B6, DJ/Producer

The Volt crew came back with yet another festival at the concert hall in Uppsala. I recognized a lot of faces from last year. It feels like Volt only invites their friends to perform, but with friends like these, who could blame them? And if it wasn’t for the friendship, we wouldn’t be there either.

The VJ line up was actually pretty much identical to last year. Me (The Midi Thief) and Ben (Synthetics) from Instructions, Morrsken, Lysbang and the Vidiots, Joel Dittrich and Martin Söderblom. The Field had brought their own VJ, Victor Tarre, who did wonderful visuals for The Field‘s live set.

There was a part in Tarre’s visuals that looked like they were parts of a music video. It was made with few clips but cut in a very neat way. I got hold of Victor Tarre and asked him a few questions about his techniques and work process.

TMT = Me/The Midi Thief, VT = Victor Tarre

TMT: Is this material from a music video?

VT: The idea comes from an early draft of a music video for the Field that was never finished. Originally I thought of using the studio footage and the outdoors footage with 50% opacity composed on top of each other to create the feeling of “a giant” that uses buildings and things as instruments. This technique has been used in many movies before special effects, 3D and tracking was invented. The technique is based on having a lot of contrast in size between the two clips that are matched against each other. For example, a book could become a container, a cassette tape could be a car on a street, a bridge could be a harp.

When the footage had been filmed and captured we realized that it was a bit slow and boring having these clips multiplied on top of each other. Axel’s (The Field) music is not at all boring, rather funky and danceable. The music is built up by fragment and to use the same fragment approach on the movie clips seemed to work out great.

A display of Victor Tarre’s techniques

TMT: First I didn’t realize that it was live visuals. It was so tight that I thought it was triggered from Ableton Live over MIDI sync. Also because of the few clips used, it seemed unnecessary to use a VJ. So I was surprised when Axel told me that your were mixing it live. Could you tell us about how you synced up with Axel and what hardware and software you were using?

VT: I use software from the stone age called Wirecast that is made for editing live television. The program is really simple but since I only have film clips and never use graphics or typography interactively during the performances, Wirecast does it’s job. The synchronization is an illusion. The brain wants to put images together with sound and since it’s a pretty intensive play with perspectives or brains will fix the rest. But of course, I have different speeds that I know works when the clips work together the music’s BPM.

Me and Ben were happy to have received the evening’s prime spot, The Le Petit Orb live set, a streamlined version of the legendary British The Orb. Graphically we were more in sync than ever and we were really pleased with how the evening turned out. You can read more about the gig on our blog, www.instructions.se

Joel Dittrich and Martin Söderblom

Martin & Joel did a marathon set in one of the DJ rooms. I stopped by during the Chinese DJ act B6 and it both looked and sounded great. They had talked to B6 before the gig and decided on an abstract theme. The Vidiots were doing visuals for Shinedoe, a female Dutch DJ and remix artist. They had left their midi controllers at home but luckily we cold lend them ours which I think are the exact same ones as they usually use. It took a little while for the boys to get into the groove but once they did they delivered a potpourri of great Vidiots VJ classics. I didn’t get to see Lysbang’s nor Morrsken’s sets but it’s always a pleasure to meet them.

The Vidiots visuals for Shinedoe

The night ended up with a VJ/DJ Sandwich party (oh no, not THAT kind of sandwich…) in the hotel lobby. We had Gabba techno girl Funky Tuna, techno legend Håkan Lidbo, Shinedoe, me, Ben, Joel Dittrich and a sleeping Martin Söderblom. Pretty cheerful crowd that no outsider could break into and believe me there were attempts. There was this strange fellow that showed up. Picture this: A middle aged man, kind of buff in sweat pants and a yellow busy Ed Hardy t-shirt, eye shadow and a plate of french fries. He started rambling about having 4 mille alcohol in his blood and having to leave his Porsche (stuffed with no less than four Fender Stratocasters) around the corner. He also claimed to have been bitten by a cobra about a week earlier and he had a red swollen leg to show for it. None of us had any muster left to deal with this guy so he wandered off to the hotel shop and started stealing ladies underwear (at least that’s what it looked like because I… that’s what it looked like).

We choose to write this as an open letter instead of as a regular e-mail. We do it to show a really bad example of an arrangement. We do it in hope that this was a one time coincidence. And if not, that change will be made in the future.

