MonoMeet Fall 2009 – Tehn from Chili on Vimeo.

I’m headed to Boston next week for a workshop and evening performance – and that’s the perfect time to share some of the good folks I get to work with. You can catch them in person if you’re in the greater Boston area, and expect more on what they’re doing here online following the event for the rest of the planet.

The monome is an undifferentiated array of light-up buttons. Nothing about it really has to control music – it could be used for visuals, or orchestrating an army of small robots, or triggering pyrotechnics. Kedaar Kumar is one of the multi-disciplinary performers who crosses between music and motion. The video at top shows a little peek at his generative work, behind monome inventor tehn (Brian Crabtree). He also has one of the best housings I’ve seen for the monome, in the form of an Etch-a-Sketch case.

For more of Kedaar’s work:
www.soundcloud.com/kedaar
Vimeo playlist
See also the collective of Harmonix employees of which Kedaar is a part (yes, the Harmonix of Rock Band and original Guitar Hero fame). Their album is available free: www.oxytocinmusic.com

It can be a little tough to wrap your head around it at first, but the monome is a wonderfully powerful concept. (There are two phases I went through. The first phase: “Huh? This is just a bunch of buttons! There’s no velocity sensitivity!” Second phase: “Wait – the simplicity of this is completely genius.”) As an idea, you don’t actually need the hardware itself – really. Adam Ribaudo, the creator of the insanely awesome 7up software for monome, has executed a virtual monome that runs on a powerful multitouch Java framework. Non-physical monomes slide with elaborate backgrounds like Japanese screens, both instrument and visual representation. You can check out all the software at Adam’s site (under the name makingthenoise / mtn):

http://makingthenoise.com/software.html

Incidentally, I’m working on my own quasi-emulator which I’m writing in Processing. I’m doing it from scratch partly because I want to use it as a teaching tool, talking about arrays, objects, and imagining other monome shapes (trinome?)

Boston Events

If you are near Boston, design organization AIGA Boston is hosting me for both an introduction to Processing I’ll teach during the day and a free party by night.

Thursday, November 12
9:30a – 1:30p Visual Programming with Processing workshop at The Cloud Foundation – registration required
6p – 9p Social Mixer + Visual Lounge at The Enormous Room (which is a room, though not enormous) – FREE

Full details of both:
Boston AIGA: Visual Programming with Processing + Social Mixer

Recently I got a group of my favorite things together: A projector, a $4 Ikea rear projection screen, my Vixid mixer, Korg Entrancer, video camera, some home made pizzas, and Canadian Whiskey.

What followed was a couple of hours of partying, playing with shadows and video feedback, a bit of editing, and a subsequent music video release, for Edward Guglielmino’s Settle Down With Me:

Edward Guglielmino – Settle Down With Me from Jaymis on Vimeo.

I’ve been waiting for a while to combine the Vixid’s powerful feedback capabilities with rear-projection. The plan for this clip was to do a simple, cheap, fun experiment to help launch the single, and create something which could be revisited with more detail down the track if we decided to give it more budget.

The setup was reasonably simple:

• Projection screen made of Ikea Saxan curtain, taped tight across a double-width doorway between rooms.
• HD Camera shooting the screen (”analogue” video feedback), fed to the mixer.
• Kaoss Pad Entrancer with Time Delay effect used on the top feedback loop, to control strobing.
• Two additional Vixid feedback loops used for colour inversion (zebra-stripe) and layer rotate effects, and to enhance colour.
• Projector behind the screen.

The shoot really was about experimentation. The band came over, we made a batch of pizzas, had some drinks, and then spent the night playing around with different shooting methods and effects. In front of and behind the screen, with and without lighting, solo and in groups.

As often happens with these experimental projects, I only really found the effect I was happy with towards the end of the shoot. By the time Matt the guitarist had arrived, I’d decided that the cleanest results were coming when the talent was behind the screen, and I’d tweaked the Vixid setup to perfection. This provided some really beautiful, colourful, organic looking effects. I would have happily made the clip a single-shot of the guitarist, but apparently the plebs want more excitement and variation.

They’ve got their cheap thrills now though, so I can reveal my Directors Cut here on CDMo:

Edward Guglielmino – Settle Down With Me (Director’s Cut) from Jaymis on Vimeo.

I’m immensely pleased with how this ended up. It took a remarkable amount of on-set tweaking to get the projector and camera alignment correct, and the feedback and effects loops just right, but when it came together, the final product required minimal post-production – just a crop and a levels punch to get bright colours and pure black and white.

The VJX16-4 mixer really is the glue which made this whole thing possible. That’s not to say that the technical capabilities for this kind of thing only exist in the Vixid box. Several other mixers, and most software visualists are using could create similar, or more complex, effects. It’s the tactile immediacy which makes it so powerful. There’s no fiddling around, you just plug things together in the appropriate order, and start creating.

I think this is the point people are missing when they argue (on CDMu comments last week) about whether hardware gear is “better” than software. They can achieve precisely the same things, if they’re programmed to, and a “software” system is infinitely more flexible, because you can run other programs and join them all together. What people actually love about hardware – placebos aside – is the limitations.

The in-built barriers of a hardware device, and the comparatively narrow set of parameters in which it’s designed to work, force you to play inside a little walled garden of creativity. There’s less scope to waste time configuring, installing other software, trying new combinations of controllers and tools, building new automation techniques, checking your email… A hardware device doesn’t do any of that. You’re forced to focus on two things: What am I capable of doing, and what do I want to make with those capabilities.

In a world where our creative capabilities are effectively infinite, (and getting more infinite every day,) it’s liberating to spend some time in a place where there’s less choice. This is why music producers love their MPCs, and why house tracks still get produced on drum machines with a dozen hardwired samples. Too much choice can be paralyzing.

This is also why, after owning it for over a year, I still haven’t been able to give you a Vixid review. I must have sat down to write it every two months since I got the thing, and every time I do so, I get distracted by discovering more techniques which let me do awesome stuff.

So, while I’m espousing the benefits of limited hardware boxes, let me give you the executive review, in case my opinion wasn’t already clear: Of all the boxes I’ve ever worked with, the Vixid is the least-limited, the most flexible and configurable. Yet it still gives you enough of a walled-creativity-garden that you’re not paralyzed by choice. It’s an inspiring tool to own, and to work with.

If you’ve got the need for a limited hardware mixing box, and the budget with which to acquire one, there really is no other choice. If you don’t, then you can put together something cheaper, and much more flexible, using the computer you may have lying around your home.

Just don’t let it paralyze you.

Qeve is a promising-looking, open-source visual performance tool built in visual patching environment Pure Data (Pd). It was built primarily on Ubuntu Linux but should also run with some adjustment on Mac. (Pd itself runs on Windows, but some of the visual dependencies are not available on that platform. I’d still recommend Linux.)

Aside from being free and open, and a set of patches you can go in and modify, there are some nice-looking features here:

• Audiovisual mixing and step sequencing, transitions
• Video browsing
• Beat sync and master clock
• 3 layers, supporting multiple formats (video, 3D, photos, text, paint), 3D/2D graphics
• Full OpenSoundControl support
• Audio analysis
• FreeFrame plug-in support
• Live video streaming
• MIDI configuration
• Control with Wiimote, Nintendo DS, and (open source iPhone OSC app) MrMr

The project comes from the development team Estereotips (Italian/English/Spanish site).

Project page:
http://www.estereotips.net/qeve

vdmo Kstati tells us all about it, in a complete English-language blog post:
Qeve: Free tool for Live Performance and VJing

The current documentation PDF is in English.

I’m giving this a shot on my Ubuntu box; stay tuned.

And here’s what happens when the software mixes with TUIO and an open multitouch interactive visual mixing table. It’s the MesaQ project, by the same team.

When Thanksgiving rolls around, OpenCV will be one of the gifts for which I’ll be thankful. OpenCV is a “computer vision” library, capable of tracking motion and analyzing images, but generally useful as a pixel-crunching video library for many tasks. It’s a native, C/C++ library, accessible from many other languages, including Java and Python. Experienced C++ programmers and artists dabbling in Processing alike can use it. (See our Processing tutorial.) It’s also a real success story for open source code, first developed by Intel but heavily developed by researchers and artists ever since. And it’s a success story for the permissive BSD License, used in everything from academic work to commercial projects.

I’m happy to have a few bits of really good news on the OpenCV front.

OpenCV 2.0: Vision improved. OpenCV itself has taken a massive leap forward this fall with version 2.0. The library is smarter, faster, leaner, and easier to use. You can program with Python instead of C++. And even if your programming skills are moderate, this should mean lots of new features that will filter into other OpenCV-based libraries. Among the 2.0 features already rolling out in pre-release versions:

• Loads of new object detectors and descriptors, including a 3D feature descriptor, self-similarity, new abilities to detect objects and people
• Faster and smater algorithms, and more samples to learn how to use them
• A new Python interface
• All-new, cleaner C++ interface
• Easier installation, easier builds on different platforms, and easier integration with IDEs like Xcode, Eclipse, and CodeBlocks
• Subversion for access to code
• Stereo camera support on Linux

Check out the changelog. And to get started, learn how to use the thing, and download OpenCV, see the wiki:

http://opencv.willowgarage.com/wiki/

Computer vision on Android: The other news is that, thanks to Google’s growing support for native code (finally), OpenCV is coming to Android. With OpenCV doing the geeky pixel crunching behind the scenes, you’re free to write some fairly straightforward Java to make vision-enabled mobile apps – or simply use OpenCV for high-performance pixel processing.

You can check out the project on GitHub:
http://github.com/billmccord/OpenCV-Android

This is an early build, so expect some wrinkles. But there are already some handy tools for getting started. There’s a video emulator, so if you don’t yet own an Android because you’re waiting for the better devices coming out in the next few months (smart), you can still get going. And there’s even some basic sample code for testing with face tracking.

If I’ve fired up your appetite, and you’re not sure where to begin, there is an excellent book on the topic, called – aptly enough – Learning OpenCV. It came out last fall, and so doesn’t include all the 2.0 features, but the basic functionality is the same.

