Recently my friend and collaborator Josephine Dorado invited me to speak with her Social Media Mashup class at The New School, which I was delighted to do. The conversation (on Seesmic) ranged across a variety of topics, including improvisation vs. structure (in my work and live visuals in general), visual performance tools, and how my own background as a theater/comedy actor has impacted my live visual work. Now that the class is moving on to another topic, I’m posting this here for anyone who’d like to keep the conversation going, e.g., ask me all the heavy, technical questions I said I’d answer later. Thanks again, Josephine, Barb, Tom, Debbie, andrihatesjazz, Cecelia, Antoine, Rick and all you lurkers. Happy holidays!

Last month Glomag and I kicked off a new collaboration with a show at XRAY NYC, a new monthly burlesque/magic/awesomeness show put on by those who organized the late Freaks ‘n’ Geeks party. Some of the video Emily (my steadfast documentarian) shot will soon make its way online but, in the meantime, I hope you like these shots Asif Siddiky of 2 Player Productions took as much as I do. Thanks, Asif!

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.

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

Tonight I’ll be doing a set in the “VJ battle” at MediaLounge, a new festival at Grace Exhibition Space with a ton of cool-looking video installations. Come enjoy the open bar whilst I brain VJs with my pixel mace.

This Saturday, I’ll be jamming with CJ (seej.net) and Peter Shapiro at the Love Your Lane Ride after-party, a benefit for Time’s Up, the environmental, alternative-transportation (bikes) group, at an enormous, indoor skate park called the Autumn Bowl. I shall paint its mammoth walls with hearts and spades. And bikes (Excitebike FTW!).

p.s. I’ve put up one video from Saturday’s show — more to follow

Tonight:
MediaLounge
at Grace Exhibition Space
840 Broadway, Brooklyn time: 6 pm (festival starts), 11pm (VJ battle)
free

Saturday:
Love Your Lane Ride after-party
at the Autumn Bowl
73 West St, Greenpoint, Bklyn time: 8:30pm
$9.99 door

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.

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.

Tomorrow morning bright and early i’ll be heading off to Owego, NY, for a 5 day residency at the Experimental Television Center. I’ll get back Sunday night, probably. Wish me luck and/or productivity.

Some of my high school students showed me this video. They don’t know what “viral video” signifies but they know what it is. Whether you can dance or not, part of this subculture or not, it’s joyful and infectious.

Can anyone point me to the original Soulja Boy video?

Update

Still haven’t found the original Soulja Boy video but here’s a great Eclectic Method remix: