What happens when projection mapping and stop motion come together and make sweet, visualist love?
Watch “Suburbia,” the charming, percussive music video, populated by mysterious birds and aquatic dino skeletons, to find out. The ingredients: VJ app Vidvox VDMX plus easy Mac map-anything tool MadMapper.
Robert Jarvis explains how he did the video for band Virtual Proximity:
It’s all projection mapping captured one frame at a time and then animated. The process quickly became tedious – after an hour or so setting up a shot there was another hour of *click* move one frame forward *clack* take a photo. I teased out a way to automated the whole process using a square wave LFO in VDMX to automatically click each frame forwards in the time it would take for my cameras
intervalometer to tick over. The animation process then became almost hands free.
Julian Oliver’s “Föhnseher” spies on images on a wifi network, then “broadcasts” them to that older, less “pull”-based medium, the analog television. Have a look at the demonstration, as made by fellow media artist Servando Barreiro.
Föhnseher rises from the scrap heap of analog TV. Unlike other televisions, Föhnseher captures and displays images downloaded by people on surrounding local wireless networks.
Other people’s phones, laptops and tablet computers all become broadcast stations for this device, replacing the forgotten television towers of old.
The name föhnseher derives from fernseher, the German word for television, and the föhn, a strange warm wind known to the south of Germany. The words have a very similar pronunciation.
Fittingly, we’ll get to see Julian’s work across from Berlin’s own Fernsehturm (TV tower). I’m pleased to be part of an ongoing partnership with the LEAP Gallery here in Berlin to feature new media art and sound; since the content is largely sonic in nature for the first installment, read up on what we’ve got planned at CDMusic: A New Partnership, a New Series on Digital Sound and Art in Berlin; First Look at the Artists
Julian’s work to me never ceases to impress; with Danja Vasiliev, he talks about his Ars Electronica Golden Nica-winning project in the video below, and at bottom, you can watch an extensive technical demo. The idea: change news as people read it over networks. It’s both potential productive tool (fighting censorship) and cautionary tale (illustrating how malleable news is). Continue reading »
Democracy Now! has a feature on the use of mobile projection in Occupy Wall Street. Projections here are simple: factoids are blown up to big-building size, highlighting economic inequities. But the results do something even signs and megaphones may be unable to do, which is to reach a large audience of passers-by without in fact having to disturb almost any physical space.
Mobile projection is of course nothing new, and a topic we cover regularly here, but it becomes visible to a broader audience when involved in a hot-button political action like this. Article and transcript:
Taylor K, a well-known artist in NYC, is featured in the video. He responds:
Seeing that these are ephemeral lights that we’re just shining onto the building, nobody can really claim it as ownership. And it’s not really graffiti, because it will move. But it still has the same impact, to the fact that we can put our message, communicate with our people, right on a canvas that we’ve been given, which happens to be City Hall.
Democracy Now! Is a usual suspect for progressive-skewed coverage, but I found that the projections also featured prominently in a number of bigger press outlets that covered the action.
(Side note: as a former resident of the neighborhood, I’m not sure “iconic” is the word I’d use to describe the Verizon building.)
From top: TouchDesigner powering the Plastikman show, Steve Mason’s Chapichapo.
If you’ve been watching big-league visuals lately, things that made your eyeballs roll out into the crowd, odds are TouchDesigner might have been some of the software in use. The tool, established in years of use but perhaps little known outside a few select circles, has been making waves lately in some very nice shows. Even its interface is dazzling (and, indeed, figures directly in shows by the likes of Berlin label Raster Noton), flying through endlessly-zoomable graphical patching interfaces.
One obstacle has stood in TouchDesigner’s way: accessibility. That Hollywood-sexy interface might leave average musicians and visualists wondering how this would work for them. And a prohibitively high cost for a commercial user kept a lot of would-be users out of the club.
The uninterestingly-named TouchDesigner 077 Gold represents lots of iterative progress on this tool. But with this release, hidden behind that innocuous version number, comes some news that could make TouchDesigner a bigger deal. Sync tools for Ableton Live, developed for the innovative show for Richie Hawtin (more on that soon), bring musical integration. TouchPlayer means you can distribute your creations for other users who don’t have the software. You can add the Player to the three-year-old “Free Thinking Environment.” While a common complaint about TouchDesigner has been cost, the FTE edition brings pricing within reach of mere mortals – non-commercial use is even free.
