Korg has just publicly shown this trio of tiny USB controllers in London, and they look very tasty indeed for live visualism – small and thin enough to fit along the lip of a non-pro MacBook or 13” PC laptop, but with advanced assignment features, scene editing, and other features. That keyboard would go nicely with the new GrandVJ’s MIDI assignment features… and that could leave another laptop routed into a mixer with a bigger controller. No word on pricing or availability, but we’ll be watching. Full details on Create Digital Music:

Korg nanoKEY, nanoKONTROL, nanoPAD: Super Tiny MIDI Keyboard, Controller, Pads

Rechenzentrum at Mutek 2008 2 from Create Digital Media on Vimeo.

Far from randomly throwing some VJs in the background with music, there are some cases in which musician and visualist build a real relationship — just the sort of thing we care about here. CDM writers Liz and Peter Dines have been roaming the MUTEK festival in Montreal, and their dispatches and interviews are starting to come in. The word: audiovisualism is thriving.

Check out all the reports as they come in at our new “events” site, which we launched last week and we hope will grow into a kind of global event radar for music and motion:
events.noisepages.com

Peter was particularly taken with A/Visions, which is dedicated to audiovisualism. It’d be great to see this become more widespread at festivals here in North America (I gather it’s more common in Europe/UK). One very good sign: it was extremely difficult to get in.

Highlight so far: Liz has an interview with Rechenzentrum, the German A/V duo. Now, this bit may sound like a challenge to the Create Digital Motion community:

The video is live in the sense that I determine which image gets shown at which second, but obviously I’m not creating the image in real time because I’m not really interested in that. Real-time-created video usually looks pretty “blocky,” and I don’t really like it that much.

Curiously, though, he goes on to say:

It’s a mixture of pre-recorded video coming off a hard disk and live stuff reacting off of Marc’s music. But we’re not connected by any kind of MIDI connections or sound analysis. I just listen to his music and create stuff based on that. It’s a connection between our persons and not between our computers.

…. which sounds reasonably live to me. (I’m assuming he’s reacting badly to VJs unintentionally running lo-fi video not for aesthetic effect but just because they don’t know how to do anything else. And I expect we feel him on that.)

It does make me want to go do a big, blocky live visual set, though.

Full interview, with lots of good commentary about aesthetic issues, making it as A/V artists, and the relationship of sound and visual:
Interview: Rechenzentrum, A/V Duo at Mutek [Create Digital Music]

More from Mutek soon; stay tuned. (Below: more visuals from our friend Joshue, who’s really getting around with SuperDraw, his live generative visual tool built in Processing. Congrats!)

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

DJs are spoiled for choice when it comes to melding vinyl turntablism skills with digital mixing. But visualists have had no real mature option. Serato’s VIDEO-SL plug-in promises to change that, when coupled with their Scratch LIVE software and the Rane TTM-57SL mixer. To give the results a real shakedown, we turned to dj rndm and Robotkid, an audio-visual duo out of Boston who had already been frustrated with existing alternatives. Is the VIDEO-SL the breakthrough product visualists have waited for? -PK

Scratch LIVE v1.8 and Video-SL 1.0 boast the ability to not only mix video alongside your digital audio tracks but to give it groundbreaking control via Rane’s TTM-57SL mixer (required). After several anxious months of anticipation, we recently got our hands on the fader of Rane’s newest DJ gear to see how well it lived up to the demo shown at last year’s NAMM event. This progression of audio/ video integration seemed too good to be true, especially for those of us wrangling with the likes of Virtual DJ and Ms. Pinky. 

When the Video-SL plugin ran for the first time, we knew there was no going back.

Video demos

dj rndm takes the full VIDEO-SL setup for a spin, mixing:

… and scratching:

Effects, transitions

The Video-SL interface blends seamlessly into the Scratch LIVE window and functions with the same ease and readability known from previous iterations. The plugin includes over two dozen video effects and sixteen different transitions to layer and transform your video content in real-time. Most of the effects and transitions are fairly standard. While Serato has no immediate plans to allow for user-custom transitions and effects, they did tell us that adding new ones is relatively easy, and they say they hope to add new content based on feedback from the Scratch LIVE forums.

