I’ve been meaning to write about the 8-bit scene for quite some time and recently something happened that gave me a very good reason to get it done.

Ok, forget what I wrote about street cred.

I have my roots back in the Amiga demo culture but saying that I was part of the scene would be to exaggerate. I was in a couple of demo groups but I didn’t really take part in any social events and my work was not spread to the rest of the world. I divided that part of my life to programming and breakdancing with the result of not being great at any of the two. It gained me enough street cred to avoid a beating and an understanding of programming that proved to be helpful later in life.

When Ilan Katin told me about the Datastorm party that was going on in Gothenburg parallel to Pixelvärk I got really excited. Datastorm is dedicated to the Commodore 64 and Amiga demo scenes. When we were done with the last Pixelvärk event and all the equipment was packed up, Ilan and I took a cab to an industrial area on Lindholmen in the outskirts of Gothenburg where the party was located. The party had already been going on for over 24 hours when we showed up just before midnight and they were pushing on for another 12.

We were greeted by a drunken, kind of aggressive looking Finn, shouting “AAAAMIGAAAA!”, like a battle cry, which was repeated by others throughout the venue. We came right in to the competition and demos were projected on a huge screen in the main room. These were the categories in the competition:

• Amiga demo
  A combination of sound, graphics and programming for the Amiga.
• C64 Demo
  A combination of sound, graphics and programming for the for the Commodore 64.
• Amiga bootblock intro
  Kind of the same as the an Amiga Demo but the it has to fit on the bootblock of an Amiga floppy disk, which is 1024 bytes. So basically you have to create something really astonishing with very few lines of code and simple music and graphic to go with that.
• C64 Graphics
  Graphics created on the Commodore 64.
• Amiga ASCII
  Graphics created with letters using a monospaced font. See examples here.
• Amiga music
  Music composed on the Amiga, usually using a sequencer called “tracker” deriving from the original Soundtracker software by Karsten Obarski.
• C64 music
  Music composed on the C64 using sequencers like SDI, JCH, DMC and GoatTracker.

Some musicians on the C64 and the Amiga use private “homemade” sequencers that only a few selected people has access to. Some even program their music directly in Assembler code, which of course is nuts!

Otromatic, Ilan Katin & GOTO80

A “demo” is graphics animated to music. It’s not performed live like a VJ set but programmed to fit the music and all effects are rendered in real time, so it actually bares a lot of similarities to VJing. A demo group often consists of musicians, graphics people and programmers (“coders”) but often members hold many roles. A good demo should contain great music and graphics but it also need to be innovative and skillfully programmed often challenging the limits of the platform. These machines aren’t anywhere near the capabilities of today’s computers. A C64 came with 64 kilobytes of RAM. The Amiga 500 came with 512 Kb of RAM that could be expanded to 1 Mb (or 1024 Kb to be exact). A harddrive for the Amiga was really expensive and held like 20 Mb, if I remember it correctly. Music wise these both computers have interesting music chips. The SID chip of the C64 has a nice and very specific lo-fi feel to it while the Paula chip in the Amiga is not as specific since it can produce a much better quality in four channels and makes it possible to do decent sampling. During the party the classic C64/Amiga scenester Mahoney released a Mp3 player for the Commodore 64. I yelled “FINALLY!” It kind of sounds like crap (due to the lo-fi sound chip) but it’s funny as hell that someone took the time to do it.

(Images by Otromatic, click the images to see them larger).

I met a couple of VJs at the party. The first one was the frenchman Julien Ducourthial a.k.a. Otromatic. He is still doing demos and artwork for the Amiga scene but he also VJs in the 8-bit style. He is part of the Up Rough Soundsystem that does various 8-bit audiovisual work.

I was curious about how Julien works so I took the opportunity to ask him a few questions (TMT= Me/The Midi Thief, OTR=Julien/Otromatic)

TMT: – Are you using the Amiga computer or emulators on PC/Mac/Linux when you work?

