EMBRACING THE CHAOS PART 2

Traveling with Electronics: Embracing the Chaos Part 2

There's a Storm on the Horizon.....how I became

VJ BLIND

My conduction ensemble Out of Context (check out OOC page) is doing a colaboration with Theater Grottesco - http://www.theatergrottesco.org/ - called STORM. It is very large scale project about the environment and a journey into the social paradigms that prevent the world from taking action.

Through a very odd set of circumstances, I have aquired the position of dealing with the live video aspects of the production, which is the Chaos I am now embracing. A bit of a steep learning curve since the production goes up in February of 2012 (85 days from this posting), but an extremely exhilarating ride!

First I had to decide on the software and man, there are allot of live video manipulation programs out there right now, but the three that come up the most often for real time (VJ) performance applications are VDMX, RESOLUME and MODUL8. For a number of reasons I went with MODUL8.

Second was the computer to run the program and the external drive to hold the video content. Just like doing sampling and live sampling of audio, faster is better and for real time video manipulation, it's even more important. I went with a MacBook Pro with the best graphics card I could get and maxed out the RAM. For the external "content drive" I went with a 320 gig 7200 rpm firewire 800 external drive.

The final issue was the controller and since I am also going to be conducting the ensemble I decided to go with a wireless controller.....enter again, the ipad. My good friend Arnaud Mercier agreed to create a TouchOSC layout on the ipad that through a wireless network would control MODUL8 on the laptop through midi via a MAX/MSP stand alone patch running in the background. He called this patch OscMidiMess.

Here are the ipad screen shots of the five pages of controllers:

PAGE 1 - Left Side - Layer Select/Play/Faders -  Right Side - Master Faders and Media Select

PAGE 2 - Left Side - Duplicate of Page 1 - Right Side - Basic Layer Controls

PAGE 3 - Top - Layer Select and Pixel Noise FX - Bottom - Transformer Controls

PAGE 4 -Left Side - Generic Midi Controls - Right Side - Painter Module Controls

PAGE 5 - Left Side - Generic Midi Controls - Right Side - Generic Midi X/Y Pads & Buttons

Arno has created a very elegant controller that is perfect for running MODUL8 and the generic midi pages can also be set-up on a seperate send to control other programs as well. He has told me that he is going to offer this ipad app to the MODUL8 Community after we have made a few more tweeks and created a manual. BIG BIG THANKS ARNO!!!

I had my first live performance set last week (BIG FUN!) and am planing on uploading a video excerpt in December's Blog. Until then I will leave you with the STORM teaser.

Safe travels.....dino