So much of the visual inspiration for digital generative visuals — even those that never leave the computer — come directly from analog electronics. There’s something organic about the motion visuals this gear creates. Case in point: the latest, short video from Mat Jarvis, the pioneering ambient artist, via his label Microscopics. Good stuff, and we’re glad to bring it to you first.
Speaking of pioneering vintage visuals, Mat Jarvis / Microscopics have also set music to the brilliant film “A Film Dealing with the Relative Size of Things in the Universe and the Effect of Adding Another Zero.” The film is the work of Charles and Ray Eames (yes, of chair/design fame), who probably deserve a CDMotion story all their own. It’s stunning to see this 1977 film predicting the worldview of technologies like Google Earth. In case you missed this on CDMusic:
Ambient music fans, here are details on the release of the album itself:
Everything is entirely camera driven and realtime. Originally started this app in processing, but realized I needed as much power as possible so switched to C++ / OpenFrameworks. Not using the GPU as much as I’d liked due to time restraints, v2 will be fully GPU hopefully ;)
Anyone going to Glastonbury? Drop in and play Memo’s piano for us. Working on your own (little!) project? Contact form’s to the right.
this person is
better than us :D
when the revolution comes
and the whole world goes mad max
we’ll be dead
and this person will be hacking the computers to fight the robot army
This is my contribution to the realtime 4 kilobytes visuals (usually known as “4k intro”) competition for Inspire 2008 (held in Spain). It is a set of spheres with radious controlled by the Fourier Transform (without the “fast”) of the music. it contains some realtime ambient occlusion and depth of field. It’s done in C, using shaders (GLSL). Once again, it all fits in a 4 kilobytes executable (music, animation, rendering engine and effects).
3L has been in the wild for 2 weeks now, so I’m expecting to see some work from new users appearing online soon.
Since launch the artificialeyes crew have kept themselves busy. ExiledSurfer has been posting plenty of new content, example clips and screencast tutorials. I particularly enjoy the talking head screencast recorded from within 3L, using the Apple webcam to drop a little talking head into the preview window.
These videos have been collected into a Thrill University section of the site. This is being supplemented with live tutorials, the first of which happens 12 hours from now (GMT1300, Thursday) on the 3LU page (which will even remind you via email when the session is about to start). I’m going to be there to increase my 3L knowledge, it would be great to see some other CDMers as well.
There’s also a 3L channel on CDMo’s favorite online video service, Vimeo. CDM makes a little appearance in the 3L channel, as I was able to finally edit the bulk of the “3L Sessions” videos we shot with Michael in Perth last year. There’s over an hour of video in the 3L Sessions album, covering the history of 3L, and an extensive tour through the interface and capabilities of the software. Through the magic of Vimeo, these are all downloadable, so you can use them to guide your first steps with Thrill.
This demo was done in Processing 0135 BETA (using Java) but I think I’m going to redo it in C++ with OpenFrameworks for performance reasons. While processing is brilliant for knocking up quick demos and getting off the ground quite quickly, for this project I need as much performance as possible. I.e. the app needs to run across 4 projectors (3000-4000 pixels wide) with loads more features!
So in short I’m halting the development of the Processing / Java version now and thought I’d post where I got to with it…
The free (for non-commercial use), Windows-only, insanely-powerful visual/multimedia patching environment vvvv just got a killer feature: the ability to make your own "nodes" (what are called objects in some other modular tools).
It’s actually pretty easy to build, too, and the developers have some templates for you. This is way up the list on my summer projects. You can do matrix transforms, as well, so 3D / GPU-based video processing gets very interesting, along with simpler manipulations of color, string, and number values:
The latest vvvv version offers developers an interface to write their own nodes for vvvv. A plugin is basically a .dll file, that can be drag&dropped into a vvvv patch where it appears as a node. If its stored in vvvv’s plugins directory, its even available in the node list.
vvvv gurus, if you give this a try and make something interesting, let us know:
Our friend Richard Lainhart sends this lovely "swirly thing" (to use technical terms). His description:
An abstract HD film animated in After Effects. The soundtrack, "The Beautiful Blue Sky", is a realtime electronic synthesizer improvisation for Buchla 200e and Haken Continuum.
My description:
Mmmm…
Oh, sorry. Forgot what I was saying: staring into swirly thing. Hey, it’s the weekend. Enjoy!
artificialeyes are keeping us updated on the impending release of 3L (current status: Soon), and while I’m still in “getting my studio in order” mode in the lead-up to the “2008 massive VJ geek-out and CDMoFest” and unable to play with new toys, CyberPatrolUnit has posted some great demo videos (and followup), showing us some of the places that 3L may be able to take us.
Exciting? Maybe a little. I still have lots of 3L video to edit from Perth last year, and I’ve promised Michael that I’ll have some videos ready for the official launch. Stay tuned!
How do you make a computer-animated sequence of 3D wireframe visuals of fancy, Empire-built battle stations — in 1977? Very, very slowly. Our friend James at Retro Thing, aside from being a electronic-sonic inventor, is a fan of vintage visuals and was already teaching the history of computer animation in the mid 80s. (Hint: prepping that class didn’t take quite as long then as it would now.)
James explains the origins of the famous Death Star briefing room sequence:
The wizard behind the early Star Wars CG was Larry Cuba, who worked out of the Electronic Visualization Lab (EVL) at the University of Illinois. Legend has it that he was pushing the hardware so hard to create the simple wireframe images that he constantly had to adjust the air conditioning in the computer room to avoid system crashes. Cuba used a vector graphics scripting language called GRASS (GRAphics Symbiosis System), written by Tom DeFanti at Ohio State in 1974. The system he used incorporated a Vector General CRT, DEC PDP-11 minicomputer, along with various cameras and recorders.
I have a special place in my heart for the original film Star Wars because — James will appreciate this — I initially experienced it as a kid only on sound Super 8 film, cut down to a svelte 17 minutes. (My understanding of narrative was never quite the same.)
But to me, these graphics don’t look primitive; they look elemental, much in the same way that you don’t get tired of ancient Egyptian art. (And in the timeline of computer graphics, it wouldn’t be a stretch to imagine thousands of years of art history happening in a few decades.)
The real star, though, is the film Cuba used to pitch computer graphics to George Lucas, Arabesque, made with John Whitney. If this 1975 film doesn’t inspire you as a visualist, nothing will. Correction: Evidently it wasn’t Arabesque, but the movie First Fig. Larry Cuba himself writes in comments:
Thank you for the appreciation of “Arabesque.” The film I screened for Lucas was actually my first CG film, “First Fig.”
(And you can connect the historical dots here, too: without Arabesque First Fig, no CG in Star Wars, no ILM CG, no Pixar.)
Well, George Lucas may or may not have seen Arabesque, but you can, below, and it’s still inspiring:
And for another Larry Cuba film, here’s the 1985 Calculated Movements:
Put them all together with a dash of virtual midi port, and you get this:
Or as Jeff describes it:
Whorld is a free, open-source, live visual synthesizer for sacred geometry. It uses math to create a seamless animation of mesmerizing psychedelic images. You can VJ with it, make unique digital artwork with it, or sit back and watch it like a screensaver. The WiiWhorld project makes it possible to control the Whorld visualizer with the Nintendo Wiimote.
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