Published on November 2, 2004 in Gigs and Music. Closed
Its on again.
Audiovisual Experiments.
8:00PM Tuesday 2nd of November.
Loop 23 Meyers Place in the city.
This month SegFault regulars Dale Nason, dpwolf and Doktorb Robotnik will be joined by Jean p00le and Future Eater.
Also joining us is Kim Bounds who will be providing the before, after and in between music and Steve Huon who will be keeping the visuals playing between acts.
Due to the date of the gig (the date of the US presidential election) we are presenting a loosely war/nasty based theme.
Things will lighten up towards the end of the night as TestPatN will be facilitating a series of experiments in the field of fun single-serve collaborations between guest artists involving microwave cookery, video and sound.
Gold coin donations were super handy last time (I covered the cost of photocopying the fliers!) so thank you and remember to bring your change this time.
“Transmedia storytelling is, simply put, franchises: a movie is followed by a game, then perhaps a comic, website and so on. This paper outlines the poetics being developed for multi-channel storytelling; suggesting narrative schema intended to guide story creation and literary criticism.”
A couple of weeks before I was a little scared about chairing and running out of things to say or ask but once I read the paper I realised that it would be no problem at all – I had a million questions to ask. Christy began her current research topic when she was writing a novel and thought it would be interesting to let the reader chat online with a character (a bot) from the book as they read. When she looked into what had been written and done before she found quite a gap. While much had been written about spin offs and franchises such as Star Wars, there was very little on multi-channel storytelling whereby a single story is told across multiple media.
Some interesting research in this area (referenced in Dena’s paper) is Jane McGonical’s Avant Game and her paper from melbourneDAC. McGonical looks at alternate and mixed reality gaming whereby the use of multiple media such as websites, email, faxes, telephone answering machines and posters are required to traverse and piece together a story. (After I saw McGonical’s presentation at DAC I really wanted to produce an alternate reality game for my MA along the lines of The Beast. I soon realised how massively complex and time consuming its production it must have been.)
Later that day was Michelle Phillipov’s presentation on Death Metal vocality. It drew by far the largest crowd of all the Critical Animals sessions I saw. I wrote a little bit about it back here
I headed over to the Cambridge Hotel to help set up the video projectors etc for the weekend’s gigs. I brought my laptop with me just in case there was a need for an emergency VJ. Sure enough, I ended up playing a set in the main room with a band who’s name I never found out. It was quite good, with guitars and beats played live with a MIDI drumkit I think (it all happened very fast). I continued to play through until the next band and VJ were set up. Again, I used the Vidget.
On the Friday night I also documented Ben Frost (sound) and Khalid Abdullahi’s (video) School of Emotional Engineering set. It was cool to watch and listen intensely as I focused, framing shots. I got some really nice silhouetted images of Ben and Khalid with the video projections behind them. I also got some good closeups of their faces which were softly lit by their laptop screens. Hopefully some excerpts will show up online at some point soon.
I arrived in Newcastle late on the Wednesday night, its was a very long drive from Melbourne.
I stayed at an Irish themed pub called the Northern Star Hotel. The room was clean, fairly big (bigger than my room at home!), had two desks for me to set up all my equipment on and a tv with Channel V (doubled as a handy preview monitor too).
On Thursday morning I finished preparation for my Critical Animals presentation. I brought my printer/scanner/multifunction thing with me so I could scan in some last minute images from books (I still need to find some video of John Whitney’s films) and print out some notes to refer to.
I decided to use the Finder as my presentation tool after a bad experience a few months ago trying to use Keynote on the 2nd monitor output of my laptop with the notes on my own screen. It was very messy and the audience couldn’t see what I was doing properly. This time I set up a series of folders for each of my main points. Within each of these folders I had either examples (Quicktime files, jpegs etc) or sub-folders with sub-points. This worked very well, letting me keep track of where I was up to and letting the audience see exactly what I was doing.
