One of the best parts of being a new media artist is having the ability to connect so many different ideas and tools together, both literally and figuratively. Recently we've been in touch with Luciana Haill and Sam Wiehl who shared with us some of the details behind their latest collaboration PZYK SKAN which brings together so many amazing things into a single project that we had to share it with all of you. The initial description was “I use PandoraStar strobe lights as precursors for EEG brainwave projects, where signals from the brain of the audience are triggers to live events via Max Msp, Ableton, OSC and recently VDMX when we collaborated” and you can read all about it below!
Read MoreRodrigo Carvalho of Boris Chimp 504 talks about new works “Multiverse” and “Light Portals”
My name is Rodrigo Carvalho. I am from Porto/Portugal. I work with live visuals, code and interactive art from screen based work, to interactive installations, audiovisual live acts, or interactive visuals for stage performance...
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Pixel Spirit Deck Table with guest Colin Evoy Sebestyen
A few weeks ago Patricio Gonzalez Vivo (creator of the infamous Book of Shaders, one of the best online resources for learning GLSL) released a new project known as the Pixel Spirit Deck, a set of tarot cards where each image includes includes code that can be used to draw the shape...
Read MoreDan Tombs live with Gold Panda
To be filed under artist profiles that have been a long time coming is Dan Tombs who has in his time as a visual artist worked with more musicians and bands than I have fingers and then some. One of the things that we love about his setups are the usage of analog equipment as part of the setup and we've asked him to fill us in on everything from how he got started with video, what gear he's collected over the years and all about his most recent collaboration with Gold Panda.
Read MoreMusic Video Feature: Uncle Skeleton's “Jeux” by MKAV
This past week in our inbox was a link to an amazingly beautiful abstract music video for the song Jeux off Uncle Skeleton's new album Cocoa Beach.
The visual artist who collaborated on this project was Mike Kluge (MKAV), an audio/visual artist living in Nashville, TN who works on freelance projects such as music videos, live visuals, art installations, interactivity, and content for tours told us a bit about how it all came together.
Read MoreWould you like to take a survey?
Hey everyone!
We've been working on VDMX for several years now and we'd love to get to know some more about the people who are performing with it and how it is being used in the real world.
There are currently two very short surveys that you can take.
The first is for general VDMX related topics: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/vdmx_survey1
The second is for specifically for the Hap video codecs: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/hapcodecs_survey1
While these surveys won't tell you which character from your favorite TV series you are (Willow) or what your favorite color is (probably blue?) but it will give us some useful information that'll help us decide what to focus our efforts on in the coming months.
Thanks very much for your time!
VDMX and Ableton Link integration
Today we are extremely excited to announce that VDMX now has native support for Ableton Link, a new technology developed by Ableton that synchronizes musical beat, tempo, and phase across multiple applications running on multiple devices. By using Ableton Link musicians and visual artists who perform together can easily keep all elements of a show in sync.
Read MoreGraffmapping in NYC
Every week we receive emails from people who want to share their work with us (keep it coming!) and a few days ago Graffmapping sent us a link to this video showing off their recent exploration into merging the ideas from video mapping and graffiti to project visuals in public spaces.
Read MoreJanuary 2017 Back to School Sale
Once again we're excited to be running a sale on VDMX for students heading back to school over the next few weeks with an extra 100 USD off; and we're also excited to extend this same discount to all customers!
But hurry, sale ends January 30th, 2017.
Read MoreThe Fantastic Work of Wiley Wiggins
Today we're joined by the fantastic Wiley Wiggins who in addition to working as an actor and animator for film (of Dazed and Confused, Waking Life, Computer Chess fame) AND as an interactive designer (currently working on an adventure game called Thunderbeam), is also an amazing visualist. For this post Wiley has written up his history of getting into performing live visuals and how things have changed in just the last few years as technology rapidly changes.
Read MoreNew VDMX Update! Cue List, Timecode, Data Looper plugins and more!
Today we're releasing one of the biggest updates to VDMX in a long time and we are very, very excited to share it with you all. It includes three new plugins (Data Looper, Timecode, and Cue List), support for LUT based FX, updates to the Hap codec family and more!
Read MoreBehind the Scenes with Zak Norman: DMX Controlled Shobaleader One Face Masks
Last April on the VIDVOX blog we featured the work Zak Norman who had created the amazing 100% live generated visuals for the 2015 Squarepusher tour. One year later it seems things are still going strong, this time for Squarepusher's new band Shobaleader One.
Read More‘Recent Arts’ from Valentina Berthelon and Tobias Freund
In the long history of human arts and sciences, the two have often found inspiration in the other. While science today seeks to uncover the dark mysteries beyond our current comprehension, visual artist Valentina Berthelon and musician Tobias Freund have begun to create a series of audiovisual pieces including ‘Dark Matter_Dark Energy’ and ‘History of Darkness’ which seek to share the experience of exploring these unknown forces lurking in the universe...
