“Augmented dancing” is a phrase we’ve gradually been slipping in, describing projection mapping directly onto dancers. It’s always been easy enough to do, but now, if you want to simultaneously mask your projection so it doesn’t also spill behind the dancer – or even go nuts and generate your visuals from intelligent tracking – it’s easier than ever before. Thank/blame Kinect, and accessible tools for using it. MadMapper even has an experimental, very basic tool for creating the mask with that program, though for more sophisticated tools, you’ll want to look to open source libraries for software like OpenFrameworks and Processing.

Before getting into those technical details, let’s look at another example of what’s possible. Daniel Schwarz, whose work I’d planned to feature separately, has an interesting proof of concept in his piece AXIOM.3. For this work, he uses another great development tool: vvvv. As he describes the work:

AXIOM.3 is an interactive dance performance augmented with projection mapping. The whole performance is controlled with a self-built street organ by the audience.
The rotational speed of the street organ affects song tempo, dancing and visuals. The box on the left side visualizes the relative speed.
The projection mapping on the dancer is generated in realtime with a kinect camera.

Everything in realtime.
All done in vvvv with three computers, three projectors, kinect and ps3 camera.

Music [top]: Orquestra Popular De Paio Pires – Kyoto Melody
myspace.com/​orquestrapopulardepaiopires

Music [second from top]: Timatim Fitfit – No How
soundcloud.com/​timatimfitfit

Seen other dance work? We may shortly need to do a round-up, so send them in.

More on vvvv, which I simply pronounce “vvvvvvivvvvvvvvvvvvvv….. vvvvv” (I like to run it on my Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee PC):
http://vvvv.org/

The Mapping Festival is one of the real hubs of live visual activity, hosted by the creators of Modul8 and MadMapper but dedicated to everything that’s happening with visualism and mapping projections beyond the generic rectangle. For a glimpse of what happened last year, read our most recent post:

From Technique to Medium: Mapping Festival in Videos Immerses Eyeballs

But if you don’t just want to read about Mapping or watch videos of it, but actually participate, here’s your chance. The open call is now up for May 2012. (May will be a busy month: Mapping and the epic LPM, Live Performance Meeting, both happen in May. Clear your calendar for some time in Europe.)

Details:

Your imagination is full of audiovisual projects? You have performances, installations, workshops or other audiovisual multidisciplinary projects to discover?

Submit your project to the Mapping Festival!
As every year our curatorial committee develops the Mapping Festival program through an open call for submissions.

For it, you have to submit a COMPLETE file and register on line on: www.mappingfestival.com

BEWARE: Mapping Festival 2012 call for entries start OCTOBER 18h TUESDAY until NOVEMBER 18th FRIDAY included.

Different categories:
- Clubbing: VJing / scenography / Set AV
- Audiovisual performance
- Installation / Exhibition
- Outdoor projection
- Workshop / Lecture / Software demonstration

Booked next Mapping Festival: May 10th to 20th, 2012!

Some background:

The Mapping Festival is dedicated to the advancement of the VJ medium. It does so by initiating events where the medium of projecting images is combined with other currents in contemporary culture, and bringing these events to the people of Geneva and international visitors.

Formed in 2005 by the creators of Modul8 and the association of the night club Le Zoo/Usine, The festival seeks to present works by individuals and collectives that share a passion for real time image making and performance.

The festival is a laboratory for the VJing discipline, offering both novices and professionals the possibilty for experimentation as well as a forum for exchanging ideas and resources. This approach has given it a reputation within the world wide VJ community.

And I hope to see you there.

This video is making the rounds, but I only recently saw it, so you may be new to it, too. Benjamin Dowie shoots some beautiful footage on the new iPhone 4S. And forget the novelty for a second: this works because of some specific engineering decisions in how the camera on Apple’s phone works.

Got an iPhone 4S yesterday and got up this morning to go for a surf. No surf, so thought I’d shoot some stuff to see what the new camera is like on the 4S. Got home, looked at the footage, and couldn’t believe it came out of a phone. Was so excited so thought I’d quickly cut a vid to share the goodness.

It’s actually amazing. The automatic stabilisation seems to work wonders, and gets rid of most the jello. Depth of field is flipping awesome. Colours are really good straight out the camera, but I did give this footage a slight grade.

For capturing footage when you left your camera at home, it looks utterly brilliant. I’m curious to see if any other devices approach this shooting quality.

Benjamin suggests throwing the 7D “in the bin,” to which I’d say, anyone getting rid of your 7D, please just throw it in my general direction. (Shout when you do so, so I catch it rather than getting beamed in the head.)

Obvious ongoing challenges inherent to a phone form factor:
Low light is out of the question.
Sometimes you want the flexibility of interchangeable lenses.
Sound input remains a big problem (actually, also true on many dedicated cameras).
You might need your phone for use as a phone.

It’s easy to swap all of those tradeoffs for mobility, and swap mobility for all of those advantages. So, I don’t fear for the dedicated camera; I just see more good footage getting shot. (Oh, I also predict someone smart collecting all the worst mobile phones and exploiting their gritty, digitally-distorted quality, so throw those in my general direction, too! Unlocked, ideally.)

Pacing live visuals over the course of a performance can be a key to its success, so it makes this 60-second timelapse of the Plastikman (Richie Hawtin) show all the more compelling to watch. You have a sense in this condensed version of how color and imagery are mapped to the flow of the performance, and the amount of constraint required to make that consistent. (Style differs – I’ve seen plenty of visual performers get more hectic than this in 60 real-time seconds. It works for some, not as much for others.)

Ali Demirel & Jarrett Smith of Canada-based Derivative Inc., using Derivative’s TouchDesigner application, designed the visuals in the show.

I would say more, but then it might take you longer to read this post than to watch the vi

(buzz!)

http://plastikman.com/
http://www.derivative.ca/Plastikman/
http://www.derivative.ca/plastikman/Tech/

It’s hard to say enough good things about the music video for “Persephone” by Mimi Goese and Ben Neill, so let’s keep it short:

40 blocks of ice (25 L of water), in 40 timelapses of four hours, are strung into some 36,000 photos of stop-motion animation. Stop motion might just rest on its visual spectacle, but in the hands of director Christophe Thockler, the results are positively cinematic, too, and oddly poignant.

With sound on mute, that would be wonderful to watch, but instead, you get to enjoy the music of trumpet player/technologist Ben Neill and vocalist Mimi Goese in a silky, sexy-smooth track that might melt you like so many blocks of ice.

The artists:
http://www.mimigoeseandbenneill.com/

http://www.christophethockler.com/

Ah, you say, but how was it made? Watch:

On that video – Oberon by Mimi Goese & Ben Neill, available on the special edition of “Songs for Persephone,” along with, of course, the track in the music video.

We’ve been waiting for some time to learn what was next for Jitter, the 3D, matrix data, animation, and video side of Cycling ’74′s Max 6 graphical multimedia development environment. (Phew!) The wait is now at its conclusion: Cycling has released details of what’s changed, as well as an extended video sneak preview above worth a full watch.

Jitter users will see new workflow improvements, usability, and features that help you figure out what the heck object you need and what the heck it does. But there are substantial new tools for actually creating graphics, too – arguably beyond even what’s changed on the sound side. Highlights:

• Lots more eye candy: Image Effects, geometry, hierarchical rendering, lighting and cameras, materials.
• More scriptability: Script Jitter and OpenGL via Lua, the lovely scripting language now popular in gaming development (among other places).
• Get physical: An all-new built-in 3D physics engine means, for the first time, you have access to physics out of the box without having to build your own simulation.
• Vastly-expanded animation: Animation and “hierarchical motion” (basically, a series of nodes in a scene-graph-like arrangement in the patcher, making it easier to animate characters and complex scenes). This could radically change the ability to use Jitter in animation.

There are also new vector graphics options for the UI, styled after the way you work with the HTML5 Canvas (though not actually the Web Canvas, sadly).

Aside from this, it’s worth a look at everything else. I go over the changes to the tool’s usability, and the news for people working with sound and music, on our sister site:

Max 6 in Public Beta; For Home-brewing Music Tools Graphically, Perhaps the Biggest Single Update Yet

Go grab the public beta to try Jitter for yourself, and experienced Jitter users, we’d love to see your impressions (and your work) here on CDM, so do get in touch.

http://cycling74.com/downloads/max-6-public-beta/

At first glance, the visuals seem mysterious and almost intentionally obscure. Then, as you watch the dance of pixellated artwork in “Dot,” you see moments of strange, lonely beauty.

Brazilian-based audiovisual artist and regular reader Henrique Roscoe (aka vj 1mpar) writes us to describe his work:

This is an audiovisual performance with synchronized sounds and images, played by a ‘game console’ built and programmed by the artist, and controlled by retro videogame (Nintendo) joysticks. The instrument is completely autonomous and works without the need of a computer, using only a projector and sound system to play its content. All images and sounds are played in real time and the public is invited to participate ‘playing’ part of the performance.

The work pulls apart the logic of gameplay, leaving the image and interaction as a kind of aesthetic artefact. From the video description:

The performance works as a game, and each part deals with a specific theme:
- Violence: critic to the stimulus of the use of violence in games. In a hole opened over a red background, the players movements draw veins that leave tracks of blood.
- Downgrades: ones value is measured by the diminution of the other. Two elements in the form of screws are stuck on the ground. The only possible action is to hit the ‘opponent’, sinking him more and more.
- Excess: each player controls the position of falling objects. This objects fill the screen until there’s no more space for the player.
- Standardization: critic to fashion and the imitation behavior. Abstract shapes pass through the screen and the player should change his own shape in order to become similar or different from the others.
- Decadence: Melancholic ending where both players goes down a 45 degrees ramp. The only possible movement is delaying the arrival of the bottom.

More on this and a lot of other wonderful audiovisualism from the same artist (as featured at venues like LPM, the Live Performers Meeting and a hotbed for live visuals):

http://hol.1mpar.com/