i may not have been blogging terribly often the last few weeks but that’s because i was making this!  it’s for james annesley’s virtual proximity – the track’s called suburbia.  dig the album here.

the clip was made using a combination of stop motion animation and projection mapping and i put together a little video describing the process.  dig that below.

i discovered there’s a shortage of keystroke to MIDI converters for mac so I made MIDIpress.  to use it…

1. Download MIDIpress
2.  select your keyboard from the menu on the left.  this might take some trial and error – when you find it the yellow button next to the menu will flash when ever you hit a key.  mine’s “Apple Internal Keyboard / Trackpad 4″.
3. choose your MIDI output settings.  “from midipress 1″ is a safe bet.
4. make sure your target application (ableton, FL studio etc.) has your chosen midi port active in it’s preferences.
5. set your velocity and note length.
6. do whatever! you can control any midi mappable parameters or jam as you type.

here’s the max patch for the nerdlingers

i’ve started a new clip for Virtual Proximity – the sax/beats/pixels trio i VJ in.  the new clip uses a combination of stop motion animation and projection mapping.  so far the process has been something like this:

1.) animate thing
2.) project thing onto other thing
3.) capture thing 1 projected on to thing 2 one frame at a time and animate that

the track’s called suburbia and the clip has a big focus on power lines and houses (both large+real and small+paper).  i love the look of power lines and i’ve really been enjoying projecting onto them, making the ceramic insulating doohickies flicker and causing anxiety amongst my neighbors.

if you’re in melbourne, you can see these plugins in action along with some button pressing, singing and jumping around when i play live at plugnplay next thursday the 28th of april at the kent st cafe, 201 smith st, fitzroy.  i think i’m playing with vdmokstati, jean poole and others… bit short on details at the moment… but it’ll be awesome, i’m sure.  the day after that (friday 29th) i’m playing at the builders arms with time shield, the leafs and sun blindness.  i’ll also supplying visuals for the leafs and sun blindess.  check the fb event!  and the poster:

in other news, the dudes at projuice have thrown up a little write up about me which makes me feel a little warm and fuzzy.  projuice is a media creation showing airing on abc at the moment – it’s really great seeing tutorial style programming making the airways especially since it’s pretty much favorite sort of thing to watch on the interwebs.  that and videos of baby sloths.

in other, other news, i’ve been inspired by this, this and this and have decided to build a midi controller (i’ve undertaken a similar project in the past).  i’ll be using the guts from two korg nanokontrols and a usb qwerty keyboard and it should end up looking a bit like this:

can’t wait.

Practice

i’m playing this saturday night at the empress with JUNK! and the time shield – and this time not as zeal but as my VJing alter ego lazy laser.  i’ll be trailing some new AV material (using VIZZable)  and it will be under rehearsed but hopefully interesting. it should be a taste of the future zeal live show.  the inimitable junk will be doing some stripped down acoustic or ambient or jazzy versions of their songs and time shield will be there to shield us from the horrors of time (and also make pretty pictures and sounds).  back to getting my shit together!

go dig the facebook event.

While you’re at it, check out all things Subsketch.  He makes tremendous stuff.  It is worthy of your attention.