After Vision’R 2011 success, focused on nomadic hybridations and local minorities cultures international resistances, for 2012 up to you to express your singularities and alterities, reactive or not to the geo-strategic actual contexts. Resistances and relative autonomies are both singularization sources.

Next Vision’R will take place around month of May 2012, with Paris days at the Mercoeur Center based on the May, 12 weekend.

Proposals reception period is open until December 5, 2011.

Read more on the VJ France Forum (English & French)

As ElectricKingDan pointed out earlier this week, it’s about time to apply for the 2012 edition of the Mapping Festival. This is what you need to know:

Your imagination is full of audiovisual projects? You have performances, installations, workshops or other audiovisual multidisciplinary projects to discover?

Submit your project to the Mapping Festival!
As every year our curatorial committee develops the Mapping Festival program through an open call for submissions.

For it, you have to submit a COMPLETE file and register on line on: www.mappingfestival.com

BEWARE: Mapping Festival 2012 call for entries start OCTOBER 18h TUESDAY until NOVEMBER 18th FRIDAY included.

Different categories:
- Clubbing: VJing / scenography / Set AV
- Audiovisual performance
- Installation / Exhibition
- Outdoor projection
- Workshop / Lecture / Software demonstration

This weekend I got an email from Lasse Andersen a.k.a. Same Same, a fellow visualist from the Dark Matters collective in Copenhagen. He was pushing their last video from the Trailerpark Festival 2011 but since it was so freaking nice I asked him a bit about how it was made and about the people involved in the project.

Throughout the video you see visuals created by Dark Matters and Hvass & Hannibal using VDMX and Modul8. Two visual styles that comes together very nicely.

[00:00 - 00:51] This is a good display of the interaction created by Yoke. The box with the two circular holes contains a Kinect that tracks hand movements. These movements are used for controlling 10 interactive compositions that could put on top of other visuals. The hands controls the worms, the big bouncing balls, etc. If you look later at [01:34] you’ll see a nice bulge effect applied as well. OpenFrameworks and OpenNI was used to process the tracking data from the Kinect and Unity 3D was used to create the interactive scenes.

[01:48 - 02:06] I really like how the different sections of the set are made to look like they are moving. It looks great with the abstract patterns but it really gets uncanny at [01:58] where you can’t even spot the lines of the set anymore. I was discussing with Lasse whether it was a just a lucky coincidence due to the way it was filmed but he pointed out that it’s also because the anatomy imagery is so bright and busy that it fools they eye.

Here’s a video of the rehearsal showing the bulge effect.

The set was constructed by Bo Benzon at Arkitektur Ministeriet. It’s made out of 50 plywood pieces (122×244 cm) and was designed in 3D and cut on an CNC router machine. The one ton set was assembled on the floor and it took 20 people to erect it.

The group spent about 750 hours putting this together including the four days of live projection at the festival.

SWElectronica 2011
2nd festival of swedish electronic music feat. Goto80, Random and Raquel Meyers will take place on 30 April – 4 May 2011. Join us in Moscow, St.Petersburg and Petrozavodsk!

30th.04 – Squat Cafe, Moscow
01st.05 – Tsokol, Petersburg
02sd.05 – Porshen, Petrozavodsk

<<<< Facebook event here

Ben Cook (Synthetics) and I went to the VJ Festival in Erlangen, Germany, to perform with our act Instructions. It’s a new festival that I became aware of when they contacted the Swedish VJ Union about half a year ago, right in the backwaters of the Visual Berlin festival scandal. What started up as a small festival became a pretty big one with 8 VJs, 11 A/V live acts, 3 movie screenings, 7 installations and 9 DJs. The F.E.T.E. crew under the direction of the VJ couple Norbert Schoder and Stephanie Peters produced the event and they took very good care of artists and guests.

We got to stay with a guy called Max and and became flatmates with Ricardo Cançado a.k.a. VJ Eletro-I-Man, a fun and crazy brazilian guy that lives in Barcelona and runs the Visual Brazil festival. He had two performances and a lecture during the festival. Because Ben and I live in different countries we had some synchronizing to do which left us dealing a little too much with preparations instead of seeing more lectures and performances. We still got to see some of the great stuff that was going on at the festival:

Probably the best and most inspiring experience during the festival was Kadâmbini, an audiovisual theater performance by the French group Iduun. It’s a dreamy Terry Gilliam like narrative made up of a mix of pre shot video, animation, acting, live video, video mapping, recorded audio and live sound effects.

