Even before we get to the “open source hardware” angle, it’s special just finding something that can function as a self-contained, digital visual instrument. And Milkymist more than qualifies, as a video synth that can produce seemingly-endless generative outputs from raw image and live video inputs.

But it is significant that this is open source hardware. Milkymist in its present form isn’t for everyone, but it’s evolving fast – and it’s a visual coder’s and hacker’s dream. Entirely custom hardware runs elegant scripts for effects like video feedback with razor-thin low latency and blazing framerates and performance. Add the open source spirit to that, and apart from the entire design and software being open to your inspection and modification, you get a box that wants you to add inputs, unusual controllers and sensors, and generally muck about with what you can do.

I’ve been watching this project for some time, but had to fully wrap my head around it. One of the developers, Sébastien Bourdeauducq, had been nagging me for some time. “Yes, yes, it’s open source, it does … things,” I responded. “Great.” But to tell the truth, I hadn’t fully grasped what would make you go down this path rather than a computer. Finally, I gathered Sébastien and some friends in a flat in Berlin-Friedrichshain to have a look.

It’s when you see the speed and low-level hackability of this thing that you get it. Jack in a keyboard, and just a couple of lines of code in the Milkymist’s scripting language, and you can suddenly produce an eye-popping feedback effect or layer. Being this close to the hardware is just terrific: you switch on the device, write very lean scripts, and it just works. And while you could do the same with a computer, there’s no mucking about with drivers and trying to contend with high input-to-output video latencies. Nor do you have to set up a whole environment before you begin scripting – it’s there right when you turn on the device (see screenshots of the interface.) There’s even a camera included in the box so you can get to work right away.

A look at some of the effects that Milkymist can produce – this using included presets:
Diversity of Programmable Effects

Granted, this kind of number-crunching with pixels may not appeal to you non-coders. So the main test of Milkymist in 2012, I think, is whether a combination of flexible presets, controller mappings, and documentation can turn this into something other people can just pick up and play. I was impressed enough that I’ll be loaning a unit to try my hand at that, alongside more conventional computer-based projects.

And yes, of course, a computer GPU has greater capabilities. But at this price, and with this integration, I think it’s best to think of Milkymist as a hacker-friendly, high-performance, standalone instrument. Hopefully soon we’ll also see mixer that make it easier to integrate a computer and something like the Milkymist. (There are options for doing that now, but not the digital mixer of which we’re all dreaming.)

Inside the Hardware

See the unopening and hardware tour above. Just a few of the specs that make this worth a look:

• Connect via Ethernet or (if you connect a router) WiFi
• DMX512 support and hardware connectors
• Onboard MIDI in and out
• Analog video input via composite, S-Video, and component
• VGA output
• Audio line input and integrated mic (for your audio-reactive visuals – and they’ve got some presets ready
• Remote control
• USB ports for MIDI devices, keyboards, mice, joysticks, etc., etc.
• Less than half a kilogram, 172x145x45 mm, and runs on a scant 5 watts.

Complete specs: http://milkymist.org/wp/for-developers/

This is all built on an FPGA, or “Field-programmable gate array.” For those of you are aren’t integrated circuit geeks, what that means is that you have a hardware platform where you can actually customize the function of the hardware after you’ve got it, not simply by changing firmware on a chip, but actually modifying the logic of the circuitry. (The Borg would have loved this.) It’s some hardcore stuff, but it’s about time a creative open source hardware project took advantage of this kind of platform, as it seems uniquely suited to the open source hardware concept. And what this means for you as an end user is that the Milkymist’s capabilities – thanks to all this custom hardware and software – are constantly improving. It’s hardware that gets better rather than worse; it’s the opposite of planned obsolescence.

Deep configurability – getting right at pixels and frame buffers with scripting, from the moment you turn it on, and being able to re-configure the hardware via the FPGA – is really the soul of the tool. You can re-program the very way in which signal is processed inside the box. And, in this case, the primary advantage of the FPGA is democratization of custom hardware, enabling a small band of coders to brew their own device, as with the Milkymist.

You can read more on the theory behind this design, and its high-performance approach to visual processing, in Sébastien’s thesis paper:
http://milkymist.org/thesis/thesis.pdf 

In Action

Milkymist hasn’t been seen out in the wild much, though hopefully that will change shortly. Here’s an example with our friend, the tallented visualist NO CARRIER, playing in Philadelphia at 8static in November, with Cheap Dinosaurs. (Skip ahead in the second vid – it gets good – or check out the picture gallery on Flickr.)

And lastly, if you’ve got some time, here’s the complete video of an extended presentation at Berlin’s SCOPE Sessions, which is becoming a valuable hub for the visual scene:

We’ll be following this story more, so if you’ve got more questions (including “wait, really, what is this for anyway?”), we’ll entertain them. Stay tuned for some hands-on details shortly.

http://milkymist.org/

Nearly as unique and irreplaceable as the men and women who designed them, the analog machines behind early animation produced in idiosyncratic circuitry pre-digital visuals. The fingerprints of those designs are all over familiar animation from decades past. And one of the most extraordinary of those machines must certainly be the Scanimate. Built by the Computer Image Corporation of Denver, Colorado starting in the late 60s, only eight models were made, of which just one survives. That one remaining unit is in Asheville, North Carolina, near the home of Moog Music and our friend Chris Stack at Experimental Synth. So, of course, we wind up seeing this analog-powered machine driven by Control Voltage from a Moog, at top.

What makes the Scanimate worth revisiting above all else is the fact that it was real-time – pumping out a consistent 60 frames per second, or more than a lot of the digital devices we see today. As a real-time animation device, in fact, it still edges out a lot of the sophisticated digital tools today, from those employed by pros down to the “render it first” workflows of software like After Effects. I wish, indeed, that computer software designers would look back at how these tools worked; even though the hardware is almost impossible to find, the design notions introduced here still could inform new software. They may seem even more relevant today than when they were new, particularly with software’s ability to quickly produce new tools.

Do watch the video here, but you’ve seen the output of this gadget before:
The Electric Company, Logan’s Run, Star Wars, Sesame Street, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, and countless station idents and commercial spots used the tech.

I could say more, but there’s enough information at the site of the remaining machine’s owner, one Dave Sieg, to ensure you don’t get any more work done all week. So I’ll leave it to Dave – and let the Scanimate speak through its eye candy.

Productivity, die!
http://scanimate.com/

Here’s a fantastic vintage news report on the tech, as seen through the eyes of the time:

I’ll close with what I think may be one of the best visualizations of periodic waveforms and wave physics I’ve ever seen. Note to self – I need this a lot.

And the rest is history.

True to their roots in metal, stone, and wood, typography is generally imagined to be fixed in place. It’s hardly the sort of thing you’d imagine transforming in time, the way you would a musical utterance. Yet the Meek FM Typographic Synthesizer defies that convention.

The 2007 project, designed by Rob Meek and Frank Müller, was recently exhibited at Berlin’s Letters Are My Friends. That makes it a perfect time to revisit the project, and its notion of typography as something fluid, malleable, and temporal in the way synthesized music would be.

From the description by Letters Are My Friends:

The combination of a custom built hardware controller and software generates new shapes and sounds out of pre-installed typeface vectors.

Like a real musical synthesizer, the Meek FM can shape and modify forms (+ sounds) with several parameters. This device shows that there are still a lot of untouched possibilies in realtime graphical instruments.

Music by Flying Lotus: Breathe Something, Stellar Star

meekfm.org/
lettersaremyfriends.com/

Letters Are My Friends is a story in itself. Located in Berlin’s Kreuzberg neighborhood, it’s a typographical gallery and laboratory. It comes a long way from dry type description pages on the Web. One feature is “a cosy showroom where letter relationships can be experienced in a physical space and progressive way.” There’s also a research lab and production label run by Ingo Italic and Bärbel Bold: “We share an interdisciplinary and experimental approach to services and products related to typography, motion- and interaction design.”

Expect a visit soon.

The Wobbulator from blair neal on Vimeo.

