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.
Shot on a Panasonic GH2 with hacked firmware and a Canon FD 50mm f/1.4, no color correction. The trains are an annual holiday display at the Roberson Museum in Binghamton, NY. Music graciously provided by the wonderful band The Octopus Project.
Hi folks. The weekend before last I shot some pretty footage in my office and turned it into a music video. It’s set to a beautiful, minimal/ambient track by John Chantler and you can watch it below. Once you’re done watching it, scroll down to read an explanation of what the footage is of.
I shot and edited this video as exercise. I was spurred to do it, to do it expeditiously, and to finish it when someone tweeted about the Cult of Done Manifesto, which I hadn’t read in a while. All in all, it was very satisfying and I hope people like it.
Mysteries revealed
The two first guesses about the nature of the footage that I received (from Benton-C Bainbridge and Chris Jordan) were pretty much dead-on. It’s sunlight reflecting off a plastic (mylar?) book cover, which I crinkled and tugged at slightly while recording. Benton guessed it right first so he gets the cookies. If I’m getting my optics right, these kinds of reflections are known as caustics, and I have always found them very, very beautiful. All of the effects were done in post and I tried to keep them subtle. I’m pleased that I succeeded to some measure since CJ guessed that the chromatic aberrations were done with a polarizer.
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.
This is a brief sketch I put together to bounce off a new collaborator — just a little something that popped into my mind while out the other day, a manifestation of an homage to Ed Ruscha that I’ve been meaning to do for years. Here’s the 720p Quicktime version, which looks much better than the one above. The black line is an unintentional rendering glitch; however, as my collab said, “The black line is a nice touch; as the Persian rugmakers said, perfection is an offense to God.”
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.
{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.
First things first: Open Emu v1.0.0b2 is now available, featuring a massively refactored architecture, refined user interface, several new emulator cores (GBA, Genesis and SNES), and the first public release of the Quartz Composer plugins. Go get it at openemu.sf.net. Let us know how you like it and please do send us video, screenshots, bug reports, and tag your stuff on other sites with “openemu” so we can find it.
Open Video Conference
Although I missed most of the conference, what I did experience at OVC on Saturday and Sunday was great: met many interesting people, ingested tasty ideas and saw some great demos. More on this soon.
Here’s a rough demo video of Open Emu I whipped up for the conference despite intense sleep deprivation.
Let us know how you like it and please do send us video, screenshots, bug reports, and tag your stuff on other sites with “openemu” so we can find it.
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