Recent visuals at Share Oct/Nov, 2011, a set on Flickr.

Happy Thanksgiving! Here are some stills (screengrabs) from some recent jamming/noodling/experimentation at Share NYC (share.dj).

Updated 12/7/2011 to add some missing pics from the set.

Kalorama by Dan Winckler on Vimeo.

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.

UnitedVisualArtists » Speed of Light.

A beautiful installation done with lasers. Excuse me — forgot this was the the Internet — I meant, LASERZ. United Visual Artists are a UK-based team who create live visuals and interactive installations with an architectural bent, meaning, not just the usual glowing rectangles: really striking work. As I tweeted moments ago, I can haz laserz, too? I’m tired of weak projectors on dingy screens.

The VCW Performance

Weds 4/28
8pm
$7 suggested donation

Diapason Gallery
882 3rd Avenue (map)
(bet. 32 & 33 Streets)
10th Floor
Sunset Park, Brooklyn
Info: 718.499.5070
Subway: D, N, R to 36th Street/4th Avenue

The VCW Performance is a show of live video pieces created as part of the Video Composition Workshop.

The Video Composition Workshop is dedicated to writing performative video pieces. It explores how artists approach their compositions and how they notate the scores from which the videoists perform.

This show presents the completed compositions, works-in-progress, and experiments of six videoists and musicians resulting from the first six-week salon. Pieces include video paired with acoustic instruments, analog electronics, and digital audio. The evening will end with the VCW composers discussing their various approaches. (We’re as wary as you are of endless artist discussions. We’ll stay focused and concise.)

Live video has made some great advances in the past years. Technological capabilities and popular awareness are making it more integral to contemporary performances. VCW is happy to present 6 approaches to working with video as a dynamic, performative art.

Compositions by:
Naval Cassidy (aka Jon Giles) (including performers Roland Brown, David Hainsworth and Jonathan Moniaci)
Jonny Farrow
Nisi Jacobs (including performer Michael Schumacher)
Adam Kendall (including performers Christof Knoche and Eileen Mack)
Phillip White
Dan Winckler

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, 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

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.