserve (as do the lighting and laser operators), so by the time  it’s done, we can only depart exhausted.

**

Thanks to Weirdcore and his tech companion Fede for taking some tour time out to meet up and chat about pixels.

Be sure to check out  his video projects, including works for MIA, Chuck D, Cassette Playa + Simian Mobile Disco etc, and this Weirdcore video interview at the Creators Project.

( Thanks also, to juanjocruz for letting me use his zoomed in photos, the best on flickr for the Melbourne show. )

R.I.P. Moebius, aka Jean Giraud, ( 1938-2012 ).

Sadly, we’re now without a living Moebius. All the more reason to revisit (or explore anew) his wild and fantastic creations. Most people might recognise his graceful intergalactic palette as some of the best parts of Heavy Metal magazine (originally Metal Hurlant in France) – but even the comic-less would be familiar with his work and influence on films such as Alien, Tron + Blade Runner. Indeed, we’ve lost a gentle giant.

Some Moebius links to dive into?

official site ( French )
Moebius on wikipedia
Airtight garage, a fan site / tumblr-collage tribute (named after one of his books).
There are several feature-length Moebius documentaries available. Here’s a video interview with Moebius drawing on a Cintiq screen-tablet.
And then there’s the Moebius and Alejandro Jodorowsky film version of Dune they never got to make. It was also to feature Salvador Dali and Giger amongst others, so the documentary about this, Unseen Dune (see trailer), should at least be pretty interesting.

If looking to do an out of print Moebius comic binge on your ipad ( including say, The Incal, his series with Jodorowsky) … Stanza - is a free app that can read CBR + PDF comics.

[Update: 2 great, long-read, illustrated Moebius tributes - on sci-fi sites io9 + Tor.com]

After being invited to perform at the Australian Natural History Museum in Sydney ( back in Aug 2011), I couldn’t resist the chance to project onto a dinosaur skeleton. I was performing video in the foyer with Pattern Machine as part of the Museum’s Jurassic Lounge evening series, and the museum staff were super helpful in squeezing in this extra request during an already hectic night ( which amongst other things, included a silent disco and live taxidermy!).

The Muttaburrasaurus was apparently a herbivorous Aussie dinosaur that lived 100 million years ago, around 8m / 26 ft tall and weighing around 3 tonnes. To project onto it, I connected my camera to my laptop and used Madmapper‘s spatial scanner function to generate an image mask, tidied this up in photoshop, then played with the masked image using VDMX.

Soundtrack by Pattern Machine ( patternmachine.possumpalace.org , see also: related field recordings at soundcloud )

Thanks to Barry Saunders for the invite, and Chanele Moss for general museum awesomeness.

Congo Tardis #1 are an absurdly talented trio of Melbourne turntablists, who recently asked me to put together a micro-budget music video for their new EP. Part of their pitch was that they already had some green screen footage of the guest vocalist (hula-hooping extraordinaire: Marawa the Amazing), so ‘hopefully a quickly composited clip wouldn’t take too long’. The green screen footage, of course, turned out to be a drunken ninja fest: most shots cut off part of Marawas’ head, or featured the camera wobbling on the tripod (when the cameraman wasn’t busy zooming in and out). And yeah – it featured juggling of *green* limes. There was enough gold slithers to make it work though, and making it reminded me how useful VJ tools can be for video production today.

Integrating VJ Software Into Post-Production

Congo just wanted a series of composited scenes cut to music, rather than any narrative, so given their tropical flavour I set about designing some lo-fi cosmic jungle compositions. Typically that’d involve playing with images and video files in Photoshop and After Effects, but being easily able to record HD video with Syphon suddenly makes software like VDMX all the more useful for generating customised textures / timings / visual effects.

- Play music track. Adjust visual parameters with the knobs and sliders of a midi controller and record as you go.

- Playback instantly, see what worked, then rinse, repeat and refine. Or remix that video for a more layered effect.

- Throw these recorded clips into After Effects for some ‘mastering’ / fine-tuning / colour grading etc

The current Adobe Premiere + After Effects integration is another great contributor to an improved video workflow. Using what they call ‘dynamic linking‘ many rendering steps can be cut out and this can make a great difference for putting together a video. It allows precision editing a clip within Premiere, easy offloading into After Effects for parameter adjustments, then re-importing the newly adjusted clip back into Premiere – all without needing to render. Or work on a complex composition in After Effects, then import just this composition into Premiere for timeline cut-up. And of course, the end result of these processes can be exported and used within the likes of VDMX for further real-time splicing, remixing and layering, and easily recorded – for reintegration into… etc etc. THIS MAKES ME HAPPY!

The Sweet Lime (FT Marawa the Amazing) is available now on the Number 1 EP as a 7″ Vinyl, or digital download via congotardis1.com or scatterblog.com.

