Pseudotoad

Eurovision visuals

Antti S — Sun, 22 May 2005 17:47:18 +0000

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.

Minter’s realtime visuals go Xbox 360

Antti S — Sun, 22 May 2005 17:16:46 +0000

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.

Collaborations with Amoeba et al

Antti S — Sun, 22 May 2005 16:39:11 +0000

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.

Antti S at PikselLiveCD

Antti S — Sun, 22 May 2005 15:08:10 +0000

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 (US) in Helsinki

Antti S — Mon, 02 May 2005 17:44:27 +0000

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.

Pseudotoad at PixelACHE

Antti S — Thu, 14 Apr 2005 18:09:21 +0000

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!

OSC test

Antti S — Sun, 20 Mar 2005 18:12:03 +0000

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

OpenSound Control

Antti S — Fri, 18 Mar 2005 18:17:09 +0000

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

New Years Eve visuals

Antti S — Sat, 01 Jan 2005 18:20:27 +0000

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.

Edo - an image composition program by Pauli O and New Years Eve by Antti S

Antti S — Thu, 30 Dec 2004 18:31:01 +0000

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.

Thoughts on Umo Jazz House gig

Antti S — Sat, 18 Dec 2004 18:33:05 +0000

Well well, the last night’s gig was just as fun as I anticipated. Magnus Zinmark played a crossover DJ set of spy jazz, samba, hip hop and electro, and my colourful pseudoanalog looking visuals seemed to back that up really plausibly. This is an audiovisual connection I would like to investigate further, so if anyone is willing to play music in the similar fashion and wants visual backdrops with Brazilian-esque hue-psychedelia, please drop me a mail.

Umo Jazz House gig

Antti S — Fri, 17 Dec 2004 18:34:06 +0000

This will come with an extremely short notice (since I didn’t know it myself three hours ago) but it is still probably worth mentioning that I’ll be doing some visuals for DJ Magnus Zingmark (KOOP) at UMO Jazz House tonight from 22:00 to 03:00. The music should be jazz combined with electronic music which sounds like fun, and pretty suitable for my usual set of audio synchronized visual abstractism.

Piksel04 aftermath

Antti S — Sat, 06 Nov 2004 18:36:27 +0000

I’ve returned from piksel.no at Norway and the spirits are high. The very openness of the open source community was an eye-opener and I’ll try to contribute to that scene in the future. Greetings fly out to all the people I met, it was interesting talking to you. Check out piksel’s software page for many intriguing projects going on.

As if their hospitality wasn’t plentiful enough, the organizers are providing fine video streams and images of the event. I’ve made some screenshots of the stuff below, but you’ll also want to download this, this, this, this and this if you’re interested in seeing Pseudotoad in action. The VJ show and the following Antti S. workshop speech went well on the whole; special regards must be given to Anders Gogstad for playing one of the best DJ sets I’ve ever visualized.

Piksel04 in Bergen, Norway!

Antti S — Sun, 17 Oct 2004 18:38:33 +0000

The gig autumn already seemed alarmingly quiet, but just recently we were invited to perform at piksel04 in Bergen, Norway, where Antti S’s programmed visual fripperies will be joined by the amfiphile media artist Teemu K. The pair aims at exploring the boundaries between software and art and will exhibit a one hour VJ performance that is part real time rendered, part video; part improvised, part pre-planned; part contingent, part predetermined; part indifferent, part reactive; part actor, part structure; part nature, part technology; part essentialistic, part nominalistic; part real, part social construction.

30.10.2004 23:00 @ Bergen, Norway will see the retrieval of performance V0.1. If all goes well, further revisions may appear at a venue near your home town.

Pseudotoad summer

Antti S — Sat, 11 Sep 2004 18:45:53 +0000

The Koneisto festival, ISEA 2004 and flow’04 festival are finally done with and the Pseudotoad crew is feeling justifiedly exhausted. Two weeks, six gigs and one Baltic cruise with multimedia posse is a lot to handle - plus Antti S even managed to release a couple of demos at Assembly 2004 at the beginning of August. No grand prizes at the Assemblys this time though!

