Modul8 is a proud supporter of SCREENPLAY at the Collegium Hungaricum Berlin This one night only event will feature a variety of seasoned artists working in the field of live cinema, many of whom have found Modul8 to be an essential tool for expressing their ideas through live video performance.
April 9th from 14h00 until 02h00?
Ungarisches Kulturinstitut
Dorotheenstraße 12
10117 Berlin
For further info: http://chb.screenplaynights.com/
Mid last month my friend fRED was approached by some colleagues of his to create an installation for one night in a new working space here in Berlin called House Of Clouds. There idea was to have an open house followed by a party to promote the space. For fRED and I to work together, an opportunity to have a free creative hand, test out the MadMapper and work with another friend, ElectricKettle who does breakcore music but has been interested in collaborating with me on something for a long time.
Prior to this project fRED and I did some VJing together and when the MadMapper emerged for me in its incubative form he used it at this years Chaos Computer Congress. He and I were both interested in using wood. I have seen this used before. MXZEHN explored this type of material and I had seen other examples, namely a huge structure created in one of the previous editions of Burning Man. The above photos is almost all I have of the structure sans the projections on it as I did not stay for the event due to a heavy workload at the time.
fRED and I reviewed the photos provided by House Of Clouds and decided on a particular room, the one pictured above. We liked the stage and the distances from it to the walls appeared to be appropriate for the distances that were needed to get a decent projection on the sculpture I had in mind.
Our initial impression of the room was dictated by photos provided. If there is no person standing in the space while the photo is taken, and there wasn’t then one can have no sense of proportion. When we finally got to see it in person it was a lot larger then we thought and I was a little worried that the sculpture I had in mind would be too small.
We measured the entire space using a handy little laser measuring device from BOSCH. I highly recommend getting one of these. Gone are the days when you have to use a measuring tape where someone has to hold the other end. Just place the base of the BOSCH device on the wall, press a button and the laser measures the distance between the two walls.
With these measurements fRED created a 3D model. The above is a rendering that helped up pre-visualise what we were getting into.
Conceptually I really wanted to work with a free standing structure with horizontal and vertical lines. I knew that visually, because our eyes see things in perspective, that it would still be chaotic looking. I also wanted to break away from the one point perspective and allow people to walk around the structure and look at it from various perspectives. That there are no large surfaces was part of my desire to move away from the ‘image’ projected on a surface akin to film and allow the viewer to create their own ‘image’ by observing the structure as it was transformed by light and sound.
I also was not interested in performing with the installation. I wanted to see if we could create an engaging and dynamic enough experience that was a video loop where nobody would realize it was a video loop. An ambient room that will allow people to stay there for a bit, go away, come back and never realize that there is a beginning, middle or end.
While we were working on the model I met up with ElectricKettle and I discussed some of the sounds I wanted him to create. I had some specific ideas, sounds that would created the impression of the structure disappearing and reappearing. I demonstrated these ideas by imitating what I had in my mind to him: ‘whoooooosh…. boooo’ and so on.
We were lucky to have the space three days prior to the date of the event. The first day we would build and set up the projectors, the second day work on the mapping and the animations and the third day, the day of the installation, we would put in the finishing touches.
By using exact measurements from the 3D modeler we were using, fRED was able to somewhat accurately recreate what we had visualized and in the end the sculpture appeared to fill the space more then we imagined, with a few minor alterations due to the throw of the projectors we had not being wide enough.
The MadMapper made it extremely easy to do what we wanted to do in a fraction of the time it usually takes to do it. During the night the shelves we created for the projectors ‘settled’ and while it was still a bit of work it was not nearly as much work if we had used any other tool I can think of.