Together with a whole bunch of other VJ’s we’re supposed to perform at Visual Berlin Festival closing party, a party that was held in collaboration with DMY International Design Festival Berlin. We arrived in Berlin on Friday. No one from the organization was there to meet us. That’s really not a big issue since we only had as much tech as we could carry. After getting to the hotel we went straight to Tresor. Getting the accreditation was no problem, but we had now been in Berlin for quite a while and still no one from the organization had tried to contact us to see that we were in town. The fact that this was a DIY festival started to get more and more clear.

It is now Saturday, the last day of the festival. It is the day of the closing party. During the whole day no one had contacted us about the evening. Now we started to actively hunt for answers. We had a paper with names of people and their telephone numbers, people who we started calling to get some answers. Finally we got hold of a person who told us that we could check the tech at around 7 p.m. The party was about to start at 00 a.m. so that was ok. The festival had now moved from Tresor to Collegium Hungaricum Berlin, but the closing party was going to be held at Picknick Club. We arrived at the Picknick Club around 7.30 p.m. The only one there was the clubs own technician, only responsible for setting up the bar/sound and preparing the yard for the evening party. He was really stressed up about the people from Visual Berlin not being there. He had no knowledge, not the responsibility to set up the projectors and screens. We called the person from the organization, asking what’s up. They was still at Collegium Hungaricum. We wasn’t surprised since none of the workshops we had been to during the weekend had been on time. Since the place wasn’t far away from Picknick Club we went over there to get some answers. We got told that the person who was supposed to be in charge over the technical stuff was to tired after the weekend and had to leave the responsibility to another person, which was the one we were talking to now. He told us that, “I should have been at Picknick five hours ago, but have not had the time to”. He said to us that he would head over there right away, and that we should come back one hour before the party started.

Due to miss match in the U-bahn we arrived at Picknick Club at 11.30 p.m. The line outside was long and a huge amount of people had already got in, the party was in full bloom inside. When we reached the yard where the main visuals was going to be, we were met by a handful of the evenings VJ’s hard struggling with getting everything going. No one had been there to set up the screens or the projectors. There were no switch, no power supply. Nothing. They had, as we, arrived just before the party was supposed to start. On two beer crates (placed on the table, taking up huge work space) they had managed to pile three projectors on each other. Just to get something up. We always bring a Kramer switch with us and thanks to that we could switch between the computers. We also have to many cables with us that now came in handy. Thanks to all VJ’s hard work (except my own, I was just furious) everything was up and running at around 00.30 a.m. It looked like crap, but no one other than MacGyver could have done anything more/better with what we had to work with. Since there was no one from the organization there, we had no one who could give us drink tickets. I paid 3€ for a Coca Cola. Yei.

At 00.57 a.m. (I checked the watch). One of the VJ’s called the person we talked to earlier at Collegium Hungaricum Berlin. To see what was going on. He got the answer that they had decided to keep the party over there. Read it again. They decided to keep the party OVER THERE. And they tell us this now. But we were very welcome if we wanted to come over. Oh, how nice. Or, if we wanted to, we could just stay at the party at Picknick. I got so upset over the ignorance that they showed us that I didn’t know where I would go.

Since there was no work space left on the table only two computers could fit. So I gladly handed over the responsibility for the nights performance to Dan and Daniel. They did the best of the situation. Until the club owner came down. Our table stood right next to the DJ table. And the DJ demanded more space. So we had to move our stuff. The club owner decided that two crates on the ground would be good enough for a VJ to be working on. That was it. The time was around 4 a.m. There was still two-three hours left of the party. But all of us VJ’s decided that it was enough. We shut down the projectors, the place went totally black. We packed our bags and left the place.

We don’t expect any apologies. We just want to let you know how disappointed we are. We are disgusted by the ignorance you showed us, your guests. We are disappointed over the fact that we as artists puts down a great amount of money and get nothing but humiliation in return. It makes us sad, sad to see how a collective of VJ’s can act this way towards other VJ’s. If it would have been just regular people I could understand it somehow. But we are professionals, fighting for acknowledgement in the same hard, dark and poor branch. What the fuck? Is it supposed to be this way?

Not everything was as bad as it sounds tough. Visual Berlin had gathered a large number of international VJ’s and interesting lectures/workshops were held during the weekend. Tons of tongue twisting geek talk was exchanged. It was a nice spread of installations and club performances. Berlin with one of the best club scenes/culture in the world offers a perfect spot for artist from cross platforms to meet each other and exchange ideas. And Tresor must be the ultimate place to do this at.

Well aware of the fact that the organization didn’t have any money to pay for travels of performances, we applied to this festival. All together we spent about 1 000€ on this trip (travel, transportation, living).

