Last wednesday another VJ London meeting took place,
this time in the lovely Roxy bar and screen on borough high street
For us, these meetings are already a permanent component
of our VJ live here in London and it’s always fun and
about vjing, surviving and meeting new and interesting people.
This time we had the chance to play with Pikilipitas latest creation -
the PS24VJ, which is a cute, pink mini PS2 loaded with a custom computer-software-program-hack to unveil the consoles hidden vjing capabilities.
This is the visual repertoire for the start,
but we are looking forward to get more footage to play with in the future!
All you need is a PS2, a controller and your fingers…
…not to forget the DVD, that starts the software from the external USB harddrive ;)
Me, shooting some heads?
Kitty, yo!
Another beautiful and very playful thing was the installation
“Hurry Up Please : IT’S TIME” by video artist and VJ
Mauritius Seeger aka Dr. Mo and the artist and architect Alex Haw.
“Hurry Up Please : IT’S TIME offers an expansion on the drinker’s eternal concern for questions of time (that pressing pint; the tyranny of Last Orders). A camera above the bar scans it for activity. Computer vision compares pixels adjacent in time and calculates the geography of activity. A co-located overhead projection then remaps the scene with abstracted, responsive imagery, conjuring a composite temporal image. Active drinkers are rewarded with faster imagery, updating in real-time, whilst inactive parts of the bar and screen slumber in archival mode, dormant until activity is intense enough to accelerate playback into real-time. Boozers, bingers and barflys collaborate to produce a 4-dimensional document of space and time.”
The program was written from scratch in C++.
The more you move, the more you attract these little, green flakes.
It’s like f#ck1n6 flies in summer, but much more fun!
It was really cool to play with the light and to watch people reacting (or not),
but beware – intense use can cause cider effects!
This was not an original intention of the artists, but the reflection in the mirror above the spirits were really fun to watch and intensified the impression,
because the whole animation was in the the field of the users visual perception and
you were able to see the bigger picture.
We are looking forward to see both projects somewhere else in the near future,
‘coz we really liked it and we think it’s very good work!
For all our austrian friends who are interested in the work of Pikilipita:
He will perform with the “gameboy music club” in the famous Rhiz and at the opening of the “GAME” exhibition. He also will hold some lectures in Vienna and Graz soon.
For more info see his homepage or http://subotron.com/673-subotron-social-meeting-8bit-visuals/.
This is an interesting little application and
I am sure it will make a big 2.X buzz out there in socialized interwebs.
Even if this automated service seems to do quite a good job,
I don’t think, that motion graphic artists have to worry about their jobs (The End Of Mograph),
because for perfect results in the end it always needs the human touch.
But for people who have no ideas, no time or no feeling
for slideshows with a bit more pepper than the usual ones,
this little service will come quite handy and
I’d predict, that it sure will be kind of a successful thing.
In terms of VJing, I have to say, that I have seen lots of VJs,
who’s visuals were far worse than the results that program spits out.
Especially the VJs, who have specialized in sampling footage
might be in big danger, because when you push the idea of Animoto further and
change the images to videos, no more VJ might be necessary for an average task.
This is just a logical step forward and
nothing else then a next gen audio visualizer with video footage.
From the press kit:
“Animoto is a web application that, with the click of a button,
produces videos using images and music that a user selects.
Using their patent-pending Artificial Intelligence developed
to think like an actual editor & director, the resulting video
has the emotional impact of a movie trailer and
the visual energy of a music video.”
We’ve had a great evening at the Tate gallery last friday and
according to Oli Sorenson (one of the heads of Ne1co) and the Tate itself
it was one of their most successful events.
It was really impressive and good to see, that it was so crowded!
So thumbs up for the people of Ne1co and for the (coming) AV Social events.
They are definitely bringing the art of short cinema, visuals and VJing to the people.
We have shot a few images of the beautiful work,
but these images just give a small impression
of the projections interacting with the colossal architecture.
Unfortunately our cameras battery suffered from a loss of power,
so we couldn’t shot the lower floor (Narrative Lab w/ various artists &
the Lightbox w/ Derek Jarmans “Imagining October”).
Bopa and Bruno Tait
Bopa and Bruno Tait and a VMS (Video Moving System)
One of the analog parts of the “Underlap” installation by Blackout Arts
One of three final projections of the “Underlap” installation by Blackout Arts
Another projection of the “Underlap” installation by Blackout Arts
“Dwelling” by Hiraki Sawas
Lazerboy and Movement (Godskitchen) in the Ne1co Lounge
