Where better than the self-proclaimed most isolated city on Earth to talk about the state — and future — of VJing? The Byte Me Festival in Perth, Australia brought a rare convergence of digitalists and visualists in December. We cornered a variety of individuals at the open-jam Plug ‘n Play, from lay persons to internationally-touring artists, to chat about their work and the live visual scene in general.

My personal favorite interview of the night was Solu, the Finnish-born, Barcelona-based audiovisual artist. Solu’s meditative A/V set, with softly-echoing deconstructed wartime imagery, was one of the highlights of the evening. She stopped to talk to us about:

“In this scene, women are missing … even though in workshops, there are 50/50 women and men. I think we need more women here, definitely, for many reasons.”

• what to call what she’s doing (”live visualist”? “video processor”?)
• how she got into visualism
• how women respond to her work (the “dream world” description I thought was apt)
• where all the women have gone
• why VJs should be paid fairly, and their art respected more — not just as a means of selling bottles of booze
• why 2008 will be the best year ever.

Sounds like a platform for global VJ President. Got my vote.

Incidentally, since someone asked in comments on another story, her three tools of choice were, in order, Max/MSP/Jitter, Isadora, Modul8. Max/Jitter was the software of the evening, for sound and visuals.

In case you missed it the first time, our informally-edited footage of Plug ‘n Play is mostly Solu for the second half. Seeing her live is best, though, so keep your eyes peeled, especially if you’re lucky enough to live in Barcelona.

Plug N Play - ByteMe Festival - Perth from Create Digital Media on Vimeo.

Byte Me: Open Jamming for Visualists at Plug and Play, Perth

Solu’s artist site

Plug N Play - ByteMe Festival - Perth from Create Digital Media on Vimeo.

Being in Perth, Australia with some of our favorite VJs/visualists was a real inspiration. We’re still processing some of that inspiration — and, literally, all the footage and words we captured while there. One highlight was undoubtedly the Byte Me Festival’s Plug and Play night Thursday. Plug and Play is a regular event in what is supposedly the world’s most isolated city, an open jam for visuals. It reminded me of the open video mixers we’ve had in New York at Share and formerly at Eyewash, but it benefits from being dedicated, as the name suggests, to a full evening of visuals. (Maybe it’s time to follow up our Handmade Music events with Handmade Motion.)

This particular evening, though, was really a global event:

Solu

VJZoo

DPWolf

Jean Poole

Chris McCormick

VJ Lambency

Roly Skender

It represents people from all around the Australian continent, plus the United States and Europe. Here are some glimpses of the evening, featuring custom tools in Pd/GEM and Quartz Composer, but focusing on the extended ambient audio + visual set by Solu. (Solu had not only meditative visuals to watch but, along with the other VJs, some reflections on visualism in general; more on that soon.)

Plug and Play Perth

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

This time next week Peter and I will be in Perth, Western Australia, basking in the geekly radiance of ByteMe festival and enjoying the hospitality of the inimitable Kat and Jasper, a.k.a. CDMo favourites VJZoo.

We don’t have any official panels or workshops planned. Instead we’ll be devoting our time to documenting the goings-on and creative outputs of all the other cool people who are attending the festival.

Aside from catching up with the ArtificialEyes crew and Australian Visualist extrordinaire Jean Poole, this festival will be especially exciting for CDM as it’s the first time Peter and I get to meet In Real Life! Will we still get along after our fleshy casings have shared a continent? Will the CDM empire crumble as we discover that we’re not really interested in writing about CreatingDigitalThings? Watch this space to find out.

After the festival concludes on the 9th of December Peter will accompany me back to Brisbane for CDM Summit ‘07, where we’ll discuss the future of CDM, work on CreatingDigitalStuff, and probably play quite a lot of Strikers.

Leisure time aside, we don’t really have anything concrete organized, so if any CDM readers will be in Brisbane between 9-14th December and are interested in an informal get together, or would like to catch up at ByteMe festival, make with the comments.

Ed.: If you happen to be coming to Perth, or know folks who live there (and really, who among us doesn’t have lots of friends in Perth), be sure to sign up for events! Many require an RSVP. And if you can’t make it to Perth, we’ll make the virtual experience as rich as possible! -PK

Byte Me! Festival Events List

We’ve said it before, but worth mentioning again: Resolume, with its super-clean interface, reliable performance, and support for extras like Flash files and open FreeFrame video effects, is bar-none our favorite Windows-based performance. It runs nicely even on my old Pentium M Toshiba laptop, and powers Jaymis’ globe-trotting tour with rockstar Bobby Flynn. If you’re looking to get into the program, Kat Black from visualist trio VJzoo has some good news:

Thought your readers might find this useful - we’ve released the handbook from our courses last year free for personal use. Covers the basics of PC-based VJing using Resolume, making loops etc. Linked off the forum at http://resolume.com or from our site http://VJzoo.com

Featured: Basic PC-based VJing techniques, VJzoo’s perspective on VJ-ing, Creating your own VJ loops, Formatting content for PC-based VJ-ing and using Resolume v2.3.

Introductory Manual to Resolume [PDF]

Here’s VJzoo setting up their rig and rocking Sevilla, Spain, because churches totally get me hot:

And even if you’re not on Windows, you can reap the benefits of the Resolume peoples’ generosity on free media treasure-trove Archive.org:

We’re in the process of uploading a bunch of clips to Archive.org, although geez it’s exhausting. I’ve been working constantly for three days to upload two new batches of clips. So far, only one works:

http://www.archive.org/details/68_Urban_Vector_VJ_Loops_by_VJzoo

The other ones… Argh.. Maybe in another day or two, will let you know. None of them are as weird as our vintage CVI clips - although thanks for even being nice about those ;)

In case you missed them, you can catch the full set of CVI clips:

Glitch, Synthetic and Real: Free Vintage Fairlight VJ Clips, Glitch in Jitter

Hope Kat will forgive me for posting that whole email, but it brings up a good point — Archive.org is great, but maybe we need a new, faster service for uploading visuals. Would you be willing to pay for such a service, if you could pay a flat fee for uploads and then use bandwidth freely or cheaply?

Australians: If you happen to be in Perth, Australia — and, really, if you’re anybody, I’m sure you are — VJzoo is at the center of the Perth audiovisual scene. (The scene does sound genuinely awesome. How many hours does it take to fly from Melbourne or Brisbane to Perth again? Might have to drop by and see more of the continent.)

Jaymis and I are out in Meatspace being visualists, leaving little time to, you know, blog and such. Here’s how to find us:

If you’re in Australia, find a big rockstar with big hair (listen for screaming girls and boys), and Jaymis will surely be nearby.

If you’re in the Bay Area of California, find a convergence of technology gurus, crafters, and DIY counter-cultural geniuses, or small downtown venues cramped with people, and you’ll probably find me. Actually, after thinking I might get away with just doing sound and not image, I’ve managed to find lots of projection possibilities so I’m going to go nuts and do both.

There are some promising-looking visualist goodies here in San Francisco, so I hope to get some images up as soon as I can and will have a full report next week.