The circles of lighting designers for tours is surprisingly tight knit, and one of the names that will keep popping up is Sarah Landau. Along with being one of the most talented production designers and performers in the game right now, she’s also great found a way to find some balance between the worlds of nonstop touring and getting to enjoy life, which anyone who has done it will tell you is no easy task. When we first met Sarah back in 2013 she was on the road with Passion Pit and already well established as one of the top up and coming LDs in the game – since then she’s worked with m83, Grimes and a bucket full of other amazing musicians… and now we’ve finally gotten hold of her for a minute between jumps for a quick interview about her latest gigs and world travels!
Read MoreArt and projection mapping with Lucinda Dilworth.
Lucinda Dilworth, a digital artist following her Greek origins, is aiming to evolve as an artist to suit the modern and technological-driven world.
Her fusion of creativity, innovative thinking, and a deep understanding of the digital landscape sets Lucinda apart and drives her to push boundaries and explore the intricate relationship between art, technology, and artificial intelligence
Read MoreVideo and Light: an Interview with Derrick Belcham
Derrick Belcham is a Canadian filmmaker based out of Brooklyn, NY whose internationally-recognized work in documentary and music video has led him to work with such artists as Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Laurie Anderson, Paul Simon and hundreds of others in music, dance, theater and architecture. He has created works and lectured at such institutions as MoMA PS1, MoCA, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Whitney Museum Of American Art, Musee D'Art Contemporain, The Philip Johnson Glass House, Brooklyn Academy of Music and The Contemporary Arts Center of Cincinnati. His work regularly appears in publications such as The New York Times, Vogue, Pitchfork, NPR and Rolling Stone as well as being screened at short, dance and experimental festivals and retrospectives around the world.
Who are you, and what do you do?
I’m a multi-disciplinary, collaborative artist that generally focuses on moving images of some kind or another. I’ve made hundreds of films in performance documentary and traditional “music video”, but I usually use VDMX for the fun stuff… experimental and live productions. Particularly, I love using VDMX for its audio-reactivity tools with video files and DMX lighting systems.
With it, I built the lighting and projection design of three of my large-scale immersive productions in the 60,000 sq ft behemoth of the Knockdown Center a few years back, the last with 300+ custom lighting heads all triggered to the sound of musicians and actors inputted into VDMX. It’s a really amazing environment to map out and deploy the technology of a piece, and allow for so many indeterminate, playful outcomes as you do.
What tools do you use?
I like a combination of analog and digital tools in my process, or else the feeling of “transience” gets a bit too prevalent for me… I like to start with a notebook and pen with most things, imagining then designing specifics of a system. Sometimes a very specific image will appear, and then the process would be working backwards through a set of problems that allow me to reach that vision.
I use Red digital cinema cameras and Leica R glass (digital + analog marriage made in heaven) along with a Fujifilm GFX 100S for stills on the digital side, and then a Braun Nizo 8mm and a number of weird/wild 35 and 120 cameras on the purely analog side. I have a lot of different filters, pre-made and homemade, for certain effects and really like to try and keep as much as possible “in-camera” before it makes its way onto the computer.
With VDMX, my essential is an ENTTEC DMX interface and various dimmers and controllers to create custom shapes alongside traditional lighting heads. I use projectors quite heavily as well along with even haze to conjure all those Anthony McCall-type ephemeral shapes…
Last year, I made two projects with Bing & Ruth for the release of their latest, Species. David is an old friend, and I wanted to design a system in VDMX that he could operate almost like an EMS Spectron or one of the super early oscilloscope visual synths… I set up two stacked projectors in my darkened studio, hazed it to Irish winter dawn levels and put David in front of a set of knobs and sliders that shifted the shape, opacity, color and speed of the outputs from VDMX. A camera faced these shifting, volumetric rays and then displayed them in an inverted monitor (also in VDMX) so that he could “play” along to his song in realtime. The final video is one, unedit sequence of David’s visual performance.
Past Work:
I’ve utilised VDMX as the driver/processor of the lighting and video-reactivity on videos with Dave Gahan, Julianna Barwick, Blonde Redhead, My Brightest Diamond, Simon Raymonde and so many more the last 10 years that I’ve been using the program.