So, would anyone like to start a little user group to work on this stuff? Say so in comments, leave your real email (it shows up for CDM admins, but not publicly), and we’ll get something rolling.

Tutorials from CDM on OpenCV:

Processing Tutorials: Getting Started with Video Processing via OpenCV
OpenCV Motion Tracking, Face Recognition with Processing: I’m Forever Popping Bubbles

…and because Linux is a terrific development platform you can boot into on any Mac, PC, or netbook, check out my rundown of getting OpenCV working on Ubuntu.

It’s striking how audiovisualism has broken into maximalist and minimalist streams, toward DJ-style cut-ups and mash-ups of video at one end of the spectrum and geometric generative animation at the other. Firmly planted in the maximalist, Emergency Broadcast Network-descended sliced-and-scratched popular culture, we have Eclectic Method. The duo does audiovisual pop-fragmentation better than anyone right now. They’ve appeared in a number of interviews, but Babelgum focuses right in on what they’re about, why those shards of mainstream politics and culture matter, and how a future generation will be able to receive multiple streams of information at once, jacked in Serial Experiments Lain-style.

Oh, yeah, and you get a brief glimpse of what happens when you mash with Fraggle Rock.

They’re indeed an audiovisual supergroup, and when your eyeballs and eardrums are ready to rock out, they deliver.

Thanks, Shawn Faherty, for the tip!

L’Odyssée de Rick le cube (extraits du spectacle) from Jesse Lucas on Vimeo.

This year’s festival has an awesome international lineup, streaming for 20 hours in the next 3 days, including cutup artist Tasman Richardson (Canada), RVB en Alpha (France), Origamibiro and The Joy of Box (UK), The Incredible Hexidecibels (NZ), UpDate (France, hopefully with their cool projection mapped laptops), and many more.

You can stream the show to your favorite media player with this address. The stream goes live in about 12 hours, plenty of time to plug in your projector and fire up VLC.

Yoo sends along this charming animation from CalArts Animation program student Miwa Matreyek, entitled “Dreaming of Lucid Living.” Merging digital effects with a silhouetted character, Miwa creates elegant shadow play. It’s not hard to imagine this kind of technique being applied to live performance – just look at the centuries-old tradition of wayang shadow puppet theater in Indonesia.

Over at the Vixid blog I’ve been looking at the work of French “video scenographer” Perrick Sorin, who integrates projection, live video, and chromakeying into stage performance.

/Jaymis.

That said, I’m all about the community-voted lists of awesome stuff, especially music videos. I always look forward to the Triple J (Australia’s publicly funded “youth” radio station) Hottest 100, as it generally heralds a weekend of fantastic music video programming.

Videos.Antville is one of my favorite music video sites. The community posts an eclectic mix of great stuff, both new and old, and the group of filmclip-heads often lock horns in the lively comment threads.

Inspired (or perhaps disillusioned) by the Pitchfork “Top 50 Videos of the 2000s”, they got together, nominated and voted for the “‘Ville.2K 101 Best Music Videos of the Decade“.

Just as interesting as the end result, I think, is the list of nominations. This really has been the decade in which video production and distribution escaped from the big studios, and it’s great to see low budget pieces like Chairlift – Evident Utensil, OK GO – Here It Goes Again and Architecture in Helsinki – That Beep are inhabiting a similarly cherished space to money-burning productions like, well, Cochise.

This decade has really been about advancing tools and capabilities. Those advances will never stop, but realistically, there’s no longer an exponential gap in capabilities between “indie producer in a home studio” and “big budget juggernaut”.

The next decade is going to be mesmerizing.

APPARATI EFFIMERI Cosmopolitan Opening from Apparati Effimeri on Vimeo.

The Drive-In Movie Theater may be all but dead, but using facades of buildings as the new, architectural visual surface is very much alive. So, at the risk of this site becoming Create Digital Projection Mapping, here’s another beautiful work from our friends at Apparati Effimeri.

Cosmopolitan Hotel 03/10/2009
Bologna (IT)

Apparati Effimeri:
Federico Bigi
Marco Grassivaro
Roberto Fazio

Sound Design:
BeInvisibleNow

Now, if only there were indoor spaces with permanent projection systems where this stuff started to happen. Instead of clubs with a few dinky projection screens, imagine having a rotating roster of visualists redefining the interior of a space. I guess we just need a new economic boom?

blink (hc gilje 2009) from hc gilje on Vimeo.

HC Gilje sends a wonderful new installation he has just opened this month in Norway. Here, mapping projections into the space is a kind of improvisation on the architectural volume, a way of playing with the space itself. Even without any particular projection mapping tricks, the “flat” projection” does take on depth in three dimensions. HC also tells us a Kindergarten class got to explore the space, and evidently had a ball fooling around in the light. (Kids are always the best audiences.)

As he describes the work:

Combining mapped projection with reflections from the floor onto the walls of the space, and the mirroring of images from the walls onto the floor, to create abstract light paintings.