Producing slick trailers for electronic and audiovisual events has become all the rage lately, it seems. This one from FIBER Festival is especially lovely, in that it sets the darkly moody ambience of the festival, and fuses sound design and motion elements nicely.
For its part, the festival itself has interesting aims. Rather than sprawling over days (or weeks), everything is packed into a single, explosive day and night. Visual curation is an integral part of the audiovisual lineup – of particular appeal to us at Create Digital Motion. And an intrepid Dutch curation team from musical and visual worlds is fighting head-on what they perceive as the “grim Dutch cultural climate,” in the wake of funding cuts and cultural re-evaluation.
This is a teaser, designed to “tease,” so if you feel you want more optical satisfaction, Fiber have put together a nice Vimeo gallery. While based in Holland, they pull video from around the world:
Fiber also have something they call Fiber Space, an online network – focused largely on the Netherlands, but looking to Europe and beyond – bringing together a variety of audiovisual stimulations, from artists to events. This includes an impressive round-up of Dutch visual collectives and electronic culture: http://www.fiber-space.nl/fiber-network/
Gallery opening in Berlin, top (photo: Ken Buslay); Klasien among participants from some 13 cities who contributed to the font (photo: Create Digital Motion).
With an image in mind of a piece of metal or wood, there’s nothing quite more static in our Imagine typefaces, and your mind probably conjures an image of a piece of wood or metal, literally cast in a permanent, unchanging form. But experiments in digital typography are exploding that conception, making fonts dynamic, kinetic, and very much about creating digital motion. Nowhere is that more true than in the rough-hewn, sketchy shapes of Sweaty Feet, a typeface produced by people running around city grids with GPS-enabled smartphones in hand. These fonts are literally a record of motion.
We’ve been following Letters Are My Friends, the Berlin gallery, and their wacky typographical adventures this year. So far, that has included exhibiting a typographical audiovisual synthesizer: Modulating Type with Synthesizer Knobs: Meek FM
– and making analog-looking graphical forms with generative visual software: Dynamic, Morphing Type, Generated in vvvv
Now, working with the iPhone app FigureRunning, an exhibition this month merged the activities of jogging and drawing, scrawling letter forms by recording a path across a city grid. App users in 13 cities from San Francisco to Amsterdam to Tokyo made the letters, giving the alphabet a varied and personal flair. Some of the participants spelled out entire words (one gave his wife her whole name across the city of Bussum); then the designers picked out 26 faces. As typographical design, it’s far from perfect, but the informal quality is half the fun. The design is also collaborative: the designers assembled a charming book full of faces, stories, and maps. Continue reading »
Robert Henke’s new album is out this month, and definitely counts among our anticipated albums of 2012. But what has not gotten wide coverage is the visual element of this upcoming performance, which will accompany the surround-sound tour of the show in audiovisual splendor from Slovenia to Portland. (We’ll be catching up with Robert, I expect, in Berlin at Berghain.) Dates below, along with the sound of the new record.
Monolake is getting visual support from none other than Holland-based artist Tarik Barri. In the teaser test above, his work glitches and pulses in a percussive, retina-firing opus, like a trip down your neurons. Tarik is doing great stuff merging optical representation and musical structure, as we saw recently on Create Digital Music: Across the Universe: Mind-Blowing AV Performance Makes Music a Spacey Trip
Here, some of that same sense of visual-sonic parity is in abundance. Little wonder: the two have worked together before; see below for a video in which Tarik’s audiovisual engine interacts with Monolake’s live performance.
If you’re in Europe or North America, there’s a good chance you’ll get to see the whole thing in person, and not just read about it here:
February 18 Monolake Live Surround Belgium Brussels @ RecyclArt
February 29 Berlin @ Berghain with support by Shackleton (DJ set) Peverelist (DJ set)
March 1 UK London @ Fabric with support by Craig Richards (DJ set) Peverelist (DJ set)
March 9 NL Amsterdam @ 5DaysOff
March 17 Spain Madrid @ KlubbersDay
April 20 USA New York City @ Unsound Festival
April 28 USA Portland (tbc)
May 4 Slovenia (tbc)
June Canada Montreal @ MUTEK Festival (tbc)
July 6 Italy @ Dancity Folignio
July 7 UK London @ Bloc
September 29 Italy Bologinia @ Robot Festival (tbc)
* more concerts in other countries, on other continents, and in distant solar systems to be announced *
French-born, Bristol UK-based artist Joanie Lermercier is one of the names most associated with projection mapping. But in a new video, the artist – who goes by the name ANTIVJ, which doubles as his audiovisual label – expresses just how he conceives these tricks of perception, as plays of shadow and light.
The work itself is beautifully documented here, interspersed with its surroundings, as an installation and (for Joanie) artist residency at Troy, New York’s EMPAC, not far upstate from New York City.
It’s not just an escape from the rectangle that motivates ANTIVJ’s work. The specific application of calculated (and sometimes exaggerated) illusion, and the awareness of those illusions, recalls the trompe-l’œil technique that saw its peak in Baroque and Roccoco art. And it’s movng to me to hear Joanie speak about the sensation that surrounds that technique; somehow, I’ve always found French artists and perhaps even the French language most articulate in appreciating ephemeral sensations in expression. (I certainly have found that in playing French music, so I at least have that personal connection, if imagined or otherwise.)
It’s beautiful work. And at the same time, I find it encouraging that you could close your eyes, listen to Joanie’s conceptual notions, and create something entirely different. This could well be a deep well of thinking about digital projection, in which three-dimensional illusion is far from novelty. Centuries of art certainly suggest as much – and this new digital work demonstrates that aesthetic can be independent from illusion.
The explosion of physical interfaces for computers continues. But it’s not so much the novelty of the idea as its evolution toward really being able to express ideas physically. Connecting visual expression to hands-on control, the creators of a new book entitled Prototyping Interfaces “sketch” in both the physical/electronic and digital/on-screen realms simultaneously. Color from an object can impact color onscreen, or a wooden knob can give a parameter physical form.
Several things are significant about their effort versus the many other similar projects. First, they have beautiful documentation. (Yes, folks, if you’re scratching your heads wondering why you’re not recognized for your work, lack of high-quality documentation is a good first candidate.) Second, they’re using the incredibly-powerful tool vvvv, the rich visual patching environment for multimedia, which is not nearly as well known as it should be. (Mac users, quit your whining. You can install Windows in about an hour on your MacBook Pro, as they do here, and boot into a dedicated, distraction-free environment.) Thirdly, they take all of this clever experimentation and put it into what looks like a really fantastic reference for learning. (Indeed, it’s so visual, that even if they don’t get around to an English translation, I can imagine even non-German speakers will follow it easily.)
Or to put it in brief: there’s a ridiculous amount of awesomeness in this video and photos, and you’ll want the book, and you’ll want to tear your Arduino off the shelf and just doing something silly and fun with it right now.
Even before we get to the “open source hardware” angle, it’s special just finding something that can function as a self-contained, digital visual instrument. And Milkymist more than qualifies, as a video synth that can produce seemingly-endless generative outputs from raw image and live video inputs.
But it is significant that this is open source hardware. Milkymist in its present form isn’t for everyone, but it’s evolving fast – and it’s a visual coder’s and hacker’s dream. Entirely custom hardware runs elegant scripts for effects like video feedback with razor-thin low latency and blazing framerates and performance. Add the open source spirit to that, and apart from the entire design and software being open to your inspection and modification, you get a box that wants you to add inputs, unusual controllers and sensors, and generally muck about with what you can do.
I’ve been watching this project for some time, but had to fully wrap my head around it. One of the developers, Sébastien Bourdeauducq, had been nagging me for some time. “Yes, yes, it’s open source, it does … things,” I responded. “Great.” But to tell the truth, I hadn’t fully grasped what would make you go down this path rather than a computer. Finally, I gathered Sébastien and some friends in a flat in Berlin-Friedrichshain to have a look.
It’s when you see the speed and low-level hackability of this thing that you get it. Jack in a keyboard, and just a couple of lines of code in the Milkymist’s scripting language, and you can suddenly produce an eye-popping feedback effect or layer. Being this close to the hardware is just terrific: you switch on the device, write very lean scripts, and it just works. And while you could do the same with a computer, there’s no mucking about with drivers and trying to contend with high input-to-output video latencies. Nor do you have to set up a whole environment before you begin scripting – it’s there right when you turn on the device (see screenshots of the interface.) There’s even a camera included in the box so you can get to work right away.
Slim, but packed with 3D power, the iPad is now capable of being a sketchpad for 3D shaders and graphics programmability. We saw as much when we saw this tool last month (it’s destined for other platforms, too, in case you’re jealous):
Well, that tool keeps getting more functionality. American Developer Ben Hopkins, aka kode80, tells us this new release adds some much-desired new functionality: think 3D model importing and code completion. (Only an independent developer would call significant additions like that “1.02,” but we love it!)
Full feature list below.
There’s also a new video so you can see this in action, and see what fun it can be.
Also notable, GLSL Studio touts in its press release that it’s aimed as much at novices as code experts. Perhaps it’s the psychological hurdle of fiddling with this on a tablet, or maybe it’s just that the streamlined coding features make it more accessible, but I like that idea. After all, sophisticated graphics programming used to be part of grade-school education. Not all of us are going to be great programmers (believe me, I speak from experience), or even digital artists – at least in the sense of our generative coding prowess. But that’s no reason to stop anyone from fiddling with math, being able to expand what’s possible in expressing their own imagination, and better understanding how the ubiquitous computing machines in our lives work.
And as something to “play around with,” this is one hell of a serious tool: Continue reading »
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