OTR: – Well I used to have an Amiga setup in the beginning, I used two Amigas when we were running gigs with the ParisHQ, an Edirol V4 mixer and using both exe files and Mnu software for animations but then I switched to Pikix vj tool on the handheld Gp2x when it came out and I’m still keeping this configuration, this is quite similar to mnu and amiga veejaying but with less heavy gear to travel with.

TMT: – When creating your artwork do you use Deluxe Paint or are you emulating the style in modern software like Photoshop?

OTR: – For video and animations I’m using Amiga titlers softwares mainly for dynamic 2d/3d animations and optimize them on the PC for palettes and file sizes purposes. For graphics I’m using Personal Paint and Brilliance on the Amiga and Pro Motion on PC.

TMT: – Is it important for you to use the original software / hardware to get  the right feel?

OTR: – Yes, it helps me getting it low-tech, and finding new approaches with those softwares today.

TMT: – I read that you felt a bit tired of the 8-bit scene for a while – how was that effecting the esthetics of your work?

OTR: – Yep, sometimes I think the community is very purist in staying 8-bit only and won’t open up to other fields (with exceptions of course). I hope it can go forward and drop some more experimental combinations! I’m more in to polymorphic releases,  just trying to adjust the mood and feel to what made the 8-bit aesthetic a cool and fun thing to enjoy!

TMT: – What do you have in store for your upcoming VJ sets?

OTR: – I took a break from VJing for a couple of years to work on graphics more than videos. I’m planning some more iconoclast vj approach, different graphic materials, breaks and glitches for my upcoming VJ sets, stay tuned!

(You can also download the file in it’s original Amiga format.)

I captured this slideshow by Otromatic at Datastorm. The music is made by swedish chip tune artist GOTO80 (Anders Carlsson) who is also in the Up Rough crew. The piece was made with an Amiga 1200 and was prepared a week before Datastorm but was finalized during the party. The piece is inspired by C64 Petscii & old school megademo graphics. The slideshow is of course also available for download in it’s original Amiga format.

I also met another VJ, Markus Hamburger a.k.a. Rudebox and Yonx (Rudebox on the music and VJ scenes, Yonx on the demo scene). He is currently about to get his master in science from Chalmers in Gothenburg, has a pretty tech approach to VJing and in his thesis work he has been doing some interactive video installation using Processing, Quartz Composer and VDMX in combination with Ableton Live. Markus is member of the international audiovisual crew Up Rough Soundsystem. As of a couple of days, Markus and the Up Rough Soundsystem are new members of the Swedish VJ Union.

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There are some other people (not present at the Datastorm party) that are worth mentioning in relation to the 8-bit scene and VJing: Raquel Meyers is a name that keeps on being mentioned. She does a nice blend of techniques and I especially like the Polybius performance with GOTO80 (thanks to Ilan for showing me this!) that is based on an urban legend about an arcade game that drew people insane.

Paris Treantafeles is another VJ who mainly uses hand held game devices when performing. He comes highly recommended, even the United Nations loves him.

Last but not least, probably the funniest thing seen at the Datastorm party was the release “Svenska Narkotika Polisföreningens c64 tidskift nummer 2″, a C64 floppy magazine about narcotics allegedly published by the Swedish police force. A group of anonymous purists from the C64 scene (probably undercover police officers) have urged me not to publish any of the pages. You simply have to download it yourself and run it through a C64 emulator. But I tell you – it’s worth the trouble!

I’ve had a week to come down from all the stress of arranging a festival. Pixelvärk turned out really great due to a nice collaboration with Gorki Glaser-Müller, some contributing organizations and the power of our VJ community with the Startsladd boys in the front, doing a tremendous job. We also did a smart decision by working with the set designer Erika Weissenberg and two assistants Niklas Andersson and Jesper Nilsson all of them proving to be invaluable. I thought I’d break down the festival as brief as possible in this blog post. Ok, well you know me, it won’t be THAT brief…

The Gothenburg Film Festival’s opening party at Trädgårn’