Take a peek at our gig screenshots below. We’ll try to get hand of some live footage too. The two right most shots are effects from the Fit demo Dr Fungi Goes to Africa, coded by Markku Reunanen. I used them as a basis at flow04, filtering their output with texture mapping effects real time. I think conceptually I was remixing Markku’s visuals, building my own performance on top of them. As a statement I think we should have more remix culture at the coded visuals side of things. Every video clip user’s been grabbing material from public domain archives (and not so public doman archives) as long as VJ culture has existed. I think it is time us coders caught up with them.

Links to interesting projects

Antti S — Mon, 26 Jul 2004 19:25:41 +0000

Just updated a diversified bunch of upcoming gigs to our calendar. Why not audit them?

Plenty of interesting projects running over and about the net: check the open source dynamics engine ODE; the small realtime render engine with audio analysis, Fluxus (whose aesthetics surprisingly resemble Antti S’s figurines, possibly because they use very similar techniques); and the nebogeo group behind Fluxus. It seems the open source is finally reaching the whole visual coding stratum, where coding your own super engine behind closed doors has until recently been almost a norm. Or so it has appeared to me, originating from the demoscene.

Finally, here’s a refreshing vector video Amiga demo by up rough called live axxion. Most certainly entertaining to watch.

Antti S involved in Amiga demo

Antti S — Sun, 06 Jun 2004 19:26:53 +0000

Antti S, Markku Reunanen and Jarkko Rotstén decided to hack together a demonstration for Amiga-AGA (receiving additional help from Yrjö Fager and Petri Isomäki), and a VJ esque bravura of black and white catastrophie clips emerged! Called Chrysler, it placed first at Motorola Inside 2004. Versions for various platforms as well as a video available at downloads.

Yellow Rose of Texas at Scene Awards 2003

Antti S — Sun, 02 May 2004 19:28:32 +0000

Scene.org has posted the combined jury comments on all the Awards 2003 winners. Here is what they had to say about Yellow Rose:

“A short yet powerful performance, displaying an expert use of attractive colors and camera view points. One of the best examples of generative code, as it cleverly makes one single effect interact with one of the coolest tune we´ve heard in a 4k intro. A must see.”

Thank you for these electrifying lines of text. If you want to see the demonstration yourself and prefer a video format, I recently noticed Markku Reunanen has put a Quicktime video available for download here:
http://ftp.kameli.net/pub/fit/yellow_rose/Yellow_Rose.mov.

Weathermatrix system at Korjaamo

Antti S — Fri, 23 Apr 2004 19:29:51 +0000

An automated version of the Weathermatrix-software will be displayed in the Master of Arts exhibition of University of Art and Design Helsinki. Date & time 30.4.2004 from 19:30 onwards, location Korjaamo near Raitiovaunumuseo in Töölö, Helsinki. Not actually a graduation work of anyone, but the work was invited anyway.

Yellow Rose of Texas won at Scene Awards

Antti S — Mon, 12 Apr 2004 19:30:47 +0000

The Yellow Rose of Texas won this year’s scene.org awards for the best 4k intro. Head to their site for brief results.

Photos of Weathermatrix at Kiasma

Antti S — Thu, 08 Apr 2004 19:31:48 +0000

Pictures from the Kiasma gig of Weathermatrix updated to gallery.

Weathermatrix performances

Antti S — Sat, 03 Apr 2004 19:33:54 +0000

Two performances of the Weathermatrix were given in Kiasma Theatre and attracted quite big an audience of clearly over 100 people each time. I’m really glad about all the positive feedback we got, although many people (including Helsingin Sanomat) assumed a connection between the showing of weather pictures and the recent road accident in the middle Finland. Guess that made the performance a whole lot more actual, but also a bit more tragic than CNCD intented.

