Space exploration has had a deep impact on the way a lot of us see the world and think about our art. So I can’t wait for this Saturday’s Yuri’s Night Bay Area, which will bring a convergence of bleeding-edge music, art, technology, science, and visualism to a 12 hour-long party on NASA’s airfield outside San Francisco. We’ll be bringing some of the best of this event to you all around the world. Read or subscribe to RSS for our special minisite to make sure you don’t miss a thing, wherever you are on the planet; updates will continue live through the event and in the couple of weeks afterward:

yuricdm.com: Yuri + CDM + music + motion
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If you’re near the Bay Area, let us know if you’re coming to the event. We’d love help with photos, video, and coverage. And if you’re involved in a Yuri’s Night somewhere else in the world, let us know about that, too.

Here’s just a sample of the visualist angle at Yuri’s Bay Area:

Lighting designers rely on DMX in a similar way that electronic musicians use MIDI; it’s the glue which binds their performance together. Many older (as in age, not experience) VJs I meet have come to live video performance through a profession in lighting. Younger visualists tend to have been attracted to the artform through work or study in film and TV, or a love of electronic music and culture. These people (like myself) may know that DMX exists, but have no real experience with the protocol, or the gear it controls.

So when artificialeyes demoed the VMS system for Peter and I at ByteMeFest in Perth last year, I was struck by how simple this step into the lighting world could be. Todd and Michael were using off-the-shelf VMS projection units and controlling them with a clever little open source USB DMX controller called the uDMX, which includes software to translate midi messages into DMX.

So when it came time to plan for the 2008 album launch tour with Bobby Flynn, my desire to expand the impact of our show (while keeping to an extremely restrictive budget and baggage allowance) put a moving video system right on top of my list of possibilities. In the end we didn’t have the cash to invest in VMS, but taking Peter’s previously tried route of mating an inexpensive Rosco iCue robotic mirror with the projectors we already had in our rig was a simple backup plan. For around AU$1000 each (around $600 in the US), plus a trip to the hardware store, we now have two functional (if currently rather ugly) DMX controllable video moving systems.

Fixate from Aaron Sjogren on Vimeo.

Aaron Sjogren shares this VJ test set from an installation last week. It raises an important point — even as we’ve talked about the importance of getting “out of the box,” rectangles can be cool, too. (Notice: combining multiple 4:3 rectangles already means you escape the bland aspect ratio.) And it illustrates the importance of good documentation, ideally in an actual environment. (Previously reliant on pricey cameras, cheap HD can give you great results if you know how to use it!)

I love the idea that communities like Vimeo will help raise the bar for visualists sharing their work.

Full HD version available on this video’s Vimeo page, along with more from Aaron.

And since Aaron wasn’t sharing, anyone care to ID the visual app in use on his Mac? (I also think people are warming to dudes standing behind computers, much as eventually we got used to people manning synths and mixers.)

In case you haven’t noticed, a theme has been emerging on CDMotion: alternative interfaces geared for performance, software that expands the range of expression, and projection that gets visuals out of the 4:3-ratio box. There’s no one solution, and the expense involved in the tools covers quite the gamut. (I may have to personally start the “ghetto” guide to this stuff.)

But bringing together these elements is still essential to raising the impact of visuals. I still hear the “but the visuals aren’t as important” over and over again from people outside our field, and I think it’s a phrase that is — mercifully — doomed to extinction as visualists expand their craft.

So, one artist collective we’ve been covering is Turkey-based artificialeyes.tv. We’ve seen the Video Moving System, the automated mirror system for projection, the Vixid mixer with its matrix and multiple blend mode features (among other things), and the eyeball-scorching interface of 3L (”Thrill”) now in beta.

To see it all put together, of course, we’d really like to hit the club in Istanbul. Barring that, though, Michael from artificialeyes.tv has directed us at some images and video.

It’s really clear to me from these images how little you need lights. And in motion, with architectural effects amplifying the imagery, the projector itself can be more than just lighting effect (especially with these in motion, something you don’t get from the stills).

I was first introduced to Cornelius in Film School, where the buddy I often shared a dark editing room would play ‘Count Five or Six’ while I attempted to count and mark 16mm frames on the tiny strips running through our moviolas. This January, I jumped on the chance to see him at the awesome Walt Disney Concert Hall with Plaid.

Let’s start off with Plaid. I was very excited to see them, after catching their AV Set with Bob Jaroc at the Natural History Museum last year. The visuals, unfortunately, didn’t do much for me. There were a few sweet moments, but mostly I felt trapped in a semi-monotonous 3d visualizer. As we broke for intermission, I talked with a few other VJs and they agreed. I was skeptical about Cornelius, and figured I’d just have to settle for a rockin’ audio set and not expect much from the visuals.

I’m glad I was wrong.

Cornelius’ set started off with slow-mo footage of a giant bubble floating in a park. I couldn’t tell if it was CG or footage, and it didn’t matter. With the beautiful swells of the music and the rainbow-riffing undulating soap mass onscreen, I was lifted out of my funk and ready for an awesome show.

Each song had its own specific video - and each one looked and felt very different from the last, which does wonders to avoid visual burnout. Ironically, the first visuals set where I was amazed by the variety of visual atmospheres was that first Plaid/Bob Jaroc show.

