[ How would you describe you ideal gig? ]
Short and sweet. One thing that I’ve learned over the years, nothing can kill your artistic vibe more then 8 hours of continuous retinal mixing overload. That being said I enjoy the unexpected.
One of my favorite mixing experiences ever, took place in a tiny club in Shibuya Tokyo during a Lightrhythm Visuals tour. I had no idea what type of music I would be mixing too, was totally unprepared and had just managed to get unlost from the Tokyo jungle. The band turned out to be the most fierce live jazz group on the planet. I had never felt so thrilled and challenged as a live visualist.
[ Where do you think video performance is heading? ]
Hopefully to higher levels of quality and meaning. Obviously technology will be as important as ever in defining the landscape of live visuals. The high end tools that are available today such as VDMX, Processing and Resolume 3 will hopefully give artists the freedom to focus more on the art form rather then the technical hurdles that have plagued the movement for such a long time.
In January I had a chance to catch up with Deborah Johnson, who was touring Australia at the time with Sufjan Stevens. The morning after their show in Brisbane, Australia we recorded an hour-long discussion of the show, and seeming to cover the whole gamut of visual creativity and performance. I’ve finally managed to transcribe this epic from audio to text.
Deborah: I would really like to see our show from the audience’ perspective.
Jaymis: I would have loved to have shot some video. There are some really beautiful moments. Did you notice that there was quite a bit of the crowd cheering visuals?
Jaymis: No?
Jaymis: I noticed that there was a couple times when you did something, nothing else was happening, and people around me were “yeaah!”, and not just the people I’ve conditioned to do that, either.
Deborah: ~laughs~
Jaymis: You’ve obviously got a good aesthetic happening. I’ve seen on your website as well you have that kind of drawn aesthetic. Do you do the illustration yourself?
Deborah: On the website?
Jaymis: In the set, you have images that come up: Stars, growing vine objects…
Deborah: Those are all based on drawings, they’re all drawing programs that are written in Director. I work with a programmer, and we’ll be like “this is what I want to have happen”, and he writes an algorithm to make that happen.
Jaymis: Peter would be very excited that someone’s still using Director… So that’s then rendered out to video clips?
Deborah: I mean, the dream is to be able to make them instruments that I can play live, but…
Jaymis: Director’s getting a bit old for that kind of thing. You might have to go with Processing or Quartz Composer or one of those fun things.
Deborah: I really would like to learn Processing. Recently I feel like I’ve become more of a curator, art director.
Jaymis: As video gets bigger that’s what you have to become; you can’t do it all anymore.
Deborah: For this, I knew what I wanted to happen, but I knew that I would need some help. So I started working with a programmer named Siebren Versteeg, who’s an awesome artist in New York. It was great because in Sufjan’s music there’s just so many layers of stuff that happens. My skills were limited to be able to create something that’s just totally generative and so massive, there’s no way that I could author that stuff. So how do you just get a source concept and send it out over an animation.
One thing that I worry about is that it becomes too… Say with Processing or that kind of work, people associate it with screensavers?
Jaymis: Very true. Well I guess that growing vines is one of those things which is quite ubiquitous with that sort of thing. Obviously you’ve got a particularly cool little spin on it and it works really well in the context of what’s happening on stage, but “something growing” is a very standard…
There’s a lot of great tips packed in to 3 minutes of video, so pay attention. I wish someone had told me “take some chocks along to help angle your projectors” before I wasted countless hours over the last year searching around various venues for scraps of wood.
I swear by baluns, which allow me to use readily-replacable CAT5 cable for video runs. Also an inexpensive power inverter is a great addition, to keep your laptop, mp3 player, and phone charged on those long drives between cities. I’d love to hear from other gigging visualists though: What’s your secret touring sauce?
I’ve had 2 rented Draper Cinefold screens with me on the tour. These are relatively expensive collapsible screens which we got a good deal on for a 3ish month rental. Unfortunately their former life at dance parties outside in the elements had left them with some pretty serious battle scars. One of the screen frames had a broken hinge, as did one of the legs.
This is why I don’t go Outside. Bad Things happen Outside.
These I “fixed” with gaffer tape and strips of plywood, until we had a couple of days off between tour legs and I time for some maintenance. I realised that while the screens came with drape bars to hang blacks from, they had never been used as the drapes are an extra US$1000ish, and not really required for raves out in the bush.
It was a relatively quick fix to dremel off the rivet heads from the broken and fresh hinges and to bolt the new ones in place. Requires some 6mm bolts, washers, and some nyloc nuts if you want to be extra sure that they’re not going to work their way free as the kit vibrates its way around the country in the back of a truck.
I shot a timelapse of the fix. Not really as a tutorial, as it’s not really something which requires much explanation. More as a celebration of my return to civilization, where I can waste a couple of hours shooting and motion tracking a mundane exercise.
The tour with Bobby Flynn is hotting up now. Over the weekend we had two shows: In Brisbane and the Gold Coast, which meant that I spent about 8 hours of my weekend setting up and tearing down my rig, aligning projectors and screens, running cables, and running around. The tour map currently displays 16 gigs down Australia’s east coast, and we will have another 35 or so joining them over the next week or so as dates are finalized. The cardboard box protecting my V4 during transport has already torn, and I’m sick of plugging and unplugging cables. So I need to get this stuff cased up, for the protection of my hardware and my sainity.
The current list (left to right, top to bottom):
Wii - for pre-show warmups and after hours fun. Need to organize a wireless sensor bar.
0
