Update: June 22, 2009

Open Emu version 1.0.0b2 is now available, featuring a massively refactored architecture and several new emulator cores. Go get it!

Open Emu, an application I helped develop, is now available for download at SourceForge.net. Here’s my part of the story.

At the first Blip Festival in 2006, I generated some of the visuals with jit.atari2600, a plugin for Max/MSP/Jitter (my platform at the time) that encapsulated an open source Atari emulator. Jit.atari2600 was buggy so I quit using it in performance, but the idea of encapsulating an emulator and ‘bending’ it in software — as my friends noTendo and No Carrier do with hardware — stuck with me. Early last year, I began looking for an open source Nintendo emulator and learning Objective-C/Cocoa in order to try making an emulator plugin myself. I found Open Nestopia, an open source, Cocoa-based port of the fearsomely thorough and accurate Nestopia emulator by Martin Freij, and started work on the plugin during my residency at the Experimental Television Center. I contacted Open Nestopia’s developer Josh Weinberg who generously, patiently and kindly helped me get the app to build and get a sense of his code and what to do with it. Then I got really, really busy with other things and shelved the project until August when, with the help of Josh and Anton, I got the plugin to build and run in QC.

Anton joined the project — which in the meantime Josh had transformed into Open Emu, a framework for multiple emulators (NES, Atari, Sega, Gameboy) — and development really took off. Now, five months later, our first beta release of Open Emu is live on SourceForge and the Quartz Composer plugins are in private beta and soon will be public. I couldn’t have learned this much and brought the plugin this far this quickly without the overwhelmingly generous help of Josh and Anton especially, as well as all the other friends and developers who’ve patiently answered my noob questions these many months. Thank you Josh, Anton, Eric, Ben and everyone else.

Gamers! If you’d like to play your favorite old school games on Mac OS X, download the beta and give it a whirl. It’s still got some bugs so we’d very much appreciate your feedback.

Visualists and hackers! Stay tuned to the Open Emu site for our Quartz Composer plugins, coming soon.

**Oh, and if you’d like to see me use Open Emu in a show, come out to 8static in Philly next month.

p.s. We’re having a private beta on the plugins right now. If you’d like to try them, let me know. Note: you must have the Leopard Developer Tools (and thus Quartz Composer) installed for these to be useful.

My friend Don (a.k.a. No-Carrier) got sick and asked me to sub for him this Friday at Lit Lounge, playing with Nullsleep, Anamanaguchi and Cheap Dinosaurs. Feel better, Don! Here’s the show flyer and info.

The Blue and Red 3D Spectacular
Nullsleep
Anamanaguchi
Cheap Dinosaurs

Friday, 9 pm
Lit Lounge (2nd Ave between 5th and 6th St)
$6 cover (I think)
Ages: 21+

demo reel from plasticpool on Vimeo.

The latest and greatest version of my demo reel, edited by the fantabulous Benton-C Bainbridge. Watch it in HD!

Music: “Compressoratorer” by Lucky Highstepper.

<br/> Photo by Anya Garrett<br/>

Tuesday I’ll be mixing a live music video parody in Sara’s show, the ONE SARA SHOW. Sara sez:<br/>

I do hope you’ll come, I’ve been working on this show for almost a year now, and, I don’t wanna jinx it…but it’s pretty much the best thing I’ve ever done. Oh, and there’s music by Meowskers, a band that will likely take over the world, and appearances by Dan McCoy and Tamra Malaga. Plus some fun video stuff by Dan Winckler. Jon Friedman directed the show. Need I say more, people???

BUY TICKETS NOW! (Use discount code SSFAN to get a free drink at the show!)

SARA SCHAEFER’S ONE SARA SHOW
WRITTEN AND STARRING SARA SCHAEFER
DIRECTED BY JON FRIEDMAN
MUSIC BY MEOWSKERS

Tickets are $15. Buy online and use the discount code SSFAN to get a free drink at the show!!!

Also get tickets by calling (212) 868-4444

Offish description:

In her new show, “Sara Schaefer’s One Sara Show”, comedian Sara Schaefer attempts the impossible. To stage a solo show all about herself while simultaneously proving she’s not a self-absorbed bitch. With the help of a hipstery rock band (Meowskers), some friends (Tamra Malaga, Dan McCoy, and Dan Winckler), and a whole lot of glitzy multi-media pyrotechnics (i.e. VHS home movies and clipart), it’s way more than a solo performance – it’s a goddamn miracle.

DOOOOOO IT!

I am pleased to announce that I will be playing AMODA’s Digital Showcase #43 on March 8th. The list of audio and visual performers is long and hot. If you’re going to be in town for SXSW or other reasons, I hope you can make it. I’ll be debuting fresh HD footage and running things with VDMX for the first time (and reviving my long dormant Quartz Composer skills to up the ante).

