One our favorite questions for people who have been using VDMX is to ask them how they would show it to someone who has never used it before and we are especially excited to see how teachers are introducing the software in classrooms and workshops. Everyone learns best in a different way and it is always helpful for us to see new approaches to VJ techniques. Last week we were joined for a guest tutorial by Kalma who showed off an example of how to get started with VDMX and for this post we are excited to get more information about the artist behind the workshops.
Read MorePZYK SKAN – EEG Controlled Sound and Visuals
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 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 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 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 More7UP 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 MoreRoute du Nord and Energy Floors! from OUTOFORDER
The visual group OUTOFORDER has been around for well over a decade, so this blog post featuring their work is a little overdue. Though they've got countless projects to choose from, we had to pick just two to include here.
Read MorePatricio's Book of Shaders: GLSL in the Classroom
Last week I had a chance to be a special guest for the final presentations in Patricio Gonzalez Vivo's GLSL class at Parsons. One of the big take aways from the class was how versatile the language is, with students presenting projects ranging from web based mapping to 3D Unity worlds, realtime data visualizations in openFrameworks, and of course for live visual performance, all driven using GLSL.
Read MoreBehind the Scenes with Brian Randall Projecting Mapping onto Pasty Bodies for Sun Drug's "Wildman" Video
In case you had missed it last week, the newest music video for Sun Drug titled “Wildman” premiered over at the Creators Project. Along with being awesome to watch and listen to, the process behind it has some pretty interesting behind the scene details that co-director Brian Randall shared with us via an excited set of emails and photos.
Read MoreVDMX Workshop at Dubspot NYC Featuring Zak Norman On April 20th 2015
This month we're excited to host another free VDMX workshop at Dubspot NYC, this time featuring Zak Norman who is taking a day off touring with Squarepusher to show off his setup and talk shop.
Read MoreVDMX Workshop At Dubspot NYC Featuring Ben Krall On March 29th
VDMX co-creator David Lublin hosts this visual performance workshop with special guest Ben Krall on content creation and performance with VDMX5. Ben will discuss his approach to building the video design for The National's 2013-2014 Trouble Will Find Me international tour and share some of his experiences from video and lighting designs for concert tours, theatrical shows, and architectural / fine art installations. Together Ben and David will discuss approaches to live design, production planning and fabrication, freelancing, and visual art.
Read MoreMike Latona with Jeff Mills: Shaping Times
Falling into the category of using all the tools at your disposal to make something awesome is this video from Mike Latona and Sean Caruso working with Jeff Mills for some classic techno mayhem in Montréal.
Recently we had the opportunity to take Montréal on an inter-galactic journey alongside techno pioneer Jeff Mills. We transformed the Studio St-Ambroise using over 50 meters of LEDs, a massive video-mapped elephant, moving lights and more, all controlled in real-time using CoGe, VDMX, and the Madlight feature of Madmapper. Our mission during the voyage: to have both the lights and video move harmoniously and seamlessly along with music, while still allowing us to perform with them live. For the lights, Quartz Composer patches with published parameters for each fixture were loaded into CoGe and syphoned to Madlight. Video animations were created in Cinema4D and After Effects and mixed live with VDMX. We also mapped the accelerometers of two Numark Orbit controllers and used audio react on various parameters for both the lights and the video to give them a more organic feel when mixing.
“We're Live” – Blair Neal's TV Face Substitution
This is a long very overdue post on the work of Blair Neal, who after interning with us many many years ago has gone on to be a lead developer at the award winning fakelove creative agency where he makes totally sick interactive installations for some of the worlds top brands. Along with this he somehow still manages to find time to make music videos, live show visuals and share his tools for other artists in the field; no doubt many of you have already probably used his Canon To Syphon app or read his invaluable in depth Guide to Projectors for Interactive Installations or one of his other projects shared online.
Today Blair published a new project he's developing called “We're Live” which involves using real-time face replacement algorithms available in OpenFrameworks to insert his (or any other face) into a live television feed that he's watching at home. It's a crazy amount of fun.
Along with photos of himself “guest staring” on a variety of popular shows, the blog post includes the technical details and his open sourced, Syphon-enabled face replacing app for download should you want to try this at home with your VJ software of choice.
His blog post also goes into the inspiration and background of the project:
We’re Live allows a user to composite their face (or any face they choose) onto a live television stream. Essentially, anyone you watch on TV can finally look like you….or anyone you want. You could make everyone on TV look like Bill Murray if you really wanted to.
One of television’s greatest powers is in its ability to display very structured and edited views of reality. By watching the fabricated streams of the shows, viewers begin to wish for the interesting, exciting and impossible lives of the characters. They can subconsciously desire the smiles and trouble free lives enabled by buying the products in the advertisements. With this software, viewers can come one step closer to truly seeing themselves on screen.
We’re Live is a project involving live HD cable TV and face substitution software. It is a hardware and software method for doing a real time facial composite/replacement on live television. The original face substitution implementation and cloning shader was created by Kyle McDonald and Arturo Castro in 2012. The face tracking algorithm that enables this kind of high quality facial substitution was developed by Jason Saragih.
Free video clips from our summer intern Shannon!
This summer we've been fortunate to have Shannon from Pratt interning with us making sample video loops. Each week so far we've given her a different style or theme to work with and over the last month she's put together four different clip packs that are now available for [free] download...
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