I love bits of gear & software that you can work with like an instrument. By that I mean, fluidly and fast and where time spent honing some proficiency and familiarity is repaid with more interesting and unique results. Aside from the sort of relationship you can have with a video or stills camera you use over a long period this isn’t a common way of working in film or video. Editing software and compositing, animation and effects packages lean toward a complex detail oriented non realtime workflow that while it can of course be engrossing, doesn’t lead to the sort of play you can experience with a softsynth or something like Ableton Live.
When I started out making video one of the tools I had was a Fairlight Computer Video Instrument, the much much cheaper visual partner to the famous pioneering CMI sampling keyboard. What was most amazing about the CVI was that it really was an instrument, the tactile sliders and buttons allowed for live play with digital video in ways that haven’t been equaled till recent years.
While most of the presets were cheesy as hell, the synthesis model it was based on meant you could develop your own patches and save them to memory. And if you were like me, then laying the treatments out to tape, layering them up later in expensive online suites. While the sampling inspired by the CMI of course became foundational to modern sound and music production, live video instrumentation and manipulation as a performance or compositional tool has only slowly developed in response to the rise of VJ culture in clubs and in live music. There are now a range of decent software tools and importantly control surfaces like this nanoKontrol (note the similarities to the CVI surface) are becoming widespread amongst the live visuals fraternity.
While live visualism is certainly diversifying into live cinema, the architectural and harking back to ideas of expanded cinema, the tools and techniques still fall into the domain of the eye candy techno Vj style aesthetics that completely dominated not so long ago. One thing holding back integration into more established (and high resolution) video workflows is the lack of recording options in many of the key software packages, the emphasis is all on the moment. While in some ways this is laudable, it is also a stumbling block for allowing live visual “playing” to become part of the process of image generation workflow for high resolution video and for the sort of visuals unable to be generated in realtime. This is only partly about the computer speeds & video hardware improvements required, it is most importantly about recognising what this sort of instrumental play brings to moving image practice in general, both how we produce and read video.
Never have I used so much gear for a performance, this Liquid Architecture gig is turning into a Pink Floyd style equipment fest. We got the streaming working the other day, its a bit of a complicated thing, but luckily we have the resources to make it happen.
The chain goes like this:
Jes & I with separate laptop VJ rigs (mine probably with two computers) running Modul8 & VDMX5.
These are mixed together in a edirol HD video mixer and output to the projector, the streaming encoder and a HDV tape deck for recording the performance.
Shannon has his laptop/controller sound rig with a submixer that as well as outputting to the main 7.1 PA also sends feeds to both Jes and I so we can use audio frequencies to control some of the visual FX we have going on. The visual and audio feeds are fed to the encoder machine a Tricaster, which is a mixer in itself and a bit overkill for this job but happily sends out a flash video stream to the flash media server sitting elsewhere on the campus. We got it working the other day and the Tricaster is now sitting down it its room sending out some random stock footage to the server, you can see it working here.
The only thing that remains to be worked out re: the streaming I think is how we might send a different high quality stream out to the screens in the main campus tower and a lower quality one out to the pages it will be embedded in, Kat Baird & I are going to sort this through the week hopefully. A lot of setup for a short performance yes?
A few weeks back I drove down to the snowy mountains with the boot full of cameras. It was gorgeous as it usually is with a suprising amount of snow, Charlotte Pass is my favourite spot, something so still and otherworldly about it.
I was part of a panel at the Sydney Writers Festival ten or so days ago, it was part of a project I’m involved with in western Sydney called Coded that has a strong element of locative art & writing involved. Even though it was conceived of as a panel discussion it was advertised as a reading & as that is the sort of thing people do at writers festivals I read some bits from an old locative story project for mobiles called “go this way” and some stuff from a newer work developed to be heard as readings on the Sydney freeway network. The panel was organised and Coded is produced/curated by Sophia Kouyoumdjian.
Thanks to Jes for kindly shooting the video & stills. This is just the bit where I was doing my rambling. Whole thing was two hours, thanks to the Writers Festival for putting on something a bit left field for them & to Blacktown Arts Centre for hosting.
My friend Maria is currently trying to do a outdoor locative project here in Victory Monument while the protest rages around. The flickr feed of recent images of the protests is as good a place as any if you want to see what is going on on the streets.
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