I was a bit remiss in not contextualizing Martin Böttger’s work with his other generative 3D forms. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the potential of 3D – not because I’m especially talented with it, quite the opposite. I’m drawn to the expressiveness of 3D the way someone longs to play a cello. Martin has done some great stuff in making 3D forms in Processing, as well as in actual physical space. No fancy 3D printers here – think folded paper and hand-made installations. I imagine this would be a great way to learn coding in 3D, to actually do more work with physical objects. I’m teaching up at MassArt this summer, so maybe we’ll get to experiment with this a bit if students want to go that direction.

http://www.flickr.com/people/tsaworks/

There’s lots of good stuff in Martin’s Flickr feed, and as always, I thoroughly enjoy seeing things in various states of completion – like looking through sketchbooks.

If you’ve got some 3D modeling / generative work you’d like to share, feel free to drop us a line!

TRACTOR from tsaworks_martin Böttger on Vimeo.

Composer/electronic musician Bruno Dias sends us his latest collaboration, with visualist Martin Bottger. It was a distance collaboration – so just the kind of thing you could be working on with musicians and visualists you know. Bruno writes:

We never had the opportunity to meet face-to-face and this work was carried along the last couples months with Martin working on the visual side in Maya and then After Effects in Berlin and me developing the sound narrative that would then drive the visuals one here in London. I worked on sound using as main tools Ableton Live and its sampler, NI Reaktor, NI Absynth and Logic/Pro Tools for post-production.

This is just the sort of thing you could do pre-rendered in this way, then adapt for real-time use, just as musicians routinely do a “studio” version and then rework it for live.(You might even export OBJ models from Maya and pull them into an environment like Processing, Jitter, or vvvv, if you have the savvy – or use a VJ app to remix, if that’s more your speed.) So, Martin and Bruno, you can take that as a subtle hint for your next step, coming from a real-time evangelist.

I love the description of the, um, fourth-dimensional tractor (maybe it’s my childhood in Louisville, Kentucky spent visiting the huge annual farm equipment show – seriously):

Some smooth, stretchy After Effects work mixed with spot-on sound design gives us Tales of the Unexpected, by More Soon.

Tales of the Unexpected from More Soon on Vimeo.

Here’s the only clue so far on the techniques used:

Yeah pretty much.. it’s a really long video made in After Effects layered over a series of displacements.

I’ll try to get some more secrets out of the creator, but in the meantime: Any CDM readers like to step up on how this might have been created?

This is my favorite part of video production, the “figuring out someone else’s Kung Fu” process, but I don’t know enough about displacement maps to even get started on this one.

AV technology is progressing rapidly. We now have two DJ/VJ mixers to choose from (Pioneer SVM-1000, Numark AVM02), most VJ apps will now play audio on video clips, and many DJ programs are incorporating video playback in their current or upcoming feature sets. Obviously these moves are following a trend: DVJ is totally hot right now. Our interweb tubes are being filled with youtubes, video mashups and remixes are constant viral video hits… The time for AV to go mainstream is now, and we’re going to see the next generation of performance innovators rise, buoyed up by these new, accessible, and immensely capable tools.

I spent last night a guest of VJ Morph at Brisbane’s Tivoli Theatre, for the last show of the Smirnoff Secret Sessions Australian tour.

Headlining the show: DJ Yoda with a DVJ set. Yoda is obviously a talented DJ, but as a visualist I was entirely underwhelmed by his performance. The source material was uninventive - mostly popular movies and music videos - with low resolution and compression artifacts telling us that much of the content was ripped from youtube. Technical nitpicking aside, the set wasn’t assembled with much regard for editing, visual storytelling, coherence, or even visual interest. There were occasional inventive tricks, nice material selection, and some proficient scratching and sample triggering, but the bulk of the visual set was comprised of clips playing through towards their full length, generally in their original unedited form, and often completely at odds with the accompanying audio. Old black and white movies would be scratched in for their vocal samples, and then continue to play as the audio segued into some unrelated track. Aside from a sprinkling of original content, the videos were solidly uninspiring, and probably overfamiliar to most internet-age, youtube slurping punters.

Despite the hype, the Pioneer SVM-1000 didn’t help matters, its video effects looked cheesy on first appearance, and positively hackneyed by the fourth time the page-spin and tile-shuffle were dropped in. There were some crowd-pleasing pop culture moments - scratching audio and video definitely has the ability to wow an audience - but anyone with a more than rudimentary knowledge of video would have been hard pressed to find “next level” visual performance here, and by the end of the 90 minute set even the crowd was losing focus between the humorous video interludes and old-favorite tracks.

So how can we go about fostering real innovation in AV, “popular”, music performance. The short term solution is obvious: Have a visualist to take care of the video.

Who would have imagined seeing a music video on Google Code? Welcome to the new age of data visualization.

Radiohead’s new video uses 3D images capture from two scanners – one a close-proximity 3D scanner from Geometric Informatics, another a multiple-laser array for the “exterior scenes” rotating in a 360-degree pattern. That yields just data, not anything you can look at, so the artists created the video itself using the open-source tool we love so much, Processing (site | CDM tag).

Cool so far. But the interesting part is that the tools and data are open-sourced and/or freely available:

View the data visualization in 3D and navigate with the mouse

Download the data in CSV form and do stuff with it using Processing source code and instructions

There’s a remix-friendly license in there, and a YouTube group to follow the results.

All the relevant links, plus the video itself:

RA DIOHEA_D / HOU SE OF_C ARDS [ Google Code ]

It’s also striking to notice that, despite the new-fangled technologies, the face stuff is remarkably similar in actual visual effect to the Rutt-Etra video synth (see also stories on Rutt-Etra restoration, Bill Etra restrospective). The process is entirely different: the Rutt-Etra processed the image directly via raster manipulations, whereas the Radiohead video is really a visualization of 3D data. But in some ways, I find the 1972 effect more appealing, and the visual relationship I believe is intentional.

Then again, part of the power of data visualization is that you can make it look like whatever you want. So it’ll be interesting to see how these techniques evolve.

Director: James Frost (Zoo Films)

Director of Photography: Von Thomas (Zoo Films)

Director of Technology: Aaron Koblin (whose work we’ve admired at the MOMA Design and the Elastic Mind show, via the now-defunct Yahoo Design Innovation Team, and elsewhere)

Joshue Ott/superDraw +Ezekiel Honig live at monkeytown from superdraw on Vimeo.

I’m very excited about the music lineup we have planned for this Friday in New York at the CDM-curated evening of live audio and visuals – but the visual lineup should be a big draw, too. If you’re in New York, come say hi (and if not, hope to have more details on these projects for the rest of the planet soon):

• Joshue Ott creates live visuals with his homemade superDraw generative illustration tool
• Paris (Voltage Controlled) and Don Miller (No Carrier) create glitchy, lo-fi visuals from custom-created 8-bit visual software on Nintendo and Commodore systems
• vade and Mary Ann Benedetto will visualize and reinterpret geeky things (possibly the Linux kernel, data packets, or both) using custom code and Quartz Composer stuff — we should even see a free release of some of those tools in time for the gig, so stay tuned to CDM
• Bill Jones creates live cinematic worlds inspired by sci-fi noir

Where: The Hotel Pennsylvania, New York City (map); head to the main door, on your left is the entrance to Penn Pavilion and you should see a table there.

When: Friday, July 18 2008 – performances run 11pm – 2am

Cost: US$10 at the door. First come, first served. (free if you have a conference badge)

We Are Hacks: Music and Visual Performance at HOPE, NYC – Preview

http://www.thelasthope.org/

Facebook event page (RSVP if you’re coming! Also on Going.com)

Above: one of my favorite videos from superDraw (Processing-based) by Joshue Ott above, though it’s even better to see it in person with the live drawing capabilities. Below: all-custom 8-bit-style software generates visuals, via Paris.

Function Field System - PureData/GEM from Paris/VoltageControlled on Vimeo.

Yes, speaking of the visual power of flipbooks, Ivan points out that Kraak and Smaak have just made a big splash with an ingenious new music video making surrealist plays with space. It uses copious, cleverly-placed flipbooks throughout. Now you have two challenges: one, to go out and make and film flipbooks, and two, to make it somehow not this but cool in some other way. (Hmmm… perhaps live flipbook VJing?)

It’s all real and real-time and, minus some subtle animation overlaid obviously at one point, it’s all flipbooks. The work is the creation of superelectricvideo, a director, motion graphic designer, video artist, illustrator, and general maker of cool things to look at based in the Netherlands. It’s worth reading his whole, oddly poetic bio, which matches some of the dry whimsy of his films:

Live visuals are all about projection, but perhaps part of the reason visual work hasn’t become nearly as commonplace as music is that screens and projectors are tougher to come by than speakers and PAs. Naturally, the appeal of a really high-quality mobile rig is obvious – especially one that can work outdoors.

Yesterday, I got to meet with Open Air Cinema, a young Utah-based company that’s already made a name for itself running events like the TriBeCa Outdoor Drive-In and LA Film Festival Outdoor Screenings. Their products have typically run at the high-end. But they’ve got a new “consumer” line that could be just what VJs and visualists need to have an on-the-go projection solution.

Various political remix videos have climbed their way up the YouTube charts, including many forcing soon-to-be-former President Bush to sing various songs. But is interest in the activity enough to warrant an entire online community dedicated to the topic? The creators of the new site RemixAmerica.org, launching in beta today, think so.

With YouTube already a popular hub for bizarre political remixes, RemixAmerica tries to bring some extra features to the table. They upload content to use, from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (really) to “I Have a Dream” to current figures. Seen John McCain’s "summer of love" ad? Click "remix," and it’s yours, for editing via an online tool in basic or advanced versions or in your own editor of choice. The site also hosts discussions, enabling video remixers and vloggers to communicate with one another. There’s even a feature that allows you to “talk back” with your webcam – so if you don’t want to bother remixing that McCain ad to the song “Age of Aquarius,” you can just shout at your screen instead.

The site has quite a founder behind it — none other than progressive activist and TV legend Norman Lear. Lear, creator of The Jeffersons, Sanford and Son, and All in the Family was also a political activist. He filmed a celebrity-laden dramatic reading of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, founded People for the American Way, and frequently used TV as a political weapon for advocacy. (Photo: mrfilms1)

Here’s Lear himself introducing the new site:

The remix tool itself is very cool – you can import videos straight from YouTube. Actual editing is tough, though, so I suspect people will stick to their trusted editors. But the community could be the thing that lets American visualists stay sane through the oncoming Presidential campaign.

You can certainly expect more of this sort of thing — Blair and Bush’s "love that dare not speak its name" was something many had observed, but perhaps it was more meaningful when it became musical.

Lots of motion in the non-digital world can inspire digital visuals. (Hey, that pretty much sums up all digital photography and videography, eh?) Keeping with this theme, I’m really taken by the flipbook work featured by my friend Bre Pettis at Etsy.com’s online magazine:

The Flipbooks of Etsy: Motion Picture Objects [The Storque]

Bre has interviews with the various makers, some of the talent on online marketplace Etsy.com, and even a dose of the philosophy and technique of creating them.

Properly shot, the flipbook effect looks really lovely on video. (I’ve also done a piece that involved scanning index card notebooks, but shooting them directly is much nicer.) If you’re interested in making some of your own, Bre also includes this tutorial: