If you’re not in to fluorescing trance, then perhaps the Cinesthesy Festival may be more your speed. Starting now and extending through Saturday is a mammoth lineup of fantastic AV acts from France and across Europe.
Cinesthesy is curated by Les Pixels Transversaux, who also produce the Visionsonic series of DVDs. They’ve been putting on interesting and innovative events, and it’s fantastic seeing this progress to a point where it can be watched, live, from places outside of Paris.
It seems that live streaming gigs have really taken off recently. Either that or we’re just paying more attention since the fantastic NetLag show. Either way, there’s a bevvy of live streaming performances ready to entertain you this weekend.
Taking the stage tonight at 11:30PM EST (check the time) from the USA is 6-piece AV trance outfit SWiY, or Someone Who isn’t You. Who they are is 2 visualists, 4 musicians, and a load of gear, UV tubes, and fingerless white gloves.
Our setup consists of Plexiglas mounted trays and racks on a Pearl Drum rack, at like a 30 degree angle facing the crowd. As far as specific configurations and software settings, thats kind of our secret. But we do use Ableton Live to run our vsts and other various AV software tools. Although we use Live, we do have several other hardware devices capable of running the setup if our computers fail. Using MIDI we can control anything from anything. For example a keyboardist could use a foot pedal to cross fade a cdj via a kaoss pad. The same MIDI also would trigger a visual parameter within the TWO vj setups. The four guys on floor are musicians and run at least a 50-50 split of live and preprogrammed sequences. The other two guys raised up are vjs.
Trance is one of those musical forms which has both fanatical adherents and vehement detractors, so I’m not going to editorialize on the content of the show. However if you’re interested in the style or not, this looks like something worth checking out… For science.
On a more serious note: VJForums readers may already be aware of this event, as SWiY were caught out astroturfing on a variety of sites. I almost didn’t post this when I found out that they had been spamming forums, but I think the performance is interesting enough on its own merits. Pretending to be a 3rd party and posting the same thing indiscriminately is not a good thing. However, I’d like to be clear that SWiY did follow the right path in telling us about their project: Our contact form. We love getting unsolicited mail from people doing interesting things, but like most intelligent humans, we have reasonably fine BS detectors. If you have something great happening, you don’t need to pretend that you’re someone else to talk about it. Come out and say it.
HC Gilje sends along Shift, an “audiovisual landscape that combines multichannel sequencing, audio generated by video, and mapping/masking projection onto physical objects.” In short, big blocks become a sonic, visual sequencer through digital audio and projection. It’s really evocative to me, and part of what we’re talking about as we talk about the potential of mapped projections. (I hope that, for you as for me, it starts to make you think of other possibilities with these kind of media.)
HC’s research is “conversation with spaces,” and that’s fitting — after being caught doing visuals without real sound, or stuck in a “flatland” of our own making that’s in two-dimensional projection, visualists can now enter space.
From his research blog (which has lots of other interesting philosophical reflections, as well):
I decided to give my current series of relief projections a name, shift: moving from one place to another, changing the emphasis, direction or focus of something. It also has a loose relation to the idea of shapeshifting. As mentioned in my previous posts about my relief projection projects, shift combines multichannel sequencing, audio generated from video, with masking/mapping a projection to fit physical objects. This creates a dynamic audiovisual landscape, a spatial light painting. The software to create the installation has developed over almost two years and some workshops, and I have shown documentation of the development, but never exhibited it as a final work. It is only this autumn that I have found the right opportunity to show it in an exhibition. I was invited to participate in the Total Aktion exhibition at Museet for Samtidskunst in Roskilde, Denmark. I had the opportunity to exhibit there in 2005 as part of Get Real, a exhibition with real-time art as the focus (which was also shown at Kiasma in Helsinki, Finland). It also resulted in the book where I wrote the essay “Within the space of a moment”.
Shift became a sort of drone installation, with slow light/colour changes of volume, sometimes cut off by sharp white planes. The video documentation is a cut version showing some of the different scenes. Here is a slide show of still images.
Free Plug-ins for a Free Visual App: Flash-Based Onyx VJ Plugs Get a Blog -
Batchass has added a new blog which will feature new plug-ins for Onyx VJ, the free and open source VJ app built in Flash / Flex / AIR. With the possibility of support for Adobe’s new Pixel Bender, this is all getting pretty interesting. (And because of the Adobe architectures beneath, that means creations can have a life on the Web, as with Processing and Java.)
So, you’ve got a shiny new MacBook / MacBook Pro — or any number of newer PC notebooks — and suddenly you realize you have no analog video output. Sure, you might be happy to output to VGA/DVI or even HDMI when you can, but for those Special Moments when that isn’t possible and you need to go a bit oldschool, you need a solution. Short of a pricey scan converter (see extended discussion on our last post on this topic), what to do?
There’s been plenty of discussion about these questions over on the Apple support forums:
Apple forum poster Lougle has posted an extensive hands-on review of the PC to Video EZ product here. Lougle gave us permission to republish here. (Warning: if you’re offended by graphic imagery of various dongles, adapters, and additional cables protruding from the pristine aluminum industrial design of Apple’s stylish new laptop, you may want to shield your eyes.)
I, and many others, have been looking for a way to output video (composite and s-video) from the NEW Macbooks and MacBook Pro’s sporting the Mini DisplayPort since Apple as yet to release such adapter. I use my computer to output video (s-video) for digital slide shows and presentations. If our new aluminum MacBook could not meet this requirement back to the store it would go.
While searching the web for a adapter, converter or whatever could help get video out of the new MacBook I quickly learned ($10 later) that a simple VGA to s-video cable would not work. NO GOOD!
I soon came across the PC to Video EZ. It is sold at several online retailers but I finaly decided to buy it from NewEgg.com (links at bottom of post). NewEgg is retailer I knew I could trust and get fast shipping from. I ordered the converter box on Friday and it arrived today (Monday) with standard shipping!
Bottom line, the PC to Video EZ from GrandTec outputs video (both composite and s-video) at equal quality to Apple’s own video adapters used on previous (pre-DisplayPort) computers. I, owning a MacBook Pro with DVI to video adapter, could not tell the difference.
The device itself is small. It is nothing you would complain about carrying around and it gets the job done.
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2008-Oct-30@13:48
