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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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, 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.

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.

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.

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