Watch/like/follow/etc on Vimeo.

On March 10th I did live video projections for the final rounds of the Laptop Battle at the AMODA Digital Showcase at South by Southwest 2012. Many talented musicians and visualists performed and showed their work — check them out.

Music: “plexiglass afternoon” by DXM (who was one of the eight contestants and came in second!)
Video documentation: Emily Kornblut

Thanks to Chris Jordan and Anton Marini for loaning me their gear! Chris has built a number of multi-mirror reflectors (that you can see briefly at 01:05 in the video) that split the projection beam up into a rotating spray of smaller images. The result is gorgeous and I am very thankful I have such generous friends who’ll share the gear and expertise with me.

Tomorrow evening I’ll be doing live visuals at the Open Planning Project, following a global webcast of Lawrence Lessig speaking live from Harvard Law School about fair use, online video, and politics. This event is free, so come on out for an interesting discussion and film screening, then stay for the free food and beer and awesome visuals and music by yours truly and DJ c-tor.

RSVP on Facebook

Screenings of the chat are being held around the world, so if you’re not in New York but still want to check it out, visit the Open Video Alliance site to look for an event in your city. Of course, you’ll miss out on my visuals, but it looks like there’s lots of good stuff planned for every location.

Update: still on!

Subject: let’s turn this wintery mix into a winter remix!

hey all,

just a reminder that our new york screening event is tonight feb. 25th beginning promptly at 6pm with a lecture by lawrence lessig. it’s at the open planning project, 148 Lafayette b/w howard and greene, on the penthouse level so take the elevator all the way to the top.

we’re expecting a great turnout and we have some amazing guests:
tom tenney of the re/mixed media festival 2010
videos by jonathan mcintosh, elisa kreisinger, and kenneth tin-kin hung
streetfilms
dj c-tor and vj dan winckler

and of course, friends, colleagues, and members of the open video alliance.

we’re now at 40 cities and 4 continents worldwide for tonight alone!

tell your friends, tag the web with #wireside, and look forward to seeing you there.

have a great night!

Happy New Year! Glomag and I have been invited to do a couple songs on the Engadget Show again this Saturday. If you would enjoy (or at least not utterly detest) the discussion of gadgets, gaming and technology by wisecracking bloggers, do come. It’s free (but you have to queue for tickets), their guest is Google’s senior product manager for Android, Erick Tseng, and they’ll be raffling off CES swag, too. Details below but please be sure to check the Engadget post for updates.

The Show is sponsored by Sprint, and will take place at the Times Center, part of The New York Times Building in the heart of New York City at 41st St. between 7th and 8th Avenues (Google map). Tickets are — as always — free to anyone who would like to attend, but seating is limited, and tickets will be first come, first served… so get there early! Here’s all the info you need:

• There is no admission fee — tickets are completely free
• The event is all ages
• Ticketing will begin at the Times Center at 2PM on Saturday, doors will open for seating at 4:30PM, and the show begins at 5PM
• You cannot collect tickets for friends or family — anyone who would like to come must be present to get a ticket
• Seating capacity in the Times Center is about 340, and once we’re full, we’re full
• The venue is located at 41st St. between 7th and 8th Avenues in New York City (map after the break)
• The show length is around an hour

Miss our first performance? Head to Engadget.com to watch Show 003. Go down to the video player and skip to 69 minutes in if you only want to see glomag and me play.

Update

Took me long enough…here’s the video.

Update:

Video’s up! Head to Engadget.com to watch Show 003. Skip to 69:35 if you just want to see Glomag and me play.

This Sunday glomag (excellent chipmusician, friend and producer/director of This Spartan Life) and I will be playing two songs at a live taping of the third episode of The Engadget Show. Tickets are free but you have to pick them up at the box office before the show (see details below). Hope you can come!

Description: The Engadget Show, next Sunday, November 22nd, with Drew Bamford, director of HTC’s Innovation Center; Joystiq’s Editor-in-chief Chris Grant for a special roundtable discussion focused on gaming.

Live music by glomag and live visuals by Dan Winckler.

Filmed live in front of an audience at the Tishman Auditorium at Parsons The New School for Design, at 66 West 12th Street between 5th and 6th Avenue. Seating is limited and tickets will be handed out on a first-come, first-served basis — arrive early and be prepared for a little wait.

