video piano i put together for illuminart‘s jackin event for the adelaide fringe.

making-of the video piano

tailor made for a small room (for whom i played bass for while they were in melbourne).

more tailor made for a small room.. just because

I’ll be putting this out as a Max for Live plugin with the next VIZZable update.  Fun times with tech!

… and we’re back. while I was blog-absent some fun things have happened. VIZZable was the 10th most read story on CDM last year. It’s exciting news for a little set of plugins in the relatively obscure Max for Live video scene  and encouraging that others are as interested in using Ableton as an audio-visual environment as I am.  Big shout out to the great folk on the Jitter in Max for Live group!

Sound 2 Light

Some documentation of  last years Sound 2 Light has arisen. Sound 2 Light was a tech/media arts event held in Hobart where artists are partnered up and given a small period of time to come up with an installation or performance. I was partnered up with venerable techno producer Sam Gregory and we created a 20 minute AV piece revolving around strange hybrid animals all mapped onto four, large rectangular panels. I also put together two smaller installations: “Homunculus II” a teleoperated robot visible at the start of the video and a colourful, kaleidoscopic, audio-reactive projected piece that evolved throughout the night. Watch the video below and see if you can spot such things.  You can also listen to the live broadcast that went out on the night.

Stereosonic

Last year I was also lucky enough to VJ the Bass Arena at Melbourne’s Stereosonic.  It was the longest set I’ve played so far – about 9 hours – I used the opportunity to try out some new masking and feedback techniques as well as the usual fare of Live camera feeds, glitches, datamoshing and rainbow meltiness.  Whilst playing for Danish electropop singstress Lucy Love, her manager approached me and asked if there was anything wrong with the video signal.  I gestured to my PS3 controller as if to say, nope, it’s OK, It’s supposed to be like that and before I could launch into a deep discussion of how visuals, when tightly synced, can reenforce sound and give it more impact he said “Don’t do that”.  I quickly pigeon holed him as a square whom I usually enjoy confusing but to keep him happy I kept the rest of the set less interesting/confusing. Anyhoo, some videos of the day have popped up on youtube.  Datsik was particularly awesome.

Next…

A few Zeal shows are popping up in Radelaide in the coming weeks as well as some remix projects to get back into the music side of things.  I’m building another controller similar to Archaeopteryx but this time for feet:

I’m also exploring Augmented Reality with a view to put together an immersive AR installation at some stage in the future.  I hope I’m not alienating all you normal people as this is possibly the geekiest video I’ve uploaded to date:

Alrighty, you’re up to date.  I’m back to blogging and tweeting so sit tight, there’s more soon.

bob.

ch ch check it out.  this may be the last zeal gig for the year plus i’ll be vjing for the black chords so you get some extra zealiness for your dollar.  dig the facebook event.

there’s more to report – new music video, newcastle, tassie, stereosonic.  but that will be in the next post.  adios for now.

quake anyone?

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.

Yo Melbournite. Monday 13th of June, 1:30PM @ The Workers Club. Be there!
from me: new visuals and I might bring the guitar hero axe back.  I miss it.

Dig the facebook event.

And then I made this.  It’s called Archaeopteryx, it’s a MIDI controller designed with VDMX in mind and I think it’s pretty hot.  I’m going to make a run of similar, smaller controllers called The Sleep Crime so if you’d like to get your hands on one shoot me an email.  But for now here’s how this one came into being.

I came across this post by Fake Money detailing building a MIDI controller around a modified Korg Nanokontrol and a USB hub and, having hacked up a qwerty controller in the past, I started scribbling out ideas for my ideal controller.  I’ve always been big on the Livid Ohm 64 but it didn’t have enough knobs for me.  The first idea i scribbled down came out like this.

The required ingredients:

• 2 nanokontrols
• 1 usb qwerty keyboard
• 1 usb hub
• 3 10k linear faders
• 33 10k linear pots and knobs
• 9 toggle switches
• 55 momentary push buttons
• Some sort of case

All up the parts cost about $400 AUD.  The case I scored for free in hard rubbish.  In a past life it was a cutlery box.

I started with the keyboard – keyboards work by having two conductive sheets placed one on the other that lead to a little PCB with a whole stack of terminals.  When a button is pressed two terminals find each other and the keyboard figures out which button you pressed.  In order to make your more awesome push buttons do the same thing it’s a case of tracing the two sheets back to the PCB and figuring out which two terminals are shorted to the desired keypress.  There’s a good run down on how to do that on the ableton forums here.  I ended up with a squid like PCB and a notepad full of gibberish:

Getting stuck into the nanokontrols was a bit tougher.  I followed Fake Money’s guide to dismantling these little things and after a bit of trial and error managed to remove everything I needed to to solder my own pots.  If you’re trying this yourself, this is a good way to dismember the faders:

after a bit of trial, error and almost frying one of the boards, all the pots somehow soldered themselves in place.

drilling…

staining…

wiring up one half of the buttons…

wiring up the other half…

attaching the qwerty squid…

slapping the whole shebang together.  I used a USB hub with a USB B connector to save more soldering and it’s actually a great little hub.

inserting the hyperstrobic eureka shield™ – scientifically designed to lift and separate.

and with the hyperstrobic eureka shield properly installed the whole thing was done.  there were a couple of little bugs found in testing.  just one or two miswired qwerty buttons but with that fixed  Archaeopteryx is ready to scavenge in the jurassic period.