During the high-definition wars, your feelings about new higher-capacity storage discs may have ranged from ambivalence to dread to simple disinterest. (Well, that’s how I felt, anyway.) But with Blu-ray triumphant comes this realization: "hey, brain, we’ve suddenly got increasingly-affordable ways of burning high-capacity media!" Drive upgrades on the PC side cost what DVD burners once did, and if you’re hooked up to a TV, the writer can be your player, too. (There’s already a Lite-On internal drive for around US$350, and I expect these prices will plummet as production ramps up.)

That’s burning, anyway — authoring is obviously essential.

This brief video, uploaded to YouTube by Fairlight co-founder and designer Peter Vogel himself, gives a brief history of the development of Fairlight’s legendary video hardware, the CVI. The CVI was a theoretical (in name, at least) visual counterpart to the ground-breaking CMI digital sampler instrument. And, like the CMI, the CVI had a major impact on artists and produced some of the best digital creation of the 80s — and some of its most-repeated cliches.

Vintage Fairlight Computer Music Instrument Videos [Retro Thing; see also Create Digital Music]

But here’s an important difference: has the evolution of visual hardware and software really equaled what’s happened since the CMI on the sound side? Music hardware and software has evolved and exploded since the CMI. The only real visual hardware today available to consumers that’s not a mixer is Roland’s CG-8, and it’s arguably narrower in scope than the CVI, despite being two decades newer. Even in software, the idea of a visual instrument you can play is still evolving. Now, I suppose you could argue visualists have more to play with — powerful 3D capabilities, for one — but perhaps that’s why visual gear has been slow to catch up.

What do you think? Is there a visual - musical cap in digital tech? Or am I trying to compare two things that really can’t be compared, whether Australian designers gave them parallel acronyms or not?

We asked earlier this month if you’d be using Flickr for videos? Here’s one answer — and in this case, it seems perfectly-suited to the medium. Accent Creative used a short video spot — tweaked to Flickr’s microformat length constraints — as a way of promoting an upcoming event. That works nicely, as lots of people already use Flickr streams to store photos promoting events and the like.

And, of course, the Create Digital Music side of our heart loves the sound-making box that shows up in there.

Brokenbeat Night - MoGraph Promo

Here’s another example, in this case using a short video as a kind of micro-showreel:

Via the CDMo Flickr Pool - thanks to everyone for all the eye candy you’ve been sending! Why blog when I can just watch the lovely stuff you’re doing?

This really illustrates what could start to happen with media on the Web: rather than littering everything everywhere, and rather than seemingly-redundant sites interfering with one another (Flickr for video?, asked users), we get content tailored for the venue. In fact, vids like this really don’t necessarily belong on Vimeo — and likewise, I’ve come up with short snapshot videos I wouldn’t want as part of my video pool.

Promising stuff. And as video proliferates, the visualist and motion graphics artist become king. Get ready.

Our friend Sean Healy, aka Jean Poole, has a great interview with visualist *spark (Toby Harris of London). We love *spark for many reasons — for founding AVit, for being a wildly-talented artist, for reintroducing the idea of narrative to visualism, for VJing live on a giant touchscreen (see below), and other goodness, not necessarily in that order. Toby talks to Sean about everything from his philosophy of performance to some of the technical possibilities of audiovisual performance today.

I particularly like what *spark has to say about live cinema, and why the tools are “hotting up”:

That term ‘Live Cinema’ is something close to my heart though: I reckon you can specifically and deliberately combine a lot of whats good in established cinema and clubbing to give a completely new way of expressing yourself as a VJ-esque performer while engaging with audiences’s own creative thoughts. The key to it is an improvisational use of narrative, rather than forcing a fixed story down their throats, you could be a cinematic incarnation of the oral storytellers of old, weaving tales on the fly, or providing the scenarios and juxtapositions that people find themselves compulsively mapping their own narratives onto. Stepping back from that, I’m interested in anything that uses media to make people interact or think in unexpected ways, which has taken me from playing with the conventions of one-man theatre to storytelling installations. And the tools are really hotting up at the moment, things are getting interesting.

*sparkin’ it up [Skynoise.net]

Speaking of hotting it up, check out that potent combination of Ableton Live (for music) and VDMX (for visuals) on a MacBook Pro. It’s a coupling we’re seeing more of these days. (And it doesn’t necessarily have to be Live and VDMX per se, or even one laptop — but people exploring real audiovisual soundtrack means Live Cinema can be sonic as well as visual.) Those of you working on similar setups, we’d love to see them. Whether it goes on Create Digital Music or Create Digital Motion — well, I can flip a coin.

Vague Terrain, a journal on digital technology, has put together an issue surveying the global state of VJing, edited by VJ, sound artist, and designer Carrie Gates of Saskatoon. (Saskatoon, the place, though that’d also be a great name for, like, an edgy Web animation firm or something…)

Vague Terrain 09: Rise of the VJ

Blogged by Vague Terrain’s Greg Smith @ serial consign

The issue is fully of great stuff, with VJs Ana Carvalho, Kelly Bolen & Jake Hardy, Defasten, Francis Theberge, Jackson 2bears, Lara Houston, Leeane Berger, Michael Betancourt, Mo Selle, Neubau & Kero, Ryan Stec, Tim Jaeger, VJ Pillow & VJ Mademoiselle, VJzoo and Chrism & Fenris, Xárene Eskandar and Ziv Lazar, and an interview of Jaygo Bloom by Michelle Kasprzak. I contributed our interview with Solu.

Why? Because…

…live video mixing performances certainly address a hunger for immersive and synaesthetic sensory experiences where aural and visual elements work together to create a whole that is something beyond the sum of the parts.

From video turntables to political messages (Singapore riots), deconstructed vehicles to guerilla visual actions, vintage gear and VJ history to modern digital techniques, they run the gamut. And it’s clear that the range of expression and subject matter in VJing is far deeper and broader than what many people recognize.

Let us know what you think, and if you have any favorite bits.

Hong Kong, seen through the eyes of vj pillow & vj mademoiselle (Thien Vu Dang and Yasuko Tadokoro).

Attention, vector math fans! Wait … stop. That’s a terrible lead. Let me try again.

Open source advocates, your attention, please! Okay, slightly better.

Anyway, Java3D, the fully object-oriented Java API to 3D visuals, is now fully open source. That actually is big news to vector math coder types, because the vector math packages are now all modifiable if you like. For visualists, the news is that even the relatively sophisticated portions of Java are going fully open — including, in this case, a key 3D component for the ubiquitous taste sensation Processing I keep talking about ad infinitum.

Much as Cat Stevens became Yusuf Islam and Lesley Hornby became Twiggy, Java3D won’t be called Java3D any more. Since 3D graphics programmers excel at marketing, it’ll instead be called “3D Graphics API for the Java Platform.”

On the off chance you’re not confused yet, Java3D isn’t the only open source 3D graphics API for the … um … Java platform. JOGL, the Java binding to OpenGL, is also open source (under the BSD instead of the GPL). So, what’s the difference between JOGL and the API Formerly Known as Java3D? (Speaking of which, can we just call the latter Fred? Fred is a great name for an API.)

Imagine VJing with a stream of live snapshots from partygoers — or playing live data from the Web on email statistics as though it were a musical/visual instrument. The ability of tools like Processing to make numbers fluid opens up new interfaces to the storehouses of data on the Web — but also makes them friendly to artists and visualists.

I’ll be doing a workshop at South by Southwest Interactive in Austin with S. Joy Mountford, formerly VP Design Innovation, Yahoo and leader of the Yahoo Design Innovation Team aka yHaus. Joy certainly knows her stuff — not only did she lead a ground-breaking team at Yahoo, but she’s also supported student work and research and has a long history in interaction design including working on the original QuickTime interface. We’ll talk about the work being done, where we think these technologies are going, and how you can give it a try yourself.

