In January I had a chance to catch up with Deborah Johnson, who was touring Australia at the time with Sufjan Stevens. The morning after their show in Brisbane, Australia we recorded an hour-long discussion of the show, and seeming to cover the whole gamut of visual creativity and performance. I’ve finally managed to transcribe this epic from audio to text.

Deborah: I would really like to see our show from the audience’ perspective.

Jaymis: I would have loved to have shot some video. There are some really beautiful moments. Did you notice that there was quite a bit of the crowd cheering visuals?

Jaymis: No?

Jaymis: I noticed that there was a couple times when you did something, nothing else was happening, and people around me were “yeaah!”, and not just the people I’ve conditioned to do that, either.

Deborah: ~laughs~

Jaymis: You’ve obviously got a good aesthetic happening. I’ve seen on your website as well you have that kind of drawn aesthetic. Do you do the illustration yourself?

Deborah: On the website?

Jaymis: In the set, you have images that come up: Stars, growing vine objects…

Deborah: Those are all based on drawings, they’re all drawing programs that are written in Director. I work with a programmer, and we’ll be like “this is what I want to have happen”, and he writes an algorithm to make that happen.

Jaymis: That was my next question: How do you do your particle effects with the stars which are drawn on, stay and then fall. So that’s Director?

Deborah: Yep.

Jaymis: Peter would be very excited that someone’s still using Director… So that’s then rendered out to video clips?

Deborah: I mean, the dream is to be able to make them instruments that I can play live, but…

Jaymis: Director’s getting a bit old for that kind of thing. You might have to go with Processing or Quartz Composer or one of those fun things.

Deborah: I really would like to learn Processing. Recently I feel like I’ve become more of a curator, art director.

Jaymis: As video gets bigger that’s what you have to become; you can’t do it all anymore.

Deborah: For this, I knew what I wanted to happen, but I knew that I would need some help. So I started working with a programmer named Siebren Versteeg, who’s an awesome artist in New York. It was great because in Sufjan’s music there’s just so many layers of stuff that happens. My skills were limited to be able to create something that’s just totally generative and so massive, there’s no way that I could author that stuff. So how do you just get a source concept and send it out over an animation.

One thing that I worry about is that it becomes too… Say with Processing or that kind of work, people associate it with screensavers?

Jaymis: Very true. Well I guess that growing vines is one of those things which is quite ubiquitous with that sort of thing. Obviously you’ve got a particularly cool little spin on it and it works really well in the context of what’s happening on stage, but “something growing” is a very standard…

Majesty Snowbird, Live Visual from CandyStations on Vimeo.

Deborah: Exactly.

Jaymis: I think the other thing is that if you become too focussed on one particular tool, then that influences your output as well.

I’m sure that after all of our gentle prompting, people are keeping a watchful RSS reader over Flight404.

For those who haven’t been paying attention: The latest iteration in Robert’s wonderfully evolving Magnetosphere series was designed for the AniBoom Radiohead video contest:

Weird Fishes: Arpeggi from flight404 on Vimeo.

More information.

We asked earlier this month if you’d be using Flickr for videos? Here’s one answer — and in this case, it seems perfectly-suited to the medium. Accent Creative used a short video spot — tweaked to Flickr’s microformat length constraints — as a way of promoting an upcoming event. That works nicely, as lots of people already use Flickr streams to store photos promoting events and the like.

And, of course, the Create Digital Music side of our heart loves the sound-making box that shows up in there.

Brokenbeat Night - MoGraph Promo

Here’s another example, in this case using a short video as a kind of micro-showreel:

Via the CDMo Flickr Pool - thanks to everyone for all the eye candy you’ve been sending! Why blog when I can just watch the lovely stuff you’re doing?

This really illustrates what could start to happen with media on the Web: rather than littering everything everywhere, and rather than seemingly-redundant sites interfering with one another (Flickr for video?, asked users), we get content tailored for the venue. In fact, vids like this really don’t necessarily belong on Vimeo — and likewise, I’ve come up with short snapshot videos I wouldn’t want as part of my video pool.

Promising stuff. And as video proliferates, the visualist and motion graphics artist become king. Get ready.

We’ve seen visual vinyl, via the video stylings of Serato’s VIDEO-SL plug-in. But here’s a more literal approach: stick the camera on the turntable. Via a multi-camera setup, Cut Chemist and DJ Shadow are doing that with their honest-to-goodness, scratching turntablist sets. I especially like the camera up close on the turntable itself — something instrumentalists might try, too. (Well, maybe you want to stop somewhere … no endoscopies during your performance, please, unless you’re an avant-garde performance artist or something.)

More on this sort of thing soon, but there’s something to get the thought process going. Thanks, Jaymis!

Beeple - iv.7 (annoyingly small mix) on Vimeo

Beeple’s Audiovisual exploits have been featured twice on Create Digital Motion, and raised a variety of questions. Momo the Monster cornered Mike Winkelmann in a dark alley and forced him to give us the information you crave.