I’m not a huge fan of 3D, not “normal” 3D nor anaglyph 3D (the kind made to be viewed with cyan/red glasses). The audiovisual act Parallaxis from Vienna did a panoramic version of the latter. But it was pretty cool in a way, giving a whole new meaning to z-space and also more depth to the whole audiovisual performance. It also made me realize that it only gave a really good effect when the graphics were moving towards the audience. If it goes the opposite direction – into the screen, anaglyphic 3D is totally unnecessary since it looks the same as moving in to z-space in a normal way. Unfortunately I missed the lecture from Parallaxis where they talked about their anaglyph techniques. I would be pretty interested in knowing how you can change the visual depth in a live mix.

Bildströrung is a crew from Switzerland. They are the kind of guys who knows so much about the video technology that they tend to take over festivals as technical directors. The Bildstörung guys provided the video matrix that made the festival’s 7 screen setup possible. For their own performance they did a setup where they fed one screen each in a triple screen setup.

Our own performance with Instructions went really well. We were headlining on Saturday at 2 in the morning (or well, technically sunday) to the tunes of DJ Julietta and DJ Ana from Munich. We’ve been continuing on the theme from the last gig we did together. It’s based on lights and reflections and has references to experiments with film and light in the 20′s and 30′s. We were accomplished for the soulfulness in the analog look of our visuals. I lost my voice on friday night and had a bit of a hard time communicating with Ben during the gig on saturday. That’s when TextEdit comes in handy.

A person who’s performance we missed but who together with VJ Eletro-I-Man was one of the most colorful people of the festival was Aiko Okamoto a.k.a. Mo. When she wasn’t sleeping under a jacket or over a desk she was running around dancing with a bottle in her hand, shooting images of people with an array of different cameras or constructing costume items out of scraps found in the artist’s lounge.

On sunday there was a brunch for the artists where festival director Norbert Schoder got really sick from fatigue and had to have a visit by the paramedics while laying down on an improvised bed on the restaurant floor. He had simply had too little food the previous days and stayed up way too many ours. He was already feeling much better on Monday when I stayed at his and Stephanie’s place.

The last event of the festival was a workshop with Iduun. Philippe Chaurand gave a demo of their Modul8 modules MapMapMap and Monomal. The first is a module that makes video mapping a breeze thanks to a well made interface. The second one is a module for the Monome which let’s you control an audio visual composition in 4 layers.

I don’t know if they will be doing the Erlangen VJ festival next year but I wouldn’t mind coming back if they did – job well done!

I am usually pretty quick at publishing news about the Mapping festival in Geneva. This time however, due to a heavy workload, I am extremely late but I hope the news will make some people happy. The Mapping Festival is closely tied to Garagecube, the makers of the VJ software Modul8. But you don’t have to be a Modul8 user to attend to or perform at the festival. The festival is known to be well organized and display high quality work. Read Startsladd’s report from the last festival to get an idea what they are all about.

Here’s the info from Gäelle Amoudruz at the Mapping festival:

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The open call of submissions to the Mapping Festival 2011, from May 19 to 29th in Geneva, Switzerland. If you have had any ideas now is the time to share them with us! The festival promotes the concept of mixed disciplines and will accept  proposals for the following categories:

• VJing
• Audio Visual performances
• Installations
• Lectures/Workshops/Presentations/Demos

The application is available on our web site: www.mappingfestival.com.
Be mindful that the deadline for submissions is November 20th, 2010.

We are looking forward to receiving your submissions!
Mapping Team

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Here’s a video from the Opening night of the 2010 edition of the festival:

Gothenburg, Kulturnatta October 1st 10:30pm @ Världskulturmuseet

An organized Video Riot will be held for the first time in this part of Sweden. It is pulled together by PixelLab under the direction of Gorki Glaser-Müller. It’s going to be a collective VJ show with multi projection on the theme FUSION. VJ’s are given a chance to drop by and interpret the theme with their own material.

It’s an open event where everyone is welcome. Our aim is to fill the entire big wall above the stairs with projections. High and low, bright and dark, graphics and video. A mosh pit of moving images!

Video artists are finally given a huge free space in Gotheburg. This event – if successful – could lead to future collaborations with the city of Gothenburg and companys here on the west coast. So don’t miss it! Send an e-mail to Gorki over at PixelLab pixellabsweden[at]gmail[dot]com and tell him you’re in!

Nino S will do an audio-visual performance, lecture and VJ workshop at the Belgrade of Light festival, 9-16 september.

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).

It might not be the perfect timing to promote another German VJ festival but I just got a message from Norbert at the VJ Festival in Erlangen, close to Nürnberg in southern Germany. It’s organized by the FETE crew (Freunde Elektronischer Tanzmusik Erlangen) and it’s their first festival. You will find the call for entries at their website.

I’ve been to Erlangen myself a few times and I can recommend the city. I don’t have a clue about the quality of VJing in Erlangen but let’s find out!