I just caught the end of Keir Smith‘s presentation From Transmission to Multiplicity: Interactive Art Installations as a Site for Research which looked very interesting. Keir is a Phd candidate from iCinema at UNSW in Sydney. He is studying as part of both the Collage of Fine Arts (COFA) and the Computer Science department.
“Keir Smith explores the changing methods with which interactive art installations are being designed, built and experienced, and the shift from singular author/creators, to groups of collaborators and multiple users.”
I look forward to reading his full paper when it is published in New Media Poetics.
Later that night I headed over to the QuantaCrib, an all-in improvised AV jam space. If I expanded the collection of computer and music bits and pieces that fill my tiny room to fill a hall sized venue this is what it would look like. Great fun. They had two video projectors going so I plugged into one and Tim plugged into the other. While he played with video feedback off his laptop monitor with Universal Access effects, I played with Vidget 3. Later another guy (who’s name I forget) played with a MAX patch he had written. I continued to play, matching some of his dark and heavily masked imagery. I tried to keep up but after a while I couldn’t stand to look at my low frame rate / low resolution video next to his super-fast, super-smooth lovely images. It was all good fun anyway.
It has been deathly quiet around dpwolf/blog land lately so I thought I’d bring some deathly noise.
Faxed Head are an extreme / death / black / noise / metal band from Coalinga USA with an excellent (very dark) sense of humor. See their bio on the site for their complete mythology and read how the members’ group suicide pact went horribly wrong leaving Mc Patrick Head confined to a wheelchair and permanently covered in plaid, Neck Head with no head at all and LaBreya Tar Pits Head with his face covered in tar.
The site also features mp3s and some video of their 1997 tour of Australia. I remember seeing them on Channel 31 way back then, hilarious Their most recent album features a ‘re-imagining’ of the 2pac/Dr Dre classic California Love as Coalinga Love. It looks like their site hasn’t been updated in a couple of years (maintained by ASCII Head!) so I wonder if they are still around.
Listening to Faxed Head also reminds me of Michelle Phillipov’s presentation at Critical Animals in Newcastle: ‘Septic vomit of chyme’: Death metal vocality and the disavowal of identification.
“Rock’s “authenticity” has long been predicated on its ability to “represent” the everyday lives of its audience, with the singing voice functioning as the primary identificatory locus of listening. Michelle Phillipov explores how death metal troubles this literal reading of the power of rock and voice.”
Published on September 26, 2004 in Note to self. Closed
Hand based shadow puppetry was probably the first ever screen based interactive media. Take one pair of hands, a light source and surface to project onto and there you have it!
Tim is right into the whole hand gesture / shadow puppetry thing, performing visuals to accompany my noises at the last Segmentation Fault using a light, a rear projection screen and a roll of gaffer tape [post something on your blog Tim :-p].
I just read about this series of lectures at the MoMA in New York, Laurie Anderson, Michel Gondry, Brian Eno speaking about the mixing of media and music, one each week. I wish I was there!
From the site:
“The mixing of media took off in the late 1960s, as the barriers between artistic disciplines broke down and artists began moving freely between painting, sculpture, photography, film, and video. …
Music is at the forefront of this interdisciplinary experimentation. Musicians led the way in developing new working methods–they were interdisciplinary from the start. The work of Laurie Anderson, Brian Eno, and Michel Gondry evinces their backgrounds in music; Anderson was a teenage violin soloist, Gondry played drums in a rock band, and Eno is a well-known pioneer of electronic music.
Music is infused with a wild, innovative energy that has proven especially invigorating to media art, an art form that thrives on trampling conventional restrictions.The development of media art over the recent decades paralleled the transformation of our musical environment. For Anderson, Eno, and Gondry, music and art are not separate forms. In their art and in their careers, these artists merge the two forms seamlessly. Installations, feature films, performance pieces, and other hybrid projects are imbued with a sensibility that owes much to the artists musical background.”