You can see them all at derrickbelcham.com
Recent and Upcoming Projects:
This last June, I went to Iceland to collaborate on two new pieces with Bergrun Snaebjornsdottir and Þóranna Dögg Björnsdóttir which took me all over the island collecting visual samples from the natural environment. As I went, I took photos of instances of pareidolia any time they hit me (faces in the rocks, symbols in the clouds, etc) and came back with a large repository. For a new art-metal project with Brooklyn composer Brendon Randall-Myers, I decided to mix those with the movements of a fantastic dancer named Jacalyn Tatro using a new sound-reactive process in VDMX. (That comes out this month, so I’ll send the link when it’s public! Sneak peek images here…)
Beyond that, I’m in the process of designing a new theatre piece fully within the VDMX environment that will use the performers visual and auditory input as the source for a kind of large-scale looping playground… very excited to keep experimenting with that these next few months. I love the power that the program has, but also how invisible it can be within a live production… it is such a beautiful thing when the audience can be held in a space of unknowing when it comes to the mechanisms of the illusion.
From Analog to Digital with Paul Kendall
An interview with Paul Kendall, a composer, producer and visual artist.
From the past to the present, Paul Kendall has a career innovating music and sound. We caught up with him to get his story and talk about his evolution into the visual frontier with VDMX.
I come from a free jazz/ musique concrète beginning to a sound engineer/ mixer middle, culminating in a deafish composer/ visual artist attempting the final writes!
Between 85-97 I helped set up a series of studios for Daniel Miller’s Mute Records in London. I worked as the in-house engineer contributing in varying degrees to artists: Depeche Mode, Wire, Nick Cave, Nitzer Ebb, Barry Adamson, Renegade Soundwave etc.
Also during my time at Mute I established a sadly short-lived label devoted to experimental electro-acoustic music, The Parallel Series.
My first musical/ hardware love was the tape recorder; around 1960 when I heard the simple slow down/ speed up possibility of an early 3 speed reel to reel, so it was sound more than music which fascinated me, but a total pipe dream as was most of the interesting technology in the 60’s and 70’s. I settled with a tenor saxophone and making noise was finally between my lips. A brief stay at University of York allowed me to learn the Revox tape machine/ tape loops/ VCS3 synthesiser but once again on return to London access to technology was limited. I had a job for 9 years in a bank so I was able to fund setting up a small studio with 2 friends to learn basic band demo recording using two 2 track machines and bouncing between them.
In 1984 following the sudden death of my mother I decided to leave the bank and with a small inheritance bought the new very affordable Fostex B16 16 track analogue tape machine, Allen and Heath mixing console, a BBC Micro Computer based sequencer UMI, a Yamaha DX7 synthesiser, Drumtraks drum machine, and most importantly an 8 tap digital delay unit called Time Matrix (almost an instrument in itself, a dub persons dream) and finally a Great British Spring Reverb.
I locked myself away to learn and experiment and as good fortune happened Daniel Miller knew of my endeavours and asked me to help setting up a similar facility for the Mute artists to demo and the lesser known artists to record masters.
The studio developed over the next 20 years or so into a fully functioning 24 track facility. At the end of 1990 I became aware of a significant new development from America the arrival of computer based digital audio. It was the moment where I fully embraced the binary world, bought a MacIIcI computer with Sound Tools/ Digidesign software for the first time enabling audio to be edited/ copied/ reversed/ EQ’d/ processed all within the digital domain. This may seem facile in the face of the acceleration of technology available today but back then the affect was considerable.
One of the areas which benefited from digital audio and which liberated my approach was remixing. It was possible to perform lots of dub mixes on the console bouncing to DAT (previously the costs involved with analogue tape would have been prohibitive). These mixes could then be loaded into the computer and edited, this was a perfect example of performance/ dub being integrated into a final mix.
Since this period and until very recently my work was almost exclusively based on a Mac and Pro Tools or Logic software. However due to severe hearing/ frequency loss over the last 10 years I have been unable to pursue sound work creation on computer as with many digital processes it is possible that spurious ‘noise’ could be generated and I would be oblivious to it.
