VJs and visualists are often asked to just make something nice happen behind musicians. What if that relationship were more intense? And what if, instead of accompanying the music, the musicians accompanied the visualists (perhaps closer to a live cinema structure)?

That’s the question Daniel Hai and Joshue Ott ask in their series Soundtrack. It doesn’t mean the music is secondary - quite the opposite. Thursday night, we’ll be working live with some of the most talented improvisers I know. Robert Dick is the legendary flute player and composer who single-handedly revolutionized what the flute was, using avant-garde techniques that extend its sound to sound — well, anything like a flute. Morgan Packard, working with Jose Ayala, creates minimal, pulsing soundscapes that to me are the perfect sonic analog to some of the visual meditations.

I think it’s also significant that the visualists - myself, Joshue Ott, Daniel Hai, and Sabina Hahn - will be working with custom software we’ve built, allowing us to imagine the visuals as a performance instrument from the ground up. Daniel, for instance, has built the open-source VJ app OnyxVJ, created in Flash. Josh and I work in Processing and Java. Interestingly, Josh and I will each be going opposite directions - Josh is working with drawing illustrations in 3D on a tablet, whereas I’m deconstructing a library of photos, flattening things out more, until those textures become a kind of painterly medium.

I really hope that these kind of events start to prompt discussions about the relationship of music and visuals. Certainly, there’s already wonderful work happening, and wonderful collaboration. But getting people to actively engage these questions - particularly in the live visual-starved US - I think has a lot of potential. If nothing else, we’ll all be dining at Brooklyn’s MonkeyTown and having a chat or two over drinks afterward.

Those of you in the New York area, I hope you can make it. Those of you not, I should have documentation from this event and our appearance at mgfest in Cambridge (the one outside Boston) next weekend.

Thursday, 2/26
$10
Reservations highly recommended (limited capacity); reserve online or call 718.384.1369
7:30 - 10:00 pm
Monkeytown, 58 N 3rd St, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY
Map

Official Soundtrack Site
Soundtrack @ Facebook

In the meantime, the photo here is Josh and Morgan at Mutek last year, and we have video from a recent jam-in-progress.

Compression Reel from David OReilly on Vimeo.

8-bit chip music went mainstream in the last few years. Well, now it’s video compression’s turn. What, you thought crunchy blippy glitch sounds were cool, but that video could only look crap when over-compressed digitally? Too late: even Kanye West is doing it now.

First up: the best of this genre seems to come from director David O’Reilly, pictured above. The man has his own compression-themed t-shirts.

The music video getting the most blogosphere airplay comes from Chairlift. Chairlift’s “Evident Utensil” is a music video made of datamosh errors - a twisted visual special effect formed from an algorithmic anomaly. You’ve seen it before, and like many of us, were as fascinated by these digital artifacts as you were by the patterns your NES made when the carts got dusty and the VHS’s when you taped one few too many Cinemax feature presentations. Of course, because this is pieced together from compression artifacts, it looks even more horrible compressed, so you need the HD version. As the uploader says:

NORMAL QUALITY LOOKS LIKE BUNK. clink on “WATCH IN HD” to WATCH IN HD!!! HD stands for “HOLY DATAMOSH,” which is what G-D bestowed upon us in the form of a MASSIVE COMPUTER GLITCH that eats up INDIE MUSIC VIDEOS and turns them into INTERNET GOLD. See the gold in its purest form at:
http://www.court13.com/Chairlift-EvidentUtensil.mov

Evident Utensil, HD on Vimeo

But don’t think for a second this is going to stay some obscure “Internet” thing. No, media moves too fast for that now. Enter Kanye West. As Jeremy Elder writes on his blog shape+colour:

Datamoshing is the new tiltshift. I guarantee. Now it’s just a matter of who’ll do it well and which big company will soullessly made a campaign out of it “because the kids think it’s ‘dope.’”

datamoshing: kanye west + nabil elderkin: welcome to heartbreak. chairlift + ray tintori: evident utensil. « shape+colour

That’s just the beginning.

Then you discover a visual wormhole full of datamosh. After all, YouTube’s “related” feature is only going to pull up more digital nonsense. And so you dive in — and the vids with 300 counts turn out to be way more interesting.

They start normal, but get strange. You’re soon under someone’s umbrella of glitch.

And then you’re here, like, following a glowing piñata down your own optic nerve.

moiré (piano and organ) from defetto on Vimeo.