We got off to a rough start by being two ours late to the venue due to some trouble checking out the rental car. We had rented one projector and brought two of our own but we had hired the rental company to hang all three of them. They only hung one (badly, attached with two loose screws) and refused to hang the two others since we were a bit late. Also, the film festival had made a late decision to wrap the room in white “photo paper” as they called when telling us on the phone two days ahead (destroying our original plans for the room). They made us believe that it was the kind of paper used as backdrops in photo studios which sounded ok at the moment. These proved to be A2 papers taped up on the wall by a very stressed producer. But we had two screens at our disposal so we ripped down half of the papers and got started hanging the projectors with the help of Gorki’s Magic Arms (both the product and Gorki’s own arms of flesh and bone). We were done about the time the doors opened but we weren’t supposed to get our VJs started until late, so we just got a logo running and went downstairs for drinks. Oh, and another drama that played out two days before the opening party was that the film festival totally misunderstood the need for music in the house-techno genres and had booked DJs playing everything from motion picture soundtracks to love ballades. We got that sorted out however and we’ve got Kid Sid and Jethro playing for us which was an excellent choice.

Daniel from Startsladd was so eager to get started that he opened 45 minutes early. Great to see that enthusiasm but I think he might have fired of a lot of his material those first 45 minutes. The last part of their set, the Startsladd boys had Kid Sid and Jethro and they fired of some new great material that they’ve had prepared for the Pixelvärk week.

When Bopa got in charge of the visuals she had to deal with Kid Sid who was really showing off behind the turntables and doing a lot of fast tempo changes. Bopa handled it very well even though her midi controller was broken. I guess that’s one of those moments when experience really comes in to play. Her visuals were really beautiful and together with her musicality really formed a great set. She was using a PC laptop running Resolume and Macbook Pro running Modul8, mixing the two in the Edirol V4.

Johan Holm from Vidiots finished of with their signature graphics based on glowing light effects but also surprising with some hand drawn content somewhere in the middle. Working the musical climaxes very well, Johan finished off strong. He had a little mishap touching our scaler/switcher unit causing the image to scale down a bit but that didn’t stop him at all. That unit came to cost us a bit more trouble later on and I think we should build a cage for next time or at least put it out of harms way.

In the large hall next to our room there were some VJing going on too. VJ Union member Hie from Visual Bandits were doing visuals for the controversial hip hop act Maskinen. I just got a short clip from it and my camera freaked out from VJ Hie’s frequent strobing during the chorus. I really liked the stalking rapist quality in the visuals for “Den som inte dansar” (chorus goes: “The one who doesn’t dance is a rapist!”).

The Bopa lecture

No sleep for Anna and the Pixelvärk crew. The lecture was held in the afternoon and we had a good turn out with people from different fields within art and design. Anna was showing her work and had a nice conversation going with the audience. One of the topics that came up was video loops for sale. Anna used to be involved with a project where they sold music with visuals. The discussion turned to video that is sold on sites like vjloops.com and whether that is good for the VJ community or not. Anna claimed that it’s good for all VJs since if more people (VJs and DJs) demands visuals, the clubs must invest in the proper equipment. This was talked about in the context of VJs creating their own content or buying video clips made by others.

A new week started and the Pixelvärk crew worked hard on promoting the rest of the Pixelvärk program and filling up the upcoming workshops.

The first Modul8 workshop

Andreas Apelqvist and Dan Nordgren from Startsladd held the first workshop in the basics of the VJ software Modul8. It was really fun to watch them going over the whole interface and what every little thing does. Even as an avid Modul8 user I picked up a few new things.

The Johan Södeberg lecture

The first and only lecture held on the Cinemix stage in the Gothenburg International Film Festival’s tent on Järntorget. The tent was actually a really good venue for lectures and you’re pretty much sure to have a big audience. Johan Söderberg, director, composer but maybe foremost known as one of Sweden’s best film editors. Johan was talking about the new education program in Audiovisual design that he is launching at the University of Dalarna as well as showing some of his work. The discussion really got going when people started asking him about where he got his video clips from and how the copyrights were handled. Söderberg pretty much divided it up in commercial work where big money is payed for all rights and non commercial projects where he simply “steals” as he puts it. As the the discussion got deeper the line between commercial and non commercial work got really fuzzy and Söderberg himself really couldn’t or wouldn’t draw a line. As some people in the audience seemed a bit skeptical one film maker thought that film makers should offer some of their archive material free of charge for people to experiment with.