Analog signal in video, as in sound, is a medium all its own – as we saw last week with the gorgeous LZX Industries modules (more on those soon, too).

Here are more examples, both sent by reader Blair Neal.

The Wobbulator has its own special place in history as a video processor, the product of a collaboration between video artist legend Nam June Paik and video engineer Shuya Abe (a legend of sorts himself).

The technique, while inherently analog, could certainly inspire digital processes. I find it unfortunate that there hasn’t been a more systematic history of this kind of gear, but in this case, at least, the folks at the Experimental TV Center who provide this gear to modern artists also have a detailed paper, complete with diagrams should you wish to try some circuit-making yourself:

A raster manipulation unit or ‘wobbulator’ is a prepared television which permits a wide variety of treatments to be performed on video images; this is accomplished by the addition of extra yokes to a conventional black and white receiver and by the application of signals derived from audio or function generators on the yokes … The distortions performed on the image result from the actions of audio signals on the yokes.

Raster Manipulation Unit: Operation and Construction
by Sherry Miller Hocking, Richard Brewster, with Walter Wright, 1980

Nor is video processing simply a historical phenomenon; while it hasn’t had the same pace as analog sound, analog video is making a comeback. Dave Jones, a Dave Smith or Bob Moog of the 70s analog video movement, is himself reviving this gear decades later. His MVIP is a standalone video processing module; since it does work just fine on its own, it can be a drop-in video module for a Doepfer or other Eurorack audio module. (Yes, that’s right, audio kids – just in case your modular habit has left you with any cash left whatsoever, now you can add video to it!)

I find it strangely poetic that YouTube can’t capture what it looks like. Maybe that’s a good thing.
MVIP Mini Video Image Processor

Jones is also working on a new modular video system, too. Moog, Smith, Buchla, Linn … Jones. Works for me.

New name of this site: Create Digital Motion, or Not. Joking aside, in all seriousness, I think you can only appreciate what digital is as a medium if you can appreciate what it isn’t, and that you can only exploit it fully if you understand the potential of analog ways of thinking, too.

Visualists are no longer safe from the addiction of modular racks. LZX Industries is bringing the Eurorack modular system, popular with a new generation of modular synthesists, to video. And in abstract, acidic washes of color and light, the results are mesmerizing.

Modular systems remain a significant investment. LZX’s “minimal” systems run over a grand, with a properly balanced rack of modular units running you some US$2675. That’s not to say that’s not a value, if you can afford it: in contrast to the tricky-to-repair, largely disposable high-end laptops a lot of digital visualists buy, this is a set of units you can repair yourself, that produces a workflow and output that’s truly unique, which you could cherish for some time to come.

Happily, though, if your budget isn’t in the four digits at the moment and you want to play around, LZX has a fantastic little synthesis kit – the output of which is featured in the video at top – for just US$80. (I like cheap. There’s something psychological about cheap, too, that gives you permission to experiment, I find.)

The $80 device isn’t just affordable; it’s ingeniously-conceived in its simplicity and efficiency. From the creators’ description:

• A frame buffer which can display internal shapes and images in many colorization modes.
• 8-bit color palette, although thousands more can be revealed from the analog color phase shifter.
• An analog envelope follower/generator that responds to an external audio or clock signal, with gain and decay controls to modulate video.
• A frequency counter also derived from the audio input, which can modulate video based on the frequency of the input signal.
• Program and mode selection pushbuttons, as well as two arbitrary knobs and one pushbutton to control parameters dependent on the currently selected display program and mode.
• Integrating programming header allows savvy users to upload their own images and animation routines.
• 1/8″ jack audio input.
• Composite video RCA output.

If you’re in the Austin, Texas area, you can catch the kit in a workshop at the Austin edition of Handmade Music and leave with one of your very own. If you go, do take some photos and video!
Austin #13 – BitVision video synthesizer [handmademusic.noisepages.com] (Handmade Motion, anyone?)