For those of you who didn’t make the awesome CDM Party last Friday night after NAMM, I’m pleased to bring you a recording of the live AV Remix that I performed with Acid&Bass.

Karate Kid AV Remix from momo_the_monster on Vimeo.

Performed live at the Unofficial NAMM After-Party using 3 MIDI-synced machines:

Video Machine:
Operated by Momo the Monster
Software: Isadora (custom patch for show)
Hardware: MacBook Pro, Monome 128, UC-33e, E-MU 0404

Audio 1:
Operated by Shane Hazelton
Software: Max/MSP With custom software IMPS (Improvisational Media Performance System), Lucifer
Hardware: Receptor VST plugin Player with Zounds of VSTs, Novation Remote 25, BCR 2000

Audio 2:
Operated by Stephan Vankov
Software: Ableton Live, Lucifer Plug-in (sending MIDI to Video Station)
Hardware: Mac, BCR2000, MPD16, Remote25LE, AirFX, NuVJ

Artist Caveats: This version was cut from the original 25+minute length to a more internet-friendly 7-1/2 minutes. Also, this is version one of the performance - we rehearsed only twice before this show, this is really our first run-through with everything (mostly) working. Comments welcome as we continue to develop the idea.

Karate Kid live remixing music performance from Create Digital Media on Vimeo.

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.

I got to run a feature yesterday on Create Digital Music with tips for getting good gigs, written by musician and Chicago electronica scenester Liz “Quantazelle.” That story has in turn generated a lot of discussion on CDM and elsewhere.

This raises an interesting question, though: how much of this advice applies to visualists and, specifically, standard VJ gigs? We face even more challenges: needing projection surfaces and (in some cases) projectors, having to “accompany” music, and having a new medium that most people still don’t quite “get.” My own gigs have often been nontraditional (modern dance) or mixed with music performance. But I’m curious what you think. And what would you want in an advice list if we could get the community here on CDMo to put one together?

Comment here, and feel free to join the chatter on Create Digital Noise; I’ve set up a new thread there:

Getting good music/visual gigs — let’s share advice

pure:dyne is a new free, open source, Linux-based, bootable, low-latency, high-performance operating system with Pure Data (Pd) as its main emphasis. Pop a CD, USB key, or bootable hard drive into your PC or Intel Mac, and you’re ready to go.

pure:dyne, the Art + Music Performance OS for PCs and Intel Macs [Create Digital Music]
pure:dyne Wiki

Now, needless to say, a big appeal of this isn’t just tuning the OS to your needs — it’s taking performance gigs wherever you go, ready to go, without having to worry about OS crashes. It’s installing a pre-built installation on a home-built Linux computer or Mac mini. It’s having a backup when your machine dies.

pure:dyne is completely tuned for Pd, the open-source cousin of Max/MSP. (Pd was created by Max’s creator, Miller Puckette, and Max and Pd have shared code and exchanged ideas since the very beginning.) Pd comes with an awesome lineup of Pd extras: PDP, PiDiP, Gem, GridFlow, RRadical, PixelTango — all the additional libraries that normally take some time and dependency-managing to install (and some of which just don’t work or don’t work as well on Windows or even Mac). So, if you’re ready for some free patching of custom visuals, you’re already happy.

But this got me thinking. Processing runs under Linux, and one challenge is often tuning a distro with the right drivers and settings (think webcam support, for one) and different Java versions. It’d be a no-brainer, if Processing is to be as successful as it could be, to tie it to a perfectly-tweaked, bootable distro. Flash, now with the robust Flash Player 9 for Linux, which also promises video4linux webcam support for live input, could do the same. (In fact, for my own purposes, a custom Pd+Flash+Processing distro would be heaven for live visualist work.) And that’s just the beginning.

This also makes a nice bridge between commercial software (the comfort of Adobe Creative Suite for assembling visuals, for instance) and free software (a perfectly-tuned, custom performance and installation environment).

So, what do you think? Who’s with me? And what would you want out of such an OS — or do you know of some places to get started? (One obvious starting point would be dyne:OS, the core on which pure:dyne is built.)