Lucky us that Berlin is the most awesome city in the world.

Sincerely //Startsladd

I got hold of Romain Tardy a.k.a. Aalto from AntiVJ and asked him a few questions about their latest mapping project at  Visualiseringscenter C in Norrköping, Sweden.

How much time did you spend on the mapping project in Norrköping and much time was spent working on site / off site?

From the very start of the discussions about this project to its final result, I think it was 3 months. We went to Norrköping to see the place in march, then we spent 2 days on site to do the mapping at the end of April, then we went back home to work on the content for 3 weeks, then back in Norrköping for 4 days to do the final tests and play the piece.
To precise things, I’d say we didn’t have any pre-produced content before we saw the site for the first time. We created everything from scratch, after we saw the place.

Could you break down your process in a few sentences, from idea to the final projection?

It’s always hard to describe precisely the work process, however, the building and its surroundings are always the starting point. We got inspired by the industrial past of the city, and, of course, by the new function of the building: the visualization center. How could we make these two elements meet each other?
We decided that I would be the director on this project, so I started to write a “scenario”, using the notion of labour as the central point of the story, taking both elements of its past (the notion of labour found in the textile industry, also visible in the nearby museum of work) and of its future – a visualization center – also questioning the relationship between intangible and practical work, statistics and factual, labour and its finality, which are all very current questions about our dematerializating world.
As we’re several people to work on the project, I drew a story-board so everyone can refer to the same document. As we work remotely, we meet every 2 days on Skype to see how things going.
Once all the content is done, I worked on the final editing – the actual piece the public sees.

What software do you use while creating and projecting your video mappings?

For this project, Simon Geilfus from our team created a new software so we can use some audio-reactive content based on vector graphics we designed. This software was used in the 1st part of the show. In addition, we used more traditional tools like After Effects, Illustrator, Cinema 4D.

What projectors are you using, how many and what hardware are you using to distribute the video signals to the projectors?

For this project, we used 2 Barco XLM HD30, that are 30K lumens projectors, outputting up to 2K resolution images. We didn’t use 2K resolution, but 1080p FullHD. For playback, we used Dataton’s Watchout hard/software, that is the easiest way to synchronize several projectors and have a smooth playback at such resolution.
The projectors can differ depending on the project. In Norrköping, the projectors were quite far from the building (on the other side of the river) so we needed pretty big ones. For closer projections/smaller buildings, 12 to 20k lumens projectors can be bright enough (also depending on the surroundings, public lights etc.)

Ok, this tech thing is going overboard, but what computers are you using?

Haha, this one’s going too far :D
For production and rendering in After Effects, Illustrator, C4D etc., we use Mac Pro’s (I you really wanna go geek, mine is a 4-core Nehalem with 8go RAM). By the way, Adobe CS5 is a must, working in 64bit on Mac Pro stations – it really improves rendering time and workflow in a general way using the total amount of RAM.
For Simon’s software, a Dual-Core DELL laptop was good enough (geek bonus: a PC running OSX…)

With your setup for video mapping – is it possible to mix content live (VJ-ing) or does everything need to be rendered and synchronized with the music in advance?

With the Watchout system, it’s possible to use live feeds from an external source. To do so, the Watchout must have the optional HD-SDI card installed, so it can take any input.
That said, I’ve never used it, and and I guess it’s a pretty big setup just for VJing. There’s an alpha version of a “mapping” module for Modul8 (made by some French guys as well) that would probably do the job too.

We walked up to the elevator that was going to take us to the second floor of the club Zoo Usine in Geneva. The walls were covered with stickers and graffiti. We were bringing a huge Pelican case on wheels, filled with technical mumbo jumbo, the kind of stuff that you always bring to a standard gig. The elevator felt very poor, it was only going to take us one floor but it took forever. The doors opened and a rank smell of urine hit our faces. None of the toilets here had doors. We stepped out and walked into the room where the party would start five hours later. There were 13 screens and five veils hanging from the ceiling and 15 projectors filling the room with the Modul8 test screen. Quite a contrast to what we are used to in Sweden.

For the second time our group, Startsladd, sent in an application for a club gig at the Mapping Festival in Geneva. Just like last year we were out in the last minute. Our hopes to get a slot were not high but we got a spot at the closing party. The festival took care of the logistics very well. They booked and paid for our tickets and put us in a nice hotel room. It was nothing like what we are used to. We arrived the last day of the festival and we went straight from the airport to watch the VJ Contest that was taking place at Zoo Usine. The contest was interesting because of how it was set up. It was split into four parts, all judged by a jury. The first part had taken place the day before our arrival. There were 16 contestants and eight of them had advanced to the next day.