It is worth having a look at the output of the modulars, too; this kind of video loses something in the conversion to online digital, but you can still get an idea. See also the photos of a recent workshop. Modular samples below:

Lots, lots more details, and links to their Vimeo and Flikcr and YouTube and whatnot:
http://www.lzxindustries.net/

Synaesthesia from We're So Digital on Vimeo.

More cross-sensory work, this time employing paint, cameras, and sound, as artists continue to explore the threads that connect media.

Synaesthesia is an interactive performance/installation exploring alternative digital music interfaces and the relationship between colour and sound, creating a relational experience between the artists, users and the audience. The project utilises video colour tracking, sequencing, softsynths and sample modulation to generate audio loops via Processing and MaxMSP.

Introducing Sheepintology from Jeff Minter on Vimeo.

You know the type – the VJs who have eighteen layers of videos, particle effects exploding everywhere. Jeff Minter’s Llamasoft is to game design as those people are to projectors. The thing is, he does it perfectly.

Llamasoft’s creations can make you laugh at a particle effect. And that’s a thing of beauty.

Best of all, Llamasoft is the only game development house I know of who dream of “light synthesizers” – just the sort of thing we live, breathe, and eat around here. As he puts it, Minter dreams of:

“something which really *was* a synthesiser, with modules that you could plug together and dials and sliders you could adjust to create a huge variety of effects, just as a musician does with a music synthesiser.”

As Minter was authoring a series of arcade classics for early game systems, he also imagined the evolution of interactive visuals and light synthesizers. That led to the ground-breaking console visual application, the Virtual Light Synth on the Jaguar.

That history is easily the subject for its own feature article, so let’s flash forward to the near-present day. In the Neon visualizer for the Xbox 360 and the legendary Space Giraffe, Minter massages your retina with trippy, explosive graphics. You’ll have to re-learn how to see to be able to play these games. But it’s not just chaos: there’s something beautiful in the motion programmed into these games.

Gridrunner Revolution fuses the arcade classic with this new visual mayhem, and it’s available now on the PC. Jonathan Blow, creator of the wonderful Braid, endorses the new Gridrunner Revolution, unveiled this week. He has something slightly strange to say about it, however, in that the game has “a lot of subtlety.” Now – as a huge fan of the style of his games – I’d tend to use the word “subtle” to describe Minter’s games much as I would use the words “driving a car over hookers” to describe Braid. But I think I know what Blow means; amidst all this frenetic arcade action, the actual game play can require some real sophistication – even as the visuals around you mock.

If you wanted to see a game that seemed to draw from the VJ and visualist experience, though, the idea of attacking the eyeballs rather than just giving them photorealistic fake virtual worlds, Llamasoft’s work is on a very short list. Now, while I keep admiring the visuals, if only I could figure out how not to be terrible at Space Giraffe.

Check out more:
Gridrunner Revolution

Llamasoft

Llamasoft on Neon and the Light Visualizer

Gridrunner Revolution Vindaloo difficulty from Jeff Minter on Vimeo.

And yes, here’s the delicious original “vintage” Gridrunner mode inside Revolution:

Gridrunner Revolution Vic-20 and C64 modes from Jeff Minter on Vimeo.

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:

I’m Bill Etra and this is the Mac version of the Rutt/Etra Video Synthesizer.

In 1970, I spent a year with my partner Steve Rutt building a video synthesizer that let me have complete plasticity with the raster, which, incidentally, will disappear in February when analogue television broadcasts cease. After two years of very hard work, we had built the Rutt/Etra video synthesizer. I was sure that after some work with Bill Hearn to colorize the Rutt/Etra’s black and white signal using the Videolab, I would be finished and have the tool I wanted. It’s now forty years later and, thanks to Anton Marini and others who are kind enough to assist and do all the hard work, we have the beginnings of what I had dreamt of.

The dream was to create a compositional tool that would allow you to prepare visuals like a composer composes music. I called it then and I call it now “the visual piano”, because with the piano the composer can compose an entire symphony and be sure of what it will sound like. It was my belief then and it is my belief now after 40 years of working towards this, that this will bring about a great change and great upwelling of creative work once it is accomplished. This software is one step closer to that since, once we’re on the computer, things can be developed and repeated reliably.

I now live on disability and we no longer have corporate budgets to support this development. I would like to spend the rest of my existence working on the project that I thought I would finish in 1972. If you find this software useful, please make a donation in whatever amount you feel is appropriate.

– Bill Etra, October 26th, 2008

Bill is sharp as a tack, funny and engaging, and continues to perform as a visualist despite chronic, severe pain from the rare, hereditary disease spinal stenosis, which also keeps him mostly wheelchair-bound. Your donations will go entirely towards supporting Bill’s ability to continue developing and performing visual art.

Download the new v002 Rutt/Etra synth from 002.vade.info

Here are some links to Bill’s work:

• a live performance on the SIGNALHEAD show
• Bill’s Blip.tv channel, especially
  • Bill demonstrates the Rutt/Etra in 1970
  • Abstractions on a Bedsheet, the first computer-controlled animation with the R/E
  • And here is an excerpt from Benton-C Bainbridge’s work-in-progress documentary about Bill.
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  A bank of faders, a touchpad, and then … it just does anything you want. Even today, the idea of a fully-integrated visual instrument is a pretty profound concept. Ableton’s creators thought about the design of the Synclavier digital synth (the rival of the CVI’s music sibling, the CMI) when designing their software. At least a couple of you have some strong ideas about the future of "visual instruments" and live visualism in general. Certainly, I’ll be thinking about the CVI as I look at the setup of my live visual rig. The effects themselves on the CVI don’t all date well, especially after the CVI itself popularized their use (and overuse) in the 80s. But the elegance of the design as interface can still inspire.

  Co-creator Peter Vogel has kept satisfying our appetite for gems from his VHS library. Thanks, Peter, for saving these from permanent deterioration. Top: watch a BBC host get a kick out of turning herself into a video star. Bottom: the original demo video, which gives a good overview of the effects capabilities. (Especially interesting, as students and artists learn to recreate some of the same effects from scratch in tools like Max/MSP/Jitter and Processing.) Tomorrow’s world, indeed.

  
  Tweet
  ]]> http://createdigitalmotion.com/2008/04/state-of-the-80s-fairlight-cvi-demo-video-bbc-on-tomorrows-world/feed/ 9 http://createdigitalmotion.com/2008/04/state-of-the-80s-fairlight-cvi-demo-video-bbc-on-tomorrows-world-2/ http://createdigitalmotion.com/2008/04/state-of-the-80s-fairlight-cvi-demo-video-bbc-on-tomorrows-world-2/#comments Tue, 29 Apr 2008 03:44:39 +0000 Peter Kirn http://createdigitalmotion.com/2008/04/28/state-of-the-80s-fairlight-cvi-demo-video-bbc-on-tomorrows-world/ Continue →]]>
  

  A bank of faders, a touchpad, and then … it just does anything you want. Even today, the idea of a fully-integrated visual instrument is a pretty profound concept. Ableton’s creators thought about the design of the Synclavier digital synth (the rival of the CVI’s music sibling, the CMI) when designing their software. At least a couple of you have some strong ideas about the future of "visual instruments" and live visualism in general. Certainly, I’ll be thinking about the CVI as I look at the setup of my live visual rig. The effects themselves on the CVI don’t all date well, especially after the CVI itself popularized their use (and overuse) in the 80s. But the elegance of the design as interface can still inspire.

  Co-creator Peter Vogel has kept satisfying our appetite for gems from his VHS library. Thanks, Peter, for saving these from permanent deterioration. Top: watch a BBC host get a kick out of turning herself into a video star. Bottom: the original demo video, which gives a good overview of the effects capabilities. (Especially interesting, as students and artists learn to recreate some of the same effects from scratch in tools like Max/MSP/Jitter and Processing.) Tomorrow’s world, indeed.

  
  Tweet
  ]]> http://createdigitalmotion.com/2008/04/state-of-the-80s-fairlight-cvi-demo-video-bbc-on-tomorrows-world-2/feed/ 10