As visualists, the sad truth is we have a poorer sense of the history of our medium than musicians. Part of this is simply a lack of access. YouTube is a weak substitute, but it’s a start. In that spirit, Karl (Format K) sends us the minimal geometric machinations of pioneering electronic graphics artist and animator John Whitney. We’ve previous mentioned the role of Whitney and Larry Cuba in helping the modern computer graphics industry to be born – with a little help from a movie called Star Wars. Here, you get a real sense of an artist working within the restrictions of the technology to produce something beautiful. It’s a chance to recognize how we’re indebted to this kind of work. While the temptation may be to replicate effects like this with more modern tools, they also illustrate how you can focus on a technique within a tool – and perhaps there’s a digital equivalent of focusing on artistic limitations.

The musical score turns this into a dream collaboration, with the work of Terry Riley.

It’s nice to have access to this, but boy, would I love to have an HD-quality rendition of many of these films available for download or on a high-quality medium like Blu-Ray. Any chance a modern-day Voyager would re-release seminal visualist work from decades past?

In case Quake creator John Carmack wasn’t already your hero, here’s a nice move: when EA wouldn’t green-light an iPhone version of the classic first-person shooter Wolfenstein 3D, Carnack had an answer: fine, just let me do it myself.

In an astonishingly open (though typically Carmackian) post on the subject, one of the world’s great game programmers weighs in on some important issues:

• How open source game code made the project more feasible – and allows an entire community to get in on the action
• How the innards of the iPhone compare as a mobile platform (the DS compares more favorably than you might think, but at the end of the day, it’s more about developers properly taking advantage of the device)
• How the architecture of the game had to be modified to work properly

If you have a passing interest in games or mobile, but especially if you’re getting into OpenGL programming, the article is a must-read. And, in fact, I think it illustrates that focusing on simpler game engines can be a great way to learn about development – the concepts are basic enough that even someone starting out with 3D could pick something up here.

Wolfenstein 3D: iPhone Development

There’s some real history here: Carmack gave us Wolfeinstein 3D, Wolfenstein gave us the first-person shooter, the first-person shooter drove the demand for real-time 3D on game cards, and now we’re using the whole thing to make live visuals as well as games. (And quite a few visualists I know go and hunt zombies in their spare time, thus keeping us sane to write more code / make more visuals…)

The very things that make many of us so passionate about the bleeding edge of visual technology make us equally attached to vintage media – not out of nostalgia, out of a love of what is expressive.

Our friends over at Retro Thing have devoted their entire site to such matters. But as we mourn the loss of the Small Thing print magazine, they have some particularly useful posts this week related to some of those older formats.

Signs of hope:

Where To Find Regular 8mm Film

– that’s the important one. It’s possible to still go pick up Super 8 film, and I’m pleased to hear the Super 8 cartridges from Kodak are still being made. I’m actually a little surprised that super 8 footage isn’t making its way into more digital visualist sets.

New Low Cost 8mm Film Transfer Unit

– likely out of reach of many of us at US$1495, but still in a range that it could impact anyone who needs such transfers.

Polaroid Fanatics Gets Another Chance

– a long shot, but it seems former Polaroid employees are trying to rescue the old Instant Integral film plant in the Netherlands. That’s heartening, because the lousy new digital-printing Polaroids just aren’t the same. The whole appeal was watching that film develop.

What’s your favorite “antiquated” medium? Do you work with formats like 8mm or even film Polaroids for your sets? How do you get them in digital form? We’d love to hear from you.

Bit Shifter & Flight404 • “Feedback” / “Flight Risk” from Bit Shifter on Vimeo.

It’s not just sound going chip, lo-fi, retro. Live visuals are, too. With Jaymis at Brisbane’s Game On fest and New York’s chip blowout the Blip Festival coming up next week, it seems a perfect time to look at some inspired 8-bit visuals – call them, instead of chiptune, chipviz? Both are set to the wonderful sounds of Bit Shifter, a star of the 8-bit scene if ever there were one.

flight404 aka Robert Hodgin is known for lush, digital videos, the very opposite of lo-fi. I know I’ve heard more than one live visualist getting into Processing who was disappointed to discover the effects are often rendered, not live, because even high-end computers can’t do all of the eye candy in real-time. Now, it is very possible to scale back just a bit and get some sophisticated-looking 3D eye candy out of Processing, his open-source, coding-for-artists tool of choice. But on this week’s occasion of the 1.0 release of Processing, it’s just as nice to note that Processing will take you the other way – toward minimalist, elemental graphics. Coding in this way is the perfect tool for that sort of thing, and it works wonders for live performance because of the amount of control you can have with the music.

Robert muses on the significance of this work. I guess it’s not at all fair to call it 8-bit, but let’s say 8-bit-inspired:

From the vault [flight404 blog]

If it’s genuine lo-fi visuals you want, look no further than the wonders of noteNdo, aka Jeff Donaldson. Working with modded consoles, digital sources, and the ravages of tape (VHS, MiniDV) as an effect, he comes up with fantastically-organic, glitchy results. If you ever spent parts of the 80s staring into the worst of your VHS collection because you liked what it did when it got destroyed, you’re one of us. Props to Jeff for making it into real art.

See y’all at the Blip Festival. But my (deserving) adoration for your work aside, don’t be surprised if CDM holds an underground 32-bit party, just to be spiteful and defend our fetish for more Fi (Hi-Fi, that is).

Bit Shifter & noteNdo • “Tea With Galactus” from Bit Shifter on Vimeo.

You’ve heard the Theremin as the eerily-beautiful musical instrument, but via the magic of pitch detection, it can be a controller for video, too. Sean McDonald of the Moog Foundation recently hooked up the original gestural, touchless controller to VDMX video software at the HATCHfest arts festival in Moog home base Asheville, North Carolina. The result: festival goers making sweet, sweet video mixes by waving their hands around the early 20th-Century invention.

The Theremin has a special connection to Moog, too; not only are the Moog Music Theremins arguably the best available, but it was making Theremin kits that helped inspire Bob Moog to go into synthesis. The rest is history, and as music and visuals continue to converge, I’d say there’s plenty of history left.

Want to try this yourself? We’ve done a couple of stories on the idea on our sister site Create Digital Music:

How to Turn Theremin into MIDI, Free with Pd
Theremin as AV Controller: Technical Details from Spacedog

If you’re not familiar with the Bob Moog Foundation, they’re a really terrific organization working to preserve the archives and legacy of the synthesis pioneer. That should be deeply important to visualists, too, as the modern VJ/live visual scene got its start in the 60s events at which synths first appeared, and our technologies often cross paths. (But I probably don’t have to convince you of that, do I?)

Guest blog: Live video remixing controlled by a theremin at HATCHfest [Bob Moog Foundation Blog]

Thanks to David Lublin of Vidvox for this one. Unfortunately, the documentation is pretty poor, so use your imagination while watching this video: