Brian T. Moore created this installation piece from footage he shot in Toronto mixed over audio that was composed by my dub hero Saetchmo from sound snippets recorded also in Toronto all with a little bit of help from me. Enjoy. Official home for the video here.
The congress for the crazy ones the wild ones the good ones the ones defending freedom and digital liberties keep the information flowing unhindered without borders the last of their kind - the real dragons. Those who share and know will meet and talk and copy and paste and for so much knowledge brought to a boil the outcome is unknown.
There be Dragons! Dragons Everywhere. I will be one and so should you.
And on the 28th around 23:00 in the smokers lounge the dragons will undertake a special journey through time:
Indian Timetravels - an audiovisual performance by Das Kraftfuttermischwerk & protobeamaz:fALK (hey thats me ;)
This saturday we are undergoing a big big experiment - something very very unique - something that saves a lot of CO2 - something that could change the face of parties around the world... got your attention? great :)
MoGreens and my lowly self (proto.beamaz:fALk for the search engines) will be playing a VJ/DJ (or A/V as it might be called in some cirlcles) gig in Toronto/Canada. But instead of flying over there trying to cope with jetlags and the pretty torontonian girls we are safely in the prototypen office using the intertubes to forward our signals to the crew around Brian Moore who are doing their awesome media jam in the coolest property of all Toronto.
Since we can´t stream to more then one computer because in the year 2008 there is still no universal multicast or streaming bittorrent protocol (that works on a mac (so I heard swarmplayer is shaping up nicely)) the only way to experience the awesomeness of a the first and only real global party (massmedia induced Bono concerts don´t count) is to go to it live - either to Toronto for the full bang loud social event at 9 oclock in the evening or come to the proto.office near Berlin for a relaxed chilled friends circle atmosphere at 4 oclock in the morning - your choice - but I am sure you don´t want to miss it either way.
Saturday November 22nd 2008
411 Front Street East Toronto /Canada
9:11 pm EST
&
proto.office Kleinmachnow(Berlin) /Germany
4:00 am CET
When I was in Toronto for the blinkenlights project I meet up with Brian T. Moore - one of the local VJs and a heck of a community organizer there. He put on a VJ Jam in his awesome residence and invited the vjs of Toronto to play. I was honored to play there too. CommandN is a local video podcast that has shot the show - even so they did some factual mistakes (like calling me mr blinkenlights) they still pulled off quite a nice episode about the event. And the heavy psychedelic visuals across Brians face where an exception. Just before the interview there was about the best collaborative mix (together with one of the lead programmers for Houdini - whos name I forgot but I will write about his selfwritten "VJ" software that he developed for Pixar) on that screen that I have ever attended. Sadly that part has not made it into the podcast.
I will give my Live Cinema Lecture on Sunday at 13:45 at the "Die Verstärker" music conference and fair at the e-werk in Erlangen / Germany. The Lecture will be a bit shorter then usual (I hope) clocking in at one hour and in return might be more digestable for the short attention span croud. I will give the talk in german as this will be a 99% german audience. After my talk fRED and some visual Berlin people will talk about VJ networks. Also there is a a "state of the art a/v" talk and "how to produce your own loops" workshop going on in addition to lots of copyright/left and more music orientated lectures. You can get more information prices etc. at the Die Verstärker website.
This is what we where greeted today with from all the newsstands in town when we went outside to get some peaceful breakfast. What you see there is a still frame from the well recieved symphonie last night. Actually what you see is Willow on the left tower and me on the right tower :) I was very delighted that they choose this particular loop as it symbolizes everything the visual side of the symphony stood for. Love the two towers and the massive amount of blinkenlights - it was my favorite and aparently the editors of the newspaper saw that as well. The performance went very well (so I was not 100% satisfied with my part as per usual) but people apparently liked it a lot as there was lots of cheers and long applause afterwards (which is very unusual for a VJ I might add). I did a bit of an extension (for people wondering why it went on longer then 30 minutes) as the crowd somehow wanted some more :) (so toby as cook dumping his iPod collection on Willows computer was a very timely thing to do as this supplied some more cool music for that unexpected part as all the music was playing from her computer).
I can not state often enough that this thing comes across best when you see it live. The afterglow of the pixels on the night sky backdrop leave you with a smile everytime you see them - its such a huge scale that the light is just brightening the whole area. The towers blinking in rythm to the music is just something otherworldly.
