Miguex (who you may know from the CDMo comment stream.) has interviewed Suryummy, creator of the fantastic Interstellar Sugar (previously on CDMo).

Interstellar Sugar - Suryummy from Suryummy on Vimeo.

[ How would you describe you ideal gig? ]
Short and sweet. One thing that I’ve learned over the years, nothing can kill your artistic vibe more then 8 hours of continuous retinal mixing overload. That being said I enjoy the unexpected.

One of my favorite mixing experiences ever, took place in a tiny club in Shibuya Tokyo during a Lightrhythm Visuals tour. I had no idea what type of music I would be mixing too, was totally unprepared and had just managed to get unlost from the Tokyo jungle. The band turned out to be the most fierce live jazz group on the planet. I had never felt so thrilled and challenged as a live visualist.

[ Where do you think video performance is heading? ]
Hopefully to higher levels of quality and meaning. Obviously technology will be as important as ever in defining the landscape of live visuals. The high end tools that are available today such as VDMX, Processing and Resolume 3 will hopefully give artists the freedom to focus more on the art form rather then the technical hurdles that have plagued the movement for such a long time.

More tips from production to performance in the full interview at Accent Feed.
Suryummy’s Site.

Vello Virkhaus’ V Squared Labs takes on some of the biggest jobs around, and has put together 12,000 pixel wide, surround visuals for the Rok Vegas club in Las Vegas. It’s super-gaudy stuff, but I’m guessing the word “subtle” didn’t feature in the brief from this client.

Rok Land
Rok Red
Purple Pipes
Plug

Aesthetics aside, those demo videos are a great way of showing off surround content. If you’d like your 360 to be a little less commercial, how about this video for Cut Chemist’s “1st Big Break”:

Cut Chemist - 1st Big Break from eyestorm on Vimeo.

They’re going a little bit far calling this “The first music video ever shot with a 360 degree panoramic lens”, but it definitely has other things going for it.

V2 via VJ.TV.

It’s been a couple of months since Peter mentioned MachineCollective - the open, DIY modular controller enclosure system - on CDMu, and they haven’t been sitting on their hands during that time. MachineCollective.org has been updated with lots of new pictures and information, and they’ve even dropped a potential price point: €25-35.

Despite a couple of visualist-specific controllers - Ohm, VMX VJ, NuVJ - we generally have to make our controller choices from the gear designed for electronic musicians. We see a lot of inventive combinations of hardware and software solutions for VJing, but we also need some good, accessible, basic setups to actually get new people in to performing live visuals. We need more hardware, which means we need more people making prototypes, some of which will eventually become commercial solutions for the next generation.

Let’s get going, people. Ready? Go!

DIY on CDMo, DIY on CDMu.
Arduino site (Previously on CDMo).
Arduinome site.

… and if you’ve already been working on custom control options for VJing, tell us about it, so we can tell everyone else.

After posting about their upcoming live performance on ORF TV, I got in touch with AddictiveTV to learn a bit more about their performances this weekend.

What kind of rig will you be taking to Vienna? Computers? Hardware? Software?

A mixture of all three! It took us days to figure out exactly what was required, to be able to do exactly what we need to be doing, as it’s quite an unusual task we’re undertaking, especially the audiovisual sampling of live streams that you’ve actually no idea what exactly they’ll be until they happen!

This just isn’t a normal gig set up and no equipment exists to do exactly what’s needed. Ideally, we’d like some huge Grass Valley multi-channel mixer that takes everything from SDI to Y/C and their Turbo recorder or similar, but the audio side of this kind of kit simply doesn’t work in the same way as DJ kit and certainly doesn’t have audio effects, or appropriate video effects for that matter.