I expect I’m not alone in this: I use to spend time as a kid listening to long records of Beethoven and other stuff I loved, doodling endlessly in a sketchbook. I immediately found stimulation in the challenges of synesthesia: did that squiggle that was so much fun to draw while listening to a phrase really mean anything? Did the art look like chaos, or could I lose myself in the tunes the right way so that somehow I recorded what I was hearing? Later, composing scores and experimenting with graphical notation and struggling to play piano parts for Cage scores, I wondered about the same things in reverse, as a record for musicians.

So, amidst the various experimentation with visual coding tools and reactive visuals, I enjoy experiencing people’s code ideas. Even those sketches that seem to be unsuccessful or incomplete are interesting, because they show potential.

It’s terrific looking through defetto’s Vimeo stream, with lots of synesthetic ideas. It’s a digital take on my old sketchbook, only it’s instantly shared and the music plays along:

http://vimeo.com/defetto/videos

defetto, aka Pedro Mari, has lots of good stuff going. Above, a recent take on Jan Jelinek (Loop-finding-jazz-records) - Moiré (Piano and Organ). See also his photo stream on Flickr and behance portfolio. Other reflections as you’ve tried these sorts of things?

Updated: As noted in comments, the tool in question here is the superb Windows-only, free-for-non-commercial-use vvvv, a visual patching tool for multimedia and real-time visual synthesis. [CDM tag | site] I had Processing on the brain and forgot to make that clear.

If you’ve only been watching passively, have a go with vvvv. Or try Processing 1.0: the download now includes the terrific, stable, and accessible Minim audio library standard.

Ed. It’s one of the most important live visual inventions of all time — a visual creation on the level of something like the Minimoog for audio synthesis. And it’s now in software form. But just as importantly, there’s a chance to help its inventor complete his vision. -PK

Anton Marini, a.k.a. vade, has released the first public beta of the v002 Rutt/Etra software synthesizer, which is a leap forward in the simulation of the original, badass analog video synthesizer. Anton worked closely with Bill Etra himself, who gave invaluable feedback in the development of the software version. The Mac-only plugin is available now as open source donationware at 002.vade.info with sample compositions for Quartz Composer and VDMX. Ed.: This Mac stuff is all well and good, but I may work with Anton on looking at porting a cross-platform version, as well. And this ought to inspire other ideas in live visual synthesis - an area that has almost limitless frontiers to explore. -PK

Last weekend at a Starbucks in Chinatown, Bill dictated the following statement to me to accompany the release:

shift v.2, audiovisual installation at Museet for Samtidskunst from hc gilje on Vimeo.

HC Gilje sends along Shift, an “audiovisual landscape that combines multichannel sequencing, audio generated by video, and mapping/masking projection onto physical objects.” In short, big blocks become a sonic, visual sequencer through digital audio and projection. It’s really evocative to me, and part of what we’re talking about as we talk about the potential of mapped projections. (I hope that, for you as for me, it starts to make you think of other possibilities with these kind of media.)

HC’s research is “conversation with spaces,” and that’s fitting — after being caught doing visuals without real sound, or stuck in a “flatland” of our own making that’s in two-dimensional projection, visualists can now enter space.

From his research blog (which has lots of other interesting philosophical reflections, as well):

I decided to give my current series of relief projections a name, shift: moving from one place to another, changing the emphasis, direction or focus of something. It also has a loose relation to the idea of shapeshifting. As mentioned in my previous posts about my relief projection projects, shift combines multichannel sequencing, audio generated from video, with masking/mapping a projection to fit physical objects. This creates a dynamic audiovisual landscape, a spatial light painting. The software to create the installation has developed over almost two years and some workshops, and I have shown documentation of the development, but never exhibited it as a final work. It is only this autumn that I have found the right opportunity to show it in an exhibition. I was invited to participate in the Total Aktion exhibition at Museet for Samtidskunst in Roskilde, Denmark. I had the opportunity to exhibit there in 2005 as part of Get Real, a exhibition with real-time art as the focus (which was also shown at Kiasma in Helsinki, Finland). It also resulted in the book where I wrote the essay “Within the space of a moment”.

Shift became a sort of drone installation, with slow light/colour changes of volume, sometimes cut off by sharp white planes. The video documentation is a cut version showing some of the different scenes. Here is a slide show of still images.

shift v2: relief projection installation

Keep sending this stuff in — your own work or others’ — as we hope to have a round-up soon.

The Projection Tool