The era of the visualist has come to an exciting point. From a relatively fringe activity, we have seen tools and techniques develop quickly over the last couple of years. The idea of a VJ as a performer is steadily gaining more public mind share. Along with this growth, hardware and software concepts from both new and established developers are helping to further expand the possibilities we have for production and performance.

One of the most exciting groups to enter the VJ consciousness recently is Vixid. They’ve been working on their VJ mixer - the VJX16-4 - for several years, and it finally started hitting the market in 2007.

Unlike the other semi-recent entries to the vision mixer market - Numark’s AVM02 and Pioneer’s Big Expensive Thing - the VJX16-4 isn’t just an incremental upgrade to the basic task of "mixing between two sources of video". Vixid have designed it from the ground up to be a considerably more advanced way of working with live video.

Fortunately, Michael and Todd of artificialeyes were available to guide us through this exciting and slightly confusing new world. We shot many hours of video with the ae guys at ByteMe Festival last December, including plenty of time with the VJX. First up: An intro and overview to this superb piece of kit. The video runs for 10:30. Considerably longer than we’d intended to make these CDMtv videos, however we believe the Vixid is such an important and potentially influential piece of hardware - and such a big investment - that you’d want to get more detailed information rather than a superficial overview. For those who are impatient or feeling texty I’ll follow up the video with some of my first impressions and thoughts.

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

It’s not the lumens that count; it’s how you use them. But it’s easy to forget that when your projections just got blown out by lights, which someone used because they can move and your projection can’t. And it’s easy to get frustrated with the limitations of projection when you’re again looking at a static 4:3 rectangle on another flat wall.

Unfortunately, the art of using mirrors and other techniques to make projection more dynamic aren’t nearly as well known as they could be. Alternative projection techniques have also tended not to be productized. One significant exception is VMS or VideoMovingSystem. It’s the rare case of a hardware product made specifically for creative, live, performative projection. VMS is similar to the iCue moving mirror and some other tools, but it takes the kind of tools previously customized for lighting and specially adapts them to projection. You can actually buy a VMS unit with a projector already attached, or buy a unit that will fit a standard projector, making these more effective and easier to mount and use than lighting-specific instruments. It’s not a cheap solution for an independent VJ, but it is cheaper than competing custom lighting solutions. And if you read this site, you should already know that digital, computer-powered projection can do all kinds of things boring motorized lights can’t.

artificialeyes’ Michael Parenti and Todd Thille have taken a unique role in both championing the VMS tool and developing custom applications for it, as well as rocking Istanbul with the results. Michael said repeatedly that it saved the whole act of VJing for him. We got to talk to Michael and Todd about VMS and why it’s important — and, better yet, we got to play with these units, remote-controlled by artificialeyes’ 3L software and Michael’s iPhone. Even if you don’t plan on picking up VMS yourself (or I should say, convincing a club to buy them for you), you can tell from the interview how much of a difference changing a projection technique can make — not lumens, and not content, the two things we often get hung up on.

Jaymis: I have plenty more video from the ae guys waiting to be edited, both long-form looks into Thrill, and quick tips as well. That said, video is a bit of a new step for CDMo. This past year we’ve been talking about being a visualist mostly through the written word, so it would be great to get some feedback. Do you find video reviews and articles useful? Like the editing style? Think Peter should do voiceovers for software training videos? Hit the comments.

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.

It has happened! Peter and I are finally inhabiting adjacent physical spaces, which is cause for Considerable Excitement amongst ourselves and the assembled visualistadors.

Yesterday was extremely busy as we flew from Brisbane to Perth, found our hotel, found my gear, setup and soundchecked for a little post-opening-party gig with Bobby, charged to and from the accommodation to change, warmed up, put on a mediocre performance and hyped down just in time to meet up with Michael and Todd of artificialeyes.tv. They took Peter, myself, Jean Poole and DPWolf back to their hotel room and plied us with the latest and coolest VJ gear, including the Vixid VJX16-4, VMS, and their soon to be released software, Thrill. After this we were treated to an impromptu VJ set from MoRpH with Michael and Todd, projected with 3 VMS systems on a neighbouring building.

We’ve all spent the morning hanging out in Perth’s amazing TigerTiger Cafe, getting our internets on and discussing the current and future states of the visual world. This evening ByteMe is screening the documentary Figwit.

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