Refocusing I decided to revert to my earlier love of musique concrète so just using mechanically generated sound, springs, bits of metal etc. and using guitar pedals to process, so no computer involved. In addition to this I started experimenting with visuals, whilst my eyes still function!
I was searching for a method to work with visuals as I worked with sound. I began using a macro lens on my camera zooming in on small details of an object which is an equivalent of taking an existing sound and microscopically messing with it. I looked around for suitable software which could process the visuals and add a degree of performance too. This is when I discovered VDMX. I could slow down/ speed up/ reverse/ superimpose/ manipulate/ texturalyl shift visual material exactly the way with audio, and with the addition of a Korg NanoControl I could perform dubs on the visuals, great result. This set up has served me well for a couple of years and will continue to do so. Obviously I am a novice in the visual field which is in some ways liberating as I have never learnt the ‘rules’. The adage with sound; if it sounds right it probably is right can be applied to visuals/ light or so I maintain!
Back last May after isolating since the beginning of March (my partner had Covid very early on) I was searching for some creative inspiration and got hold of a couple of iPad apps which process sound. I spent 3 intense days experimenting and improvising using springs and things and voice as source. These improvisation morphed through editing to a series of coherent pieces of music/ noise. An album, Boundary Macro, from these will be released on vinyl later on in the year on Downwards Records and published through a return to Mute Song. So far I have finished 3 videos to accompany the album all made with VDMX.
You can see more visual work from Paul on Vimeo or follow his Instagram. And if you’re curious to learn more about VDMX, visit our tutorials page to get started.
Behind the scenes: Sam Wiehl's visuals for Ladytron
In a previous very awesome blog post we interviewed Sam Wiehl and collaborator Luciana Haill about PZYK SKAN, an amazingly cool EEG Controlled Sound and Visuals project. This week we are extra excited to have Sam back to tell us about more about his background as a live visual performance and show off his latest work for the infamous band Ladytron!
Read MoreExploring the visual architecture of Ali M. Demirel
Once again we are fortunate to have an interview with one of the visualists who has been working in this field even longer than us. Ali M. Demirel originally studied nuclear engineering and architecture, lectured at GISAM (Audio-Visual Research Center) of METU, and began creating experimental videos in 1993. Since then he has worked with some of the legends of electronic music, performed at some of the worlds most impressive venues, and continues to make mind blowing work.
Read MoreStuart Warren-Hill on Coldcut, Hexstatic, Vjamm, and his latest projects Holotronica & Hologauze!
Over the years we been lucky to have some amazing pioneers in the field of live visuals join us for artist interviews to share their experiences – now added to that list is Stuart Warren-Hill, who has been working at pushing the boundaries of what is possible and continues to do so with his latest projects. Today we will find out a bit about his infamous history and get a glimpse into where he is taking things next.
Read MoreSome Thursday Night Music & Light with Andrew Juris
Along with getting to talk to VJs and visual creators about their own amazing work, we sometimes find out about all kinds of cool events happening all over the world. Today California based artist Andrew Juris is here to tell us about a weekly Thursday Night Music & Light in Berkley that you’ll want to check out next time you are in the area!
Read MoreProjected fun from Projectile Objects
I’m Cornelius Henke III, also known as ProjectileObjects.
Most of the projects I work on are in the realm of film/video, but over the last decade, my interests have spread. (Projection mapping masks, VJing, LED light sculptures, etc.) I think most of the work I do fits somewhere in the category of a creative technologist. The natural progression of my work was from Music Video Creator/Director -> VFX & Motion Graphics -> VJing/ Projection Mapping -> “Creative Technologist” / Video Producer/ Editor.
Read MoreMojo Video Tech gives us a behind the scenes on Meta-7, a new collaboration with XIX Collective and John Sully
We’ve been emailing with MojoVideoTech for about 15 years now, and his career goes back well before that… a full in depth interview is long overdue, but today we’ll have to settle for a quick behind the scenes of his latest project Meta-7, which is playing through May 18th, 2019, and you can still get tickets.