Audiovisual Collaborations

In the afternoon Ilan Katin, our guest from Berlin, held a lecture in audiovisual collaborations. Showing some work from three very different artist collaborations he painted a picture of what could be done in this field. As a fourth example he showed Lance Blisters, one of his own collaborations and talked about how the project was structured and even opened up the project files. Ilan finished up by performing one piece live.
This was also the first lecture being offered as a live video cast. Unfortunately however, we didn’t get the sound working properly which was a real bummer.

The VJ jam

Trying to do three things on one day is very hard for a small team like ours so I’m very happy that we really pulled it off. The VJ jam took place at Nefertiti in collaboration with the club The Eye. A collaboration that we pulled out of the hat about a week before the festival since our other plans really didn’t work out. To add to the difficulties, all of the equipment could not be rigged at Nefertiti before the gig. It’s a jazz club and they have concerts earlier in the evening so they didn’t allow any equipment on stage. We hung the projectors the day before which was a pretty time consuming job due to a very low ceiling which complicated things. Once again Gorki’s Magic Arms saved the day (not his real arms though, since he had to leave town for a meeting this day). After the jazz club was done we only had about an hour to rig three screens, a video wall as well as the VJ table with mixer, splitter and all cables. This is when the greatness of the Swedish VJ Union came in to play. Everybody helped out causing us to magically finnish somewhat on time. Even our guest, Ilan Katin was dragged in to helping out. But I think he was kind of pleased doing it and experience the spirit of our little community.

Each VJ set was split up to about 30 minutes per VJ act. I had some technical difficulties with our equipment so the first 10-15 minutes were spent getting creative with the blue screen (a good point was made that we should have taken us the time to set the projector’s default screen to black). I was followed by Ilan, Lysbang, Fetish23, Morrsken and Startsladd who all had very nice and memorable sets. The decision to add the old school video wall was great. We got our name up there and everybody had a good time playing around with the computer dedicated to the video wall while not performing, dancing or having drinks.

I must also lift my hat to Sankt Göran and Cazuma, the club organizers and resident DJs as well as Trickski, the DJ act visiting from Berlin. They performed very well and the dance floor was packed 5 minutes after opening the doors. I wish that could happen in Stockholm…

The Morrsken lecture

Can’t say we had a massive turnout for this early saturday lecture. But Linnea really did a nice presentation (her first of her VJ work) and we had a good conversation going. This time we also got the live cast going so we had some additional viewers on-line and more people keeps on watching the saved video stream. Linnea was, among other things, talking about living in a small community with lack of good clubs and visuals as well as being a woman in the VJ-world, something she claimed didn’t really effect her that much.

The advanced Modul8 workshop

The last thing on the Pixelvärk program was the advanced Modul8 workshop held by Ilan Katin. Many of us were tired from the VJ jam the night before and only had a few hours sleep. This didn’t stop us from having a great workshop. Ilan’s methodical way of explaining and de-dramatize things made it really easy to understand. After showing how to make our VJing more effective and fun with midi controllers and giving more insight to the module system as well as creating your own modules, he got down to more advanced concepts such as multi screen projection with the TripleHead2Go device, video mapping and controlling lights with the DMX protocol. He really made it seem like piece of cake and it reminded me of when my design teacher once said “Aftereffects is nothing but Photoshop with a time line, nothing for you students to worry about”.

Pixelvärk will be back but I’m not sure where and when. The only thing I do know is that I need some time before I’m involved with a project like this again, so it won’t be next week. For those of you living in the Gothenburg area, keep on the lookout for Gorki’s project Pixel Lab. They will continue with lectures, workshops and lab sessions for people interested in all forms of VJing.

