The Dogstar. 389 Coldharbour Lane, Brixton SW9 8LQ
£3 on the door, £2 with flier
Directions: Exiting Brixton tube station, turn left. Turn left at Coldharbour Lane (KFC is on the corner). The Dogstar is a couple of minutes walk away on the right hand side of the road. Easy! :o)
After more than a year since the last “news” on the Neon v2 website, some big news indeed: Neon v2 has gone open source! (First read about here: “Neon v2 goes open source” by Soledad Penadés). Neon v2 being the software that I use for mixing visuals, of course, which is why I’m excited.
This happened at the beginning of August, apparently – I wish I knew about this a few weeks ago… but better late than never. I’ve recently been considering the need for a change to some different software to cope with some new demands, but maybe, just maybe, I can make some changes in the now-available program to do what I want.
A bit of a big ask, perhaps… when I tried the version 2.5 alpha, it basically didn’t work on my machine. If I can make it to work, at least, things could start to get very interesting. A quick look at the info.txt file for the Subversion repository suggests Visual Studio 2005 (among other things) may be required. With luck, Visual Studio Express 2008 will do the job. With good luck, that is.
Hmmm… of course I only appear in the clip tooling about in front of the camera hooked up for video feedback, trying to make something interesting happen. I’m not so sure it was working. ;o)
I don’t think I will make it to the 27 August VJlondon.org meeting tonight in Shoreditch, though, as I have a meeting about my upcoming gig at The Dogstar in Brixton at the same time. Maybe I can get back in time to catch the end. Now where did I leave that teleporter?
Wheels, maybe cogs. Went to a meeting las night about a monthly Sunday afternoon/evening gig starting up at Vibe Live (above Vibe Bar) in Brick Lane next month: Sound on Vision, a visuals-heavy night for VJ / AV / etc stuff with some music, with a focus on the visuals. Sounds right up my alley… well, up the lane I live near. :o)
In preparation for that, and for Mind!, I had a good session of being absorbed into my screen on Wednesday night, working on some new ideas and compositions for visuals and how to control them for a performance.
I’ve also decided to book some flights and make Ars Electronica happen. The part where I go to the Ars Electronica Festival, that is. The fifteen quid flight to Salzburg (with no taxes for some reason) had of course disappeared, but I found a cheaper flight back to London from Berlin, so it wasn’t all bad. I’ve also made a reservation for a festival pass. The wording in the confirmation email is a bit strange, with an incorrect date and words to the effect of “if you don’t collect your ticket at least an hour before the event, the reservation will be void”, so I’ve written to them asking what the deal is. Hopefully upon careful consideration they can sort out what they really meant to say, as “the” event isn’t so clear when there are many events on during the festival.
Rather than repost updated travel plans in the “blogstream” (I just made that word up), I’ve created an Ars Electronica 2008 page that I’ll update with the latest info.
Other exciting news is that I noticed a piece of mail in the kitchen when I arrived home last night that says the power company is going to come to disconnect the service in the week starting… yesterday. Well that’s just great. I’ve only just moved in and already there are major problems! When I spoke to someone at the power company (EDC) about the outstanding bill (from before the time I moved in) I was assured that the power wasn’t going to be cut off any time soon, and I see the letter is dated three days after that conversation. I’m now not so confident.
There should be an image gallery just above this: some still captures of the visuals I mix. There should also be a couple of random images in the sidebar.
Over the past few days I’ve been tidying up the contents of my webserver. The other day I noticed that the gallery was broken, and it took a little while to sort out whatever the problem was. Changed some directory permissions and server settings, and upgraded to the latest version of the software. I’ve deleted some unused CMS’s and their databases, made some database backups, and upgraded WordPress. I’ve had a play with some WordPress settings, like running a second blog off the same content folder (containing plugins and themes, etc), changing themes, using Widgets, and installing some new plugins, most notably a gallery plugin – something I really needed to get sorted to be able to post photos in some sort of nice manner. I managed to wreck the second blog for a while, and delved into some PHP programming to see what was going wrong. It sorted itself out in the end.
I’ve also revised some tags and categories for existing posts in this blog: the Subpixel category should now take you to all posts that are about me, gig’s I’ve performed at (subcategory Subpixel’s Gigs), or that have creations (subcategory Creations) to show such as photos, graphics, videos, and software (eg Flash, Processing).
