Crowd Control makes VJs and DJs obsolete

Mark Ridder, a brave 3rd year Interactive/Media/Design student from the Royal Academy of Arts in the Hague wrote to the Swedish VJ Union to promote his show:

“Crowd VJ is an interactive visual show where visuals are defined through movement. You only need to bring your favorite light source and the visuals are generated for you while dancing. Easy as that! No vj is involved anymore, just party.”

[youtube width=”445″ height=”275″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBa6vw4hG00[/youtube]

Ok, Mark, you had my attention there for a few minutes. I went to the web site (www.markridder.nl/installationart/crowd-vj/) to read more about the project. On the site Mark goes a bit further in his explanation:

“Together with Crowd DJ we are Crowd Control. The audience is back in charge again. They decide what the music will be, what the visuals will show. No more remote distant arrogant dj. No more psychedelic nerdy wierdo vj, which you never saw before anyway. Just a do it your self party. Back to the core, back to the people.”

So there is a camera connected to a Macbook Pro running Mark’s Crowd VJ program that he made in Max/Jitter which paints by tracking light sources and sends the image to the projector. I will assume this gets pretty boring after 15 minutes? Or how long it takes for the crowd to get tired of waving their glow sticks (glow sticks, really?!). Maybe there are different funny brushes for the audience to paint with? Maybe one that sparkles? (I hope there isn’t a person that needs to control the brushes because then you will have to call him “BJ”)

The companioning software, Crowd DJ (made by fellow genius Tom Laan), also does camera tracking by dividing the dance floor into 9 squares. Each square represents a sound and each sound stars if at least one person enters a zone and stops if no one is there. I hope for Toms sake that there will be a lot of sound loops and at least 9 people on the dancefloor co-operating all night to make an interesting soundscape or that crowd will turn on you. Tom is using Max with Max 4 Live and Ableton Live to achieve this.

I don’t know about the name “Crowd Control”. Doesn’t it imply the authorities taking control of the crowd and not the power to the people as Mark seem to imply? Crowd control to me is when the riot police uses a water canon, plays high frequency noise or sprays the trouble makers with a disgusting smell to make them go home.

But this is fine as a school project and all but sorry, I won’t make it to your school party, I’m afraid. If you happen to be around the Hauge on December 14th, you can experience Crowd Control at the KABK gallery. Be sure to bring glow sticks, ear plugs and protective clothing.

DIY: Lock the Firewire connector

I was surfing some VJ related sites when I came across a few DIY projects that I really liked. The one I fell for instantly was the securing of the Firewire 800 connector to an ethernet cable. I bought some nylon cable ties today and pulled the connectors together. I secured it with some tape too, just in case. Now the connector pair slides in to the port and the ethernet connector snap locks into it’s port so that the Firewire cable can’t be pulled out.

Read the original story and see the other projects in this Skynoise post. I love the velcro idea too, even if it isn’t that pretty. Btw, we’re planning to have more DIY related posts here in the near future.

Report from the VJ Festival in Erlangen, Germany

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.

[vimeo width=”445″ height=”250″]http://www.vimeo.com/16715088[/vimeo]

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:

[vimeo width=”445″ height=”250″]http://www.vimeo.com/15167261[/vimeo]

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.

[vimeo width=”445″ height=”250″]http://vimeo.com/11987591[/vimeo]

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.

[vimeo width=”445″ height=”250″]http://www.vimeo.com/16714699[/vimeo]

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!

Syphon – a new revolutionary technology for OSX

I’ve been very exited about the new possibilities that are opening up with Syphon, the new revolutionary open source technology for Mac OSX by Anton Marini (Vade) and Tom Butterworth (Bangnoise). There has been a lot of talk about it lately but it was not until last week Syphon came out in Public Beta that everyone can download and try out for themselves.

So what does this wonderful thing do? Syphon allows applications to share frames – full frame rate video or stills – with one another in realtime with alpha channel. Syphon also utilizes hardware acceleration on the GPU allowing for HD video in 60 fps.