Live in Kuwait. Image by WatchLookSee

So central to our set-up will be one of Pioneer’s new SVM-1000 audio/visual mixers. We worked with Pioneer on the development of the SVM, from conceptual ideas to the testing of the early prototype - so it’s good to be pushing it’s capabilities outside of the club environment. We’ll also be using our own customised Edirol V4 video mixer that’s been modified to take audio, and we’ll use it to shrink the picture and do further overlays; allowing us to have two live images side-by-side, using our laptop running VJammPro - which is essentially an AV sequencer and clip triggering software (which can also shrink the picture live too); we’ll also capture footage on this laptop from any of the live feeds and place the clips in VJammPro. And to complete the set-up we’ll have three DVJ-1000’s - Pioneer’s DVD turntables, and a DJM-1000, which is a six channel audio mixer plus it’s effects unit, the EFX-1000. Oh and ten tonnes of cables, connectors and video monitors!

Addictive TV’s Modified Edirol V4. Image by artificialeyes

How many concurrent feeds will you have access to?

We’ll be getting six live feeds, and I think it’ll be a mixture of live cameras from the same event and at other times different events coming down at the same time.

With the Olympics opening ceremony coming up, I’m sure there are some visualists right now in Beijing preparing for one of the biggest performances of their lives. Since 2004, generative video and projection mapping has come a long way, so I’m expecting we might see something completely bonkers in the next 12 or so hours.

I’m sure it’s no surprise to CDM readers that I’m not super keen on “outside“. It takes quite a lot of effort to get me in to a sporting mood, and AddictiveTV seem to have done the trick with their hyper-kinetic sampling techniques on this material for Adidas.

As reported by Coolhunting: This piece will be part of Adidas’ “Sport in Art” exhibition, at the Today Art Museum in Beijing for the games. Addictive TV will also be remixing live feeds of the games “for an Austrian television network”.

And if that’s not enough to get you in the mood for sport, then maybe some explosions will be more your speed.

Update: The Live TV Remix is happening on Austrian network ORF over the 16-17th. More information on shots.net.

CDM friend and deep thinking visualist Jean Poole has been migrating a swathe of articles from a defunct web host, and some great interviews and reviews have bubbled to the surface:

Artist interviews…
A Brief History of VJing in Australia ( longgg interview heavy piece focussed around late 90s onwards), The Light Surgeons (UK), VJ Honeygun Labs(US), Jasch (Switzerland), Eye-Fi(Sydney), John De Kron ( Germany), Falk (Germany), Lalila (Sydney), Semi-Conductor (UK), Rawbone ( Perth ), DJ Spooky on cutting film ( US ), Falk on VJ blogging (Germany), Solu ( Finland/Spain), Runwrake (yes he VJs sometimes as well as being an amazing animator)(UK), DJ Yoda (UK), Neotropic on music and film (UK), audiovisualizers.com interview, meta, QBert on Wave Twisters (US), and Addictive TV ( UK) and 242 Pilots ( US/Europe) both of which slipped through as ‘recent’ posts.

VJ related Software reviews :
Comprehensive overview of VJ Software in 2004 with screenshots, interviews, smaller VJ software round-up in 2005, vdmx 2, VDMXX 4.0, Grid Pro Vs Arnold Schwarzenegger, v-track, Arkaos video sampler, Arkaos VJ 3, Wildform Flix, Isadora, Livid 1.1

There’s some fantastic material there, much of which is still exceedingly relevant. Be careful, it will be easy to lose your day to reminiscing for the old days of Motion Dive and VDMXX, and longing again to see Arnold Schwarzenegger’s epic battle with Grid Pro.

I’ll be in Melbourne from tomorrow, presenting CDMo at the “DIY TV: Video, UGC, Mobile and IP TV” edition of the globetrotting think-tank X|Media|Lab.

I’ll be talking to some smart people about where visualists fit in the future of TV, and while my head’s full of my ideas of what’s happening next, I’d love to hear from some CDM readers too. There’s plenty of visualists out there currently working on transitioning their art from hobby to business. We have some ideas on how we can help this process along (more on that next week), but in the meantime: How are you building up your visual business? What opportunities or resources would help you?

And for those who are quite happy to do this just for the fun of it, here’s a little DIY TV I put together last week, a continuation of my quick, single shot “Bridge Sessions” video series.

Edward Guglielmino - Landslide (Bridge Sessions) from Jaymis on Vimeo.