A marvelous round robin “cover chain” of videos to support peace and reconciliation in Uganda.

Peter Gabriel » Tom Waits from The Voice Project on Vimeo.

“In The Neighborhood”

“Home” in Gulu from The Voice Project on Vimeo.

a thank you for the new farm from the ladies in Gulu, started with money raised at the Edward Sharpe record release party
voiceproject.org

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.

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.

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Open Emu demo from Dan Winckler on Vimeo.

Here’s a small excerpt of my visuals with Dam-Funk at One Step Beyond last night. Details tomorrow. Thanks, Benton!

Open Emu: video-glitching with unintended consequences from Dan Winckler on Vimeo.

In this brief screencast, I show some of the video-glitching you can do with the Open Emu NES plugin (for Quartz Composer), resulting in some intriguing unintended consequences. In a nutshell, the video glitches can be physical, i.e., Mario and Luigi can step on the random blocks we’re writing to the screen. This opens up interesting possibilities for on-the-fly level-editing, cheats, and tormenting NES sprites.

Sorry about the somewhat crunchy audio — I accidentally captured it at a low sample rate.

Tonight I’m doing visuals at the 8static show in Philadelphia with chip musicians Cheap Dinosaurs and Starscream. If for some reason you’re not in Philly (i hate you), you can watch the live webcast tonight on Ustream or in the player below. I’ll be debuting my first visuals using the Open Emu QC plugins — wish me luck!

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).

Since vade went ahead and spilled (some of) the beans, I might as well post a little teaser of the open source project I mentioned in my last post. Essentially we have wrapped a game emulator in a Quartz Composer plugin, with the goal of enabling virtual console bending, so to speak. Here’s a little video of some of our latest developments in deliberately glitching the graphics of a NES game.

castlevania-nst_rom_glitch (click to watch)

More to come…

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.

Paul Owens writes to say:

Hey everyone, I just wanted to spread the word that the feature length documentary [Reformat the Planet] that I directed is now streaming off of the mega hipster site Pitchfork Media…

http://pitchfork.tv/week/blip-festival-reformat-the-planet

the whole movie. for one week only!

If you haven’t yet seen it, or have been waiting for a copy that I never got around to sending, please check it out now. for those of you who aren’t familiar with the movie, a little history lesson: i’ve spent the last few years documenting (with pals Asif Siddiky and Paul Levering) the Chip Music scene, which is an underground music movement based around using old videogame hardware (gameboys, nintendo, atari, etc.) as musical instruments.

Eventually we realized we had captured enough footage to make it into one of those feature length documentary-type things. Taking a year to compile the footage, we eventually premiered the film at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin in March. It also recently played in Melbourne, Australia and will be seen in Seattle, New York, and Amsterdam in the coming months. But who cares about that? Just go watch it now.