Documenting the research and production of interactive network based media. By David Wolf
More Melbourne VJ action next Saturday and Sunday nights as part of the Melbourne International Animation Festival in “Remains to be seen“, co-ordinated by John Power.
I’ll be playing as dpwolf at around 9 on Saturday 25th June @ Duck Board House, 91 Flinders Lane.
Electundra is an annual festival of live experimental audiovisual performances. It was held at Loop, Melbourne, Australia from Sunday 12th of June through to Wednesday 15th, so I’m a little late in promoting it! Since last year the festival has grown from two to four nights and featured around 40 artists performing. It was great to see the range of visual styles and techniques represented from live camera switching and physical object manipulation to computer based performances.
I went with the latter option for my own set, performing visuals with Quartz Composer on one laptop whilst running Ableton Live on another laptop for sound, collaborating with Doktorb Robotnik (Adrian Lucas) on feedback electronics. I knew that doing two things at once was going to be quite a challenge so I developed a visual patch which used live audio input to modulate and manipulate images in a number of ways - see this post for a simplified version of my setup. Hopefully this gave the imagery a ‘liveness’ and ‘directness’ which meant that it wasn’t too obvious when I was focussing my whole attention on what I was doing with the audio side of things.
Technorati Tags: Electundra
One of the coolest things I’ve discovered about Quartz Composer lately is the fact that you can use it (in combination with Xcode) create stand alone applications with custom interfaces all without having to know any ‘proper’ programming. So, here’s one of my first experiments….
This vidget is a simplified version of a larger Quartz Composer patch I have been using to perform with recently. It allows the user to import a number of Quicktime files or still images and apply a number of effects to them.
On the left hand side of the window are five text fields which store the local path to each movie file. To add your own clips, simply click in the field and then drag the movie’s icon from the finder into the field and press enter.
Just to the right of these text fields is a selection slider, which is used to select which source clip is to be effected. The arrow will snap to each of the clips as you slide or click it.
Below the and to the left are more sliders which control the clip’s playback speed, saturation, brightness, contrast, and hue angle. All of these work in real time to adjust the display of the clip.
To the right of these image controls are check boxes for the different rendering effects. They are ordered from top to bottom in terms of the layers onto which they are drawn. The top three have optional black ‘clear’ backgrounds which block out the layers below.
Expanding audio renders the clip onto three layers, red, blue and green and uses live audio input to resize the three layers to produce a coloured motion blur effect.
Particle system renders the clip onto hundreds of small layers which explode out from a randomly selected point on the screen.
Slow moving layers renders the clip onto four layers which crop the image and oscillate in 3d space based on a combination of audio input and low frequency oscillators.
Inset Image produces a ‘picture in picture’ effect which is manipulated by audio input.
Download (requires Mac OS X 10.4).
BikeLights Clips (these tiny lo-fi clips of my bike lights were shot with my phone and are the reason for the name, try them out)
Quartz Composer file
Xcode Project
This work is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 licence.
Technorati Tags: Quartz Composer, vidget