Web developer. Art/Tech hacker. I ♥ music, film, live video, art and the social web. By David Wolf
Again from the Electrofringe list (join here):
EXPERIMENTA
2004 NEW VISIONS COMMISSIONS
Call For Submissions
Deadline: 12 July 2004
Experimenta is inviting emerging digital artists, new media artists,
filmmakers, video makers and animators to submit project ideas for the 2004
New Visions Commissions program that reflects upon the concept of illusions.
Continue reading ‘Call for submissions: Experimenta New Visions 2004′
From the Electrofringe list:
Electrofringe call for
1. Screen Works
2. OnLine/Net.Art
30 September 30 - 4 October 2004 in Newcastle NSW Australia.
1. ELECTROPROJECTIONS
Electrofringe is looking for innovative video and screen based works. Send us your cut/up, arthouse, pop kitsch or glitch documentaries, animation, whatever and if selected your work will be programmed into the ElectroProjections screening program.
2. ELECTROFRINGE NET.ART
Submit your online artwork for consideration in the Electrofringe 2004 Net.Art exhibition.
… Closing date for submissions – 25 JUNE 2004.
Continue reading ‘Call for works: Elecroprojections & Electrofringe Net.Art’
This is a little movie I made to test how Quicktime deals with real time text input. It is also the first step in a project to dynamically source video material from any URL. In future examples I will use this same method to paste a URL and load it into another window.
Click the poster movie to load the real one. Click above the line and enter some text. The movie copies the contents of the top text track to a string and adds it to the start of the bottom text track. I initially had the movie execute this action only when you clicked. In a purely ‘functional’ interface this is how I would do it but I wanted to stress the real time aspect of the process so I have the movie add text on the ‘Idle’ event handler. This means the text will start cascading down the second track as the user types without waiting for them to finish.
The LiveStage Pro source files can be downloaded here.
Office Voodoo is a great example of an interactive video project that uses a cinematic/televisual aesthetic with real life actors whilst maintaining meaningful real time user interaction. It is rare to a project which achieves all these aims at once.
Office Voodoo features footage of two bored workers as they sit in an office. By physically manipulating ‘voodoo’ dolls with red flashing eyes, two users may control the characters’ emotional states. Depending on the combination of the two characters’ moods a real time editing engine cuts together shots which form a kind of ‘algorithmic sitcom’, as the site says. The editing engine respects the conventions of shot / reverse shot and continuity editing, making for a fairly seamless TV like program.
While I haven’t played with it myself, the About Office Voodoo movie on the site shows examples of people using the system and the effects of their actions on the characters. It reminds me of being a director holding casting auditions where I would get actors to act out a scene in a couple of different ways. My favourite was when I asked an actor to rap a David WIlliamson play.
From the site:
“With advances in compression standards and faster, larger hard disks, the film form is finally freeing itself from the inherent linearity of the celluloid or tape substrate, as it becomes chunks of data that can be retrieved instantaneously. This explosion of the film medium is redefining our approach to narrative filmmaking and over the viewer’s control of the time flow and the plot. In the attempt to carry on the tradition of mimetic storytelling with real actors, this piece brings together the craft of cinema with automated editing techniques, trying to replicate in new media semiotics what 1920s soviet filmmakers like Kuleshov did to film with montage. Here, the knowledge of the editor is represented in the machine, and the rules are scripted according to user interaction. As a filmmaker and a programmer, the author is telling a story not only with audiovisual media but also with computer code.” [my emphasis]
More Links:
Michael Lew
Media Lab Europe
|
CODEBASE="http://www.apple.com/qtactivex/qtplugin.cab"> |
CODEBASE="http://www.apple.com/qtactivex/qtplugin.cab"> |
Click the poster movies above to load the real ones. The second one will take a little while to load (3.9Mb)
Alternatively (recommended) download the two files, ControlTOBE.mov (Controller) and TOBE.mov (Player) and open them both in Quicktime Player.
Ok, this is a half finished draft of a basic Quicktime vision mixer. Like the inter-movie text communication movies I posted earlier , this project comes in two parts: one movie to control another. I actually created the text sender movies to troubleshoot when I was making this movie.
