Visuals at Lovebytes07
Flickr: Watz vs. Rishaug at Lovebytes
I just did some new live visuals for a performance with Alexander Rishaug. Alexander's music tends towards the ambient, with rich textures and large soundscapes that develop slowly in time. Check out his Myspace for sound samples and bio. Alexander was the producer of the Generator.x concert tour for Rikskonsertene and was also responsible for hooking me up with Phonophani, so we have some good history together.
Our first gig was last weekend at an event called Algorithm, part of the Lovebytes festival in Sheffield. The event was in an intimate white cube space, and the audience responded very well to our set. The other acts were Senking, Aoki Takamasa and Pixel - all great people to play along with. My thanks to Mark Fell and Mat Steel for organizing a great event.
The visuals were built with Processing, using Sonia and my own SoniaHelper for sound input and analysis. My laptop lost its ability to output to an external monitor before the show, which added an extra bit of tension but allowed me to experiment with running Windows on a Mac. Someone lent me a MacBook running Bootcamp and Windows XP, and it turned out that simply exporting my files using Fat Jar and copying them over to the MacBook was all it took to migrate.
There was no noticeable performance hit, but I did have trouble with the ATI graphics card that made the image flicker when background() was not being used (see video below). This is an issue I have seen in the past with ATI cards, so it was not a problem with the MacBook. I chose to take the Microsoft approach: It's not a bug, it's a feature.
Check out the Lovebytes Flickr set for more images or see the YouTube video below for an impression. Sadly, the video was recorded at an angle that makes it hard to see the visuals, but it still gives an idea of the atmosphere.
YouTube: Algorithm - Day 7 Lovebytes 2007
[tags]generative, visual, vj, animation, code[/tags]
(Via Code & form.)