UPDATE Video from the first day of the VJ contest.

The task for the quarter final was to use a small number of still images (approx. 20 including the Mapping Festival logotype) on which they had to base their material. They got the images at the end of day one, so many of them had probably worked the entire night. Half of them moved on to the semi final. They now got to use whatever material they wanted. But they had to draw a card, on which it said what kind of music they were going to perform to. There was reggae, funk, hip-hop and power metal. None of them genres that are closely related to visual performances. Out of these four VJ’s were now only M&Y and Indefinite VJ left. In the final they competed in a classical battle were the contestants had about 30 sec to perform before the turn went to the other side of the room. Then back again for another 30 sec, etc. After a 15 minute beer break and consulting between the jury, alone stood the winner and it was M&Y.

Video: ARES | M&Y | GRAFKUT

After the contest it was time for dinner at Zoo Usine. I was served a cup of coffee by the second dirtiest punker I’ve ever met (the dirtiest punker I’ve ever met didn’t know how to operate a coffee machine).

The video check worked like a charm. The club had a guy responsible for and only working with video. He was there for the entire night making sure that everything went on smoothly. The working space was huge. Startsladd alone had three computers that we hooked up to the Edirol V-440HD mixer. With it’s two buses connected to the video matrix and software written by Garagecube we could then decide and seamlessly mix what went out and to which one of the screens in the room. It was very simple and fun to work with, since this technology opened an extra door in our performance.

During the night there was six VJ’s/crews that performed, all together with their own DJ. Except for Dat Politics, who at their arrival told the organizers that they didn’t want to have a VJ during their performance. They brought their own DVD with prerecorded material. That caused some rearrangement of all the acts, since everyone had counted on using a VJ for this slot. After all it’s a festival for visual performers. Crews of the evening were: Jellyfish, Startsladd, KRMT, VNBC and M&Y. All put colors on the dance floor with their own very personal style. The funny thing was that out of five performances this night, four of them contained material with Mexican wrestling masks.

Video: Startsladd @ Mapping Festival 2010

I was very impressed by the Belgian VJ Jellyfish’s performance. He had a very nice mix of recorded footage and graphics. It was interesting to see how he had put it all together. Often with a character from movie, masked out and put on a solid light color, mixed with moving graphical elements. It was kind of a disappointment that the other crews didn’t take advantage of the fine technology that Zoo Usine offered. Startsladd was the only crew that really played around with the HD-mixer. The others sent their one and only output to all the screens.

Video: Jellyfish Demo reel

The party was great and the place was packed the entire night. In the backstage area a lot of good ideas came up and many new connections was made. At 4.30 AM we threw in the towel and went back to the hotel, the Mapping Festival 2010 was over. We woke up on Sunday looking forward to eating some good bacon at the hotel breakfast just to be informed that bacon had not been paid for by the festival. For a short while we hated them stingy bastards intensive. But then we got reminded of the free t-shirts we had been given. We returned to the hotel room and recorded some material against the frosted glass in the shower cabin. Then we packed our bags and left Geneva. The night had been a blast, it was just sad that we hadn’t been able to see more of the festival. I can recommend everyone who considers it, send in the application next year! Startsladd will.

I was invited to the Pixelache festival to hang out and network. For once I didn’t have to perform or give a speech, so I could indulge fully in the activities. I only went friday to sunday and got straight from the airport in to the Bar Camp session at the Keravan Taidemuseo located in one of Helsinki’s outer suburbs. For those who are not familiar with the term “Bar Camp” I could describe it as a user generated conference where the content is provided by the participants, anyone can post a subject to discuss. This went on the whole day and several interesting discussions went on parallel, so it was pretty hard to pick. I went between groups dealing with guerilla gardening, software presentations, audio visual experiments and open source technologies. The day ended with the opening of two exhibition at the Kerava museum, How to Build a Dishwasher and chmod x+ art and later a Pixelache network dinner in Helsinki.

There were a couple of things from the Bar Camp that I found extra interesting. One is the open source project Puredyne which is a GNU/Linux package for artists. It’s an operating system bundled with a load of open source software for artists and the whole system is bootable from a USB stick or a CD and will run on your Intel machine.

The second thing was the project Brainwave Music Lab where they were making music from alpha and beta brain waves. I’m not going to tell more just watch the video, it give me the chills, you know, in a good way.

The Saturday started with Breakfast Club III, a breakfast with a discussion about open source technology led by cyber feminist Nathalie Magnan. It got pretty interesting, with many different views. There were the extremists looking for the utopian open source society, there was Li from Shanghai who explained how Open Source was not relevant for young people in China at the moment since people don’t think software costs money and then of course the people complaining that they will become less productive with Open Source applications. For me personally, the more interesting discussion about Open Source technology was on the boat back to the hostel where I came to speak to Italian design students, Emanuele Bonetti and Loredana Bontempi from the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, who are in a program that runs only on open source software. They said that they couldn’t really find good replacements for the standard design applications but they had other applications that let them do other things and take their designs in new directions. That sounded very appealing to me and we immediately started bouncing more or less realistic ideas.

After lunch there was the Fritzing+Arduino workshop. Arduino is an open source prototyping platform that makes it easy for artists and designer types like you and me to create physical interaction devices. Fritzing is an application that let you document your electronic prototype and help you take it steps closer to production. I’ve been wanting to get in to the Arduino for a few years and this was the perfect time to get started. I bought the neat little starter kit from the Fritzing people that had an Arduino and some basic components.

At night I went to see The Urban Projection Lab, that was an architectural video mapping on the front of the Finnish National Theater. The environment was a little bit to lit up for my taste which made the projections a bit washed out. We actually walked past in without seeing it and had to circle the block. If I understand it correctly we saw a visualization of Helsinki’s energy consumption in form of bubbles going up the facade.

The night continued at IHME Party located at the Vanha Student House. The night started bad with some hipster DJ playing the a Finnish version of a Pippi Longstocking tune and drunken Finnish girls dancing awkwardly. BUT then came the Black Horse + VJ Sakke Soini performance that was AMAZING. It’s rare to see such good band + visuals combination and they got the lighting and smoke to blend in as well. The band and the VJ had never worked together before and it was the band’s first live performance ever. One of those magic moments.

I never got a chance to speak to Sakke Soini that night but emailed him to ask some questions.

(TMT= The Midi Thief/Me, SS=Sakke Soini)

TMT: Your style with, what looks like old optical experiments or maybe just fx part out of old sci-fi movies, is that found footage or have you created it yourself, or some combination in between? And how do you work with your compositions while VJ-ing?

SS: Yeah, they are all my creations. I utilize the same techniques I use for my illustrations. I create clips that are easy mix together a sort of a continuum of each other. Therefore it is really easy for me to mix dynamically during the performances, create dynamic changes quickly and with the music.

TMT: What hardware and software is involved in your creation process as well as the performance?

SS: Mostly I create my graphics with Illustrator and After Effects. During the performance I use Resolume 2.4 running on my Macbook through Bootcamp and a MIDI controller.

TMT: Why are you using Resolume 2.4 in Windows and not Resolume Avenue in OSX?

SS: I tested Avenue a bit when it came out on my white Macbook, but I didn’t see any point upgrading. The program was a disappointment. And why fix something that isn’t broken. But I do very little post-processing during my live show anyways. I mainly just adjusting the colors.

TMT: Your visuals works extremely well together with this music (Black Horse) but what music do you normally VJ to? And how does the look and the tempo of your graphics work then?

SS: I basically have two vjing styles. The one you saw and the other one is more vector based. For the more uptempo i use the vector based stuff. The clubs i normally VJ for is more Electro/Disco/Dubstep oriented.

The second performance of the the night was Swedish Slagsmålsklubben and VJ Motorsaw aka Sune Petersen, an awesome Danish guy that I shared rooms with at the Hostel on Suomelinna. The extremely happy uptempo music of Slagsmålsklubben seemed to work really well with this crowd and so did the visuals. Sune had a project set up in VVVV that he based his whole performance on. It looks like vector lines but is really to slanted rectangles, one masking the other that he can tweak the shit out of with a Korg NanoKontrol. I think that one quality that I particularly liked was the possibility of changing the stroke weight. This might seem trivial but I actually can’t remember seeing it used that much. It’s really useful for interpreting nuances in the music.

The classic after party for those who didn’t want to go home or those who couldn’t get back to Suomelinna took part at a design agency. Slagsmålsklubben, Sune Petersen the Mal Au Pixel crew and others from the Pixelache network. All kinds of alcohol appeared auto-magically when some other alcohol ran out.

Don’t think I really managed to do anything productive the following Sunday. There were a few performances I would have liked to have seen but I missed them and then had to leave for the airport.