[[ PS. Thanks to Pineapple Donut, Skynoise now has a dedicated and dynamically updating projects page, so there's a place I can put stuff like this Congo Tardis music video...  without it getting lost in the archive-ether. Or you can release your comment hounds, while viewing it directly over at vimeo ]]

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!

2012. Zowie. Time flies. And as the year ticks over, it turns out to be 3 months since I last posted.

Mostly I’ve been busy (doing video on the Making Mirrors tour with Gotye / making a set of motion graphic video clips for Audego ).

Partially, the skynoise part of my brain has been ant-eaten away by the likes of twitter.

There’s also a whole bunch of almost-ready posts waiting to be covered in finishing sauce :

- CoGe review (including an interview with Tamas Nagy)
- VDMX 5 (Beta 8 ) review ( it is now 10 years since I reviewed VDMX 2, including a tiny interview with Johnny DeKam )
- Resolume Avenue / Arena review
- Web Aesthetics by Vito Campanelli, book review
- Art Rage Pro Review
- Sydney Film Festival + Melbourne Film Festival reviews
- another Quartz Composer tutorial / set of links + observations
- science fiction books set in the non-anglo world
- reflections on touring with Gotye..

Expect those to start trickling through in January. And after that, probably occasional longer form pieces on current obsessions, and more with images and video, less of the pop cultural snapshots. That said – everything about 2011 was probably covered in David Weinberger’s amusing top ten list of top ten list of top ten lists. And as Umberto Eco reckons, liking lists is part of the human condition.. we face infinity and our mortality by making lists / catalogs / encylopedias / museum collections etc .

Anyways,  2012 – what a cracker - and only 360ish days until everyone stops talking about Mayans..

This week’s mission – finish off a video clip for Congo Tardis, using wobbly green screen footage sent by their charismatic guest vocalist, Marawa the amazing.

*PRIMATE-FIST-BUMPS*

(( PS. The duo above, aping the Gotye bodypainting filmclip with 35 million views(!!), were wandering around at the 2011 Peat’s Ridge festival, and they became a pretty apt 2012 countdown backdrop on the big screen.. ))

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.

So a while ago I interviewed Fernando Llanos, a Mexican artist with a huge catalogue of artworks under his belt. Notably, this included the Videohuahua project – which involved a micro projector strapped to the back of his pet chihuahua. Turned out he was bringing a video blimp to Australia for the Splendour in the Grass festival, and was spending a few days in Melbourne afterwards – so we made plans to meet up.

A couple of days later, I was introduced to Gonzalo who runs the enchanting Magic Lantern Studio ( 155 Brunswick St, Fitzroy, Melbourne ), which is filled with puppets, optical illusion and vintage pre-cinema moving image devices. At some point I noticed he had a few paintings of chihuahuas on the walls, and we got talking about them – and then I mentioned Videohuahua – Gonzalo stared at me, then lead me laughing to his computer where he showed a series of paintings that feature chihuahuas with cameras strapped to their heads.

Inevitably Fernando’s Melbourne visit had to include a trip to Magic Lantern, where it turned out the art and chihuahua anecdotes flew thick and fast ( mostly in fast-forward Spanish). Below, Fernando on the left, Gonzalo on the right, in front of the shop and a painting of a chihuahua with an electric shaver as head. Photographed and blogged, so I can say, no, I am not making this up.

See also art, politics and the daschund.

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!

Previously:

Learning Quartz Composer Part 1

Learning Quartz Composer Part 2

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.

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.

Next: Learning with Quartz Part 3 – DIY anchor rotation FX for VDMX

Want to directly support a very legendary local musician, who recently had his solar powered studio broken into?

The unfortunate recipient of the break in was Monkey Marc (Lab Rats, Combat Wombat, esteemed solo artist, and relentless workshop and gig organiser – read more about his technicoloured musical history at monkeymarc.com, or in a previous Skynoise interview).

“It took several months or hard work, a bit of a crazy idea and some help from friends to make the solar powered studio dream come true, and now its been going from strength to strength (despite a few ‘electrical’ issues) for nearly 2 years. It takes six solar panels on an old horse float and almost one tonne of batteries. The studio itself is built inside an old shipping container.”

- Monkey Marc’s website, describing his studio at Abbotsford Convent Artist Community in Melbourne, Australia, where he recorded all of the music for his latest album using solar power.

Solar Powered Monkey Fundraising
http://monkeymarc.bandcamp.com will let you specify whatever price you want for Monkey Marc’s most recent album (solo instrumental hip-hop, dub, future dub and dubstep) as an ‘immediate download of 11-track album in your choice of 320k mp3, FLAC, etc’. It’s a pretty good deal – gain a pretty fine album, and the knowledge your donation is going directly towards replacing stolen recording and musical equipment. Help a monkey in need!

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).