So to do a search for “factory” I take the string “http://www.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=” and add it to the contents of the text box and then add “&format=rss_200″ to the end. This give me the URL of the feed. I then use the “LoadQTListFromXML” command to load it into the movie. The RSS file is structured as below, it has a lot of information for each picture.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/42039133@N00/560315/
<img src="http://www.flickr.com/photos/560315_ac00de7218_m.jpg"
/><br />I’m not sure whether the quotation marks
add to the effect, or detract from it. Fri, 24 Sep 2004 23:05:08 PSTnobody@flickr.com (several_bees)
length="16472" type="image/jpeg" />
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rae/547742/
<img src="http://www.flickr.com/photos/547742_555b39e9fb_m.jpg"
/><br />Watching the precious bottles of Cascade beer get packaged up. Thu, 23 Sep 2004 23:30:10 PSTnobody@flickr.com (Raelene)
length="17794" type="image/jpeg" />
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rae/547738/
<img src="http://www.flickr.com/photos/547738_9b3371cb06_m.jpg"
/><br />Apparently this cat lives at the Cascade factory. It was there the last time
Tony visited. Thu, 23 Sep 2004 23:29:40 PSTnobody@flickr.com (Raelene)
type="image/jpeg" />
If you compare this with the previous XML example you can see some similarities. Where I have the whole list surrounded by the tags, the RSS list is surrounded by and tags. Where I have each clip name surrounded by the tag, the RSS list has each item surrounded by the tags. Within the tag there is more information and it is more structured. For locating the images, the important URLs can be found in the…
Ok I just realised it would have been much easier to find the image details from in the enclosure tag, but I used the description tag. I’ll change this next version. Anyway…
For each item, there is a url for a medium sized jpg image. After some quick snooping around I found that the images are coded with a letter to describe their size. For example here is an image from DocManhattan‘s Flickr photostram showing the various sizes and their urls (note the how only the last letters change):
The RSS points to the “m” sized image but what I need is the “t” thumbnail sized version so I remove the last few letters and add “t_d.jpg” to the end.
This post is getting really long so I’ll continue with part 3 soon. Please leave a comment if I need to explain anything more clearly.
Each of the clip names refers to the name of both the thumbnail and its associated video clip. For example, when AKM is read, I add “.jpg” to the end and add a sprite image. When the thumbnail is dragged to one of the layers and released I add “.mov” to the clip’s name and add a child movie to the layer. All of these files are located in the same directory on the hypertext.rmit.edu.au server but could potentially be from any directory on any server.
Loading the Flickr thumbnail images is a little more complicated.
This is the latest version of my interactive networked video project.
Click on the image to load Vidget 3 in Quicktime Player. (It is quite small but very processor intensive – especially as it first loads)
This version is a mix between the my first vidget which featured a text based interface for mixing up to three video clips on top of eachother, and my Quicktime Flickr photo viewer which let you search for and view images based on a search word.
The interface has been redesigned and now features a grid of 25 draggable images which represent video clips. These may be dragged and dropped onto three coloured ‘layers’. The blue layer is the uppermost with green below and red at the bottom. Each of these layers has a number of ‘graphics modes’. Like Photoshop layers, these may be combined in a number of modes, ranging from fully transparent to fully opaque. Each of these layers also has a number of playback controls which allow the user to play the clip faster or slower, forwards or backwards and step through frame by frame.
To the right of the three colour layers and their controls is a small white text field. This allows the user to search for images from Flickr. The ten most recent pictures tagged with the search word entered are loaded as thumbnails below. These thumbnails may be dragged and dropped onto any of the layers and combined with other moving and still images.
I have resized the output movie area so that everything fits on one screen.
Behind the scenes, the vidget has also been greatly updated. Rather than being limited to a set number of video clips determined at the time of authoring, this version dynamically loads all content including thumbnails. The names of these files are drawn from an XML file. This file may be updated with a simple text editor to add or delete more clips. The movie automatically loads the first 25 thumbnails from the XML list as it initially loads but may load the next 25, and the following 25 via the 1, 2 and 3 buttons at the top right of the controls.
