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
VJ Bertranol aka Bertrand Gondouin is a Sweden based VJ, video blogger and video software developer.
Through his company Mixnbrew he has developed a number of interesting bits of software including Symtonic A Flash based online video mixer application, Patchouli a video blogging uploader / content management system, and Scramble a granular video synthesis engine.
Good work and good to see the whole video blog / vj / network video crossover thing happening.
Today I played live visuals for Legs For Fish at Thornbury High school. Kent Macpherson from the band is a music teacher there and organised a performance / presentation for the kids from music, media and IT classes. We played three improvised AV sets and the kids seemed not to hate it
As Paul from the band said, it makes you acutely aware of how self indulgent this sort of improvised performance is when are doing it in front of a room full of kids who aren’t necessarily there by choice. Some of the kids seemed to dig it and some asked some good questions. “Why do you do this?” “What does it mean? The pictures just looked like colours and shapes.”
I used the Quartz Vidget I prepared for the Liquid Architecture gig in July as it works fairly well and made it easy for me to show the kids what I was doing without the confusion of showing a huge messy Quartz Composer patch. After each set we took questions. I showed how I can grab any two video files or sequences of still images and mix them together, manipulating colour, brightness, contrast etc. as well as layering multiple copies over each other. After the second performance I showed very briefly how Quartz Composer works by dropping in a video file, connecting it to a Billboard and then running it through a couple of effects.
Looking back at the QC presentation I gave at Electrofringe after this one I realise I should have shown heaps more examples and started much more slowly in Newcastle. Assuming no prior knowledge meant I explained things much more clearly, and I introduced things in a much more logical order (having slept the night before also helped!).
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, 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:
“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.
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.
I am performing visuals tonight with Jean PØØle, bunniboi, Lindsay Cox and Keith_D at The Public Office in West Melbourne as part of Liquid Architecture 6, a festival of sound art.
The night kicks off at 7:30pm with a huge line-up of local and international sound artists including excellent Melbourne AV performers Robin Fox, Dale Nason and Kim Bounds. At around midnight the night will change gears and proceed in a minimal techno orientated direction accompanied by live video on three screens until around 6am. I haven’t done an all night gig for a long time so it should be interesting. We’re going to split up the night into roughly hour long brackets where we will each have a defined role (lighting, matrix switching, main vjing, or support vjing) and will rotate and collaborate in various combinations and permutations.