International Sound Artist John Sully teams up with XIX Collective and MojoVideoTech to present, META-7 (an alchemic opera). Audience members lay on a sub-bass vibrating floor surrounded by a 7.1 sound system inside a 360° video mapped dome. The story is about all of us. Where do we come from? Why are we here? Where do we go after? Very much inspired by Sully’s album listening parties when he was a kid in the 70s, META-7 is a gesture towards the sacred and mysterious through a deep immersion of sound, light and architectural design. There will be 4 shows per night at 7,8,9 and 10pm. Please join us at 10-16 Studios, 10-16 46 Ave Long Island City NY.
MojoVideoTech has also provided us with a description of how the setup works… if you plan to go, maybe wait until afterwards to read the rest of this to avoid any sensory spoilers.
Read MoreVJ Zef: Saturday Shaders
Starting a few years ago, shortly after adding support for GLSL shaders in VDMX, we were especially excited to start seeing artists using it as a jumping off point for learning how to write their own shaders. Among the projects that we would hear about there was one in particular that we have been trying to get for a guest interview since it first landed on our radar – VJ Zef’s Saturday Shaders. It popped up in our timeline places like this, this and this… wonderful weekend treats of inspiration. Now finally we have Joseph here for a talk about these videos (and shaders!) that we have seen online.
Read MoreJulia Maria Morf talks with us about transparent screens!
As software developers, one of the things that gets us really excited is seeing people using new kinds of display technologies in creative ways. A few weeks ago we saw some photos online from Julia Maria Morf that involved using transparent screens for installations and live performances, and of course we had to find out more about her stunning work!
Read MoreMagmovies in Madrid and around the world
Joining us in this post is Madrid based artist Magmovies, another world traveling VJ who truly loves getting to push pixels around the globe. It is always inspiring for us to see people who enjoy this craft so much and for this reason we have been following Laura on social media for a little while now – and we figured it out was about time we had her for an interview so you can enjoy her work as well!
Read MoreSSWIII's 2019 Daily A/V Experiments, Creative Commons loops and other hotness.
This week we were fortunate to get a chance to interview Switzon S. Wigfall, who along with being both an amazing musician and visual artist to keep an eye on, is one of those people who should be on your radar for being a prolific creator of creative commons VJ loops ;)
SSWIII’s free clip packs have popped up on our radar a few times in recent years, but when we caught wind of his new project for 2019, daily A/V practice sets that are producing great results, we knew it was time to finally get some more info about his work…
Read MoreThe Past, Present and Future with Juanjo Fernández Rivero (aka Gnomalab)
In recent years one of the biggest contributors to the online and offline VJ communities has been Juanjo Fernández Rivero. Along with his work with VJ Spain and other organizations, teaching workshops and organizing meet ups, he is also known as Gnomalab, a prolific VJ who has been creating live visuals going on 20 years. We finally caught up with him for an interview looking back at his career and to find out about his latest projects!
Read More3D Projection Mapping from Motus.Lumina and Nerdworking at the Solid Light Festival in Rome
In the running series of people in the field of live visuals that we keep seeing pop up in the VDMX community, and over due for an interview, is Motus.Lumina, a group of audio, visual and interaction designers based in Buenos Aires. In particular they make spectacular usage of a wide variety of tools and work on some incredibly interesting events, such as the 3D projection mapping project in collaboration with Nerdworking that showed up in our Twitter feed not too long ago.
1. Who are you and what do you do?
Motus.Lumina is a Buenos Aires based design collective that works on visual programming, indoor / outdoor stage design, VJing, animation, interactive design, video mapping, audio-visual installations and music.
Our main objective is to create interactive visual projects integrated with sound, music instruments, data and digital control devices. Motus.Lumina was founded by Temel Hüseyin Kuru a.k.a VJ Vidbeat / Istanbul-Turkey and Claudia Hiroki / Buenos Aires-Argentina. Since February 2015 we are programming audio-visual projects for many artists, musicians, festivals and art collectives from all over the world.
2. What tools (software, hardware, etc) do you use in your creative process?
We are using Quartz Composer, Touch Designer, Cinema 4D, After FX and VDMX for creating our visual content. We use 2 15-Inch Mac Book Retina laptop for programming and live performances, Black Magic Intensity Shuttle for capturing video and live mixing and finally for audio-visual works we use Roland Octa-Capture sound card for audio and MIDI input.
