Roger Ho has a great eye. He also has really impressive focus-pulling ability. Check out this video he shot of The Octopus Project playing in Dallas on Thursday night.

Also, Roger Ho is an enigma. What’s your story, Roger? Drop me a line.

Last night I checked out my friend Chris’s art installation Synopsis at the Leo Kuelbs Collection in DUMBO. Gorgeous work, elegantly executed. Here are my pics (click for the Flickr set).

relations between hardware and content/intent

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.

This Saturday at The Tank, we’ll be doing a live This Spartan Life show, hosting Pulsewave, the monthly chiptunes event. Is machinima. Is funny. Has live music. Hope see you there.

Info:

This Spartan Life Hosts Pulsewave at The Tank July 26 with 3 live chiptune acts!

Please note new address for The Tank, below

Damian Lacedaemion will be joined by AeroMC, Fyb3roptik, Dan O’Conduit, Amber of the Solid Gold Elite Dancers and 8 Bit Collective forum members, live on screen via XBox Live!

In gamespace, no one can see you sweat.

Pulsewave is the monthly live chiptune music event in NYC. This Spartan Life is the award winning “talk show in gamespace.”

Your host, Damian Lacedaemion enters the unpredictable multiplayer universe to interview various guests and luminaries all within the 3D gamespace of Halo 3 on Xbox Live.

This time, Damian and the crew from This Spartan Life will be on screen live to host a special Pulsewave with musical guests from the upper reaches of chiptune Valhalla:

8GB
Unicorn Dream Attack
Neil Voss

Visuals by the incomparable No Carrier!
Special machinima videos!
Live interaction between avatars and audience!
The bizarre and frightening world of the ub3r 1337 on graphic display!

All with a heavy dose of CHIPTUNES and EXPLOSIONS!

Don’t miss it!

Saturday, July 26, 2008 at The Tank
@ DCTV
87 Lafayette St @ White St
New York, NY, 10013
Cost : $10
Doors open at 9PM

<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 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

Josh Ott invited me to draw with him last night at Galapagos Art Space in Williamsburg. Josh has written a phenomenal live visual drawing program called superDraw which, surprisingly, I’ve never posted about before. At base it’s a drawing program: the performer draws with a Wacom tablet and the lines are transformed with beautiful effects, the list of which keeps growing and growing as Josh adds to the program. For some time now, it’s been capable of two performers drawing simultaneously, which is what we did last night, playing along with a phenomenal DJ (whose name I didn’t catch) and Mad EP — of Psychasthenia Society — who (dammit) I haven’t posted about before, either. It was thoroughly engaging and fun, like every time I’ve played superDraw with Josh. After much persuasion, it looks like I’ve talked him into considering porting superDraw to Max/MSP/Jitter. Anton discovered a relatively easy way to port Processing code to Jitter and we’re going to do a test port with part (all?) of superDraw — so clean up that code and send it over, Josh.

The ever-engaging and delightful Chika played with the reggae/dance group after our set, with her increasingly engrossing textural, psychedelic visuals. Bravo, Chika.

It’s Fleet Week, apparently. Partying sailors abound. I was to see two shows tonight but the first one was so enthralling that I missed the second. So it goes. Adam Kendall did visuals for Roger Eno and Plumbline at Tonic: lovely music paired with absolutely brilliant visuals. Adam’s approach is very painterly and moving on a gut level. Since I saw his work for the first time two years ago, his craft has gotten better and better. Misty, melting, mnemonic melanges of powerful, personal films — see? Words don’t do it justice. Watch his Case Studies, which are fairly close to what he did tonight.

It was really cool to see a great pianist like Roger Eno play. He had a delicate touch and phrasing, well-placing his lines in Plumbline’s laptop work. He showed how you could improvise just outside the tonal structure of a (seemingly) fixed set of tracks, which is something that had stumped my imagination a bit when thinking about how to play piano in a Share jam with similar laptop musicians. And he watched Adam’s visuals closely. Thumbs up.

Aside to Adam: are you putting out 320 x 240? I’d love to see your stuff in higher res. Good reason to start incorporating those GPU shaders…

The show I missed was my friend Eli’s, which I wrote about earlier. Ah, well — next time (which is just what Eli said). He’s going on a solo tour this summer, hitting LA, Vancouver, Buffalo, and other places I can’t recall. If you like the tracks on his myspace and you know someone with a venue in the lower 48, drop Eli a line — he’ll probably be interested.

Challenges

Adam and Anton’s approaches seem similar and complementary to me. I hastily scribbled an idea that came to me during the show: challenges. I’d like to give collaborative challenges to my fellow/favorite visualists, e.g., swap: Adam and Anton doing a duo show with their current setups (god’s eye and vade, respectively). Both of them predominantly use a library of video clips that are both personally meaningful and formally interesting, which they know and have practiced well. Now swap their libraries and let each other decide which clip the other will use next. Connect them with an Ethernet cable and a very simple Max patch to streamline the process. The patch notifies them when a video’s been selected and previews it so they can prepare to slip it in.

