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…
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 I’ve compiled as a standalone application. It’s aimed at visualists who are just starting out and looking for software to play with. Programmatically, it’s 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 you’re 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.
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.
