APPARATI EFFIMERI Tetragram for Enlargement from Apparati Effimeri on Vimeo.

Apparati Effimeri write to let us know about their latest visualist projection mapping project, “TETRAGRAM FOR ENLARGEMENT.” Watching abstract patterns wend their way across the geometries of the castle-like building is hypnotic, to be sure. But it’s as the visuals make the building seem to melt, collapse, and reconstruct itself into fluid shapes worthy of Dali that things
get really interesting.

Blog post + stills

I have to ask: is it really club culture that has “failed” the visualist, or just the limited architectures of the clubs we have now? Projection mapping has tended to be the domain of “art” visuals. But I wonder if music and visuals alike might benefit from sharing new spaces. Heck, I’d be happy to go dance outdoors to adventurous music programming while visuals crept around the buildings around me.

So, do spread this stuff around, because sometimes the live event metaphor in which a lot of us find ourselves is something very different — the silo.

“Visual label” ANTIVJ has made an artistic expertise of projection mapping, light sculpture, outdoor projection, and generally painting projections onto architecture and objects. I got to see their latest work in Montreal at MUTEK, and will have an interview with them up this week. In the meantime, here’s a really stunning work from the Netherlands, at the cathedral in Breda. With original music by Thomas Vaquié, played on organ by Gerard Maters with light design by Giacinto Caponio, Grote Kerk is a sublime modern, digital spectacle, a light and sound show in a tradition extending back to the magic lantern shows. All of this is performed live using software from arKaos. (Thanks to arKaos’ own Marc Nostromo, who incidentally has a fantastic blog on noisepages.)

http://antivj.com/

For another work from this crew, here’s Joanie Lemercier’s Live Painting: Shackleton, performed live in Croft, Bristol, UK at the end of last year:

AntiVJ - Live Painting: Shackleton from AntiVJ on Vimeo.

As inspired by mememamo’s Visual Space Music, I bought some Ikea Saxan curtains last year for DIY rear-projection experiments.

Initially these were used for a series of pixel-cloud shaped screens at the Game On opening night.

The Saxan curtains (US$4) were great for this kind of shaped, temporary screen. The white PEVA material is bright and contrasty when rear projected through glass, and we used a black PVC “Joining and Sealing Tape” to create our screen shape, projecting the cloud on the curtain and then applying the tape directly to make the outline.

We’d initially planned to use gaffer tape, but quickly changed out minds as the first test piece stuck unevenly, and tore the curtain when we tried to move it. The PVC tape we found felt like thin, wide insulation tape, and was somewhat repositionable, while still sticking firmly and providing some structure to the thin curtain. After our shape was outlined, it was a quick and simple process to cut out the desired shape with craft knives.

Amazing 3D immersion technology from IDEO Labs on Vimeo.

IDEO Labs share this immersive projection rig. As described:

A simple, featherweight headset, a 10′ x 10′ x 10′ white room, and $600,000 worth of projector and computer equipment, combined with the smarts of the folks at Eon Reality, results in one insanely real experience.

Of course, while you can’t capture immersive 3D in an online, two-dimensional video – you can only watch someone else reacting to the rig – it’s the guy’s reactions that really make the video.

There’s only one significant issue with this approach, which is all the squared-off corners. I got to visit a spherical projection rig with a bridge at the University of California Santa Barbara MAT program, and the sense of full immersion was really great. There, the problem is brightness: with 360 degrees, black is the only appropriate projection surface so that you don’t get too much bounce from the other screens, and for the same reason, you don’t get as much brightness.

There is a lot happening, though, and I’m suspicious that a lot could be possible even without $600,000. Ghetto “immersion” with red and blue comic book-style glasses, anyone?

Or maybe you could just have someone toss fish at you from behind the crowd for added effect.

Via zeroinfluencer on Twitter.

CASTALIAN / New concept Audio Visual Touch Sequencer from nucode on Vimeo.

We’ve talked in the past about the idea of user interfaces and visual output merging. Instead of a UI on one screen and visuals on another, the idea is that the interface itself melds into the output. I can think of few better examples of how this begins to evolve than a video recently posted on Vimeo by user nucode. Working with a projected, camera-tracked multi-touch interface and audiovisual loops in custom Flash-based software, nucode manipulates samples as though on an alien, futuristic interface.

The result: a sequencer that has no timeline and seamlessly pulls content from online sources:

• Audiovisual loops, set as rotating circles/bubbles, palettes of sounds and visuals
• Sequence events together by attaching bubbles to one another – no timeline needed
• Gesture triggering of YouTube video search (make a gesture, get a video from YouTube)
• Simple real-time audio (low-pass filter, echo, and so on – sounds like there’s either some live synthesis or more sophisticated scrubbing going on, too)
• Runs in the browser on any OS, built with Flash and ActionScript 3