It uses text messages to generate pseudo-random combinations of particle colour, background colour, size and speed to change the animation. It also uses a dictionary of colour words found via XKCD to find matching words in the text messages and use them to colour the particles.
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 youve 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
I’ve set up del.icio.us, a clever social bookmarking service to automatically post my daily links in the blog. I figure this place could do with a bit more activity and by adding a couple of lines of description to each link I can share the sites which catch my attention with a bit more clarity without having to sit down and write a proper post. I use del.icio.us quite a lot as I often move between different computers and locations.
While the daily post service is great, the interface for setting it up is a little clunky and cryptic unless you know what you’re doing. Thankfully Kevin Lim has written a helpful little guide to setting up del.icio.us with WordPress. It basically involves entering a username and password for your blog, the address of the xmlrpc.php file on your server, what time you’d like the post to occur in GMT and which category you’d like the post to appear in.
Another cool del.icio.us feature I’ve been meaning to post about for ages is the addition of RSS feeds for particular media types. Traditionally del.icio.us has provided RSS feeds of links for each tag, for example the RSS feed for links tagged “example” http://del.icio.us/tag/example is http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/example. Now, (since about halfway through last year actually) you can also search by media file type and generate RSS feeds for these complete with enclosures for use in podcasting applications like iTunes or FireAnt. So it can generate a feed of all the mp3 files people link to directly, or all the QuickTime movies or JPEG or MPEG files. Additionally, you can add tags to generate feeds of a particular media type about a particular topic, for example http://del.icio.us/tag/system:media:video+80s give you a collection of 1980s themed video files (mpeg, wmv, mov etc).
While I use iTunes as a media RSS client at the moment to harvest source clips which may be manipulated in live performance eventually it would be great to add a built in video RSS reader to my experimental video appliations (vidgets) and do live video searches.
[A disclaimer: subscribing to a feed of all mpeg or wmv files linked to by random strangers on the internet can lead to the automatic downloading of porn or other things you may not want on your hard drive (especially on a work or uni computer) so be careful eh .]
A few months ago I began playing with manually corrupting jpeg files to see what kinds of artefacts I could create. I selected an image, compressed it down to a very small size (so I could easily manipulate large chunks of the data), opened it in a text editor (I like SubEthaEdit and TextMate) and added random text, copied pasted and generally shuffled the data, occasionally saving as new files.
Above is a QuickTime movie which animates through 12 of the resulting jpeg files. Click it to stop if it’s giving you a headache I re-compressed the jpegs just to be sure they wouldn’t crash QuickTime Player. Manually introducing errors and noise into files and then playing them is one of those “make sure you save any important files you have open” situations as things can grind to a halt.
I was playing with these images at Plug N Play at Kent St on Thursday night. I mentioned that I was planning on writing a php script which would similarly screw with jpeg images online and Sean told me about glitchbrowser.com.
From the site:
Computers are not allowed to make mistakes.
The glitch browser represents a deliberate attempt to subvert the
usual course of conformity and signal perfection. Information packets
which are communicated with integrity are intentionally lost in
transit or otherwise misplaced and rearranged. The consequences of
such subversion are seen in the surprisingly beautiful readymade
visual glitches provoked by the glitch browser and displayed through
our forgiving and unsuspecting web browsers.
This work was produced for New Langton Arts Packets programme,
by Dimitre Lima, Tony Scott and Iman Moradi.
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.
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.
“This is brush, a small Max/MSP/Jitter patch that Ive compiled as a standalone application. Its aimed at visualists who are just starting out and looking for software to play with. Programmatically, its very simple. Video from a live camera (or a movie file) is fed back on itself so that light stays on the canvas (screen). Thus, you can paint with the light in the room youre in. Decay (fade time), tolerance (lower luma threshold) and color inversion are adjustable so you can adapt your performance to any lighting conditions.”
This is a great little piece of software, what I would call a Vidget. A small scale application which lets you manipulate digital media in real time for improvised performance. It is very easy to use and entertaining to play with.
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.
Click image to play (28Kb Quartz Composition in QuickTime wrappper, requires MacOS 10.4)
MPEG 4 – h264 version (1.9Mb) Requires Quicktime 7 or alternative player such as VLC. Quartz Composition file (64Kb) – Open in Quartz Composer to see how it works or move to ~/Library/Screen Savers/ to use as a screen saver.
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?”
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.
The main tools of trade when using Quartz Composer are patches. Each of these modular objects has a particular function when plugged together to create flows of information. For example a patch may import or download an image, calculate a mathematical operation, affect an image or function as a switch, selecting between other patches and signals. This flow ends up rendered on screen by a renderer patch.
While you can plug these patches together in almost any way, until recently you could only play with the patches Apple has included in the program by default. You could not create your own. This meant that while QC talks directly to the graphics card and renders all images as OpenGL surfaces, users were limited to rendering onto flat surfaces, spheres, cubes and a teapot shape.
I’ve been playing with rendering onto 3D Studio Max .3ds objects in QC for the past week or so but have had mixed results. The fighter jet model included by ?? works well but most other objects I’ve found online have either crashed QC or rendered incorrectly. I’m sure these issues will be worked out down the track.
Here is a quick demo Quicktime movie showing the fighter jet model in QC with cloud effects generated via particle systems based on this smoke effect by Noise Industries.
_grau is an excellent 10 minute experimental animation directed by Robert Seidel. Lush, fluid images. Stills don’t do it justice. Available in 50 and 150 MB versions.
From the site:
_grau is a personal reflection on memories coming up during a car accident, where past events emerge, fuse, erode and finally vanish ethereally. various real sources where distorted, filtered and fitted into a sculptural structure to create not a plain abstract, but a very private snapshot of a whole life within its last seconds
Squared 5 – MPEG Streamclip for Mac OS X is a handy little application which converts and demuxes mpeg streams. I found it a few weeks ago at work when I needed to recompress a large file from a client to put up on a website. By itself Quicktime Player will only export the video of a muxed mpeg file. MPEG Streamclip is designed specifically to convert mpeg 1 or 2 files to Quicktimes, or split them out to separate video and audio files (mpgs, m2vs, ac3s and aiffs). Very handy and free!
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