I’m working on The Machine documentary pretty heavily lately and so am always looking for something to help me to not go crazy. I must have clicked on some monome link recently that made me remember that I had a monome kit waiting in my closet.
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Playing with Kaos DS for a second made me want to switch over from even touching my computer when I do visuals to using something like this. I’ve gotten it mostly set up the way I like but I had ideas to change the Kaos app.

My ideas are from a lot of sources, but lately there has been so much amazing new gear coming out. The ideas for this are mostly from the last link (check out the videos in the gallery).

DSMidiWifi (home of the Kaos DS demo program),
Jeff Han Multitouch, and
Jazzmutant’s Lemur (check out the video gallery)

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I acquired a Sansui VX-99 (NTSC) video mixer a while back. It didn’t seem to be fully working when I got it. Which is fine, it was in an “as-is” pile. I was just hoping to be able to use it to add some extra static and noise to live footage for visuals if nothing else. After opening it up to fix a broken fader with some hot glue, I still couldn’t get both channels of video to display at the same time. I eventually figured out that in order to mix the two video sources, you have to press the “gen-lock mix” button. After doing this, the mixer mostly works. I still have yet to figure out how to get the thing to display any changes when you press on the RGB color buttons. I’m assuming that these allow you to fade to a color instead of black, which I wouldn’t usually want, but could be interesting if you were doing some sort of video feedback.
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Toy laptop with a view.

I have been creating visuals for various dj, band, and electronic music gigs since late 2003. I always bring various different video, data, and USB devices to play with and interact with the software. But I tend to have a few regulars. One very useful device is a video preview monitor. You can plug this in to your video mixer to see either the final product if you can’t see the screen easily from where you are located, or you can preview the different feeds before you mix them in with or from whatever is currently playing.

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Audionic Videotronic Electronic Robotic, eh!

Robots can be your friends. Your friends can be robots.

I’ve been wanting to make a robot costume for Halloween for quite some time. For Halloween of 2004, I finally went ahead and did it. Instead of building a cumbersome cardboard box to wear and do the robot, I decided to just build a helmet and wear a shiny silver jogging outfit. Funny thing is that I didn’t finish the costume until well into the morning, missing any parties that were happening. Or at least all of them I knew of. That’s ok though, I had fun. Next year, I plan to actually wear it.

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