Here’s Ilan Katin’s view on the Pixelvärk festival.

Andreas Apelqvist was quick to edit some clips featuring Startsladd from the Pixelvärk VJ section at the Gothenburg International Film Festival’s opening party.

The techno duo Dmitry Fyodorov has been out shopping for audio visual collaborators. For their last gig at Debaser Medis, they’ve teemed up with the Vidiots. I know that Dmitry Fyodorov had high expectations going in to their search. They were mentioning some really nice references from the german Minus label. They can not have been disappointed with what the Vidiots did at Debaser. Adding some old school studio monitors and a video matrix to the setup was a really nice touch! We will have to see if this collaboration will last but I now for sure that they plan to do another gig together in Malmö shortly.

I just got back from Siggraph Asia in Yokohama, Japan. Siggraph is an expo for the world’s leading experts on computer graphics and interactive techniques. I was helping Mobile Life giving a demo of the Instant Broadcasting System that they were showcasing in the Emerging Technologies section. I didn’t really have much free time to see the rest of Siggraph but visited the art exhibition and I met a few fellow VJs.

In the art exhibition there were a couple of things that stood out. The tree panel projection by Tokyo Wonder called Lights & Shadows (top video) was truly beautiful and well made.

The most exciting pice however was the Lumarca, a 3d volumetric projection on to strings. It’s made with Processing and the code is open source and downloadable through Google Code.

The VJs I met were Stuart J H Ward, a Canadian expat who has been living in Tokyo for few years and who’s very involved in the tokyo VJ scene. Stuart says the japanese VJ scene is pretty behind technically since many of them are using Motion Dive Tokyo and are bound of the limitations of that software.  Then I ran into Nicolas Guyon who is one of the two creators of a VJ application called AWI, Audio Wave Interaction. The last VJ I met Tu from Bangkok based B.O.R.E.D., a VJ crew who I mentioned earlier this year in my Duckunit article. I never met Tu before since he was in NYC studying at Parsons when I was in Bangkok interviewing his friends. Tu had a his short film “A film from underneath” showing at Siggraph.

The rest of my Siggraph experience contained corny robots, an interactive sun rose and some pretty interesting physical computing gear from Microsoft Research in Cambridge which was kind of like the Arduino but without the soldering. And of course all the variations on touch screen and depth perception equipment that you can imagine (yawn!).

This installation at Heineken’s Green Room Sessions party at Malmen, Stockholm, is a was a group effort. Jakob Grandin, head of Grandins Flying Circus asked the Vidiots to set up a triple screen video installation displaying film and photography from a number of artists. One wall displayed a slideshow and the other two video. Every 8th second a strobe went off the movies and the slideshow changed.

The gear used in this project was 3 projectors, a Triplehead2go and a Macbook Pro running Modul8 (VJ software). A Modul8 module, that was programmed specially for the occasion by The Midi Thief, sent a midi signal to a DMX light board causing the strobe to flash and the video plus slideshow to forward to the next piece.

Contributing artists:
Curator – Tony Cederteg
Left wall – Ruben Broman
Middle wall – Mathias Sterner
Right wall – Nakkna

So I went to this vase party at Nordic Light Hotel last week. Iittala was showing off their vase “Lantern” by Harri Koskinen in a two piece video installation called “Light Reflections” by the Vidiots.

The first piece was a 4:3 projection on a screen (and on a sequence of monitors in another room) portraying light shooting through the the glass surface while the vase turning on a rotating foundation going in and out of focus.

In the second piece they had vases put up on a wall and video overlapping the vases so that it looked as if streams of light were shooting up from the vases. This was the more spectacular of the two even if the “analog quality” of the first one was nice too.