For most of our audio-visual performances and installations, we are programming our visual content with Quartz Composer. Then we do all the live sequencing, adding video filters and connecting audio, OSC and MIDI signals via VDMX. Generally, our live setup contains generative visual patches programmed with Quartz Composer or Interactive Shader Format. We use video footage only for very specific works.
VDMX has a great integration with Quartz Composer and lets us program custom plugins, visuals, FX and templates for our installations and live performances.
For the last 2 years, we are using Black Magic Intensity Shuttle to connect our VDMX software and mix between 2 laptops without using a video mixer. Native Black Magic support of VDMX is very handy for live performances.
Our visuals are mostly geometric and abstract compositions inspired by sci-fi and cosmos. Using musical data and external tools ( music instruments, HID devices, sensors etc. ) takes a big part in our artistic workflow. According to those needs we are using VDMX as a hub to send and receive all the external data to process our visual content for live performances. Also, it is great to build up custom control surfaces for custom needs. VDMX and Quartz Composer are always the most popular tools in Motus.Lumina studios !!
3. Tell us all about your latest 3D projection mappings in Rome!
After we were commissioned by Nerdworking for the Solid Light Festival / Rome we started to program our visuals and start working on a custom Quartz Composer VDMX setup for this project.
We modified Kineme GL Stereoscopic plugin for VDMX as a real-time anaglyph 3D plugin – So we achieved to convert all our Quartz Composer and video content to anaglyph 3D without making any render. Also, the plugin lets us switch between different masks and models. Once we have the plugin working we prepared different presets for each episode of our story and recorded our visuals responding to the different audio frequencies of the music track.
Another interesting detail was the distance of the object z-axis. After many tests, we have created a holographic anaglyph effect that shows frontal objects floating in the air about 1 meter from the audience's eyes.
Thanks a lot to Nerdworking and Solid Light Festival for letting us experiment on the walls of beautiful Sant`Agostino church. And thanx to all Vidvox crew for programming and developing VDMX!!
You can find more work from Motus.Lumina on their website https://motuslumina.com/ as well as vimeo and instagram.
Talking with La Gaîté Lyrique, the 19th century Paris theater with 21st century productions
Over the last few years La Gaîté Lyrique has become one of the most well known venues for live visuals, serving as a place for musicians and other artists to work on special events that make use of the 360 projection space and skills of the resident on site team.
In this interview we are joined by Martial Gallorini, one of the video specialists currently working at La Gaîté Lyrique about the space, their production process and some of the artists they’ve hosted.
What is La Gaîté Lyrique and what do they do?
La Gaîté Lyrique is a former 19th century theater. After a long period of inactivity it was left abandoned and classified as historical monument. In the early 2000, it was re-built from the ground-up and it the re-opened to the public in 2011 as now a cultural center dedicated to digital art and cultures.
La Gaîté Lyrique is located in the center of Paris, France and is a polyvalent center where we attend about 1000 events a year, from smallest ones like workshops to big festivals.
We are running every types of events related to digital arts and emerging cultures like. The building is divided into main sites like an exhibition space, a small auditorium for film projections and conferences, a bar, a digital art dedicated library, video games booths, a small immersive room called La Petite Salle, and a concert hall called La Grande Salle which can accommodate about 750 people. Besides we also have exchanges with local schools to introduce creative coding and digital arts to young students.
We also host artists in residence and start-ups for them to work on their projects.
The special feature of the venue is La Grande Salle and its ability to run 360° projection shows using 8 video projectors. La Petite Salle can also do 360° video projection using 6 projectors.
In this concert hall we welcome private events, concerts, film festivals or music festivals.
For the record, here is some artists that we welcomed:
concerts : Atoms for Peace (Thom Yorke), Death in Vegas, Phoenix, Gran Daddy, Beat Assaillant, Christine and the queen, Zombie Zombie, Parquet courts, The Breeders, Terry Riley, Mondkopf...
exhibitions : Vincent Houzé, Matt Pyke, Stefan Sagmeister, Kyle McDonald...
What tools (hardware, software, other...) do you use in the creative process? How has this changed over the years?