“With Hair Balancing, hair is treated as a COSMIC ANTENNA. Its energetic properties are refined as a means of communication on many levels.”
– Linda Deslauriers, Hair Balancing Practioner

And In Other News

With their usual flair for flamboyantly bypassing bullshit detectors, perpetual hoaxsters The Yes Men recently succeeded in getting a lot of media outlets to fall for their most recent campaign involving hair and oil.

MyHairCares.com

Using a ex-oil workers, clever PR releases and a network of Hair salons, the Yes Men built the campaign to draw attention to the environmental practices of Enbridge (an oil company with a record stained by many oil spills, including a spill last year of 800,000 galllons of oil into Michigan’s Kalamazoo river, who are currently seeking to seeking to build a controversial pipeline through sections of important Canadian wilderness… ). The Yes Men press releases put forward the idea that Enbridge was planning to protect the proposed pipeline by turning hair salon clippings into ‘super-absorbent oil cleanup booms’ on the route of their proposed pipeline.

“Human hair has been successfully used to clean up oil spills for nearly two decades, ever since Alabama hair stylist and inventor Phil McCrory patented the technology in 1995,” the fake release said.”With MyHairCares, Enbridge expects to collect 450,000 pounds of hair.” Fact checkers are apparently in rare supply, as despite the stretched truthiness of it all, a number of North American media outlets snowballed the story up into a media-disaster for Enbridge.

Even More Haircare

Who knew the $9 billion black hair industry would yield a film of such sociological insight and humour? Chris Rock apparently. When Lola Rock, 5 year old daughter of comedian Chris, asked “Daddy, how come I don’t have good hair?”, it prompted Chris to dive into research for the production of the documentary Good Hair, about the relationship between African American women and their hair.

“When I was a dating guy, I dated women from different races. Anytime I was with an Asian or a Puerto Rican girl or a white girl, my hands would constantly be in their hair. Like my hands were thirsty, ” says Rock, explaining that because a black woman’s hair is such an investment, men are often not allowed to touch it during sex.

Wet Footprints: it’s flooding everywhere, but we’re running out of water? Information visualisation can help us get a grip on the slipperiness of water scarcity.

“Freshwater is a scarce resource; its annual availability is limited and demand is growing. The water footprint of humanity has exceeded sustainable levels at several places and is unequally distributed among people. There are many spots in the world where serious water depletion or pollution takes place: rivers running dry, dropping lake and groundwater levels and endangered species because of contaminated water. The water footprint refers to the volumes of water consumption and pollution that are ‘behind’ your daily consumption. Your ‘indirect water footprint’ – the water consumption and pollution behind all the goods you buy – is much larger than your direct water footprint at home.”

- worldwater.org

Visualising Water Use
Visit this eye-opening site to get a quick and easy grasp on water use around the world. Info-vis FTW!

“How much water do you consume based on where you are from? How much water do you consume based on what food, beverages, and products you purchase? This data visualization reveals the hidden water content in your nationality and your consumer goods. Label your lunch, your drink, your friends, yourself, even the whole world with its water footprint.”

The takeaway message: Australia uses around 3269 litres of water per person a day – over twice the amount of water for New Zealand, 3 times the amount for Indonesia or Korea, 4 times South Africa and 5 times Colombia. Who uses more water per person? Only the United States and Canada. At a glance, we mostly seem to use it on agriculture, followed by domestic then industrial use.

And Measuring Wet Footprints
The visualization site takes some of it’s information waterfootprint.org, where using their extended water footprint calculator, and guesstimating how many kgs of food I eat per week etc, I discovered my water footprint is pretty close to the global average of 1243. Agriculturally, coffee (and fruit juice) seems to require around 10 times the amount of water to produce as tea, and per kg of food, beef takes between 10 to 50 times the amount of water needed to produce potatoes, wheat, corn, rice or soybeans. They mention plenty of caveats*, and suggest the figures are best used as a guide to help think about our water consumption.

*These kinds of data are fraught with problems and uncertainties, and users should be extremely careful about using them for other than the most simple comparisons. When we can, we like to use ranges to try to bracket many of the uncertainties, but other sources rarely mention uncertainties or provide ranges of estimates. For example, the Water Footprint reports that 15,500 kg of water are required to produce beef, but work from the Pacific Institute reports a range of 15,000 to over 70,000 depending on diet, climate, the amount of product from each cow, and other variables. ( via http://worldwater.org/data20082009/Table19.pdf)

“When you see tuna, think panda. The bluefin tuna is now on the brink of extinction, thanks to industrial overfishing and corporate greeed. breeding populations could disappear from our oceans as early as 2012. Please do your bit to end this trade. Don’t sell, buy or eat this endangered species. And please support the bluefin defence campaign, Operation Blue Rage, at www.seashepherd.org.”

Facts about the endangered Bluefin Tuna

(IMG above found via Weekly Teinou Woman )

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?