It’s coming up on that time of year again. Electrofringe is a new media arts festival held in Newcastle as part of the This Is Not Art arts festival. Lots of good stuff on and definitely worth the trip.
This year I’m presenting / performing the following:
“Introduction to the use of two software platforms which allow the creation of realtime video installations which can respond to the audience or other available data.”
This will be a introductory ‘tips and tricks’ panel presentation with Luke Toop (Adelaide), Steve Huon (Melbourne), Khalid (Melbourne) and myself. I’m probably going to focus on the basics of how create a Quartz Composer patch and then turn it into a stand alone application with Xcode and a little bit on network access and RSS etc.
A live improvised AV performance with my frequent collaborator Doktorb Robotnik. Audio and video feedback crossed with data pulled from the network in real time. Followed by a discussion.
“Audio has been easily sampled, processed and manipulated live for decades. Although hardware and software now allow video to become just as malleable, it is used in a limited number of ways. How can current-day video tools be used to composite video at live events differently? How can theatre and storytelling better integrate live video? What storytelling possibilities lay beyond recreating cinema, music videos or ‘wallpaper’? How do live video and sound work best together? What video is most worth having live?”
On the 3rd of September I headed out to Wild Dog Hill, a recording studio in St Andrews (about 40km north-east of Melbourne) with Doktorb Robotnik (Adrian Lucas) on feedback electronics and Simon Gorman on processed keyboards to have a jam and make a couple of recordings. Simon invited along Dan, Caesar and George who play drums, guitar and bass respectively.
It was the first time Adrian and I have really played with ‘musicians’ (these guys were VCA music graduates). We make noise, soundscapes, amient, textural noise. There are rhythmic and occasionally melodic elements but its not exactly something you can hum along to. There was a beautiful clash of cultures and general confusion as we were sound checking. To set our levels Adrian, Simon and I would produce the loudest, harshest tones we were capable of making. Dan, Caesar and George played a perfect rendition of “Rapper’s Delight”
Anyway, the session ended up being a lot of fun, resulting in two half hour sets. Simon did a great job of mixing us as he was playing and making sure that everyone was involved and had space to contribute. I am most happy with the first of the two sets, I guess because it sounds more like our other recordings, only with the addition of more traditional musical elements. I’m looking forward to playing with them again.
Here it is. It’s long (29 mins). It’s big (40 Mb). It’s a 192kbps MPEG-4 audio aac file. Enjoy.
The site is powered by WordPress and makes extensive use of customised templates, css and custom fields. The design is by Nicole Dominic, sliced up and css/xhtml-ised by me.
One of the main functions of the website is to present an easily update-able show-reel of the company’s work (primarily TV ads). Some of the tricks I discovered whilst making the site may be of interest to the videoblogging crew or others wanting to use WordPress as a content management system for video. The next step is going to be working out how to customise the site’s RSS feeds to include this information.
For each of the ads I make a regular post, storing a lot of information in custom fields, such as: the url of a thumbnail image; the url of a poster movie and the url of the movie itself. I store this information here rather than in the actual post text in order to separate content from styling and presentation, allowing me to refer to the same clip in a number of different ways from different areas of the site.
David played an ambient set of prerecorded tracks mixed with musique concrete style found sounds and samples and I projected very abstract, fluid, generative images created using analog to digital feedback through realtime effects in Quartz Composer.
I had just been down to see the excellent white noise exhibition at ACMI and was inspired by the ideas of abstraction on display. Curator Mike Stubbs’ essay on the exhibition is definitely worth a read: white noise : a leap into the light.
Here is a quick diagram which shows how my setup was plugged together:
The video output of the laptop was connected to both the analogue input of the MiniDV camera and the projector. The FireWire output of the video camera was connected back into the computer. Displaying the DV signal from the camera through colour controls and halftone line filters, back out through the computer’s video output I created a feedback loop. Rather than using mouse based on screen controls as I have with previous Vidget setups, for this performance I chose to use a MIDI controller with 8 knobs and 8 faders. This gave me much needed ‘hands on’ control so I was able to manipulate the feedback by adjusting various patch variables.
Click image to play.
Here is a fairly large (29 Mb), long (8 min) video created playing around with the setup in preparation for the gig which should give some idea of how it looked. This kind of play is an important (and fun) part of my research.
