In January I had a chance to catch up with Deborah Johnson, who was touring Australia at the time with Sufjan Stevens. The morning after their show in Brisbane, Australia we recorded an hour-long discussion of the show, and seeming to cover the whole gamut of visual creativity and performance. I’ve finally managed to transcribe this epic from audio to text.

Deborah: I would really like to see our show from the audience’ perspective.

Jaymis: I would have loved to have shot some video. There are some really beautiful moments. Did you notice that there was quite a bit of the crowd cheering visuals?

Jaymis: No?

Jaymis: I noticed that there was a couple times when you did something, nothing else was happening, and people around me were “yeaah!”, and not just the people I’ve conditioned to do that, either.

Deborah: ~laughs~

Jaymis: You’ve obviously got a good aesthetic happening. I’ve seen on your website as well you have that kind of drawn aesthetic. Do you do the illustration yourself?

Deborah: On the website?

Jaymis: In the set, you have images that come up: Stars, growing vine objects…

Deborah: Those are all based on drawings, they’re all drawing programs that are written in Director. I work with a programmer, and we’ll be like “this is what I want to have happen”, and he writes an algorithm to make that happen.

Jaymis: That was my next question: How do you do your particle effects with the stars which are drawn on, stay and then fall. So that’s Director?

Deborah: Yep.

Jaymis: Peter would be very excited that someone’s still using Director… So that’s then rendered out to video clips?

Deborah: I mean, the dream is to be able to make them instruments that I can play live, but…

Jaymis: Director’s getting a bit old for that kind of thing. You might have to go with Processing or Quartz Composer or one of those fun things.

Deborah: I really would like to learn Processing. Recently I feel like I’ve become more of a curator, art director.

Jaymis: As video gets bigger that’s what you have to become; you can’t do it all anymore.

Deborah: For this, I knew what I wanted to happen, but I knew that I would need some help. So I started working with a programmer named Siebren Versteeg, who’s an awesome artist in New York. It was great because in Sufjan’s music there’s just so many layers of stuff that happens. My skills were limited to be able to create something that’s just totally generative and so massive, there’s no way that I could author that stuff. So how do you just get a source concept and send it out over an animation.

One thing that I worry about is that it becomes too… Say with Processing or that kind of work, people associate it with screensavers?

Jaymis: Very true. Well I guess that growing vines is one of those things which is quite ubiquitous with that sort of thing. Obviously you’ve got a particularly cool little spin on it and it works really well in the context of what’s happening on stage, but “something growing” is a very standard…

Majesty Snowbird, Live Visual from CandyStations on Vimeo.

Deborah: Exactly.

Jaymis: I think the other thing is that if you become too focussed on one particular tool, then that influences your output as well.

UK touring visualist Deepvisual (who is currently kicking around the UK with The Orb) has posted a 3-minute overview into his touring rig.

There’s a lot of great tips packed in to 3 minutes of video, so pay attention. I wish someone had told me “take some chocks along to help angle your projectors” before I wasted countless hours over the last year searching around various venues for scraps of wood.

I swear by baluns, which allow me to use readily-replacable CAT5 cable for video runs. Also an inexpensive power inverter is a great addition, to keep your laptop, mp3 player, and phone charged on those long drives between cities. I’d love to hear from other gigging visualists though: What’s your secret touring sauce?

Via the wonderful San Francisco-based culture blog of Scott Beale, Laughing Squid, comes this incredible hand-animated series of graffiti animations:

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

blublu.org

Prediction: we’ll see lots more innovation in future mixing code-based, digital artwork and physical media. And since that’ll take some time, and we, uh, missed doing an installment of Weekend Inspiration, you’ve now got a head start on it this week!

Processing derives its power from its use from Java, and using Java applets, you can run Processing sketches in a browser. (You can even use 3D — OpenGL included, with some trickery.) But what if you could use Processing syntax with JavaScript — even just for the heck of it?

John Resig has done just that, porting Processing’s syntax and basic functionality to JavaScript, using the browser support for the Canvas element:

Processing.js

Incredibly, the whole project fits in a svelte 5000 lines — a 10kb compressed download. Now that it’s done, is there any advantage? Well, I can see using it for simple, lightweight JavaScript visualizations in the context of a Web design in which an embedded Java applet didn’t make sense. You will want to keep your expectations realistic: you lose out on some of the performance and functionality advantages provided by Java, and John has the additional warnings:

NOTE: I highly recommend that you use the latest Firefox 3 beta to view the demos. Most will work in the latest WebKit Nightly and a majority will work in Opera 9.5, but all will work in Firefox 3.

Note again: A lot of these demos will peg your CPU. As I mentioned above, I’m trying to squeeze the most out of the browser, as possible - be ready for it!

That said, I’m running Firefox 2 on a modest CPU and most of the demos are actually just fine. Anyone out there who, for some reason, has been waiting for this, I’ll be curious to hear more about how you think it might be used. But for the rest of us, it proves that some of the power of Processing is in the underlying concept and syntax, not just the literal implementation — and that’s a cool thing. As for those crazy hackers out there, well, keep on hacking!

