Prediction: we’ll see lots more innovation in future mixing code-based, digital artwork and physical media. And since that’ll take some time, and we, uh, missed doing an installment of Weekend Inspiration, you’ve now got a head start on it this week!
Hurrah, stop motion fans — it’s time for the Stop Motion Eye Candy of the Day!
This time, it’s artist PES, translating classic arcade scenes into stop motion, real world objects. It’s utterly brilliant — and a reminder that, stripped of more advanced code and graphics, early arcade games were reduced to strangely iconic designs. That’s food for thought when thinking about digital motion in general.
There’s more of this stuff, too — here’s a complete round-up from “counter-culture” mag Hi-Fructose:
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.
Our friend Richard Lainhart sends this lovely "swirly thing" (to use technical terms). His description:
An abstract HD film animated in After Effects. The soundtrack, "The Beautiful Blue Sky", is a realtime electronic synthesizer improvisation for Buchla 200e and Haken Continuum.
My description:
Mmmm…
Oh, sorry. Forgot what I was saying: staring into swirly thing. Hey, it’s the weekend. Enjoy!
No matter how committed you are to some of the alternatives, Google’s YouTube will remain part of your online life. So we continue our look at how to make it more livable.
Readers wrote in with some tips and impressions of YouTube’s new "higher-quality video" mode:
Richard Lainhart, a regular on Create Digital Music (attention, Buchla modular fans!), had some specific tips on which upload settings to use and how to force high-quality playback:
Gavin Morris has been working on an audiovisual setup with Ableton Live and Isadora, a tasty combination for any Windows or Mac user. Isadora, for those of you who don’t know, is a visually-focused modular patching tool. It’s similar to tools like Max/MSP/Jitter, but by emphasizing the practical needs of visual performance, it’s unusually usable when putting together real-world gigs. Its use by A/V dance troupe Troika Ranch (co-founder Mark Coniglio is also the tool’s creator) has also popularized it in modern dance circles.
Gavin has two tutorials for us to start. The first syncs up Live and Isadora, along the lines we ran here using Live by momo the monster:
It’s similar to Momo’s recent Tutorial but uses a free tool for the VST (Pluggo) and allows control from the Live interface (as opposed to within the VST) This allows you a lot more flexibility and means you can use Follow Actions, adjust loop lengths/positions in realtime and even create a slicer. It is Live>Isadora via OSC but could equally be to many other softwares and could equally use MIDI.
Gavin warns us that the video may "put us off." At first I thought that meant it was NSFW or something, but … well, that’s not the problem. You’ll see. I leave it up to you to decide how you feel about it.
The second tutorial gives you the power of Emergency Broadcast Network-style A/V slicing:
I’ve done a tutorial for a Video Slicer - synching up Live’s slicer to Isadora - same technique but a bit of maths to convert the midi notes Live creates to video position. You can make some quite glitchy s***!
Good as this is, I hope we see some audiovisual setups that work with more asynchronous relationships between music and motion — I know my own tastes for my personal work tend in the abstract. Maybe I’ll have to put my money where my mouth is and write it up myself.
Put them all together with a dash of virtual midi port, and you get this:
Or as Jeff describes it:
Whorld is a free, open-source, live visual synthesizer for sacred geometry. It uses math to create a seamless animation of mesmerizing psychedelic images. You can VJ with it, make unique digital artwork with it, or sit back and watch it like a screensaver. The WiiWhorld project makes it possible to control the Whorld visualizer with the Nintendo Wiimote.
One of the things I’ve really grown to appreciate over recent months is the rich communities on Flickr and Vimeo — Flickr for stills, Vimeo for videos. Each of those, incidentally, has very active groups around free visual tools vvvv (for Windows) and Processing (for everything). Unlike "big bucket" sites like YouTube, Vimeo in particular has had some really terrific niche crowds of people.
Of course, now Flickr has gone and added video. I don’t see this becoming anyone’s primary video uploading site, given a more restricted feature set, the mixture of videos and photos, and the 90-second length cap. But as a supplement to, say, Vimeo, it’s interesting — especially given the number of times I’ve wound up in someone’s photoset staring at a still image and wondering what the thing looks like in motion.
Personally, I could easily see doing long-form or "feature" videos on Vimeo and adding photos to Flickr where it makes sense in my photostream — it’s all about context for me, rather than dumping lots of random stuff everywhere.
How do you feel about Flickr video? Are you using it? Are you staying away from it? Any first impressions? Videos you’ve got I’m you’d like to share with the CDMotion community?
At top: one the first people in my contact list to use Flickr Video is interactive artist ("slash" many other things) Jaki Levy, who is doing HD video for Ralph Lauren’s flagship store here in New York — see his blog.
CDM’s Jaymis has just gotten his Vixid VJX16-4 mixer, but we continue getting other hands-on reports from VJs. This one comes from Tiago Pereira, who’s posted a video of him having some healthy play time. Thanks, Tiago — looks like you’re having a blast. Keep them coming, with this or your other favorite gear.
We really prefer Vimeo.com around here, but that doesn’t stop people from uploading video to YouTube — meaning you have to live with the results.
You can make YouTube slightly less painful, however. Old news — the setting popped up a few weeks ago — but if you’re like me and haven’t changed your settings yet, now’s the time. Here’s how:
You’ll need to be logged in. Go to Account > Account (the header on your My Account Page) > Video Playback Quality and choose “I have a fast connection.” You don’t need a terribly fast connection, because the upshot of all of this is that you bump up to 480×360. (Yeah, I know — be still my beating heart. Vimeo, Blip, and others already have HD, and YouTube has 480×360.)
Oh, and it gets worse: not all videos have been converted to the new format.
And worse still: the content uploader apparently has no control over this whatsoever.
Did I mention how much I hate YouTube? Still, it’s worth the 30 seconds it takes to change the setting.
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No matter how committed you are to some of the alternatives, Google’s YouTube will remain part of your online life. So we continue our look at how to make it more livable. 