Last night Emily and I got back from three days in Bremen, Germany, where I was invited to perform at the MENSCHMEERMEDIEN (man, mirror, medium) festival at the Nordwolle fin-de-siecle wool mill. We had a wonderful time and wonderful hosts. Thanks for the invite, Martin! The whole experience went something like:

Monday: Receive invitation via Share discussion list. Accept.
Tuesday: Martin tries to book ticket.
Wednesday: ticket falls through. Dan books incredibly cheap ticket on Emirates. Wednesday afternoon: Emily decides to come and books incredibly cheap ticket on Emirates. Thursday: leave for Hamburg.
Friday: arrive in Bremen. Eat bratwurst and tour the city with alternate historians.
Saturday: perform at massive old Victorian factory. Eat bratwurst. Party all night with splendid Germans.
Sunday morning: conclude party with Turkish/Sri Lankan falafel.
Sunday: act like tourists. Bratwurst. Completely fail to throw up out of one’s nostrils (note: this did not happen).
Monday: return to New York. No bratwurst.

I played with Axel Himmelmann, who makes excellent music and looks a lot like me. Emily shot some great pics and video of Axel and me performing. You can watch one of them above and the rest on the Internet Archive.

Sept 27th I’m playing with Lance Blisters, stepping into the skin of Ilan Katin’s face-melting visuals once more.

Sept 28th I’ll be doing the visuals for Samita Sinha’s NAKED : a multimedia excursion, at NYU. Listen to some of Samita’s clips — this looks like it will be an interesting collaboration. Show info:

NAKED is a meditation on desire: the desire to belong and to express oneself, the desire for love and transcendence. For children of immigrants, these desires are informed by certain questions: what of our inheritance do we preserve, what do we transform, and to what degree? NAKED plays with these questions through a music performance of North Indian classical vocals fused with electronics, harmony, and global rhythms, against a backdrop of video of found visuals from classic Bollywood cinema, family photographs, and paintings. NAKED takes the nayika, the romantic heroine of classical South Asian art, as its departure point. Using the skeleton of her story– girl falls in love, breaks rules to enjoy and endure love’s trials, and glimpses transcendence as her beloved eludes her? The show describes what a post-identity, diasporic nayika sounds and feels like. Through 2,500 years of development in miniature paintings, temple sculptures, poetry, dance and music, the trope of the nayika’s quest has emerged as a complex metaphor for human desire. NAKED sets the nayika loose into the next frontier, the cracks between tradition and progress, for an enchanted journey that is as novel as it is ancient.

Friday, Sept 28, 7-9pm
Palladium Presentation Room A
NYU Wasserman Center
133 E 13 St, 2nd fl

Last night’s show at The Tank was fun. It was a bit of a struggle with my patch at times (lots of those texture binding errors) but I beat it into submission such that things started to flow, especially with Touchboy, who played last — and who I hadn’t heard before — great stuff. Asif and (?) from 2Player Productions (makers of the Blip Festival documentary) were there shooting some footage and posted a great duet by Glomag and Receptors on YouTube.

Straight from the Bit Shifter cosmic email blast to you, here’s the info for the show I’m doing visuals for on Saturday. Should be hot.

.: RECEPTORS, TOUCHBOY, GLOMAG, NULLSLEEP @ THE TANK :: 09 15 ::
.: NEW YORK NY US ::
This Saturday night features another senses-shattering installment of the monthtly low-/no-tech PulseWave event at The Tank, featuring Toronto Game Boy electro technician TouchBoy, and the intense, moody low-end crunch of Receptors. Covering fire supported by local legends Glomag and Nullsleep; cutting-edge visualist Dan Winckler dazzles your eyeballs all night. $10.00, all-ages. I’m not playing but I’ll be there, dancing like a spastic. With you.

:: TouchBoy, Receptors, Glomag, Nullsleep, & Dan Winckler ::
:: PulseWave @ The Tank ::
.: Saturday 2007 09 15 | 9:00 p.m.
.: The Tank | http://www.thetanknyc.org/
.: 279 Church St. | between Franklin and White
.: New York NY 10013
.: US
.: 1 (212) 563 6269
.: $10.00

.: PulseWave:
http://pulsewave.8bitpeoples.com/

I forgot to mention that I’m doing visuals with Lance Blisters tonight at the after-party for the 1st annual Anarchist Book Fair.

LANCE BLISTERS: LIVE Jungle, Breakcore, Punk, and Noise performed with MIDI Guitar and Microphone, using custom software to create cutup political anthems. LIVE synchronized visual transcriptions of the songs’ subjects. LANCE BLISTERS was initiated in 2003 to SMASH THE STATE with a show which will ROCK YOUR FACE OFF! LANCE BLISTERS is a live multimedia band currently comprising Lance Blisters (music) and Ilan Katin (visuals), with special guest visual performer Dan Winckler for this show.

This Saturday, 14 April 07, LANCE BLISTERS will perform at the Anarchist Bookfair Afterparty with bands VIC THRILL and SATURN MISSILE, MOURNING GLORIES, ZEMI 17, and DJ’s CX KIDTRONIK, PETER GUNN, SHAKEY, AMOK, EMMIT BROWN, JASON BK playing a mixed bag of breaks, hip hop, d and b, techno, rare grooves, dubstep, breakcore, and…

Expect LANCE to play at 10:30pm

9pm-4am, Saturday, 14 Apr 2007
The Creek in The Cave, 10-93 Jackson Ave. (Long Island City, QueenS)
7 to Vernon/Jackson -or- G to 21 St/Van Alst.
$3-6 w/ ID
Google subway map from onnyturf.com