I was in a bar yesterday and just happened to watch through the entire Eurovision song contest. I noticed that along with the usual stage antics of dancers, lights, rotating mirrors and flame throwers the show sported computer-generated visuals. This reminded me of an article in Helsingin Sanomat that I cut out one year ago. It is about the team behind the lights and visuals of the whole contest. Apparently they rely on sponsors who like to test the newest light, projection etc. technologies there. And showy and flashy the stage was. But what about the visuals themselves?

I dare say it looked like any club visuals you would see in Helsinki. Colorful abstract patterns flowed across several screens, as interesting as tapestry, and I couldn’t help noticing many old demoscene effects such as the flame and plasma were rehashed. But maybe they were just fullfilling the very function of visuals in a larger sense?

Nevertheless, it is a VJ’ing career opportunity for those who it might concern.

Jeff Minter, a cult figure in the computer game industry, has gotten his latest “light synthesizer” Neon built into the Xbox 360. Its a piece of realtime software that syncs on both audio and four joypads. I like the sample movies - they take the hypnotic, multi-layered Winamp plugin aesthetics to the extreme, but with certain style and at least visible audio syncs. You should read his light synths’ history as well: it seems this guy has been combining psychedelia with computer programming already in the early 80’s. Computer shows, realtime art, Pink Floyd, “smoked spliffs” and Atari ST’s. Well, I find it curious.

Inventive, idiosyncratic and international! Or how would you describe a dozen artists from several different nationalities performing inside an inflatable bubble? This is how I spent my Friday night a couple of weeks ago. Below in the pictures by Antti Ahonen the bubble is first constructed by Amoeba and then used as a projection medium. During the evening, Amoeba Technologies [US], 2012 [RU], Kokeellisen Elektroniikan Seura, Amphibio [sic!] and Pseudotoad did their damnedest to fill the air with laptop music, strong breakbeats, experimental electronic sounds, curious speech samples, video clips, dia projections and audio synced code visuals. As one would imagine, it proved to be very interesting.

The people at piksel.no are putting together a liveCD (which is a bootable Gnu/Linux CD) with Piksel software and artwork. Actant Automatique by Antti S, a small display of audio sync which is an excerpt from a larger VJ software of his, sees its first appereance there. Antti provides two mp3 tracks with the package, but you can use it with your own songs as well.

The program unfortunately only works in Gnu/Linux at the moment. (But if you know what you’re doing, compiling for Windows or Mac OSX won’t requre drastic changes.)

Amoeba technologies from New York, USA, are visiting Helsinki 1.5-12.5. They will perform in Gloria 4.5, on La-Bas in Valssaamo, Kaapeli 6.5 and in Kolinaklubi in vuoritalo 10.5. I will be giving technical assistance during the La-Bas gig (but who knows if I’ll do some visuals). As these guys have been the VJ’s for Psychic TV, the show should never the less prove to be interesting.

Thank you for this opportunity goes to Antti Ahonen, who is hosting them and will probably do some collaborations with them.

Antti S will be VJ’ing at the BANG PixelACHE Closing Party this Sunday in mbar/Helsinki starting at 20.00, and a Selfish Shellfish + Amfibio performance featuring Pauli O is setup in Nifca project space in Suomenlinna, Helsinki, this Friday at 20.00. See you there!

Made a small Open Sound Control server test available at downloads.

I have been investigating a bit of OpenSound Control for purposes of integrating my software with those of others. If the visual software had a decent OpenSound Control server, it could mean for instance collaborations with people running Pure Data. But not much is written as we speak aside from some preliminary tests. Anyway, here are some relevant links about OSC.

http://www.cnmat.berkeley.edu/OpenSoundControl/
http://www.cnmat.berkeley.edu/OpenSoundControl/clients/sendOSC.html
http://www.cnmat.berkeley.edu/OpenSoundControl/dumpOSC.html
http://www.cnmat.berkeley.edu/OpenSoundControl/OSC-spec-examples.html
http://barely.a.live.fm/pd/OSC/index2.html

The New Year’s Eve saw me, O-P Lehto and Teemu K. doing ten hours of visuals for Entropy, myself standing behind the desk at least six of them. Didn’t catch any sleep or see the rockets, but it’s the performance that’s important, right? Below are some photographs where the visuals are, sadly, barely visible. But at least one can witness O-P’s fine idea: the screen consisted of nine separate white squares hanged from the ceiling, making it look like there was nine separate screens although the whole thing was projected with just one projector. We made use of this fact, switching between one screen and nine small screens in our software. Very professional-looking! The two rightmost pictures are from hardware, first the audio mixer, the video mixer and MIDI-controller, and then the flat monitor and Amfibio’s Shuttle PC.

Pauli O, my Pseudotoad collaborator (though we rarely have chances to work together anymore), has put his image compositing software up for grabs here. It’s free and from what I’ve seen it in work, a really good and practical piece of tool. You should check out his other offerings as well.

It seems I will be doing New Year’s Eve visuals for artists called PJVM, Tero Civill a.k.a. Coma, Hiski & Pinnie, OlliS and Kolina. As this is a secret underground type of an event, let’s not mention it in more detail here either.