The ‘player’ movie contains three video tracks. The ‘controller’ movie features a number of clickable sprites which tell the ‘player’ movie what to do. By clicking on the green or red buttons on the left hand side of the ‘controller’ the tracks in the ‘player’ movie may be enabled or disabled. In the middle of the ‘controller’ movie there are two gradients with a percentage number, these control the opacity of each of the two ‘upper’ video tracks. By clicking on the gradients at various different places along the horizontal the numbers should change and the tracks should fade in or out. On the far right of the ‘controller’ movie is the ‘invert’ button. This inverts the top video track so that white is black and black is white etc.. The other button at the bottom of the ‘controller’ is the ‘add’ button. It is the latest addition and it also controls the top movie (I’ll move it up top in the next version). Rather than simply inverting the video track, the ‘add’ button produces an additive effect (like a Photoshop layer) which changes depending on the presence or absence of the underlying two video tracks.
This draft was designed as an experiment in building a VJ instrument in Quicktime with Livestage Pro for a recent Segmentation Fault gig I was organising. The ‘player’ movie is designed to automatically go to full screen on the video output of my laptop while the ‘controller’ sits on my screen out of sight. I built a more complicated version with about 20 different video tracks for the gig but unfortunately most of the effects such as fading in and out and layering decided not to work on the night. I think I’ve worked out the problem so I’ll post a new version soon.
The buttons usually take a couple of clicks to get going but they should work after that.
Segmentation Fault
Loud noises and flashing lights
Dale Nason = sound + additional projections
David Wolf aka Kernel Klink = sound + visuals
Adrian Lucas aka Doktorb Robotnik = sound
Elaine Carter aka Null Hypothesis = sound (DJ Set)
Stephen Huon = visuals
Michael Rigby = visuals
Free 9:30PM
Tuesday 6th April @ Loop
23 Meyers Place Melbourne
A while ago Adrian Miles’ posted Video Blogs, Vidblogs and Vogs, presenting an ongoing discussion about the nature and definitions of video weblogging.
He writes:
“At the moment all video blogs are video inside text orientated CMS [Content Management System] engines. But here’s a simple idea (more complex backend), you make a movie that has a sprite and a text track. The text track is there to show a number. The sprite reads an external XML file which simply indicates how many trackbacks that video has.”
So I set about looking for examples of alternative content management systems which deal natively with video rather than text. I’m still working out how to get Quicktime movies to read and write to my own XML databases using Livestage Pro.
WaterCooler provides a very slick looking and functional interface for their content management system in a small 265k host movie.
Navicast provide another ‘aqua’ styled interface to their CMS, this time with more controls such as three levels of compression quality and playback size. The selection and organisation of clips is, however, not as well executed as WaterCooler (for example the first movie loads by itself – slowing down access on a slow connection before the user has made a choice).
The two sites provide good examples of what is possible using the Quicktime Player as a front end for content management, accessing online clips and data. While both feature linear movie clips, a similar approach could be used to deal with interactive and dynamic ‘hyper’ media. This is a direction I am looking to explore as I learn more about the tools.
videos.antville.org is an endless source of music video goodness. It’s a video weblog of sorts, using a weblog content management system and anyone can sign up as a user and post links to interesting clips and comment on posts. The site also features links to well produced ads and is categorised by both artist (music) and director.
I recently saw the World Rush_4 Artists exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria and was particularly impressed with Doug Aitken’s work Interiors, a multi screen video installation. KultureFlash has an interview with Aitken by Andreas Leventis and a nice picture of the installation. The viewer is surrounded by three large projection screens each portraying a different character in a vastly different location. Sound plays a big part as each visual source has an accompanying speaker playing the ambient sounds of the location. The three channels are tightly edited together so that the whole piece moves from being slow, reflective and almost tranquil to a rapid cacophony as a worker in a helicopter factory breaks into tapdancing, a young woman plays hand ball, Andre 3000 from the amazing hip hop duo Outkast breaks into rap and a Japanese business man grunts and moans in a kind of vocal percussion. While there are only three screens, there are four ‘channels’ of video each with a different character so the work repeats, each time with a different combination of sources on different screens. This was the coolest part, since each of the channels was edited to fit with any of the other channels in terms of both audio and video, the work was fascinating to watch over and over as each new combination was played.
While my current (and near future) work is based on the single (small) screen of the computer, I think this multi screen approach could be implemented to interesting effect using multiple windows and frames. Unlike a large scale video installation like Interiors where the user is physically surrounded by the work, overwhelmed by which way to face, a computer screen base work could generate a similar affect as viewers are more inclined to sit closer to a computer screen and focus their attention on a particular part of the screen (of their choosing). A video work composed of multiple channels on the one screen, generated and assembled randomly or by algorithm as it plays it may produce an interesting, similar effect.
Another 3-screen video work featured in the exhibiiton was The House by Eija-Liisa Ahtila. Rather than contrasting different locations, each at a perpendicular orientation like Aitken’s work, in The House Ahtila uses the two extra screens at the sides of the main screen to extend the screen space. While the middle screen may focus on a woman sitting in a room, the others look out the windows and doors.