• The show is graciously sponsored by Nokia, and hosted by Parsons The New School for Design
• The total show length will be around an hour
• There is no admission fee — tickets are completely free
• The event is all ages
• The venue seats just over 450 people
• Parsons students are welcomed, and we encourage them to come!
• Tickets will be available for pickup at the Tishman Auditorium at 2PM on the 22nd, and we’re strongly encouraging people to get their tickets and not stand in line — if you have a ticket, you’ll have a seat!
• You’ll need to hold onto your ticket stub to be eligible for the giveaways
• You cannot pick up tickets for other people — if you want your friend to get a ticket, bring your friend!
• The show begins at 5PM, and doors will open at 4:30PM

More info (and the first two shows): http://www.engadget.com/tag/TheEngadgetShow/

Facebook event: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=180756203617&ref=mf

This Saturday I’ll be playing at 8static, the monthly show for the friendly, enthusiastic chiptunes/chipvisuals scene in Philadelphia. Before the show, I’ll do a brief show ‘n’ tell workshop about Open Emu the open source emulator-bending tools we released this year. Animalstyle (local Philly favorite and cat rescuer), Glomag (local NYC favorite and This Spartan Life producer/director), and Trash 80 (if I knew where Trash 80 lives and something interesting about him, I would tell you) will be playing their excellent musics, and I will be sharing the pixels with Enso (local Philly favorite and pixel artist). It’s a cheap, fun show and just a few doors down from a very tasty Ethiopian restaurant. Let your friends in Philly know about it.

Tuesday, I’ll be playing at {R}ake with the improvisational bleeps ‘n’ bloops of Color Is Luxury, a duo consisting of Charles Cohen and hair_loss, which will be a refreshing return to pure improvisation for me after being quite focused on tight A/V pairing this year. It’s audio/visual dinner theater in the back room of Monkeytown, the Williamsburg venue that feels like a 70s sci-fi film: soft, white couches lining a cubic room with projections on each wall. Good food, well worth experiencing. All details below.

8static
Saturday, November 14, 7pm
West Philly
http://8static.com/about/ $5 with a flier

{R}ake
Tuesday, Nov 17th, 8pm
Monkeytown
58 North 3rd Street (bet. Kent & Wythe)
Williamsburg, Brooklyn
$7 Admission; $10 Food/Drink Minimum (I recommend the cheese plate)

Update

The {R}ake show went great — Charles and hair_loss are master improvisers and it was a pleasure to play with them. Here’s the video. I bumped up the brightness and contrast so you could see Charles (right) and hair_loss (left), hence the grain. The sound quality from the on-camera mic is less than could be desired, but still listenable.

The most difficult stage of preparing for a visual performance for me lately has been the process of preparing a ‘patch’ (lately a project file in VDMX) and deciding on connections between my hardware controllers (Trigger Finger, Xbox 360 controller, Wiimote), the patch, and the content (video files, animations, generative elements). Often I wish I could simply have a one click/drag connection between a particular controller and the effect or generator I wish to control: connect Wiimote to OpenEmu instance, done — not connect 7 of 15 Wiimote data sources to 6 or 12 effect parameters. Thinking about this tonight I was reminded of Lance Blisters, the audio/visual duo made up of Geoff Matters (music) and Ilan Katin (visuals), and what I learned of their working processes when I subbed for Ilan for several shows. Some aspects of that process:

• Lance Blisters (Geoff and Ilan) chose to use the Trigger Finger exclusively to control the visuals. Unless something went wrong, Ilan would not need to touch the mouse or keyboard during the show.
• Geoff controls the music with a MIDI guitar. After each song, he sent a MIDI command from the guitar (to his laptop > MIDI > WiFi) to Modul8 on Ilan’s computer, triggering the loading of the next song’s project file, using custom modules they wrote. Again, no mousing: just one MIDI CC command triggering the next song’s visual setup. (And one song’s visuals (Grindcore?) were entirely controlled by Geoff via the MIDI guitar.)
• The controls for each song’s visuals were fitted to the capacity of the Trigger Finger, not the other way around. (And they chose the Trigger Finger because it has 16 pads, matching the 16 slots in Modul8’s media bin.) If a song had more than 16 media in it, a row of pads was often used as a bank switch. Chorus: tap 12 pads to switch animations in time with the music; bridge, tap one pad to switch to another bank of media (reflected onscreen in Modul8), tap the same 12 pads to bring up different media. Again, custom modules were written to make Modul8 fit the songs, not the other way around, e.g., to change the MIDI mappings on the fly, sometimes a module for each song.
• Each song was practice-practice-practiced to get it into muscle memory.

