CTRL ALT SHIFT - from V.I. Artists on Vimeo.

Michael Faulkner of D-FUSE says the most interesting thing in this video: it’s when technology becomes redundant that it’s accepted as art. Photography gets invented, and suddenly painting - a business and a craft for centuries - is “high art.” (Don’t ask, incidentally, about what late 19th Century art critics and salon organizers thought was great painting. It was utterly dreadful.)

Ctrl Alt Shift is a 10-minute documentary, pointed out by Resolume developer Bart on their forums, featuring live visualists and audiovisualists. It has a number of things going for it: a terrific artist lineup, asking the tough, obvious questions about why fundamentally we do this stuff, and an editing style that makes projection, live-style edits, and eye candy animation part of the documentary object. It’s a tasty treat to watch if you know the artists, and even if the chatter in this video is the sort of thing you discuss over beers and V4s with your mates, it could be an ideal video to pass along to your friends who don’t yet entirely get what this whole thing is about.

Featured artists:
The Light Surgeons, D-Fuse, Hexstatic, Vj Anyone, Addictive TV, Vector Meldrew, and Fatamorgana

It’s a production by Dean G Moore and Simon Lane.

I know of at least one other documentary project on live visuals evolving. Of course, maybe what we need - given the imperfect and evolving nature of the medium - is more along the lines of a 24-hour visual network. I nominate … all of us.

See full report…

Jim Myogenic talks to SPIN about doing live visuals with Jon Hopkins during Club Transmediale. Everything about these visuals looks great, even from a low-res online video and chat: prominent projection behind the stage, lots of thoughtful and original content, intelligent focus on materials instead of just a chaotic assemblage of things, and what sounds like the right balance of pre-set preparation and live triggering. Jim and Jon, if you’re ever passing through New York… hope you say hi.

Jim’s setup is Resolume, both The Original Series and The Next Generation. That is, the saucy new MacBook Pro with its more powerful GPU runs the new Resolume Avenue, and the old PC runs the tried-and-true Resolume 2.x. It’s funny, as a lot of Resolume users I know are hanging on to their old sets, which I think says a lot about that tool – you live with it even as the technology ages.

Found via Resolume on Twitter.

Friend of CDM Simulcast caught up with Australian video remixers Soda Jerk last year, to talk about their technically intense, epic, narrative remixes.

Soda_Jerk are two remix artists who create brand spanking new stories with their compositions. They work across several mediums but are probably best known for their entirely sample based audiovisual films that range from a couple of minutes to an hour long.
Their feature length and excellently named, “Pixel Pirate II: Attack of the Astro Elvis Video Clone” uses over 300 video and audio sources and stars Elvis Presley doing battle with the evil Moses and his Copyright Commandments fighting for the ancient art of the remix. The film also stars The Hulk, Monkey, Batman & Robin, Michael Jackson and The Ghostbusters.

I had the chance to hear these two inspiring artists speak at a recent exhibition and thought I’d hit them up for an interview…

So there’s an endless amount of content to sample and remix out there…what grabs your eye and ear?

We never know what’s going to grab us until we hear it or see it, so we just watch and listen to as much stuff as we can, as much of the time as we can. We do have a soft spot for aged or damaged footage though: decaying celluloid, warped video grain or digital glitches.

I really like your decision to use narrative in your remixes. Can you give us some insight into your workflow? Do you come up with a story first, or just sample everything that sounds and looks good and say “Cool, we can make a remixed feature film starring Moses, Elvis and Bill Murray.”

Our work is largely research driven, in the sense that we generally start with a concept that we are interested in and investigate it by consuming culture that’s related to the area (books, films, audio tracks etc). So with our most recent project “Astro Black: A History of Hip-Hop” we were looking into this interesting field of theory called Afrofuturism and that lead us to dig through science fiction films and anything related to African-American sonic culture. It’s from these viewing sessions that usually an idea will emerge about what shape the project might take and then we’ll search in a more focused way for shots we could use. The way the narrative evolves is constantly shifting as we discover new footage that leads us in new directions. It involves a degree of openness to improvisation.

And what about technical workflow, I’m guessing there’s a fair bit of masking going on there?!

Yeah, our process is definitely large on the tedious and labor intensive aspects. Most projects involve weeks or months of doing nothing but just pushing masks around in After Effects.

Miguex (who you may know from the CDMo comment stream.) has interviewed Suryummy, creator of the fantastic Interstellar Sugar (previously on CDMo).

Interstellar Sugar - Suryummy from Suryummy on Vimeo.

[ How would you describe you ideal gig? ]
Short and sweet. One thing that I’ve learned over the years, nothing can kill your artistic vibe more then 8 hours of continuous retinal mixing overload. That being said I enjoy the unexpected.

One of my favorite mixing experiences ever, took place in a tiny club in Shibuya Tokyo during a Lightrhythm Visuals tour. I had no idea what type of music I would be mixing too, was totally unprepared and had just managed to get unlost from the Tokyo jungle. The band turned out to be the most fierce live jazz group on the planet. I had never felt so thrilled and challenged as a live visualist.

[ Where do you think video performance is heading? ]
Hopefully to higher levels of quality and meaning. Obviously technology will be as important as ever in defining the landscape of live visuals. The high end tools that are available today such as VDMX, Processing and Resolume 3 will hopefully give artists the freedom to focus more on the art form rather then the technical hurdles that have plagued the movement for such a long time.

More tips from production to performance in the full interview at Accent Feed.
Suryummy’s Site.

After posting about their upcoming live performance on ORF TV, I got in touch with AddictiveTV to learn a bit more about their performances this weekend.

What kind of rig will you be taking to Vienna? Computers? Hardware? Software?

A mixture of all three! It took us days to figure out exactly what was required, to be able to do exactly what we need to be doing, as it’s quite an unusual task we’re undertaking, especially the audiovisual sampling of live streams that you’ve actually no idea what exactly they’ll be until they happen!

This just isn’t a normal gig set up and no equipment exists to do exactly what’s needed. Ideally, we’d like some huge Grass Valley multi-channel mixer that takes everything from SDI to Y/C and their Turbo recorder or similar, but the audio side of this kind of kit simply doesn’t work in the same way as DJ kit and certainly doesn’t have audio effects, or appropriate video effects for that matter.

Live in Kuwait. Image by WatchLookSee

So central to our set-up will be one of Pioneer’s new SVM-1000 audio/visual mixers. We worked with Pioneer on the development of the SVM, from conceptual ideas to the testing of the early prototype - so it’s good to be pushing it’s capabilities outside of the club environment. We’ll also be using our own customised Edirol V4 video mixer that’s been modified to take audio, and we’ll use it to shrink the picture and do further overlays; allowing us to have two live images side-by-side, using our laptop running VJammPro - which is essentially an AV sequencer and clip triggering software (which can also shrink the picture live too); we’ll also capture footage on this laptop from any of the live feeds and place the clips in VJammPro. And to complete the set-up we’ll have three DVJ-1000’s - Pioneer’s DVD turntables, and a DJM-1000, which is a six channel audio mixer plus it’s effects unit, the EFX-1000. Oh and ten tonnes of cables, connectors and video monitors!

Addictive TV’s Modified Edirol V4. Image by artificialeyes

How many concurrent feeds will you have access to?

We’ll be getting six live feeds, and I think it’ll be a mixture of live cameras from the same event and at other times different events coming down at the same time.