Along with making great software and open source projects, one of the areas we have tried to focus on is creating educational materials to help visual artists at all levels help improve their craft. Over the last few years our website tutorials section has served as the main outlet for our various lessons, demonstrations and conversations of the various techniques used for all aspects of live visual performance.
Today we are extremely excited to announce that we are taking the next big step in our educational offerings, and as you might imagine, we’re doing it open source style: https://vidvox.github.io/vvedu
Read MoreToday we are excited to announce the release of a new update to VDMX that adds several major new features and some noteworthy smaller additions and improvements!
Read MoreOne of the most useful techniques for artists working with audio and visual software is the OSC protocol for sending control information from one application to another. While MIDI is great for a lot of situation, OSC was designed to be more extensible and allow for a variety of different datatypes, greatly expanding the possibilities within the community of real-time digital art. Over the years the ecosystem of tools that support the protocol has grown and now we are excited to release a new extension to help the community take OSC to the next level.
The OSCQuery Protocol is an agreed upon specification that extends the base functionality of OSC to make it easier to construct impromptu or improvisational interfaces between different systems…
Read MoreAs 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 MoreIn 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 MoreI am Johnny DeKam. Many of you know me as the founder of VIDVOX and original creator of VDMX. Ever since I stepped down in 2004, I’ve been a video designer and director, working mostly in the music industry, as well as Fine Arts and a myriad of other projects. VIDVOX has now reached an epic 20 year anniversary! David and I thought it might be interesting for you to hear more about me, and the humble roots of VDMX that you all love.
So let's start with a deep history. VIDVOX's roots grew directly from making art, and in this regard, has always been creator focused. I started VIDVOX alone, on a mission to build better tools for my own personal work... but how did it all begin? This is an origin story.
Read MoreOne of the best parts of open specifications for file formats is that artists can create visual generators and FX for one piece of software and share their creations with others, regardless of what tools they use.
A few months ago we received an email from Silvia Fabiani asking if we could provide any tips for how to get started with remixing and writing her own shaders, and with a few links covering the basic ideas, she was ready to go. Over the following weeks we noticed that she had posted some of her own compositions on the ISF sharing site and we thought it'd be a great story to bring to the blog for an interview.
Read MoreThe history of VDMX dates back to the late 1990's when Johnny Dekam was developing the software in Max/MSP using the infamous “Nato.0+55+3d” plugins as a follow up to his first software release as VIDVOX called Prophet. Over the next 20 years the project would grow through many iterations to become the software that it is today.
Here we will take a look at the evolution of this project and some of the major release versions since the beginning through images.
Read MoreA few weeks ago we had the pleasure of getting to go to Splice Festival for the first time. Along with getting to participate in workshops and check out great live A/V performances, the inspiring artists talks were a big highlight of the trip. In particular we finally got to meet Lucy Benson and hear about the creative process behind her amazing work. Videos from each of the talks from Splice will be online at some point in the future, and we recommend checking them out, but in the meantime we've got a little advanced interview with Lucy!
Read MoreMy name is Charles-Zoltan (better known as Zoltan or CZ), my path is quite eclectic, I started by studying at the conservatory of music in piano. Subsequently I played and formed rock / dub groups as bassist and guitarist. At the same time I discovered 3DS Max and photoshop and video editing self-educated.
I completed my career by studying sound engineering where I discovered electronic music and its methods of creation. I had the opportunity to collaborate with contemporary artists and other musicians as technical director which led me to discover VDMX as a solution to manage live visuals in 2013. I am quite curious and have a great pleasure learning new things and experimenting with anything.
Read MoreOne of our favorite things is getting to see videos of people from around the world posted online. Last week we caught some visuals from vjZaniZ in the VDMX Facebook Group and had to reach out for more details.
Read MoreCatching bits of action from people using VDMX via Twitter is always great for us and one of the best parts is that we get to connect with people like Mike St. Jean who share with us photos and videos from their latest gigs with amazing musicians... along with the behind the scenes details of how it is all put together that we crave.
Read MoreFor this artist feature we had a chance to talk with someone who has been doing this way longer than we have – by a few decades. It's always a particular pleasure for us to know that the tools used today connect back to a rich history of analog film and video that still have a fingerprint on the modern visual arts. With that experience Charles Atlas is one of those artists who has the special talent of bridging different genres of performance and production into a single cohesive piece.
When asked to send over some videos and images to include with this post Charlie put together an amazing collection for us that goes back 15 years, so strap yourself in for a bit of time travel through video.
Read MoreTo be filed under artist features that have been too long in the waiting is the work of Funken, who have been on our radar of visual artists for a few years and now are excited to finally follow up with for some behind the scenes info.
Read MoreTo celebrate the start of 2018 we're running our annual back to school sale on VDMX through January 31st for the special price of only $249 and $99 for students!
Read MoreLast month while browsing along on the blogosphere (is that still a word?) we ran into this article about Chris Speed Visuals on ShareSynth and of course had to follow up for our own interview to find out more about these glitch-tastic creations. For people who remember the days of dragging around lots of old analog gear to gigs, as well as those who missed the chance, will have a lot to enjoy in this one.
Read MoreOne 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 MoreOne 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!
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