Documenting the research and production of interactive network based media. By David Wolf
It’s almost TINA time again!
This year I’ll be heading up to Newcastle to present a paper at Critical Animals and perform an improvised audiovisual set and presentation with Somaya Langley as part of Electrofringe.
More info on the academic paper / panel here: Critical Animals Program (Thursday 28th September @ 11:30 AM).
More info on the gig/artist presentation here: TBA with David Wolf (dpwolf) and Somaya Langley (Sunday 1st October @ 2PM).
Tomorrow night (Sunday 11th) I’m performing live visuals with Simon Gorman (aka Phoenix Lake, aka Soul Mirage) as part of the Electundra electronic music and video festival at Loop.
I’m playing next Sunday the 18th too, performing laptop percussion with my new band Low Rise Estate. Tim Webster will be providing visuals.
I also recently authored the Electundra 2006 DVD which is being sold at the shows and features video and music from 14 acts. Click on the picture above to view the DVD’s opening menu animation.
After a momentary break in musical proceedings, Fly by wire and Similar are back to present the second instalment in their impromptu electronica sessions. Freshly sequenced beats fused with acoustic instrumental noodlings, miscellaneous loops, and evolving sound textures await the curious listener. No intractable, avant-garde noise making here folks. Soulful ambient melodies meets urban digital beats. Visuals in extra wide screen format by dpwolf.
Fly by wire vs Similar
8pm, Sunday March 5th
Horse bazaar
397 Lt Lonsdale St
Melbourne
$4 entry
If you’ve never been to horse bazaar its well worth a visit. They have this crazy panoramic projector setup covering most of the room and even a rear projection display in the toilets?! oh yeah, and there will also be music of course…
Busy weekend. On Saturday and Sunday I did lighting, video projection switching and played iTunes in between acts at The Corner Hotel for two big nights of noisy industrial music featuring various acts from Sweden’s Cold Meat Industry record label plus a few local acts.
I can’t believe how much fun it was doing lighting! So much power to change the mood of the stage, pinpointing and highlight certain areas, in 3D, with smoke machines! It really made projecting straight video feel dim and flat in comparison. I guess the ideal setup for larger shows would be using multiple, brighter projectors or PixelLines so as to project potentially moving images from different angles.
Each of the acts provided me with their own visuals on DVD, VHS or live from their laptops and my job was simply to make sure the right footage was playing at the right time and project an animated logo in-between acts. Melbourne’s Shinjuku Thief’s carefully synched visuals reminded me of video clips for artists on the Warp record label, in particular some of Chris Cunningham’s work, really good stuff.
Oh yeah, I added a gigs category to the blog and moved some old gig info posts into it. Hopefully I’ll manage to post in this category BEFORE the gigs happen once in a while 
Here’s a short excerpt from the video portrait I produced for Boxed as part of the Short & Sweet short theatre festival.
I used the excellent Vidgeo Gogh plugin for Final Cut Pro to generate a number of layers of video with different levels of paint effect and Quartz Composer to composite the layers together in real time with masks.
Technorati Tags: Quartz Composer
I am currently working on the design and production for a ‘video portrait’ which will be projected on set as part of the play Boxed directed by Simon Gorman.
The play is part of the Short & Sweet short theatre festival at The Arts Centre
The festival, advertised as ‘The Tropfest of Theatre’ features 10 plays per night all of which are 10 minutes or less in duration. We’re in the first week of the top 30 plays, beginning tonight Wednesday 23rd of November and playing through until Saturday.
You can see the synopses of all the plays in week one here (pdf).
I’ll post an excerpt of the video here shortly - still rendering the latest version ;-).
Technorati Tags: short&sweet
I’ve been back in Melbourne for a week now and have started to catch up on some sleep so its time to reflect on the past couple of weeks’ gigs and event.
On the 27th and 28th of September I performed as part of Kiss my after effects, an experimental video art festival which is part of the larger Melbourne Fringe Festival 2005.
On the 27th, after much last minute tinkering, I provided visual accompaniment for Null Hypothesis (aka Elaine Carter) who played a set of crunchy industrial beats and glitchy tones. Parts of my old Quartz Composer patches refused to work on my new laptop (I think I had a second ‘Video Input’ node hidden somewhere in a macro-patch, connected to nothing which prevented my use of live video in) so I ended up using my old computer with an older patch and copied my newer images across. The set ended up going pretty well, visually based almost entirely on sequences of still images manipulated and fed back upon themselves. I really like the effect of adding in a layer of video feedback over the images so that the highlights bleed out and move across the screen. I’ll post some examples of how this looks soon.
On the 28th I played two sets with Doktorb Robotnik (Adrian Lucas) and Soul Mirage (Simon Gorman), also as part of KMAE / Melbourne Fringe Festival. For the first set I played audio and video simultaneously with Adrian on feedback electronics and Simon on keyboards. I used pretty much the same video set up as the night before and found the task of playing both audio and video a bit overwhelming. I would either get lost concentrating on the audio and realise that I hadn’t changed the video for 5 minutes, or fade myself out of the mix and focus only on the video. It was an interesting exercise but far too stressful to allow for good improvisation. I don’t think I want to try it again any time soon. For the second set I focussed on audio only (playing with ableton live) and felt an enormous sense of relief and freedom in contrast. I was able to listen to what Adrian and Simon were playing much more easily and improvise without having to ‘think’.
After the gig Adrian and I started the long drive up to Newcastle for Electrofringe…
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:
Realtime Video Manipulation using Isadora and Quartz Composer
“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.
Spac{v}e dpwolf vs Doktorb Robotnik
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.
Re - Imagining (live) Video - Narrative
A panel presentation / discussion with Jean Poole and Anna Helme.
From the blurb:
“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?”
Technorati Tags: Electrofringe, Quartz Composer
Hmm, nothing like retro-promotion… this happened a few weeks ago.
Friday 26th of August: A night of live AV performances with dpwolf and David Sevo, Bits of Clay and Canvas City at Glitch Bar & Cinema in North Fitzroy.
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.
The video is released under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license however the music is copyright .
Technorati Tags: Quartz Composer, vidget
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