I did visuals for a couple acts this past weekend for Seattle’s 2009 Decibel Festival. There were some great artists playing, though I was a bit of a non-goer. I was working on my visuals software right up until the Nosaj Thing show. Ended up going back to a software setup from about three years ago and took about five hours changing some things around to make my software a bit more friendly. As usual, I was editing the software during the shows as well. Thankfully, I didn’t cause any weird errors or crashes while doing this. That is definitely the danger.

I’ve been doing quite a bit of messing around with Max/MSP/Jitter and have most everything figured out. There are a couple main things (and I’m sure some small ones I’ll run into) that have been stopping me from using Max/MSP for my gigs. Main one is that the way I end up using my current/previous visuals software, Troikatronix Isadora is that I set up a MIDI dial controller for all of my main mixing, levels, hues, saturation, contrast, and set up a couple (or sometimes three) bin pickers, where I can look through my various folders of video. The way Jitter is mostly used is with drop down text lists. I don’t even know what most of my clips are named, since I just choose them visually.

All the methods in which I’ve tried to programmatically fill in icons and make them clickable have thus far failed. Because I really wanted to use Max/MSP this time, I started manually creating these things. I got about a third of the way through and Max/MSP crashed upon loading my file. I also tend to use some forms of feedback, by looping video back into parts of the software that I’ve already gone by, or by looping sections with specific filters. I’ve had a hard time getting this going in Max/MSP as I did a bunch of work to get the effects to be processed on the video card. The recursion I want to do looks like it might almost have to be outside of the video card, which might mean that the video card setup might not work. You can tell I’m still working on it. Hopefully by next time I’ll have some pretty crazy things happening.

(Photos by Russ, kochs.org, and Donte. Thanks to Luara for pointing me towards the Mary Anne Hobbs photo!)

View on Vimeo

This is a weird little conglom made using various pieces of software. The main audio was created on the fly using the Korg DS-10 software for the Nintendo DS. This was transmogrified using the RjDj app for the iPhone and the Echelon patch. A small amount of leveling was done on the file in Sound Studio, a simple audio program on Mac OS X. The resulting audio file was dropped into Apple’s Motion program.

The video clips are all of my creation, I use some of these files when I am doing live visuals. I tend to use Motion sort of similarly to the way I do visuals. I blend multiple layers of video and fade clips in and out while trying to have the video go with the audio. I can’t work fully live in Motion (at least with the machine I have it running on), but since it can loop segments or the whole project, I get a pretty good idea of what the end result will feel like.

I am doing visuals again for Decibel Festival in Seattle! I’ll be holding down the fort in the Baltic Room and doing visuals for a few specific acts, including:

Welder at the Baltic Room
weldersounds.com, myspace.com/weldersounds
Friday 9/26 at 10:15

and

Fax at Neumos
faxmusik.com, myspace.com/faxmusik
Sunday 9/28 at 9:30

(clicking the image above will load up a java sketch created using Processing from Processing.org)

I think that I’m going to start putting up a bunch of the clips that I decide are NOT going into The Machine documentary. There are just too many clips that I like that I have had to pull out, and I still need to cut at least 35 or so minutes.

Here’s one of them:

View this video on Vimeo
View this video on Youtube

View on Vimeo (looks nice, HD version available)
View on Youtube (works on iPhone)

This is a sequence of photos taken with a Canon Digital Rebel (1st gen). The photos are almost 2x the size of the frame, so they have mostly been downsized to fit. A couple sections have full resolution shots, these look zoomed in compared to the others.

This was the night of 02/21/2008

Time lapse animation of a fog bank lifting off of downtown Seattle. Taken from Alki Beach.

10/29/2006 or thereabouts

(I kind of love the compression errors on this first frame)

Feedback 1

Feedback 2

Feedback 3

Static 1

Static 2

Static 3

Static 4

Static 5

Using a combination of hardware and software, I got extreme glitching. Through random coincidence and exact settings, the beta version of Isadora I was using completely glitched out and made this even better than I was trying for. The only way to save the footage for later was to shoot video of the screen. I’ve used this since then as a source clip for visuals.

(Mac, Evolution MIDI dial controller, PSOne LCD display, Radio Shack video booster, Troikatronix Isadora, Steim Junxion)

If you asked what I was working on during the past year, I could probably tell you that I was “working on “The Machine”. While this could sound like a vague reference to “the man” or something of the sort, it was actually a huge collaborative project that I was working on with a bunch of people. This was created for the 2005 Burning Man Festival.

We had people from many professions including contracting, art, realty, party and event creation, shmoozing, welding, computer geekery, audio, engineers, graphic design, multimedia, dance, performance, and some architecture background. This huge structure was community created, community run and used during the event, and then community destroyed at the end of the event.

The short description given to the Burning Man event beforehand:

Made primarily of steel and wooden parts, The Machine (Mach12e) expresses an elusiveness of time and place. Burning Man participants will at first have the opportunity to view the sculpture, a triangulated meta-mechanical temple, in the open vista of the playa. They will explore its isolation, both spatial and emotional. Three elevated drive wheels and housings, a raised rotating central core comprised of a tower of gears and a transmission, and an upper platform that suspends eight articulated kinetic limbs define its multifaceted rust, blue, and gray form.

(wood, steel, nails, screws, cable, gears, rubber belts, hard rubber casters, soft rubber tensioner wheels, belt tensioner/belt rider system to cut down on the belt harmonics caused by the wind, 8 channel audio, olfactory)