Robert Heel is a visual musician who’s been creating some lovely instructional films on topics dear to the heart of a visualist.

Of special interest, A Kick A Snare A Hat. Documenting a little AV performance in Resolume Avenue.

A Kick A Snare A Hat from Robert Heel on Vimeo.

Blender 2.5, - Got flexible? from Pablo Vazquez on Vimeo.

In case the last post didn’t give you enough Blender goodness, here’s more for your pleasure.

Version 2.5 is coming of the open source 3D suite that’s also a nodal compositing engine and a video editor and a real-time game engine — basically, a visual operating system in which you can make just about anything. 3D software in general hasn’t been gifted with especially slick interfaces. But 2.5 changes that: check out the elegant pop-up menus and Spotlight-style menu searching. Every little detail can be Python scripted, which sounds geeky but could be an easy way to just tell the software what it is you want to do - and Python is a lovely language to dip your toes into as a beginning coder, too.

All that’s well and good. But the real highlight of the video above is the fact that working in Blender now happens much more in real-time. For those of us used to working with visuals in performance, this means our “studio” workflow can be dynamic and live, too. Whether you render and remix video later, export 3D objects, or move to the Blender Game Engine to take your Blender work onstage, that is likely to appeal to visualists.

And if you’re just getting started, here’s a tutorial on using video textures in the Blender Game Engine, even if you’re new to the whole environment:
Beginner’s tutorial: Using video textures in the Blender Game Engine

Via comments from Samuel Gaehwiler - thanks!

At the moment (<2.5), Blender follows the “do everything in one window” paradigm.
As jeff clermont stated above: Blender 2.5 will be the first blender release which will allow multiple windows. Hopefully, one can show the output of the game engine on one monitor in full screen while manipulating it on the other screen. The new event system in 2.5 might allow some nice possibilities for visualists. Pablo Vazquez has done a nice of manipulating a running animation (in the 3d view), which isn’t possible in Blender <2.5.

CTRL ALT SHIFT - from V.I. Artists on Vimeo.

Michael Faulkner of D-FUSE says the most interesting thing in this video: it’s when technology becomes redundant that it’s accepted as art. Photography gets invented, and suddenly painting - a business and a craft for centuries - is “high art.” (Don’t ask, incidentally, about what late 19th Century art critics and salon organizers thought was great painting. It was utterly dreadful.)

Ctrl Alt Shift is a 10-minute documentary, pointed out by Resolume developer Bart on their forums, featuring live visualists and audiovisualists. It has a number of things going for it: a terrific artist lineup, asking the tough, obvious questions about why fundamentally we do this stuff, and an editing style that makes projection, live-style edits, and eye candy animation part of the documentary object. It’s a tasty treat to watch if you know the artists, and even if the chatter in this video is the sort of thing you discuss over beers and V4s with your mates, it could be an ideal video to pass along to your friends who don’t yet entirely get what this whole thing is about.

Featured artists:
The Light Surgeons, D-Fuse, Hexstatic, Vj Anyone, Addictive TV, Vector Meldrew, and Fatamorgana

It’s a production by Dean G Moore and Simon Lane.

I know of at least one other documentary project on live visuals evolving. Of course, maybe what we need - given the imperfect and evolving nature of the medium - is more along the lines of a 24-hour visual network. I nominate … all of us.

Shamus Young’s “Pixel City” feels like flying in a helicopter into the art from Ghost in the Shell, or discovering a metropolis inside your computer. The latest work from an undiscovered YouTube talent, the software itself will be released under an open source license. I don’t need to tell you this could inspire other experiments for urbanist visualists wanting to work with real-time landscapes.

It’s also interesting that the process itself becomes part of the artwork: it’s by understanding how each element is pieced together that you really connect to the meaning of the whole.

This is a demonstration of a program I wrote to generate and fly through a dynamically generated city. You can read the step-by-step of how it was made at my website:

http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=2940

• The program was built on vanilla OpenGL, Windows, using MS DevStudio 6.0
• Building the city takes about 5 seconds.
• Took about 50 hours of coding time.
• Runs on older hardware. The goal was to have the program work on Windows machines less than 5 years old.
• To be released as a Windows screensaver.

The music is "Around" by Oursvince, used under the Creative Commons:
http://www.vincentbernay.com/

The link on his website also discusses other reflections on digital cityscapes, so well worth reading.

Squarely in the “because you can” category: YouDisco is a research project at New York’s Eyebeam that simultaneously streams up to eight YouTube videos onto a rotating virtual disco ball. Frame rate is … well, impressive given what it’s doing. The project is the work of Jennifer Jacobs at Eyebeam “with the help of Jeff Crouse.”

http://youdisco.jenniferj.net/?id=51

What is interesting about this is that you do get interesting effects on a computer screen when you leave 4:3 rectangles behind, just as in projection.

Along the same lines, though focused on a mash-up of two videos side by side (sometimes to hilarious effect):

http://www.youtubedoubler.com/ (which is, for me, playing Shatner yelling “Kahn!”)

Lots of interesting graffiti and motion and illustration work on Jennifer’s blog, like this piece:

Nurse from jennifer jacobs on Vimeo.