Thanks to everyone involved to make this happen - and especially Ronny and Inge from Kraftfuttermischwerk for the perfectly fitting music - everyone asked me who the music was from - it just fit the atmosphere extremely well.
Now the installation is up for another week. A wide collection of games can be played (and work great even through the simulator (not so much through the live video as the delay is too big)) now and people play like crazy. You can still submit loops that will be added to the playlist and be played on the house and afterwards on the never dying blinkenproxies.
All information as always on blinkenlights.net
PS: Oh and we recorded everything - its already digitized and we will put it online very soon together in sync with the amazing audio... (soon is the next 2-3 days)
I have now finalized my setup and am testing for tonight. I am going with 4 layers. Two of those are what I call "story" layers - mostly video content telling the stereo love story. One layer is rythm loops and typography and the 4th layer is a special "pixel perfect" layer that maps pixel by pixel to the house - so I can adress specific windows without any antialiasing around them. There is one custom plugin that makes all the right connections to the house and lets me readress the output to specific screens on the house and lets me turn off one of the two buildings individually (to compensate for the mirror effect). Also there is a "blink" plugin that cycles through the screen and turns them on and of one after each other.
All in all I produced 220 fresh loops just for the house and repurposed 90 of my old loops (mostly rythm stuff) in just over a week. I don´t know if the story will come through because some of the story loops are just not working on the low resolution but I will make sure it all looks pretty tonight...
I would be more then happy for any feedback after the event.
Its 25 hours to go until I will go live and dance with the Blinkenlights. StereoLove the Blinkenlights Symphonie is a 30 minute audiovisual feast on the lovely blinken pixels. The music part is provided by Kraftfuttermischwerk who almost completely produced new soundscapes for this event. Before an after the the live part people will be able to interact in new ways with the house, play games have a wink at the winken cam (oh I know thats going to be extremely popular) or just enjoy being mesmerized by the giant blinking display.
All this as part of the Nuit Blanche here in Toronto with lots of other stuff going on as well.
So if you are in or around Toronto come down to the Nathan Phillips Square and see it all live Saturday October 4th 2008 at 10 pm.
If not - well the simulators are the way to go or wait til sunday to see a live recording of the whole event including the tasty music.
The cheaky buggers filmed me last night without me noticing :) Look at it - its very small part of what you gonna get tomorrow. BTW I didn´t even have a contrast or brightness control in the test setup (besides Tim mentioning that on the blog) - but it helps to have tested on the house with a bad gamma curve the days before to know what works and what not.
Yesterday I was able to conduct the first real live test from the plaza in front of the house wirelessly live to the house and it was bombastic. While inside the headquarter on 4th floor West Tower got my mood a bit down because I couldn´t really see what I was playing couldn´t really sense how the visuals would come through - basically I was thinking nothing works its all doomed. Yet down in front of the building I found a massive lovely vibrant reactive fast screen that worked with 80% of my prepared footage. All my ideas for effects where working, the software hardware side worked and I was massively pleased and could rest well.
Now all thats left for me is making "some" more rythm loops and making my software setup stable and usable (hey I got more then 24 hours for that so p-l-e-n-t-y of time).
Thanks goes out so far to the amazing hard and software gurus in the crew - without them nothing would be possible.
I am going to post some pictures here later (hopefully)...
Tomorrow I will be leaving to London and then from there on Monday to Toronto. But before I even arrive we have managed to send some packets over there - packets of the electronic type that is.
My favorite VJ programm VDMX has gotten a Quartz Composer implant that in turns has a custom programmed implant that takes an input image and sends it out a as a blinkenstream to a proxy server. This proxy server can then be listened to by anyone with an internet connection - so to you or the guys in Tonronto (The CodingMonkeys of SubethaEdit fame - who are hard at work programming the iPhone app at the moment).
This all goes straight out of VDMX without anything in between - very sweet - vjing directly to the world so to say. I must say that this has prompted a bit of a shift in my perception of the artform - I will reflect about that after I am back from Toronto - I think its quite awesome.
As soon as there is an official version of the program that displays the data stream (mid next week) and an official proxyserver (tomorrow?) I will post it here - so you can watch what's on the towers or me practicing (not that much fun I guess)...
I will also post the plugins for quartz composer straight when I have arrived in Toronto.
this blog will see a new Category called "Blinkenlights" for those who are interested in my updates on the project over the course of the next 3 weeks. All quite exiting.
Of course there is also the official Blinkenlights Blog for more current information...
