I have been mailing a VHS tape back and forth with Max Capacity in an ongoing collaboration entitled USPSVHS. Max recently uploaded some stills and animated gifs from the project – check out the complete series here.
Today is the official online release of Vaudeo Signal – a 31 minute album of sound and light by Ben Baker-Smith and Evan Kühl. It is now available as a free download from archive.org: archive.org/details/VaudeoSignal
Vaudeo Signal was recorded in the summer of 2010, and debuted on DVD at the GLI.TC/H festival this past October. Since then we have sold out of the first edition of 50 copies, and are currently working on a second printing which will be available soon. Contact me at bitsynthesis at gmail dot com if you are interested in a physical copy – including unique, hand-printed cover art – for cheap.
EDIT 11-29-2010: Texture mapping does not work properly on Macintosh computers, so for now GEM-Engine 1.0 is useable only on Linux and Windows computers.
As reported by Create Digital Motion last month, Austrian artist and animator Sebastian Pirch (sonofsol) has created a 3D game engine for the Pure Data visual environment, GEM. For Max/MSP users, GEM is equivalent to Jitter – but more directly tied to OpenGL. The first full version has now been released, along with a tutorial video outlining its features (see the bottom of this post).
GEM-Engine 1.0 is a truly stunning accomplishment in coding.
This freely available software (available here) provides an interface for creating, arranging, and animating 3D environments. It currently is designed to work with 3D models and scripts from Autodesk’s 3DsMax, but with a little know-how this could be expanded to include other formats.
Because it runs on Pd, GEM-Engine 1.0 has great potential for interactive and audio-responsive applications, including but in no way limited to installation art and VJ-ing.
Here are a few more benefits provided by the creator himself:
span the gemwindow over a couple of gfx-card outputs using expanded desktop mode (9 screens @ 1280 x 1024 is the most i did)
use multiple inputs for machine user interaction like: Wii Controller (piped via osc from Karl Kenners Glovepie), MIDI devices, sensors with Arduino boards, Live Camera Tracking with openCV or EyesWeb, Wacom tablets, ARToolkit coordinates, SoundAnalysis… (procedures are platform dependend) ….actually pd can connect with whatever runs on electricity.
The best thing about the Time Base Forcer, the latest handmade video processing / effects unit from Dutch creator Gijs Gieskes, is that it stablizes rough analog video signals. It also looks really nice in that partially open-air wooden case.
The Time Base Forcer has loads of practical application when experimenting or performing with analog video in non-traditional ways. Composite video signals can easily become unstable and lose sync when being mixed with other signals, fed back, or affected by circuit bending (among other things). This produces the rolling image effect sometimes seen on analog televisions, and simply a blue screen in most later models. Digital projectors and televisions may do the same or simply not display at all.
By stablizing the video, the Time Base Forcer allows some of the more interesting and fragmented analog visual effects to be displayed and recorded on digital devices. Gieskes has also thrown in additional controls to provide for some basic image manipulation.
The major limitation is that it only outputs a black and white images. There may be a new model in the future that handles color as well, here’s hoping.
gieskes.nl has a lot of cool DIY audio and video resources, including tutorials, images, and schematics for the Time Base Forcer and other devices. He also sells kits and finished projects.
Yesterday I crashed the daytime segment of The Midwest Experimental Electronic Conference and Showcase (MEECAS) at the Liquid Lizard Lounge in Chicago. It was a great informal afternoon get-together of artists, hackers, and musicians who brought a variety of interesting projects to show off and discuss.
I wasn’t able to make it back for the lineup of live shows that performed later in the evening, but there are videos on the MEECAS Ustream page.
Among them is a recording of my rig, complete with a rainbow effect from the curved CRT screen.
Thanks to everyone who helped make MEECAS happen. I met a lot of interesting people, and it was great to find such an event right in my neighborhood.
EDIT 11-17-2010: Just uploaded a couple images of my stuff at the show. Here they are.
This is an unofficial video accompaniment to 2 tracks from Cornbeast’s set at Blip Festival 2010 in Scandinavia. The first is Chip Hero off the album of the same name, the second is currently unreleased.
I created and recorded the video in realtime along with the live audio stream of the show – both are unedited.