Regardless of whether A and A would dig this idea, it’s the kind of collaborative ‘game’ (or structure or form) I’d like to explore more. Rather than focus on the technical aspects of current and future video mixers, which seems to snag us all up when we talk about visual jams, I’d like to see my fellow visualists play games with each other like this. And I’d like to build simple Max patches — and potentially KeyWorx plugins, in the new version of KeyWorx that’s on the table for the 2nd phase of Kids Connect — to aid these games. Thoughts?

Kids Connect dev

Speaking of Kids Connect, we had a really good meeting today that cleared up a lot of the questions Josephine and I had, e.g., the level of supervision needed, if/how many student teachers we’d have to help teach, when we’d get funds released to start work in Second Life, and more. Plus we were joined by Dr. Garey Ellis, who heads the Promise Fund’s Inner Force program. Not only did he have valuable insights and suggestions for KC, he reminded us how new this kind of work (online collaboration, visual performance, creative uses of consumer technology) is, and how exciting it will be for the workshop students and parents. It feels really good to be sharing my knowledge outside of the relatively narrow improv comedy world.

“Even a maxed out card can cut a straight line/”

“Momma told you not to stay out too late/ but didn’t momma always tell you not to masturbate?”

Such is the poetry of my old friend Eli Resnick, under his nom de plume…er…de rock, Second String. Tonight, he comes to town to play with his band Second String and the B-Team. Hard-hitting, Lou Reed-ish rock ‘n’ roll, funny, incisive lyrics. Listen:

Lisa Loeb
Satellites featuring Briel
Sidelong Glances

Like it? Come out to the Lion’s Den tonight at 11 pm. 8 bucks, 18+. Here’s some verbiage from Second String:

Deceptively intelligent, Second String and the B-Team are equally at home on a wavelength with Johnny Rotten or Jacques Derrida, and sometimes broadcast both frequencies at once. “Satellites,” the first single off their album “Debatable Atrocities,” (scheduled for early summer release) is a prime example. This song can be enjoyed as another rock-and-roll moan about the boredom of suburban life, an insight into the mind of OJ Simpson, or a hard-rocking song about nothing at all. It really breaks open as a critique of agnosticism and the role of a police force in a democracy, especially in light of Gramsci’s brilliant observation that “there is no ideology but ideology by and for subjects”, but what’s best about it is the way that Second screams the chorus like he’s really about to kill somebody. It’s hard to find that degree of genuine emotion in a band that understands the rules of harmony and respects rhythm.

Full of contradictions, Second is a musical perfectionist who does not permit his band to rehearse, a graduate student in poetry whose choruses (chori?) often have four words or less, a leather-jacket wearing vegetarian, and a sensitive macho pig. The B-Team is a round-robin who’s-who of the Northern Virginia indie rock scene, borrowing pseudonymous members from the Casual Occupation, The Beanstalk Library, Jebus, Instrument Cred, Bring Mommy The Scotch, The Thundertones, Space Friend, Carnegie Stew, The Lost Atoms, and The Alphabetical Order, and introducing new musicians at such an astonishing rate that only two of their shows have featured matching lineups. Behind all of the absurdity is Second’s desire to push musicians to the upper limits of their capacity for listening and creativity, and wring great performances out of them by any means necessary. It’s never an easy show to play, but the results are more often beautiful than not.

I bumped into Matt Moses last night, a very funny and genial improviser and playwright. Our groups Gunshow and Stockholm Syndrome used to do a lot of shows together and we had the same coach, the venerable Dan Goldstein, improv teacher, decision studies psychologist and marketing genius. Matt’s moving to Yale for a 3 year stint in their graduate playwright program. Yay, Matt! I hope you’ll find grad school as much of a growing experience as I have.

And speaking of great playwrights, I got an email from the UCB Theater, telling me that Anthony King’s funny, charming, ridiculous musical comedy spoof GUTENBERG! THE MUSICAL! will have a free show tomorrow night. You can hear some songs from the show on its very own myspace and read the show’s very! enthusiastic! website!. Anthony (book) and Scott Brown (music), play the parts of the show’s chipper, clueless creators, Bud Davenport and Doug Simon, who did all their research about Johann Gutenberg using Microsoft Encarta. My favorite part of the show was the hats: Bud and Doug have dozens of cheap mesh hats with the names of the show’s characters painstakingly spelled out in serif Sharpie. At any given moment in the show, each of them will have 6 hats in his hands, doffing and donning them again and again. It’s deadpan, dead-on musical satire from end to end and joyfully silly. UCB’s site says it’s sold out already but there’ll be some tickets at the door.