In the midst of the open spaces of the desert was a pile of materials put out for the purpose of art. People would wander by, tinkering with all of the interesting pieces. Some would think up a combination that was greater than the sum of the parts and create a piece of art. After the event was over, Phyxx gave me a tour of the results.
Testing out a new camera, the Canon T2i, as well as trying out the Velvia picture style. I’ll likely have to tone down the settings, some of the color looks fairly comic bookish.
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 a 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!. Videos by RyanXristopher and altapowskier)
RjDj Echelon + Korg DS-10 + Apple Motion from Ian Page-Echols 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.
The Bird Is The Word from Ian Page-Echols on Vimeo.
This is footage taken from high in the air (over 50′ up) down at people passing below. The audio is taken from a strange interview with a guy in a rooster costume. It was then processed with RjDj‘s Echelon on the iPhone. This was at the Burning Man festival in 2005.
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:
This is a sequence of photos taken with a Canon Digital Rebel (1st gen). The photos are almost 2x the size of the frame of full 1080p HD, so they have mostly been downsized to fit. A couple sections have full resolution shots, these look zoomed in compared to the others.
Click to see some of the photo frames from the time lapse.
Monome Logic Kit build time lapse from Ian Page-Echols on Vimeo.
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.
I soldered it together last night and am trying to figure out how exactly to create the grid of buttons. I have a bunch of lit buttons from an old trashed SSL audio mixing console and I’m trying to figure out if I should replace the LEDs in them or try to go with what I’ve got. The buttons are quite small, so hence the name Minime.
I took photos as I was going to see what kind of stop motion animation that would make. So that’s what you’re looking at.
Seattle downtown fog from Ian Page-Echols on Vimeo.
Time lapse animation of a fog bank lifting off of downtown Seattle. Taken from Alki Beach.
(Time lapse updated to 1080p HD)
V8 Media Visuals at Decibel Festival 2007 from Ian Page-Echols on Vimeo.
A bit of footage from Decibel Festival 2007 from the Mothership Label Showcase. Just a tiny bit of proof that I do visuals for shows. Information on the acts that I performed with below.
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Sensory Effect Showcase – Saturday, September 22nd at the Baltic Room
Electrosect – V8 Media
ndCV – Scott K. James
Logic Probe
novaTRON
Taal Mala
Lowfish
(I did most of the rest of the night, but I believe Scott did another act to give me a break. He had a specific set with ndCV.)
Mothership Label Showcase – Sunday, September 23rd at Neumos VIP
Monty Luke – V8 Media
ItaloBoyz – V8 Media
Claude VonSTroke – Pixelshift