I was looking around on the Apple QuickTime – What’s On for some innovative and clever uses of quicktime when I found Robbie Williams – Live At Knebworth promoting a live DVD. This page automatically opens up the Quicktime Player and loads a very pretty custom skin. Quicktime allows the author to customise the apperance and function of the player window almost limitlessly. You may stick to the traditional rectangular window with a playbar controller at the bottom or you may design something of any other (ie, non-rectangular) shape. The Robbie Williams skin is a very complex and detailed shape with similarly designed functionality. Rather than simply playing a single music video clip or film trailer, this .mov allows you to select from a variety of live clips, behind the scenes footage and packaging design photos. Another important aspect is that each element of ‘content’ is loaded dynamically, that is ‘on demand’, so if you decide you only want to see one song, you only have to load one song. The .mov itself is only 228.7k and automatically scales the main ‘content’ area to suit the viewer’s connection speed (this can also be set manually via a series of buttons).
The Quicktime was authored by Bluish. Their other work includes sites and .movs for Pink Floyd, The Beatles, The Flaming Lips and more Robbie Williams (more links from site).
Robbie Williams – Come Undone features another custom skin, this time at only 140k. This time the .mov is promoting a single and features a music video, commentary and behind the scenes footage (Warning contains a ‘clean’ version of the song and video complete with pixelated boobies).
I think examples like these show that just as DVD extras have added value to movies (I’m thinking of things like The Criterion Collection more than the average DVD’s promotional ‘featurette’) well designed and authored Quicktime .movs can add effectively value to other content online.
I found this link through the Oxff mailing list which is a discussion space for real time video performers (vjs etc) and programmers using patching and coding based software such as Puredata (+GEM) and Max (+Jitter).
panse – public access network sound engine
From the site: PANSE is an open platform for the development of audio-visual netart, open to all
The PANSE experiments are made up of various browser windows which each feature a flash animation and or controls such as sliders and buttons. These windows each control (or are controled by) an audio synthesiser which sends a real time generated MP3 stream back to you. The more of the little windows you have open the more complex the sounds and visuals become as they interact with one another. This sort of thing makes me want to learn Max or PD! I love the way anyone can post their own projects to the site and they can work alongside everyone else’s.
I’ve set up a new weblog for the audio/visual performance nights I organise with a couple of friends. The first Segmentation Fault gig was held on 11/11/03 I’ll be adding some images and sounds to the new weblog soon. The Segmentation Fault weblog will be updated by all of those involved so it should be interesting to watch the various different perspectives on the process as we prepare for the next.
– - – W A X W E B – - – D a v i d _ B l a i r – -
“The first online feature-film since 1993″
I don’t think I could watch this in its intended form so I’m not sure how much I can comment. The idea for the film seems to be a feature length documentary styled narrative which lets you explore a particular scene or idea by clicking on the video. Unfortunately on my computer the result is a javascript error. It is interesting to note how heavily the site promotes a CD-ROM version of the film:
“The movie is much larger and cleaner, the sound is better, and your speed of access will improve.”
I think it sort of makes the whole “first online feature film” a bit misleading. Maybe it was the “first CD-ROM interactive feature film online”. Like many similar projects it seems like a fairly good idea that never really took off, partly because of technological limitations and partly because the work seemed to be a ‘re-re-mediation’ from the start. A film, in a CD-ROM interactive, on the web.
In my research project I am looking to produce works which are specifically designed for the web. These will invlolve re-mediation of techniques and content but hopefully the outcome will be works which are ‘comfortable’ on the web and ‘conscious’ of their medium.
If you can get Waxweb to work please comment!
Segmentation Fault 11/11/03 – A night of retro future noise
Terminal: Live visuals
MCRHLP: Improvised analogue noisescapes
hTRKRTIO: Groovy noise, sleazy club tunes
Matt O: Mouth electronics, textural soundscapes
Dumpster Droid: Tape manipulation interludes
FREE 7:30pm @ LOOP, 23 Meyers Place CBD
RELINE.NET
From the site: “RELINE is a DVD from artists world wide employing custom software and modified hardware to create work that focuses on graphic abstraction, the broken output of dysfunctional systems, and the desire to re-vision both old and new technologies Bringing together a diverse array of work, this collection showcases artists engaged with the creation of new visual forms derived from experimental processes and techniques, often foregrounding the un-criticized role technology plays in our lives.”
Note to self – enter!
Twitter