There is something wrong with the Flash plugin I’m testing out (pb-embedFlash), which I was rather hoping to use to embed videos and Flash animations. I might try working on a filter to embed (or at least link to) Processin sketches… but one thing at a time – first I need to create some more Processing examples! I’ve come up with a simple solutions for what to do with multiple hosted sketches (applets) to get around the problem I mentioned earlier of there being a heavy download for the OpenGL libraries: just have everything in one directory, with the index.html file from the generated applet folder renamed to have the sketch name. So simple it might just work.
This is a beautiful example of the use of Processing. Not by me, unfortunately, but I hope to be able to make animations like this soon! Nice track by Boards of Canada too. A great result from a nice inspiration.
I’ve been to a couple of VJ events this week: the vjlondon.org meetup on Wednesday at T-Bar, and Immersion (a live experimental electronic music + visuals gig) on Thursday in The Flea Pit. I’ll mention that it’s great now living in Shoreditch, as both these venues are only a short walk away from my flat! :o)
Back to the story… it has occurred to me on more than one occasion that I will probably want (need?) to get into 3D at some point, and at these two events I saw some nice interactive 3D animation by pixelpusher (Evan Raskob), an earlier version of which can be seen in the video from the previous post (London VJ Meeting, Wed 9 July at T-Bar). I’m talking about the kinetic squiggles (which are input as gestures via his digital tablet) which zoom around. Evan had been working on this simple idea since last meetup, upgrading it from 2D only to 2D and 3D (combined), allowing multiple gestures to be loaded up as a set before “launching” (these are my own terms, I don’t know what Evan calls them!). I’ll have to clear some space on my Laptop (or get hold of another external drive – the one I brought with me from Sydney is out of reach at a friend’s house while they are at the Boom! festival in Portugal!) to upload the video I took at the event, and until then all I can say is that it looked quite amazing. That particular visual is produced in Processing from processing.org. I haven’t had much of a play with it just yet, but it looks promising! From the home page:
Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions. It is used by students, artists, designers, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional production tool. Processing is an alternative to proprietary software tools in the same domain.
I’ve also had a word in my ear from Dr Mo about XNA the last couple of times we’ve met. I’d had the idea that I might use DirectX to build my own visuals engine at some point, and Mo’s feedback is that XNA is nice to work with, especially as the coding is done in C#.
I found myself installing the XNA Game Studio last night and discovered there is a free 3D modeling package: Truespace 7(.6) from Caligari. Upon further investigation I see that Caligari (or at least this product) is now owned by Microsoft, hence the plug from XNA. I remember the name “Caligari 4D”, and think it may have even been one of the packages available back in the day of the Amiga.
In any case, this eventually ends up in looking at videos of 3D animations, and this excellent example appears in Vimeo Staff’s Choice Picks:
It reminds me of stuff done by the demoscene crew Farbrausch. If you like Suryummy’s video, you should check out the stuff that Farbrausch pump out in real-time!
Of course this video was created with software other than TrueSpace. Suryummy lists in a comment: maya, adobe*3, particular, live, reactor, absynth.
There is talk on the London Electronic Music Meetup (EMM) group about an Ableton Live DJ Workshop on a Saturday some time soon. I saw Live being used at Funckarma’s Dubstoned ep launch in London, but it wasn’t a “live” set, it was a DJ set, using Live. I want to know more… about using Live generally, but also because I know it has some sort of capability for triggering visuals. I have a project to work on with a DJ here in London, Unity Selekta, to produce visuals for his gigs, and I think I’m going to need some sort of sequencer. Live may be that sequencer.
Psytasia Castleval from Friday 06 June to Sunday 08 June 2008 had an amazing setup. It is the first time I have seen video projectors with mirror heads like “intelligent lighting” equipment, and they were used to good effect! They were used along with static projections and two massive stretched material screens (mirror image) at the front with the DJs high above the main/outdoor dancefloor.
I flew over from London early Friday morning with S&J, and we caught a ride with T&M from Salzburg to Leiben. Today I am in Salzburg, returning to London late this evening. Photos to be posted soon. :o)