I can only speak for my job which is leading the video department alongside my close collaborator David, but due to the aspect of very wide number and type of events, we need a lot of different hardware and software tools meet the needs of each type of event.
We have a fleet of video projectors from 3000 to 10 000 lumens and different aspect ratios and full HD screens. We also have plenty of media players like Mac minis, brightsign players, SD Card readers, cameras, streamers etc... And obviously due to the wide type of video signal types and sources with each their pros and cons, we do have a bunch of converters, matrices, extenders and different type of scalers.
With all those type of events and different artistic styles, we can't master every type of technology but we need to understand each project technically speaking and have a wide variety of skills. For instance, we are not motion designers, but we need to know a bit of After Effects to adapt contents to our infrastructures. We are not master coders, but we need to understand code and use it to adapt interactive installations and create tools to help control our devices...
For example, our day to day software tools are VDMX, Touchdesigner, Millumin, Resolume, Modulo Pi media servers Max/MSP, openFrameworks, Processing, Arduino... and protocols such as OSC, MIDI or NDI.
Honestly, we unfortunately don't have time to do much creative contents but we rather welcome artists and assist them with their needs and sometimes help them adapt their video installation for an exhibition or video content for a show.
From the start, we've been using Mac Pros and VDMX for projection purposes on concerts and video installations in exhibitions. Originally we were using 4 computers to play clips in sync clips in the concerts 360° setup but with the evolution of computers power it has become much easier and setting up a show has become a breeze and we can now save time for the artists to work on their show during sound checks.
Tell us about the most recent projects in development at La Gaîté Lyrique!
Well, La Gaîté Lyrique activity remains the same and we are still working hard on programming great shows and festivals. One of our next big project is setting up the incoming exhibition opening next March.
Technically speaking, the opening season's big challenge is the full upgrade of the La Grande Salle video infrastructure and workflow. We are upgrading our projectors to laser source technology and rework the whole signal infrastructure to HDBaseT and fiber optic. Unfortunately it is still a bit early right now, but still, we are working towards a base infrastructure that would be compatible with the foreseeable IP video distribution. For now we are using NDI where possible as a transition to IP world at low costs, and it is really great because NDI protocol is really spreading in the software and hardware industry, making a lot of soft / devices compatible. But i think the future is uncompressed or mezzanine compression video signal distribution will be the future as soon as we see an agreement for a standard.
If you live in Paris, or happen to be visiting, make sure to visit La Gaîté Lyrique for some amazing shows. You can also find more photos and videos on the La Gaîté Lyrique Instagram page.
VJ MEKANIX 1ups his game with Vuo x VDMX
“In our recent spotlight, Azy (@krezrock), a Los Angeles VJ, talks about his work, his creative process, and making unique Vuo image filters and image generators to use with VDMX. A frequent Vuo contributor, he's added several of his daily experiments, which he calls 1ups, to the Vuo Composition Gallery.”
“Running a VDMX patch processing ISF’s, Vuo FX and Vuo image generators. All pre-rendered content encoded with Hap. This combination gives you the ability to process 4 layers and output to multiple HD devices. Which are needed for the larger stages at festivals. All controlled via MIDI device and live audio analysis.”
He’s also one of the biggest contributors to the Vuo community itself, https://vuo.org/user/3462
Read the whole story on the Vuo blog: https://vuo.org/mekanix-1up-vdmx
and I guess we’ll need to do our own follow up interview at some point to cover this awesome work…
ID:Mora, Hola de Barcelona!
As previously mentioned, we had a great time at Splice Festival back in June and one of the biggest highlights was getting to meet so many different artists using VDMX.
Today we are featuring ID:Mora who gave a mind blowing psychedelic visual performance on the opening night of Splice and along with this interview he has shared a set of video loops from the show!
Read MoreAngie Eng and an open call for the 2018 'Visual Music Vortex' in Boulder
In another blast from the past we've just received an email from Angie Eng about a new visual music festival being organized in Boulder, CO. it sounds like an awesome time and you can find out more about the open call for works below.
But as a long time user of VDMX we weren't going to let Angie go without a quick interview of her own work as well...
Read More