Here are some videos from lectures, performances and workshops from the Piksel ’08 fesitval (member of the Pixelache network) that went down in Bergen december 4-7.

giss.tv/dmmdb/piksel08

On wednesday december 3 the Interactive Institute celebrated their 10 year anniversary with a big party at Enskilda Galleriet that I had the honor to produce. Together with a party committee from the institute we created a really successful evening. The people of the committee were Tina Finnäs, Tomas Rydell (who also is one of the producers behind NMM in Norrköping), Erik Sjödin, Aurora & Alice (interns from Italy who among other great things did a neat UV installation). We also got great help from CJ Rosén (from TII and VJ Union) and Kristoffer Karlsson (fLiM). Here are some clips from the performan

Lights
Our friends from Physical Interaction Lab did a fine tuned perfomance with their latest project, “Lights” held by Patrik Axelsson. “Lights” is build on music and light bulbs that are turned on and foo. The project includes Ableton Live, Open Frameworks , a DMX dimmer and some hanging light bulbs. You can read a more detailed description on Pysical Interaction Lab’s blog.

Carl-Johan Rosén
CJ was VJing with his survailance cameras. He had rigged three cameras in the facilities. To pick camera source, CJ uses a video switch that he controls via serial data from a program that he has written in Open Framworks. The music was mixed by DJ Dust.

DadaLife
Great to finally see this live. I’ve done Dada Life’s tour visuals but since they never performed this set live in Sweden, I never had the possibility to see it. The whole project depended on having a pre made automized VJ set that they could travel with since they can’t afford traveling with a VJ. I have created a set in Modul8, that runs on MIDI data from Abelton Live. I also programmed representations of effects the boys uses in Abelton Live. The concept was to have a very minimal amount of graphics, only a few sound has graphical representation. A pretty good concept considering I had very little time to create. In retrospect I wish I had some more time to put on the graphics but it is very effective. The simple naive style went well with Dada Life’s happy go lucky style with dadaistic under tones. The MIDI reactive elements turned out really well in a way that wouldn’t be possible to obtain as a live VJ.

Bete Rum
Once again we were featuring our friend from Brazil who ended the evening to music mixed by Adrian Lux & Oscar Wedrén.
The evening also included visuals from Bertrand Gondouin to the tunes of DJ Kristoffer Karlsson and a performance by Yoshi Akai who was playing his Lego sequencer.

With a little bit of a delay we’re presenting this report about what happened at the rest of Pixelvärk. On saturday the 18th Pixelvärk held their main party at the copper tents in Hagaparken (Stockholm). This year’s focus was put on installations. The theme was described as participatory culture, orientalism, dreams and mirages.
Söderbyggd’s performance was a chemistry lesson as art. Maybe higschool science, but that didn’t make it less good. In their little chemistry lab Sönderbyggd had directed their modified speakers towards their lab table where different substances were reacting to the frequencies of their homemade music compositions. The chemical reaction was filmed and blown up on a video screen. The act was performed twice and in between the performances they had a pair of small installations running. One of the installations was a buzzing pile of dirt. Check out Sönderbyggd’s MySpace page for some video clips.

Joyce Ip was showing an analog skeleton animation.

Interacting Arts had made a beduin tent in a Arabian Nights theme where a film was shown and they were offering water pipe and oriental snacks.
The natural but unofficial after party was held at the club Piggly Wiggly (Nordic Light) where Startsladd was VJing and DJ Jethro was spinning. All VJ-material had been produced earlier that day. As a part of the act they were showing a slideshow of images of the club’s guests that had been shot by the entrance.

On the finishing sunday there were lectures at Mejan Labs. Natalie Aubret from the started with a presentation of the live animation program Animata that has been awarded Pixelache Software of the Year. Following was a lecture on participatory culture by Interacting Arts. I must say that I had a negative attitude from the beginning but warmed up during the lecture and the finishing discussion.
Interacting Arts has written the book “Participatory Culture” where they try to define what participatory culture is and is not. To sum it up they claim that most within art that claims to be interactive is only communicating one way. The viewers can often only interact with the art piece in a way that the artist has pre defined and in that way it is not true participation because the viewers can’t or aren’t allowed to alter the piece the way they want.