The Monome, a minimalist, elegant open source hardware controller conceived as an array of light-up buttons, has already made a big splash in the music world. But because it’s fundamentally a controller / LED display, it could be used for anything. And the Monome is now starting to realize that potential in increasingly-cool visual device.

First, here’s the Monome becoming virtually visual, overlaid with generative drawings. (If nothing else, this shows you the kind of love people feel for this open source, community-supported gadget.)

Monome Step : Generative Drawing from formalplay on Vimeo.

This is my first test of having the Monome control some generative drawing along with the audio through this step sequencer I made in Flash similar to the original 64Steps.
I especially like where the step sequencing begins to break down because of how deep the drawing gets.
Its the same drawing engine I used to generate this seasons Thank You cards (although for the Monome version I removed the Type Flakes)
This season’s cards in collab with [M]:
ilikegravity.com/real/archives/2007/01/generative_gratitude_collaboration.php

This lovely work is the product of Detroit area-based formalplay.

The Monome can also be a powerful tool for controlling visuals. Here it is manipulating a set of photos on a computer, also by formalplay. You can imagine the potential for live VJing – and, Microsoft Surface, eat your heart out!

Monome_NL_PhotoGallery.swf from formalplay on Vimeo.

But, wait, there’s more…

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.

Peter and I have been having a serious love-in with Sony’s Vegas Video editing software this year. I’m a long-time Premiere user, but it hasn’t been getting a look in since I realised just how much faster it is for me to edit video with Vegas. I’ve had my eyes opened to the flow. Vegas lets you make edits, rearrange, delete, fade, and layer clips without interrupting playback. As a VJ, of course I’m used to “editing live”, so when I tried to go back to the play-stop-edit-play workflow of Premiere, it felt completely unnatural and archaic.

The one thing I’ve been missing is the tight integration between Premiere and After Effects. Vegas has some reasonably capable post-production tools, but as soon as things got beyond simple colour-correction or pan and scan, I would reach for After Effects, and things would get messy - exporting uncompressed AVIs, multi-layer exports… Unpleasant for everyone involved.

So, Peter and I were counting the ways we love Vegas, and I remarked that “if Vegas could save a file which could be imported in to AFX for post-production - absolute bliss”. I quickly followed this up with “it’s never going to happen”, and started to theorize about converting Vegas project files into XML to be then hacked into Premiere, while clicking around Vegas in a hopeful manner.

Earlier this year we posted a clip of DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist’s “The Hard Sell” performance. Soon afterwards, one of the architects of the visuals for this show - Josh Cardenas - got in touch, and I was able to meet up with him for an interview the morning after one of their performances in Brisbane, Australia.

Josh designed and built the robotic pan-and-tilt camera rigs (and wrist-mounted camera) responsible for The Hard Sell’s strikingly intimate look at the work of these two top turntablists, and he was very open in sharing his experiences and the technical details behind his part of the show.

Also along for the tour is a couple of V4s, DVJs, and a Pioneer SVM-1000. Josh gives us some background on the tour and insights into how the rig works.

Visualist Interview: Josh Cardenas - The Hard Sell tour with DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist from Create Digital Media on Vimeo.

Some of the most common post-gig remarks I heard from crowd members was that they wouldn’t have understood or appreciated the show nearly as much if they hadn’t been able to see so closely what the DJs were up to. Josh’s robotic cameras really brought the performance to the people, and in a form factor which was completely unobtrusive. A remarkable achievement, and still he was happy to share details on how this was achieved.

If you’re not interested in the Vixid mixer or 3L, then I apologize for my posts over the last couple of weeks, but after a year of touring and creating on someone else’s schedule, I’m very excited to be able to set my own agenda and focus on the things I’m interested in.

Disclaimers aside, I’ve been working with my cheapie security cameras, feeding them power and conducting their video to somewhere it can be useful. Once wired, the challenge was to get the correct doses of midi to the Vixid, and thus motivate it to output The Crazy.

But now The Crazy is out of the box, so I’ll show you what it looks like, then explain how it came to be.

In putting together this effect I tried both Ableton Live and VDMX to no avail. Both programs were able to send the correct values over the right midi channels, but the VJX control I’m trying to achieve requires sending of distinct CC messages for very precise, quick switching. If I’m aiming for “proper” one-camera-per-frame bullet time, that’s one input every 40 milliseconds. To use 8 cameras I also have to switch inputs for each layer. This switching causes a 2-3 frame freeze on the input - as it puts the video stream in sync - so layer inputs need to be switched when that layer isn’t “active” and currently visible.

These constraints led me to Max/MSP, mostly because I had a review copy already installed on my machine. I’d read through some of the tutorials, but never actually attempted to program anything with Max. So this afternoon was spent traipsing through documentation, patching, and testing. After several near-misses and a realization that I wouldn’t be able to achieve an elegant solution without wasting time studying, I went back and created a brute-force solution using the modules I understood.

(Possibly NSFW due to excessively hacky code)