The Dark Ages 31 October, 2008 at 5:23 pm
For Thursday October 30, 2008.
The Dark Ages
It seems that I’ve been accursed with darkness the past few days. First the bulb in my lamp went, then this evening my ceiling light. Grr. Off to the shops for some groceries (and light bulbs) I go. I arrive home to find a flatmate cooking in the kitchen. A minute or two later..
*blink*
Power outage.
Not paid the bills?.. Wait, it’s not just us. Okay then. Good thing I’m planning to head over to Brick Lane just now for the vjlondon.org meetup. Hopefully the power will be reconnected by the time I get back. One can hear a lot of shouting and cursing in the local neighborhood. And cars blasting their horns. I’m sure that helped loads.
I put away shopping, pack my laptop, and head off. Walking down the road I note that this power outage is quite extensive. Even as I go further down Brick Lane, no lights. It’s not until Quaker Street that there seems to be any consistent power.
Coming out of the darkness and into the light
Listening to music on the way to Cafe 1001, the refrain from one track, “It’s just another excuse!”, seemed entirely appropriate for the situation. Come on London, what else can you throw at me? Darkness? Pah!
Emerging from the blackout zone and into happy lights and fun land, when I arrived at Cafe 1001 I found Dr.Mo and some others setting up, and a documentary film crew. And people practicing Capoeira. nebulus (nebulus design on Facebook, nebulus design videos on vimeo) had his custom hardware controller and had brought two projectors, added to a third and a Triple Head To Go made for a superwide 4:1 display across the back of the club. Nice! His realtime generative 3D visuals looked pretty amazing too.
I was asked to be interivewed by the film crew, which was for a University Video Project, and which is itself to be art of a 30 minute TV show. Not sure if I’ll be on TV. I’ll let you know if I am (or will be).
After the interview I asked to connect my laptop briefly to the triple-head in order to detect the screen size, and Mo suggested to set up properly instead of just testing it. After a small amount of confusion (thinking I should see more than one external display) I was beaming out on five heads (if you include my head and the laptop screen, though these latter two didn’t display the visuals output).
Of course none of my source material is in a 4:1 aspect ratio, so I had to look for footage that wouldn’t look too odd when stretched, and was also able to trim the top and bottom of some other clips on the fly for an acceptable result.
Actually, it was better than acceptable. It was starting to look pretty rad, if you don’t mind me reviving an old schoolyard term. I was well pleased with what I was seeing, and that, really is the point of doing this sort of thing in the first place.
I also liked seeing the custom visuals nebulus was pumping out. He had one laptop closed with another sitting on top of it, subsequently repeatedly overheating the lower machine, which was a shame. He managed to get things running on a single machine, though not quite as smoothly (and with, apparently, less complex visualisations).
Overall I had a pretty good night. When I arrived home the lights were back on (and flatmates were home).
Thanks to Dr.Mo for organising the meetup, nebulus and Silent Eclipse for the projectors, Deepvisual and whoever else supplied equipment.
A mini review from Deepvisual on the vjlondon forums:
Source: Next VJ meeting – Thursday – 30th of October – Café 1001
more fun…
very few of the regulars turned up???
instead we had a surprise visit from the lovely Joanne (Silent Eclipse) and an interplanetary freak-out from Nigel (nebulus) with his astonishing planetarium visualiser software.. George ( sub pixel) then took over the triple head for a while and put Neon through its paces.
the Student film crew were out in force, I found out I had started visuals before they were all born…
and we even had a walk-in VJ who had heard in the street that there were VJs in the venue this thurs and came along.
See a video of me playing on the triple-head below.
-spxl
subpixel visuals: live at Cafe 1001 – vjlondon meetup, Thursday 30 October 2008 from subpixel on Vimeo.
Leave a Reply