For a previous example of this kind of in-browser insanity on Create Digital Music:

Lily: Browser Beatboxes and the Rebirth of Max-Like Patching

Play the NY Times Website Like an Instrument, and Other New Lily Tricks

We’ll have some more on the Robotic Camera thing soon, but in the meantime, check out the Pilot View FPV 2400 kit. It’s not quite the gyro-controlled version (below), but apparently they have a pan/tilt coming soon.

As an intellectual exercise, let’s price a similar setup from aforementioned cheapie online store DealExtreme:

USB 2.4GHz Spy Camera Set: $120
iTheatre Virtual Vision Video Glasses: $149

Ok. I don’t think I should be considering this any further. VJing is an expensive enough hobby, remote control flight would be the end of me.

(via Make.)

As a visualist I have an incessant appetite for gear. The inaugural Plug N Play Brisbane on Tuesday reminded me that it doesn’t have to be this way, however. While I rocked up with bags and boxes of computers, cables, cameras, controllers and hardware, others arrived with a single laptop, and of course were able to put equally compelling material on the screen. Or, to be perfectly honest - more-compelling material, as I struggled to remember which icons were required to get 3L’s automation chains working.

Debilitating addictions aside; everyone present was interested in my source for cheap security cameras, BNC converters, HDMI cables and other necessary items, so I’m guessing that the rest of the community may also enjoy: DealExtreme (disclosure: Affiliate links used, if you buy stuff I get a cut).

DealExtreme has a huge range of, basically, ephemera: iPod batteries, LED torches, cable converters, chargers… The type of things you’d get for $20 in a local shop, or you could find on eBay for $2 plus $15 shipping. DealExtreme matches those deceptively cheap eBay prices, and then proceeds to not charge shipping, which puts everything into the category entitled “Ridiculously Cheap Stuff”.

The range is large and varied. This coupled with a not particularly intuitive search and categorization of the site has resulted in me wasting many hours paging through, but along the way I’ve bookmarked plenty of things which may be useful to the average VJ:

Apple’s iPhone — and the significantly more affordable, doesn’t-have-to-be-a-phone iPod Touch — are essentially pocket-sized, intelligent multi-touch controllers. Hooking them up to visual software as controllers simply requires some app on the phone to transmit data, and some way of dealing with that data on the computer side. We’ve already seen this a bit on Create Digital Motion, and we’ve been covering some of the specifics of parsing data with Pd (Pure Data), the open-source, tri-platform patching software, on Create Digital Music this week.

Here’s the basic setup:

On Your iPod/iPhone

You have two options of software to use on your iThing. (You’ll need to “jailbreak” your device, as these are not — and may never be, for all I know — approved Apple apps.)

1. mrmr by Eric Redlinger of Brooklyn (top right):  open-source, editable control screens (requires Mac-only software to edit). See our interview with Eric, including some examples with Quartz Composer.

2. akaRemote.app by Masayuki Akamatsu of Japan: not open-source, not editable, but comes with a set of useful control templates, and you can transmit data to the app. See our look at a recent release. Upcoming Mac-only visualist app 3L has its own special akaRemote-based bridge called i3L, which also runs on iPhone/iPod Touch; see our look at i3L with artificial eyes.

On Your Computer

While the iPhone and iPod Touch have Apple logos on them, all of these apps send OpenSoundControl data. That means any OSC-compatible software will work, which is gradually including more visual software, as well as modular apps like Quartz Composer, Max/MSP/Jitter, Pd/GEM, and vvvv. (I love saying that last one … vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv. Okay, moving on.)

Of all of these, Pd is the one solution that’s free, open source, and runs on any platform. That means it’s also a viable candidate for translating incoming OSC data to more broadly-compatible MIDI. (i3L has you covered, as it uses a MIDI bridge.)

We have not one but two sets of tutorials / example patches for working with Pd on Create Digital Music, using a patch like Cesare’s, pictured above:

Control Music and Visuals with iPhone/iPod, Free Via Pd

Tutorial: More iPhone/iPod Touch Control With Open-Source Pure Data

So, Is It Worth It?

I usually don’t ask that question, preferring instead to report on what other folks are doing. But it is always worth asking yourself — and it is an entirely personal question. I’m not totally convinced in the case of these devices that I’d want to buy one solely for VJing, but then, what makes this so cool is that it adds on additional functionality to a device. (Too bad Apple is being so uptight about third-party development, but at least there’s an SDK — and plenty of hackers ready to break Apple’s rules.)

My own preference remains squarely with tangible controllers and tactile feedback, especially as some of the advantages of multi-touch are diminished by the iPod/iPhone’s diminutive size. But I absolutely see the argument for using these. What do you think, dear readers?

Hurrah, stop motion fans — it’s time for the Stop Motion Eye Candy of the Day!

This time, it’s artist PES, translating classic arcade scenes into stop motion, real world objects. It’s utterly brilliant — and a reminder that, stripped of more advanced code and graphics, early arcade games were reduced to strangely iconic designs. That’s food for thought when thinking about digital motion in general.

There’s more of this stuff, too — here’s a complete round-up from “counter-culture” mag Hi-Fructose:

Video: Clown Head Explosions: The Art of Pes

Found via Laughing Squid and Scott Beale’s Twitter stream

Now, digerati: perhaps these real-world sprites inspire some virtual ones for use in your next live visual tool?