For me the gigs were yet another proof of the fact that there is a point in programming your own tools for live performances. Who knows how I would have dealt with the 80 gigs of weather pictures, 9 screens streaming from the harddrive at once, without the aid of Perl scripts, threaded programming, the OpenGL interface and free libraries and compilers. Huge props to the authors of transcode, wget, ImageMagick, gcc, Perl, FTE, SDL, OpenGL and Debian Linux - your tools are the greatest (and of course, completely free of charge). I’m planning to release the live Weathermatrix tool I used in the near future myself. More info on that once I get some work done on the subject.

Last, a small observation on a quite different subject: Disco released their newest album “Pitkän päivän matka yöhön” this week and in the thank you list you can find Amfibio-oliot - translating into Amfibio creatures, and referring to me, Pauli and Maippi naturally.

Weathermatrix at Fylkingen

Antti S — Mon, 29 Mar 2004 19:34:52 +0000

The first batch of Grey Zone: Weathermatrix performances were given in Fylkingen @ Stockholm and seemed to be a success. Props to all the people in CNCD, Nursery (the organisers in Stockholm) and Pixelache for help, patience and of course, the opportunity - it was a very nice gig to participate in indeed. The gallery shall be updated as soon as someone points me to the videos and pics that were taken of the event. Also watch out for the another showings in Kiasma Theatre this thursday and friday.

Some surprise visuals were thrown in the same space by me and Teemu K/Amfibio for DJ Coolof who concluded the night with a great set of harsh electro. Nothing like some video clips and audio synced computer graphics to accompany new remixes of old Nitzer Ebb tracks!

Disco, Weathermatrix and The Communist Manifesto

Antti S — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 19:36:07 +0000

Disco are about to embark on 4 gig promo tour and Maippi/Amfibio, Pauli O and Antti S will provide the visuals as usual. There will be 4 new songs and hence the same amount of new visual clips. No performing though as the videos will be shown from tapes. See gigs for dates and locations. Also, the Grey Zone: Weathermatrix performance with CNCD is shaping up nice, just two weeks to go before the first showing in Stockholm. There’s a specific page to be found for the project here.

I recently read the Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels for the first time and in many ways it is timeless. Here’s an online version in English and in Finnish - I think everybody should consider reading it especially since it will not consume many hours of your time.

Greyzone gigs updated

Antti S — Fri, 20 Feb 2004 19:37:02 +0000

Exact time for all three Harmaa Vyöhyke (or Greyzone, if you prefer) performances updated to gigs.

CNCD Harmaa Vyöhyke

Antti S — Mon, 19 Jan 2004 19:37:57 +0000

Added the CNCD Harmaa Vyöhyke gigs that we’re supporting to upcoming gigs. Exact time of the Pixelache performance to be announced.

Micery demo

Antti S — Sat, 17 Jan 2004 19:39:12 +0000

Micery is finished. Head to downloads to get your own copy.

Altparty demo - Micery

Antti S — Mon, 12 Jan 2004 19:40:27 +0000

All right, the Altparty draft version of the latest Antti S/Markku Reunanen collaboration Micery is finished and released for Mac OSX. I’ll post a more complete news item and put the prod for download once the Linux/Windows/etc ports are finished (probably this week). In the mean while you may watch this pouet.net space for some praises and mockery. For those of you who missed it live at Altparty, fear not: I promise a plenty of this material shall be recycled for VJ’ing purposes.

The Alternative Party starts today!

Antti S — Fri, 09 Jan 2004 19:41:27 +0000

The Alternative Party starts today at Helsinki and although there’s almost nothing assembled as we speak, we should release a demo there. We’ll know that in a few days time, won’t we.

Old news

Pseudotoad — Thu, 01 Jan 2004 19:57:05 +0000

Older news here. (Will be blogged some time.)