What can you tell us about your method?

Well, usually I write the basis for a song using loop-based software like FL Studio, then i take and export all of those loops and make video that syncs precisely to each note in the loop. If it’s a melody line, then I will try to make it so that you can discern the different notes that are being played. If it is a more rhythmic or atonal sound,I will try to make some piece of video that “looks” like that sound. Then I render the loops of music and video together into one video file. Next, I take those video files into a NLE (I use Vegas 4, mostly) and attempt to write a large piece using my audio/video loops. I layer all of the pieces of audio/video, and because they are all individually synced, bits of my piece, the end product kind of makes itself in terms of video.

We’re big fans of NIN’s new album, Ghosts. Now, visualists will get to freely interpret the album in an open YouTube “festival”…

I’ve come out of my self-imposed solitary confinement only due to my man love for Trent Reznor. (Don’t ask.) Following up on the huge success of the Ghosts I-IV release (grossing a cool $1.6 mil during the first week), Trent is announcing a partnership with YouTube to present a user-submitted film festival for works inspired by Ghosts. From NIN.com:

First of all, a sincere THANK YOU for the response to Ghosts. We are all amazed at the reaction for what we assumed would be a quiet curiosity in the NIN catalog. My faith in all of you has been restored - let’s all go have coffee somewhere (my treat)!

Today we announce the expansion of the Ghosts project into the visual world. This record began as an experiment with us using sound as a means to describe visuals. Early in the project we thought it would be interesting to see what the community could create / collaborate on as a reaction to the music we were making. We wanted to keep the canvas as blank as possible for you, hence the lack of descriptive song titles and the primarily textural artwork and packaging.

So here’s the plan: we’ve teamed up with YouTube to host a “film festival” around Ghosts. The concept is for you to take whatever tracks you feel inspired by from Ghosts and create what you feel should accompany them visually. You will be able to see all of the submissions, and a team of us (including me) will be sorting through them and setting aside ones we feel are exceptional. Eventually (within a couple of months?) we will present a virtual “film festival” with me and some special guests presenting selections of your work.

This isn’t a contest and you don’t win elaborate prizes - it’s meant to be an experiment in collaboration and a chance for us to interact beyond the typical one-way artist-to-fan relationship. We’ve discussed some interesting ways this could go, including multiple installments of the online “film festivals,” to broadcast TV specials, to a one-time live performance of the entire Ghosts record with your visuals involved. It really depends on how this progresses and develops.

We are all very much looking forward to what you come up with, and hope you enjoy the experience. Visit our YouTube channel for information on how to participate.

NIN’s music has been and continues to be some of the most visually inspiring and cinematic music I listen to; now here’s a chance for myself — and everyone else — to freely be share their work and use NIN’s music without repercussion. If only there were more time!

Solar, with lyrics. from flight404 on Vimeo.

People can argue and theorize about digital art as a medium all they want. The answer is as simple as a simple word:

Iterate.

Do it over and over and over again in little bits developing techniques. Start small, add small, but keep adding over and over and over again. Iterate.

flight404 does that about as well as anyone in the Processing community, and it shows. His latest visualization of a Goldfrapp tune, now with lyrics, is stunning. And the addition of lyrics shows that these kind of techniques aren’t just eye candy — they can convey information, and do it elegantly and expressively.

Robert’s techniques are typically far from real-time, so part of why I enjoy them so much is they’re a challenge to those of us on the performance end to figure out how to do more interesting things live.

The other interesting thing here is the beat detection. Eventually, he wound up adding the beats manually, as detailed in the post linked here. That in itself is telling to me — as a composer, having worked on scoring and how things line up creatively, I’ve always found indirect relationships compelling. So this speaks to me of the importance of creating some imperfect algorithms, algorithms that don’t always line up so they challenge our ear and eye to make the connection.

Oh, and I love the fact that “Frankenstein” appears in the end, like a cameo by Alfred Hitchcock.

Solar, with lyrics [ Flight 404 ]

(It’s a long weekend in the US, so I figured we could handle double the inspiration.)

I’m not sure why we didn’t mention it here while it was “current”, but we did talk about Radiohead’s recent webcast of their album In Rainbows on CDMusic. Even if you’re not in to Radiohead it’s worth watching, as it brings a beautifully varied, personal, low-budget aesthetic to one of the biggest bankers in modern music, it completely changed how I identify with the album. As mentioned in the CDMusic comments, I’m historically a huge Radiohead fan, but have found myself drifting away from their music over the last couple of albums. I paid money for In Rainbows (even though I didn’t have to), listened to it once or twice and then forgot about it, but the Scotch Mist videos made me re-examine the entire album, and it finally clicked for me.

All of this preamble is by way of introducing Adam Buxton, a British filmmaker who says he “helped out” on the webcast, but is billed #2 in the introductory credits to the piece, so it seems he was doing a little more than making coffee.