Data as Art: Musical, Visual Web APIs [Event Page, SxSWi]

5:00 pm - 6:00 pm, Sunday, March 9

Sure, the name of the site may be Create Digital Motion, but don’t get me wrong — we know digital is evil. Or, specifically, digital gets real evil at certain times. There are the latency-inducing, problem-causing HDMI cables when VGA or S-Video or Composite would do the job, the “look at our brand, new storage format” trend that turns out to be “look at the hideously onerous, new copy protection method we’ve just invented.”

We know a little bit of our soul died when we brought in all this digital tech to our work. (Happy side note, though: my eyes now glow red. It’s totally awesome at parties.) So, we now proudly present The Battle for Analog, a completely nonsensical look at the analog world we might leave behind. (Well, unless you carry some mobile VHS decks to a gig, which could be a great idea … a little magnetic distortion live, anyone?)

And to kick things off, we’ve got a look back at VHS’ stand against the puppy-killing DVD, via our friends at the All Retro, All The Time, Retro Thing. So, at the risk of “boneheaded nostalgia” as someone described this in comments on RT, I present this mock VHS PSA from musclebeaver, with music from the Transformers music proudly playing in the background:

And, uh, yeah, it does appear to have been crafted in After Effects. Where is that Export to VHS option in CS3, anyway?

PS - I think Blu-Ray winning out over HD-DVD is finally Sony’s revenge for losing on superior Betamax.

There are some serious, high-profile indications that big artists are beginning to embrace alternative licensing for their content, whether it’s pay-what-you-wish distribution, “please remix this for us” marketing campaigns, or genuinely open content. Whether that’s just a brief fad or the sign of things to come, it’s too early to say. But R.E.M. have at least uploaded a full eleven videos, nicely encoded in MPEG4, under an open source license:

Supernatural Serious Album Page, with vids

R.E.M. Releases New Videos Under Open Source License [ReadWriteWeb, via vade]

R.E.M. aside, I wonder: will at least some VJs embrace open content, perhaps even exclusively?

Now, this isn’t without caveats:

Where better than the self-proclaimed most isolated city on Earth to talk about the state — and future — of VJing? The Byte Me Festival in Perth, Australia brought a rare convergence of digitalists and visualists in December. We cornered a variety of individuals at the open-jam Plug ‘n Play, from lay persons to internationally-touring artists, to chat about their work and the live visual scene in general.

My personal favorite interview of the night was Solu, the Finnish-born, Barcelona-based audiovisual artist. Solu’s meditative A/V set, with softly-echoing deconstructed wartime imagery, was one of the highlights of the evening. She stopped to talk to us about:

“In this scene, women are missing … even though in workshops, there are 50/50 women and men. I think we need more women here, definitely, for many reasons.”

• what to call what she’s doing (”live visualist”? “video processor”?)
• how she got into visualism
• how women respond to her work (the “dream world” description I thought was apt)
• where all the women have gone
• why VJs should be paid fairly, and their art respected more — not just as a means of selling bottles of booze
• why 2008 will be the best year ever.

Sounds like a platform for global VJ President. Got my vote.

Incidentally, since someone asked in comments on another story, her three tools of choice were, in order, Max/MSP/Jitter, Isadora, Modul8. Max/Jitter was the software of the evening, for sound and visuals.

In case you missed it the first time, our informally-edited footage of Plug ‘n Play is mostly Solu for the second half. Seeing her live is best, though, so keep your eyes peeled, especially if you’re lucky enough to live in Barcelona.

Plug N Play - ByteMe Festival - Perth from Create Digital Media on Vimeo.

Byte Me: Open Jamming for Visualists at Plug and Play, Perth

Solu’s artist site