chris caines

I can well understand the motivation for building this DVI mixing box that Toby Spark outlines the making of in his presentation below. You can hear the battle scars in his voice when he talks about the terror of relying on a small laptop in front of a huge audience. The simple lack of tools to fade to black or mix between two hi-res (computer screen) sources in live visuals is bewildering considering how cheap and ubiquitous these tools are in the audio world. Even though I have access to a Edirol 440HD I’d still like one of these, primarily because of how small it is. But also how simple. I love that it is built form an arduino too.

*spark d-fuser: dvi mixer project presentation [2010] from toby*spark on Vimeo.

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.

I took the train to work this morning, my car was with my mechanic. With the Great Depression being evoked everywhere you turn at the moment, the romance of the hobo, the road, the boxcar has been much on my mind. As I watched a goods train go by leaning against the window the ipod filling my ears with Pixies, I realised that containers had completely replaced the boxcar & had possibly done so before I knew what a boxcar was or had been.

Went to the This Is Not Art this past long weekend & as always it amused, bored & inspired.

I’ve been meaning to make a start on grappling with Quartz Composer, so it was great to do a workshop with Luke Toop who was excellent in getting everyone started. I’ll post some of the things I’ve been making in it soon.

Chris Poole windmill powered workshop.

Bluetooth microtonal Mandala performance by Greg Schiemer.

The festival fair.

You can hold a favourite writer dear and close to your heart like no other sort of artist. To have immersed yourself in the imaginative worlds they’ve created and identified so strongly they become a part of your own. I’m stunned this morning to learn that David Foster Wallace is dead, apparently suicide by hanging.

Infinite Jest is one of my favourite novels. I was absolutely in awe of its virtuosity and power when I stumbled across it a couple of years after it was published. Ten years later it still comes to mind continually as a fictional touchstone.

I’ve been listening to the RN bookshow recently enjoying the podcasts of the bio of his years in Hunters & Collectors that Mark Seymour has written. Its a great narrative of the forces and circumstances that transformed them from the art rock animals they were into the pub rock behemoth they became. The turning point in that story was probably the Human Frailty album to be featured on the Great Australian Albums show on SBS in a couple of weeks. Here is what they were when they started:

“I think that in their country, they are like prisoners and they want to feel free,” said Niki Pirovolaki, who works in a bakery on Malia’s main street and often encounters addled Britons heading back to their hotels — “if they can remember where they are staying,” she said.

from the new york times.

Ordered the whole Demux video label catalogue the other day (only two discs right now), they focus on AV performance & I like the stuff they do.

Sunday night at 9.30 Jes & I will do a live to air of a version of what we’ll be doing for the Sound Of Failure festival in a couple of weeks on Sunday Night at the Movies on FBI, tune in if you’re in Sydney or listen to the feed from the fbi main page. Sydney is gmt +10.

I suppose it takes a government like the one in China to fake part of the ceremony broadcast, having spent a year working out how to do the FX and then reveal all a few days later. Seeing as they control the feed going to international broadcasters it makes you wonder what else is CG. I’d love it if we found out the swimming was.

I suppose Zhang Yimou has become accustomed to using FX to do the physically unworkable in his recent films, interesting to see it in a live broadcast. Though considering how long shots like that take to render I imagine that sequence wasn’t live.

part two is here.

My friend Tim has had his ordination, congrats Tim!

When the electoral map of the country looks like this its hard to see how we ever have an non conservative government. Its pretty striking in Sydney. Elections are wonderful opportunities to explore  a love of stats, google has a great overlay of seats info on its google maps. Oz politics has some interesting poll graphs too if that doesn’t satiate you.

Best version of this colonial folk song is the one the Pogues did I think.