visual berlin

tresor backstage, 1am, get to the final compile of here+now for the 3am performance. there is never enough time in this world, and for experimental projects on the side doubly so. the dream of just hanging out at a festival…

having spent most of my time since arriving in berlin behind a laptop screen, it was time to unveil effort #1: a dvi mixer project presentation, keynote document with i’s dotted and t’s crossed. more importantly, for the swedes won’t buy a pig in a sack, the presentation was followed by a demo of - and hands on with - the new *spark d-fuser prototype.

pedro recorded the presentation, and i’ve comp’d it together with the slides and a quick top-and-tailing. watch it here: http://vimeo.com/12657671

thanks to prack for the photo, although i do look like a muppet…

many memories of preparing live cinema talks and performances for berlin vj events with fALk, so always good to be surprised with new things including a bold stab at a live cinema interface that might just have the engineering oomph behind it to make it real.

festivals are all about meeting your peers and being inspired, and meeting the pair of joris and eavan certainly fitted that bill. at the festival’s opening party they had a really nice live drawing program hooked into vdmx via vade’s screen capture qcfx. pictured is eavan, tablet and alchemy. its well worth checking out: http://al.chemy.org/

this is what the people behind a videokunst club look like the day before their festival starts. pretty relaxed to be sure, but this is berlin.

pixelnoizz, *spark, an empty media card and a glitch machine: when its here+now, you’ll be part of it. an experimental performance workshopped as part of visualberlin festival 2010.

tomorrow week, i’ll be in berlin crossing my fingers for a performance based on only semi-tested technology and a lot of custom development that will happen once i’m over there. collaborating with david aka pixelnoizz, who so impressed me with his performance serpendity at lpm last year, and has since gone on to develop a whole suite of quartz composer based glitch stuff. which is just what a project based on a stream of photographs coming in from a camera roving around the venue needs. its also a collaboration-in-absentia with vade, as his v002 plugins are a big part of this, and he was there at lpm where the spirit of collaborations took hold amongst our group. and if he could, i’d wager he’d be over doing this with us in a flash.

there’s also an interesting aside in that the poster image for this was created by quickly knocking something up in quartz composer, and pressing the ‘re-glitch’ buttons until a nice combination popped out. so really, rather than having the static image, that composition should be the poster, quietly evolving by itself, glitching through the embedded images and whatever it finds in the graphics memory of everybody’s individual machines. not that that would be a ‘safe’ composition that would be allowed to play in a osx browser, but hey.

http://festival.visualberlin.org/news/herenow-friday-june-11-tresor/

another work-in-progress update for the *spark d-fuser aka dvi mixer project: here we have the v1 pcb design, parts specified, plans drawn, and — with shawn multimeter in hand — the leg-work translating that into something that works. the real announcement here, though, is this: i will be presenting the project in full in berlin on the 12th june, so expect to know a lot more about what, when and how around then.

http://festival.visualberlin.org/day-program/
http://festival.visualberlin.org/news/spark-dvi-mixer-coming-to-berlin/

derivative were over from toronto for transmediale, and it was suggested they show off ‘touch’ at the visual berlin meeting. and quite the jaw-dropper it was.

greg hermanovic started by demoing his ‘drunk vj’ mixer. all so-so, designed for a touch screen but still a ‘flight deck of buttons’. that was, until he zoomed through the interface into the workings below. behold: a fully node-based realtime engine with 3D heritage from houdini and a recent video re-working, and so confident in it’s power every node featured a preview of what was passing through it, and the patch cords were even animated. and the rabbit hole continued, zooming futher into nodes to reveal they were themselves patches of further nodes - right to the point of answering my standing interface question of “so what if i need the slider to have feature x”, because all the interface elements are patches themselves. touch077 looks to combine previous alternate favourite of vvvv’s elemental and 3d power with proper video support, while at the same time dissolving the concept of editor and output: quite something.

so while greg’s mixxa patch may not have floated my boat so much, the platform he built is amazing. if i wasn’t committed to cocoa+quartz composer, i’d be investigating it very deeply right now.

if you’re in berlin working on the new avit vj network website, you’re not going to miss going to visual berlin’s weekly meeting: its a concrete expression of what avit stands for, of what can happen through the network effect. so doubly nice to have a tag-team history of avit presentation shared between so many in the room, and not just be able to trace not only visual berlin’s genesis, but many other nice things such as joanie of antivj’s proto-mapping work at avit>c23 that led to a permanent installation in maria where we had been two nights before, as well as being the big movement in visuals since.

the back room is much better however, and we have servando, met at live performers meeting and since a visual berliner, on stage. servando makes custom controllers, this one sits in a dvd spindle and has accelerometer as well as the usual spread of knobs and buttons. dr nojoke, the muscian crumpling a plastic bottle to the microphone here, dubbed it techno tambourine.