As new to this edition is an integrated mapping tool, for three-dimensional projection mapping. And tutorials make it easier to learn, atop the nice, out-of-the-box Live integration for Max for Live users.
Here’s what’s new. TouchDesigner 077 adds:
TouchPlayer, a perform-only player that lets anyone run your software free (provided they use it non-commercially – too bad it’s not just no-strings-attached). It’s included with the software.
TouchDesigner Ableton Live Sync Environment passes loops, controllers, MIDI, and timing data from Live over to TouchDesigner. I saw this in action both backstage and front-of-house with Richie Hawtin, in the Plastikman show designed by Jarrett Smith and operated by Bryant Place, and … wow. More on this soon. The one catch, as with a lot of Live extension – you need Max for Live, too.
Cineform (not to be confused with the ancient Cinepak) is a high-quality decode used in film that strikes a nice balance between image and size on new Intel processors.
HD-SDI input and output with NVIDIA’s capture cards.
New tools for displaying stats, working with multitouch and audio, and playing, managing, and blending movies.
OpenFrameworks, an artist-friendly creation environment that unlocks the brain-melting power of code in C++, now has a helpful guide to all the additional power you can add. Just as Processing, the code tool that helped inspire OF, benefits from the vast planetary resources in the Java language, so, too, does OpenFrameworks benefit from an impassioned worldwide community of coders working to make accessible all that lives in the language of C++.
If you have even an inkling of working in OF, go drool over all the possibilities – and, damn, are there a lot. The categories list alone is big, and each has a bunch of tools inside, likely including one that could inspire a project.
Animation
Bridges
Computer Vision
Graphics
GUI
Hardware Interface
iOS
Physics
Sound
Typography
Utilities
Video
Camera
Web
Networking
Of course, what I think might make this mean you’d actually create something is that you can tear off just one tiny piece of this giant cookie of code and nibble away, making some tasty form of art of your own, focusing on your own design.
Greg, who worked on the project, addressed ITP (NYU’s digital art school) alums as follows (Greg, hope you don’t mind being quoted here, but … the secret is out anyway):
I did a quick project with James George to create a directory of all OpenFrameworks addons. It went live today.
We built a site that searches github for all addons and then we categorized them and filtered them. There are so many amazing resources available in OpenFrameworks! From face tracking to animated GIF creation to projection mapping tools to all kinds of hardware control to sound generation and on and on.
Take a look and I bet you’ll think of three new project ideas just from seeing what’s available!
Speaking of projection mapping (again), Jonas sends a project he worked on that’s a spectacular example, one that seems to make a faceless box of a museum extrude fragments from its side and gain new depth. Description:
An audiovisual staging of the Leopold Museum’s architecture during the 10th anniversary of the MuseumsQuartier in Vienna, Austria.
Premiered on 30th of July in 2011.
Art Direction: Daniel Rossa (rossarossa.de), Till Botterweck
Technical Director: Till Botterweck
3D Operator: Peter Pflug
Sound Design: Jonas Wiese
Documentation Director: Thorsten Bauer
Camera: Thorsten Bauer, Moritz Horn, Oktocam Vienna (audiovisuellemedien.at)
Edit: Jonas Wiese
Commissioned by: Soundframe Festival (soundframe.at)
Realized with Wings VIOSO Mediaserver (vioso.com)
We could almost use a feature that tracks projection mapping projects around the globe. We’ve seen Mongolia; this lovely project comes to us from an opposite part of the world, in the Dominican Republic.
The smartly-titled “Last Night a Hipster Saved My Life” is a mapped audiovisual performance with Modul8, featured at the twenty-sixth National Biennial of Visual Arts at the Museum of Modern Art in Santo Domingo on Friday the 11th of this month.
More info:
PRODUCTION: ONDASONORA28c
STRUCTURAL DESIGN: STUDIOTIPO
MAPPING & VISUALS: LA PIXELERIA
AUDIO: ANDANDO BY MUNCHI – ROTTERDAM JUKE
SPECIAL THANKS: MUSEO DE ARTE MODERNO, BUBU VEGA, SURFITO, WADER, ESFERA VERDE
Peter Kirn
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