Syphon is both a framework for developers as well as some plugins. Plugins are provided for Quartz Composer, Max MSP/Jitter, FreeFrame GL and Unity 3D Pro. Through QC you can make Syphon work right now in VDMX plus CoGe and in Resolume through FreeFrame GL. The new upcoming VDMX 5 beta 8 there will be a true support for Syphon allowing for even more functionality.

Modul8 users has so far been out of luck since M8 doesn’t have full support for Quartz Composer nor support for FreeFrame GL. However, Garagecube (the makers of Modul8) has been working on an interesting video mapping software called MadMapper that lets you map video from any Syphon abled software. It would be really strange if GarageCube made a video mapping software that doesn’t work with Modul8. During the VJ Tourna festival in Budapest there was a presentation of the MadMapper where they used a special Syphon enabled version of Modul8 (also confirmed in this CDM article). So what does that mean? It means that we probably will see Syphon in the next Modul8 release but we don’t really know whenever that will happen.

To get an idea of what Syphon can do you should watch this video which demonstrates how to take a composition from VDMX and use it as a texture on a 3D object in Unity Pro, all happening in real time.

[vimeo width=”445″ height=”250″]http://vimeo.com/14566287[/vimeo]

There has been quite some debate around Syphon and some people doesn’t seem to grasp the concept of having different softwares collaborating. Here are some things that have been written about Syphon lately:

As a side note, the MadMapper, while only in it’s alpha version, looks great as a concept but as of now it doesn’t seem to have a very thought out user interface. I hope GarageCube would collaborate with Philippe Chaurand (Anome) from the Iduun collective who did a great job on the MapMapMap module.

Mapping Festival 2011

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:

[vimeo width=”445″ height=”250″]http://vimeo.com/16274584[/vimeo]

Report: Organized Video Riot

PixelLab, under the direction of Gorki Glaser-Müller, organized a Video Riot at Världskulturmuseet during Gothenburg’s Kulturnatta (Culture Night). For someone outside Sweden this might not sound that huge, but actually it is. Getting visuals and VJing accepted in the finer cultural rooms has been extremely difficult over here. The people responsible for cultural events has shown to be very conservative, I would say almost afraid to let us in. So this first Video Riot was a very big step.

The night at Världskulturmuseet was split into four different audio-visual performances. First out was Gorki himself, with a special project, material from one movie, played from seven DVDs. Second up was Midori Hirano together with the American VJ Jeffers Egan. After that Daniel Troberg performed under his alias Erase.

The video riot was the final act. Enough video artists arrived to get use of all projectors. As usual, we had to do all the rigging our self, but for this kind of event I can accept it. There was a big gap of silence between the third and final act, because the DJ’s were late and didn’t know how to get audio out of their CD players, this I can’t accept. [update] I just got the information that there could have been some technical issues with Världskulturmuseets mixer, so I will hate a little less. [/update] People assumed the night was over and started leaving the place. But finally we got some audio. The act lasted for about 1,5 h. A perfect duration for something like this.

VJ’s for the night:
Pia Engman
Morrsken
Startsladd
Madelene Bergman
Hosea Waore
Mio Lee Rapp
Snailpainter
Joel Dittrich
Gorki Glaser-Müller

All together this was a really fun event. When the night was over, Gorki told us about his future hopes. He thinks that events like this can open the eyes of the conservative people sitting on positions that make these big cultural events happen. Next time he wants to see even more people showing up. People bringing their own projectors, shooting video all over the place. A real Video Riot. And I think he’s right. Among the people, considering themselves to be the most open minded persons in the world, we find the most conservative and boring schmucks on earth.

I managed to record very few clips during the night. I present them here in one of the worst movies I ever made.

[vimeo width=”445″ height=”250″]http://www.vimeo.com/15512102[/vimeo]

Snailpainter who also took part of the video riot sent me this video today

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/15601090[/vimeo]

//Andreas, The Angry VJ

external links: Gorki Glaser-Müller

Organized Video Riot @ Världskulturmuseet in Gothenburg/October 1st/10.30pm

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!