What is there to take away from this? Obviously the last point is the strongest. Fit the software to the hardware; fit the patch to the song. Whatever you decide to do, practice the heck out of it to make it second nature, making the set tighter and freeing you to play, even improvise. What else? I’m thinking of rewriting all my qcFX (most of which are wrappers for v002 plugins — thank you, vade ) so that they fit to my controllers, instead of experimenting with different controller mappings during shows. Maybe get more use out of the Trigger Finger’s pads by creating different ‘stab’ behaviors in the different FX/generators, e.g., use the 16 pads as a spatial grid, turning on and switching the direction of particle systems that stream from/in the four quadrants of the screen. We’ll see.

More on the One Step Beyond show soon, hopefully. In case it doesn’t happen, some thank yous: to vade for his plugins, to Momo for his “Momo particles” QTZ and his four-layer setup, to Benton, Owen, Jasmine, Reid, Emily, SeeJ, Peter, and the museum crew, to Chris Covell for his NES demos, to No Carrier for glitchNES, and to Vidvox for VDMX.

AMODA Laptop Battle
The Mohawk, 912 Red River at 10th St
Friday, March 13th, 9pm-2am
$9 General Admission
$5 for AMODA Members, Free for SXSW badge holders

Update

AMODA posted more details about the show, which I thought I’d share. I’ve been listening to the laptop battle contestants’ tracks on their MySpaces — not done yet but I would already recommend The Mysterious H (chiptunes!) and Uber Dub by Blixaboy. Have a look/listen!

CONTESTANTS:

Blixaboy (Dallas)
The Mysterious H (Austin)
Deejay Yayyay (Austin)
Kidko (Austin)
QuantumEyes Ent. (Austin)
Bangalore (Austin)
Caglioso (Austin)
Disco Hospital (Austin)
Cygnus (Dallas)
Grassnose (Austin)
Skinnebrew the Destroyer (Austin)
Sudrok Inalak (Austin)
DXM (Austin)
Traducer (Austin)
Dubbel Dutch (Austin)
Majora (Austin)

JUDGES:

John Gomi (G on 5 / The Fifth Gallery)
Craig Negoescu (Naka Media / OpenLabs)
Dave Gonzalez (DJ Starsign)
Amanda Butterfield (YellowTape)

EMCEES: (these guys were great last year. really kept the mood up and the flow going)

Phranchyze (Austin)
Zeale (Austin)

DJ for the rest of the space:<br/>

Learning Secrets

Visual Artists: (presenting pre-recorded material)

Catherine Ross
Daniel Swan
Guthrie Lonergan
James Johnson-Perkins
John Michael Boling & Javier Morales
Mac&Cheez + Mistah Le
Melanie Patiram
Video Jams 2013 (also doing live visuals!)
Zeitguised

Update

The show lat night went really well. Paris and Outpt’s visuals were astounding, especially their set with Nullsleep: the work they’ve put into collaborating with Jeremiah really shows. I’ll put up some video of my sets this week. Technically, the Open Emu debut went really well — no crashes! Did have one hang, though (not sure of the cause), and two kernel panics (Bluetooth, when connecting the Wiimote). :X

8static: Starscream’s first song from plasticpool on Vimeo.

One video up, more to come: this is the first song of the first set of the night: Starscream (Damon on chip, George on drums) and my visuals. You can hear tracks by both bands on MySpace.

I generated the video live using the Open Emu QC plugins, which let me play original NES ROMs in emulation, live. I used two ROMs, one written by No Carrier and another called Polar Pinwheel by Chris Covell. These ROMs are being played totally live — no pre-recorded video — and partway through the song No Carrier picked up the controller and jammed with me.

If you’re interested in using No Carrier’s ROM, watch my blog and/or his site for its upcoming release (free and open source).