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Behind the Scenes of LCD Soundsystem's Visuals at Coachella 2016
For those of us who couldn't make it behind the stage during the LCD Soundsystem reunion show at Coachella 2016 to see how the audio reactive visuals worked, Nev Bull (aka master media server programmer from pixelsplus) has sent us this field report with details...
Read MoreVIDVOX Workshops at Mapping Festival 2016
Next week we'll be heading to Geneva to join Mapping Festival to teach a few special workshops and presentations.
If you'll be in town for the festival we'd love to get a chance to say hi! Leave a comment below or send us a message to let us know who to look out for, or just show up at one of the events listed below.
On Wednesday, 4th May:
VJing: WTF is it? – a brief history and introduction to the world of VJing and its related fields.
On Thursday, 5th May:
VDMX Master Class – a two part class that will cover the basics of performing, producing and manipulating visual media with VDMX and advanced tips for pro users.
Writing ISF Shaders For Live Visuals – for this class we will look at the possibilities offered by the GLSL coding language to create live visuals (some examples can be seen on sites like interactiveshaderformat.com and shadertoy.com).
ProjectMilkSyphon – Free MilkDrop Music Visualizer to Syphon App For VJs
ProjectMilkSyphon is a free app to create sound reactive visuals from an audio input to your computer such as a built-in microphone or line in and mixed into your favorite VJ software over Syphon.
This tool is possible thanks to the projectM community who did all the years of hard work that are behind this project and generously made it available under the terms of the LGPL.
Read MoreVIDVOX at VJ London April 2016 Meetup and Showcase
If you happen to be in London next weekend we'll be joining VJ London for a special meetup to talk about VDMX. They've also lined up some excellent AV sets of local talent to keep us entertained!
The event will be on 10th April 2016 starting at 7:30 PM at the Westbank Gallery (3-5 THORPE CLOSE London W10 5XL GB) – see flyer below, VJ London website and facebook for more details.
Hope to see lots of you there!
7UP Teams Martin Garrix With Fake Love To Create Awesome Concert For The Deaf
Here's another feature from our friend Blair Neal over at Fake Love. A few months ago they were brought on by 7UP for the task of working with famed EDM musician Martin Garrix to create an immersive concert experience for an audience of deaf students. What they came up with is bound to inspire some new ideas for concerts everywhere.
Read MoreOpen Source At VIDVOX
In addition to VDMX and several related free utility applications, one of our major focuses at VIDVOX is open source software. We have found that open source code and open standards are especially important for creative communities such as ours where interoperability between tools is often crucial for artists to achieve their visions. We encourage other developers of creative technology and artists themselves to share their low-level knowledge and support the adoption of open standards in their work.
Below you can find links to some of the significant projects that we are particularly proud to maintain and sponsor.
Much of the low level code for VDMX can be found in the VVOpenSource project which is maintained by our own Ray Cutler. In particular you can find the code for our MIDI, OSC and OpenGL backends to use in your own Mac and iOS apps. This project also contains several example applications such as the OSCTestApp and MIDIviaOSC tools that are also useful for non-developers.
The Hap video codecs are an open standard for high performance movie playback originally created in collaboration with Tom Butterworth. Today Hap is supported cross-platform by over 20 different applications and creative coding environments.
Related to this, our free AVFBatchExporter Mac app utility for converting movies into Hap and other standard formats is also open source.
Interactive Shader Format (aka ISF) is an open format for GLSL based video generators and image filters that we created for use in VDMX. ISF based shaders now can be used in a handful of VJ softwares, as well as with OpenFrameworks and on the web. Developers looking to add ISF support to their Mac and iOS can applications can find example code in the ISFKit portion of VVOpenSource. Artists can get started with ISF using the online editor or Mac desktop editor.
In collaboration with several other developers, OSCQuery is an extension to the already popular OSC specification, the OSCQuery Protocol makes it possible for client applications to remotely browse a remote OSC address space. The intent of this goal is to provide baseline functionality that other developers may take advantage of to construct impromptu or improvisational interfaces for dynamic environments. Our open source implementation of OSCQuery is available for developers looking to support the protocol in their own software. This repository also contains several useful sample projects and helper tools such as ‘MIDI OSCQuery Helper’ and ‘OSCQuery Helper’ which can be used to enable OSCQuery capabilities in apps that already support MIDI or OSC.
The code for our FreeFrame plugin loader can be found in the VVFFGL project. This framework was commissioned by VIDVOX and written by vade and bangnoise.
We are proud sponsors of the Syphon framework for video sharing between applications on OS X. The introduction of Syphon into our community has reshaped what is possible for visual artists working on the Mac and we are looking forward to continued support of its future development.
Lastly, there are several open source libraries that we are unaffiliated with but do make use of in our own work. We'd like to additionally thank developers like Mike Ash, Dave DeLong, John Engelhart, the libartnet team and the countless others who have shared their code online for us to benefit from.
Freebie Apps
Along with VDMX, we publish several free utility apps that visual artists on the Mac may find useful...
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