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: That was my next question: How do you do your particle effects with the stars which are drawn on, stay and then fall. So that’s Director?

Deborah: Yep.

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…

Majesty Snowbird, Live Visual from CandyStations on Vimeo.

Deborah: Exactly.

Jaymis: I think the other thing is that if you become too focussed on one particular tool, then that influences your output as well.

Via the wonderful San Francisco-based culture blog of Scott Beale, Laughing Squid, comes this incredible hand-animated series of graffiti animations:

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

blublu.org

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!

LUX from Richard Lainhart on Vimeo.

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!

artificialeyes are keeping us updated on the impending release of 3L (current status: Soon), and while I’m still in “getting my studio in order” mode in the lead-up to the “2008 massive VJ geek-out and CDMoFest” and unable to play with new toys, CyberPatrolUnit has posted some great demo videos (and followup), showing us some of the places that 3L may be able to take us.

3L and Lemur at LAX from CyberPatrolUnit on Vimeo.

Exciting? Maybe a little. I still have lots of 3L video to edit from Perth last year, and I’ve promised Michael that I’ll have some videos ready for the official launch. Stay tuned!

Aforementioned visual synthsizer slash exercise tool WiiWhorld has been released for public consumption.

Jeff Mission has tied together GlovePIE (for Bluetooth/Wiimote input (previously on CDMo)), Whorld, and his own secret sauce (a GlovePIE script to control Whorld).

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.

WiiWhorld.

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?

Don’t forget the CDMotion Flickr Group; we’ll be watching for videos there.

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.

OMIRI com VIXID from mspinky23 on Vimeo. (Warning: Contains some NSFW imagery. Jaymis.)

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.

This is something I’ve been working on for quite a while, but I’ve realised that there are too many new things on the horizon which will take up my time (and my computers’ CPU cycles) so I’ve decided to release it as a draft rather than sitting on it until "perfect".

While there’s still some editing and motion tweaking to be done, this piece is rather time consuming to preview and render. As the action speeds up it is blending many high resolution images together for each frame.

The video compresses around 10 hours of stencil cutting into 4 minutes. Shot with the same Pentax *ist DS as my previous time lapse efforts, the camera takes around 35 frames per minute at 1536×1024. This gives plenty of leeway for pan and scan in post production if outputting to SD or lower resolutions.

This method of shooting allows a very high quality look, with minimal expenditure. I had some problems with this camera’s viewfinder focus and auto-aperture function recently, the repair quote was AU$300, while a new K100D (the new version of the *ist) is under AU$600 including a lens. With prices for digital SLRs getting this low, a proper SLR version of the ghetto timeslice rig can’t be too far away.

Or, I should say, vim, vigor, vivaciously vivid vertex vitality, vivisected for your voraciously voyueristic viewing in vvvv.

VertexNoise[take2] from desaxismundi on Vimeo.

This beautiful work comes from French-based desaxismundi, who’s also on Flickr. I’m always struck when similar, elemental techniques can yield unique results.

vvvv, for those who don’t know it, is a cult-hit software application for Windows. Like Max/MSP/Jitter and Pd/GEM, it uses virtual patch cords to create modular setups for visuals (video and 3D). But unlike those OpenGL-based packages, vvvv is built around Windows and DirectX. That doesn’t matter so much — what’s important is that vvvv has some unique strengths of its own, and a passionate following pushing its capabilities to the bleeding edge.

vvvv group @ Vimeo

It’s been almost 6 months since we posted about Shiffman’s Most Pixels Ever processing library, but that doesn’t mean there’s been no progress.

Recently he’s left the lab and ensconced himself in front of the IAC Video Wall, bringing Most Pixels Ever to the screen with the most pixels to give.

Run Lola Run Lola Run Lola Run Lola Run from shiffman and Vimeo.

A little technical detail, with an announcement:

Each cell of video is 60×45 pixels. The entire system is run by 3 Mac Pros each pumping out 2720×768 (totaling 8160×768 for the entire wall.) I’m going to be releasing the Processing library/framework this week! Stay tuned!

Releasing the library? You mean this library?

The site is still a little lean, but early adopters can download the Alpha version and read a little about running it with processing.

Bouncy bouncy!