His LED light rig was simple and spectacular. He had several lighting stands with rows of LEDs, and custom patterns that matched or contrasted the video for each song. There were also strobes mounted on top of each pole which were used sparingly and to great effect to punch up the impact of the hardest-rocking songs. You can see them in the following video:

Cornelius Live 01-17-08 from momo_the_monster on Vimeo.

Please note that this footage, taken in video mode with a still camera from the very last row in the hall, does not nearly do justice to the quality and variety of video. That said, it’ll give you a taste of the night, which is better than nothing.

One question that remains after the show - how did they keep it all synced up? I suppose Cornelius could be playing to a click-track, but it all felt very freeform, so I’m inclined to discount that idea. My only guess at this point is a DVJ or something similar that played back the pre-composed videos, with a VJ speeding up or slowing down the playback to stay in sync - like a DJ would do to keep two records from trainwrecking.

If you have any favorite moments from the show, or ideas on how they put together the video, leave your mark in the comments.

Read the full interview with Cornelius (Keigo Oyamada) on Create Digital Music. He tells CDM:

For the live performance, it’s an important part as there’s not only the sound in live shows but the visual aspect. By creating visuals I think it helps to understand more about the music as my songs are in Japanese.

The picture says it all. BBC Research & Innovation is considering presenting video in surround. Just as audio surround assumes a still-central source, enhanced by additional material in the 360-degree audio field, the idea here is to capture ambient visuals using a fish-eye lens and then project that beyond the screen.

Of course, whatever the (uh, dubious, potentially) practical applications of such technology, there are plenty of compelling directions this could lead VJs. In general, the ability to control more of the environment and break out of the rectangular frame helps live visuals and installations. And there are other consumer, examples, as well: TV maker Phillips has toyed with creating ambient, colored light that matches the on-screen image with Ambilight, something DIYers have already cloned (see Hack a Day).

Hmmm.. I think BBC should just give us all projectors and we’ll go work on it, eh?

Graham Thomas, one of the researchers, explains:

Surround Video is a means of visually immersing the viewer into a TV programme.

It is like surround sound, an optional extra that enhances viewing on a normal display. The idea is to use a wide angle (or fisheye) camera fixed rigidly alongside the normal camera shooting the programme, and project the image onto the walls, ceiling and floor of the viewer’s room.

Wait, you know, this could have practical applications — making English children hide behind the couch even more readily during Doctor Who.

Pic Of The Day: Surround Video [BBC Internet Blog]

Via ChromaTouch, aka Leon Trimble

It’s not the lumens that count; it’s how you use them. But it’s easy to forget that when your projections just got blown out by lights, which someone used because they can move and your projection can’t. And it’s easy to get frustrated with the limitations of projection when you’re again looking at a static 4:3 rectangle on another flat wall.

Unfortunately, the art of using mirrors and other techniques to make projection more dynamic aren’t nearly as well known as they could be. Alternative projection techniques have also tended not to be productized. One significant exception is VMS or VideoMovingSystem. It’s the rare case of a hardware product made specifically for creative, live, performative projection. VMS is similar to the iCue moving mirror and some other tools, but it takes the kind of tools previously customized for lighting and specially adapts them to projection. You can actually buy a VMS unit with a projector already attached, or buy a unit that will fit a standard projector, making these more effective and easier to mount and use than lighting-specific instruments. It’s not a cheap solution for an independent VJ, but it is cheaper than competing custom lighting solutions. And if you read this site, you should already know that digital, computer-powered projection can do all kinds of things boring motorized lights can’t.

artificialeyes’ Michael Parenti and Todd Thille have taken a unique role in both championing the VMS tool and developing custom applications for it, as well as rocking Istanbul with the results. Michael said repeatedly that it saved the whole act of VJing for him. We got to talk to Michael and Todd about VMS and why it’s important — and, better yet, we got to play with these units, remote-controlled by artificialeyes’ 3L software and Michael’s iPhone. Even if you don’t plan on picking up VMS yourself (or I should say, convincing a club to buy them for you), you can tell from the interview how much of a difference changing a projection technique can make — not lumens, and not content, the two things we often get hung up on.

Jaymis: I have plenty more video from the ae guys waiting to be edited, both long-form looks into Thrill, and quick tips as well. That said, video is a bit of a new step for CDMo. This past year we’ve been talking about being a visualist mostly through the written word, so it would be great to get some feedback. Do you find video reviews and articles useful? Like the editing style? Think Peter should do voiceovers for software training videos? Hit the comments.

The world’s smallest projector is dead — long live the world’s smallest projector! PC Magazine reports from CES 2008 that Microvision’s PicoP projectors are smaller than an iPod, battery-powered, and make teh visualz with fricking laser beams. Max resolution 848 by 480, zoom 1:1, brightness and frame rate unknown. From Microvision’s marketing materials, it seems that we’ll be seeing cellphones with built-in PicoP projectors in the near future.

Via Slashdot.

Microvision Pico Projector Line Product Page

Ed.: Yep. I want one hundred of these, and my own club. -PK

John Hutchinson pointed us to this hack a day post about a new projector calibration system. Skip to minute 3:00 in the video to see the applications for multiple projections and non-rectangular, curved surfaces. It uses embedded light sensors in the projection surface and software — no projector hacks — and was created by researchers at Carnegie Mellon (pdf), Stanford, and Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs. Not only could this be a huge timesaver for groups like the Circus of Now, the time saved could be used to get really ambitious and experimental with your projection design.

Ed. Thanks to John Hutchinson for the tip!