In William Gibson’s novel Spook Country released last year, artists create a new generation of “locative art.” Peer through goggles at a real-world scene, and see something that isn’t literally there. Few would say it was Gibson’s best novel – perhaps partly because the plotline didn’t live up to how compelling the locative art ideas were. But the art has already moved from science fiction into reality.

CONTAKT @ Amsterdam from Ali M. Demirel on Vimeo.

David Lublin at Vidvox points us to this fantastic video from CONTAKT, playing live in Amsterdam with Richie Hawtin:

I’ve started to use Kineme plugins for Quartz Composer in my live set. Here is a good example based on ‘tb soundflower’ composition by alx toneburst. I’ve modified it to my performance and controlled variables live through VDMX. It worked great when Richie was playing with the mixer. Special thanks to alx toneburst and Kineme!

I have to get over how great the projection looks. Yes, event planners / promoters / club owners, this is how it’s supposed to be.

It’s also great to see some really lovely generative work. And you can expect more. The Kineme plug-ins are open-source, donation-based plug-ins for Apple’s lovely Quartz Composer.

kineme.net

There are some great little tools in there, including useful utility stuff – work with the Apple Remote, QuickLook, audio devices, cameras – and visual stuff as well, including OpenGL-based tools and a network camera tool. Anyone else using them? Other QC tips? Seems like we need to do an updated Quartz Composer guide soon. (In the meantime, I remain committed to developing some of the stuff I’m working on on the PC, vvvv, and Processing sides!)

CDMotion contributor vade has posted the first release of his v002 Screen Capture tool, which allows video from the screen (including video, 3D — anything output to OpenGL) to be routed between applications. It all happens on the GPU, which means it’s very, very fast. In vade’s words:

v002 Screen Capture allows you to capture your desktop, or a portion of it to a texture and further process it. This can be used to bring in other applications output or windows as a source input to VDMX or other Quartz Composer compatible patch hosts.

Screen Capture is fully GPU accelerated, and therefore is very fast.

Sample Processing, 3L, Modul8, Jitter, GEM, or any application, and mix them in VDMX, or your Quartz Composer patch host of choice.

Right now, the release is Quartz Composer and Mac-only. (Quartz Composer plug-in support means it’ll also drop nicely into software like VDMX.) But there’s an open call to port this to other environments (Pd, Max/MSP/Jitter, Processing, and such). It may even be possible to replicate the basic technique on another operating system, though the implementation would have to be reconsidered.

We’d love some feedback, so have at it! Especially interested in Processing support; see the thread on the Processing forums.

v002 Screen Capture Quartz Composer plug-in download

Peter posted last week about Flight of the Conchords’ new video.

For additional CDMo flavour, Toolfarm have an interview with the visual effects gurus for this clip, talking about the shoot, with lots of motion tracking and colour correction thrown in:

Michele: The job involved tracking the stunt double’s heads with the singer’s heads. I noticed tracking dots on the stunt double’s cheeks, nose and chin in your photos. Jemaine and Bret were shot against a greenscreen and with a green cape. How did you get it to match? Can you talk a bit about the process of tracking and rotoscoping and matching angles?

Dave: This was a very tedious process that had to planned out for the entire video factoring in the limitations we were facing. We had placed tape on the doubles faces for reference as to how their heads rotated and twisted. We made sure to keep our doubles aware of what was happening in each shot, but allowing them room to perform their stunts.

Dave: Some of the takes were really wild and crazy and we would have to come in and tone down the movement a little to make sure we were going to able to recreate the same move on the greenscreen with Bret and Jemaine. The most difficult part was getting Bret and Jemaine to match these moves and be able to maintain lip-sync. On set (greenscreen) we would run each guy through individually and have them watch a monitor playing back the footage from the shoot. This footage was played back, mirrored in some cases, and slowed down to 50%. This gave the guys a chance to lip sync and get the head movements down.

Check out the full interview on Toolfarm, there’s some fascinating insights there from some obviously talented artists creating big things with a tiny team.

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:

vvvv40beta16 release with plugin interface [Results in Reverse blog]