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.

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

We’re relatively new to cat ownership. One thing we learned after we moved to Williamsburg last fall was that nearby birds and other prey can make our cat Lila Brown make a strange cracking/clicking sound, as if she’s imagining crunching their tasty bones. Recently I caught this behavior on video. You’re welcome, Internets.

My brother’s probably already seen this on BoingBoing, but I wanted to post this video here for my parents. Having got themselves a Wii for Christmas, I hope they’ll appreciate the technical side of this hack as well as its artistry and nostalgia-hacking glee.

Found on BoingBoing

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.