At the moment the whole movie pauses whenever thumbnails are loaded, either via a Flickr search or by skipping to the next 25 thumbnails of video clips. I am working on ways around this.
The LiveStage Pro source files may be downloaded here: vidget3.zip
Sorry, my del.icio.us post was a little full of TLA (three letter acronyms).
I’ll try to explain a little bit more clearly.
Steve Harrington writes:
“I don’t get what is significant about RSS let alone RSS feeds or RSS feeds of bookmarks. Couuld you give an example and why you see this is cool -i.e. what does it help you accomplish fasterbetterqucker?”
OK, RSS was originally developed as a way of syndicating news headlines, summaries and the like. For example a news site like slashdot.org or news.bbc.co.uk may put out an rss feed of its current (latest) stories. This is like a stripped down version of the regular html version: no ads, no styles, nothing fancy, just the information. Rather than being formated like a normal html page with tags for bold, italics, etc. an RSS (or the competing format ATOM) feed will be formatted in XML with more general, database like tags like item, link, and description. This format is readable by a special news reading program and some newer web browsers (the next version of Apple’s Safari for example). So with an RSS feed and a program to read it, a user can get all the headlines and summaries very quickly and see if their favourite news site has been updated.
This format is also designed for computer-to-computer rather than computer-to-user communication and so is relatively easy to parse or interpret with a fairly simple program (much easier than HTML). So if I use del.icio.us to make an RSS feed of the URLs to video clips rather than web pages, I can make a simple program that takes these URLs and displays the associated video.
When you post a link to del.icio.us you can assign ‘tags’ to it. By tag I do not mean a piece of code, but rather a keyword. So say I linked to a clip of a monkey on a skateboard I could tag it ‘monkey’, ‘skateboard’, ‘silly’, ‘video’, etc. What is cool is that del.icio.us will generate an RSS feed for each of these tags so I could search for all links tagged ‘monkey’ by username and it will return an RSS formatted list.
For an example of how this could work, see my Quicktime Flickr photo viewer. It takes a word you type in and reads an RSS feed of images tagged with that word from the Flickr photo sharing site. It then takes these images and displays them as thumbnails. The same sort of thing could be applied to video content.
I had a quick play with del.icio.us today. It’s like a public bookmarks list, they call it ‘social bookmarks’. Its also like a stripped down blog engine with two key features that I think are very cool.
1. It generates RSS feeds of bookmarks.
2. Each entry can be ‘tagged’ and categorised – mmm, metadata
1+2 = It can generate RSS feeds for each tag.
So I was thinking, what if rather than linking to web pages I link to video files. And what if rather than giving a text description, I include a reference to a jpeg thumbnail. Now I could theoretically link to any piece of video I find or generate on the web and find it by searching for its tag. This would work just like my flickr viewer except for video/sound/anything.
I just got home from playing some visuals at Kent St. The show went pretty well but unfortunately the internet connection was down. This meant I could use only the clips I had on my laptop – no flickr image leeching . I’ve seriously gotta make/process some more clips and/or explore some more different effects because by the end of the three hour set I was thoroughly sick of all my clips.
I added a couple of new buttons to the interface so that I could have more than 25 clips at a time to choose from but they didn’t work as I had planned. Rather than getting the next 25 clips from my xml file, they got only got one extra clip and replaced the first. Luckily I was able to edit the xml, cutting the top 25 clips and pasting them back at the bottom, then re-loading the thumbnails. Whenever I load an xml file everything pauses for a good few seconds, even if the file is stored locally. I think I’ll just try to make more space for thumbnails so that next time I don’t have to reload as often.
Published on September 15, 2004 in Gigs, Music and Video. Closed
More gig action
Segmentation Fault n+1
A night of audiovisual experiments
7:30 Tuesday 21st September, LOOP 23 Meyers Place Melbourne. Gold Coin Donation
Dale Nason
multi screen projections and noise
dpwolf (David Wolf) + TestPatN (Tim Webster)
A+V memories of buildings and places;
Dumpster Droid
reel-to-reel tape and theremin adventures
Yasmin Sabuncu
live visuals
Cahl Schroedl
industrial DJ set.
I’ve got another blog for Segmentation Fault here: http://dpwolf.net/segmentation_fault/ which will hopefully have some footage/recordings of some of the previous SegFault Gigs some time soon (for now I’ve got to cut about 300 more flyers and finalise my setup).
I think I’ll try out the newest vidget at the end of the night too.
For the past couple of Thursday nights I have been playing live visuals at a night called ‘Plug & Play’ at a bar called Kent St (located confusingly on Smith St in Collingwood). The night is run by two fine gentlemen named Jean Poole and Future Eater and is a nice relaxed place where each week people come to plug in their audio/video/laptop/playstation/casio devices and play. The venue also has a good broadband connection which allows for international djs/vjs to perform remotely and for me to test my latest vidgets. Version 3 is just about ready for posting here and combines the layering/mixing of clips of the first version with the photo searching and xml reading of the Flickr Viewer.
Here is a screenshot of the new drag and drop interface. The grid of images is loaded dynamically based on an xml file which means I can set the vidget up to play different content without rebuilding the entire project in LiveStage Pro. Almost everything is modular now. The ten thumbnails on the right are the results of a Flickr search for the tag ‘blue’. Each of these thumbnails is draggable to the three clip holders at the top of the screen (red, green, and blue). These refer to the three different layers of video which are output to a screen or projector. Up to three video clips or still images may be mixed/layered together.
After playing with this prototype version at Kent St last week I’m definitely going add some more space for thumbnails as I ran out of content after a while. I am also going to explore some more of the graphics modes for combining the images.
Oh yeah, I’m playing there again this week so if you’re in Melbourne come down. Its free and starts at about 8pm @ Kent St, 201 Smith St Collingwood.
Published on September 15, 2004 in Tech and Web. Closed
A few people have recently commented that my poster movies weren’t working properly. I think this was due to the fact that I was using .jpg images as the poster movies. While Safari and Firefox had no problem using the Quicktime Plugin to view the .jpgs, Internet Explorer didn’t like them. I have now replaced the .jpgs with .movs of exactly the same content so hopefully the problem has been solved.
Published on September 8, 2004 in Video and Web. Closed
A survey of the consumption habits of my neighbours. The other day I ran around the block with my camera phone taking a quick snap of the contents of each recycle bin as I passed it on the street. I fixed the jpegs up a bit in Photoshop and opened them all in Quicktime Player, copying and pasting them into a new movie and exporting at half size (320*240).
As usual, click to load. It’s a bit bigger than my recent posts because I wanted each frame to be clear. I used the photo jpeg codec for this reason – it uses only spatial (not temporal) compression.
Once the movie is going you can click to pause and use the left and right arrows to advance frame by frame to inspect the rubbish closely
Click image to load in Quicktime Player (it seems to be a little funky in a browser)
This is a little Quicktime movie that lets you view photos from Flickr, a photo sharing and social networking site. When users upload their images they associate them with tags, so a picture of a tree may have the tags ‘tree’, ‘green’, ‘eucalyptus’ etc. The entire database of photos is searchable by tag, by author, by series and other organisations. Each of these has a RSS or ATOM feed associated with it. This is what I am using here to access the 10 most recent uploads for a given tag.
To search the site and view the photos, just type a tag, say “cow” (no quotes) into the small white text field and press return. If you press return without entering any text you get the 10 most recent uploads from any category. Once the thumbnails load you can click to view at a larger size on the right.
The movie uses Quicktime’s ability to read and parse XML files such as RSS feeds and access files from the network.
Their most recent album features a ‘re-imagining’ of the 2pac/Dr Dre classic California Love as Coalinga Love. It looks like their site hasn’t been updated in a couple of years (maintained by ASCII Head!) so I wonder if they are still around.