Production wise I used a traditional compositing animation tool that I will not name here. The above is a frame I grabbed of how we created the file so that we could create segments of color and form that we would use as sources in MadMapper. It was a rather abstract way of working that was a nice exercise for the mind that thankfully created a sensation in the final output, that is, what was projected onto the sculpture. In a previous installation I used a whole series of loops and triggered them using a timeline in Ableton Live with two MacBook Pros, the network module slaved to the more powerful laptop of the two I had. The problem with this was that inevitably the audio would not sync up properly with the triggering of the loops. The audience did not see it, but I did. Since I did not want to work with loops I went for creating big video with audio so that nothing would go out of sync. Having a Mac Pro It also made me think of how I really need to think about some better tools for this kind of thing.
We used up to 150 quads for this project. I am not sure if anyone else in our internal test team has done this, and it definitely was not part of any particular goal. The main goals being to create a work made entirely by the members of the collaboration, to get as much of the piece ready given the time that we had and still create something that people could experience without noticing any particular beginning, middle or end, and finally document it properly.
This documentation process is very important to me. For me it has always been difficult to get it right. I took a lot of time lapse photos, but I also took a lot of video footage. In the end the time lapses were much more befitting the vision I had. I was not so much interested in trying to replicate the experience as I don’t think that is really possible, but more to create documentation that was an art piece in itself.
I think I could probably write a whole lot of ideas here about the project, but this has already gone on much too long.
Now with this project behind us we have learned several things. First, I have found a team of people whom I can share a common vision with, each of us know our roles and how to best fulfill them. We also all have an excitement and vision of what we want to do when we get together again for the next project. One experience will build on the next and I look forward to sharing it.
Okinawa69 (Tasso Okinawa) sits comfortably witin my non-existent top 10 VJ’s. His reputation preceded our meeting through videos from VMS, his long collaboration with the Cologne based Kompact label and a story that his V4 has a dent in it as a result of slapping the a/b buttons while wearing rings.
I finally met him during the 2009 edition of the Mapping Festival. His work, constant varations of geometrical shapes and still imagery, provided the Zoo with a smooth, light sensation. When observing him in action he is extremely engaged in what he is doing. His body moves to the music and when transitioning materials his movements are akin to a combination of machine operator and ballet dancer.
Mapping Festival meetings are always very brief. Between occasional skype chats and a collection of chances for face to face in Cologne and the UAF in Austria I was able to conduct an email based interview with him that charts his timeline and talks about what it is that he loves about the medium, what makes it work and, not to be too cheeky, how much he loves Modul8.
The images included in this interview are from the performances of Okinawa 69 and Bruno Tait during the Urban Artforms Festival in Austria during the DJ sets of Carl Craig and Sven Väth.
<< begin >>
m8us: What is your history with VJ’ing? What got you interested in the medium?
Tasso: I studied Art and Design in Cologne. During my studies I focused for quite a while on textile prints and flyer design. It was only a matter of time until that started to influence my other work.
As I was promoting partys in Cologne together with my partner-in-crime shumi, I became aware of the fact that we didn’t want to stop at promotion only. We wanted to be part of the party itself. So we started to do our own little evening in Cologne’s hallmackenreuther, every Tuesday evening. The owner of hallmackenreuther is an avid collector of design classics and had old wega tv’s in his bar. That’s where we started to show videos from VHS, cut together by us and presented together with Shumi’s music as a dj.
Urban Art Forms 2010 – videos by the PXLZ feat. Bruno Tait & Okinawa 69
Later the hallmackenreuther opened its basement with two beamers and a professional DJ-Set-Up. Also, friends of ours had just programmed a vj-software called “almost sync.” That’s how it all began: shumi playing records in the basement of hallmackenreuther and me, mixing clips with my laptop. We called our evening “micro.”
md8.us: What kind of materials were you using for imagery back then? Were you transferring what you had on VHS onto the computer or were you creating new material? How were you assembling it and what were your sources for inspiration?
Tasso: Back in the days I started with found footage and sampled movies like koyaanisqatsi (lol), but pretty soon I got bored with that approach. I wanted to visualize music and not just show random clips.
So I generated my first loops with the computer, consisting of simple stuff like squares and circles. That was imagery giving me enough freedom to still manipulate the clips in a live surrounding via software.
More than anything else, music is my main source of inspiration, and since the music back then was quite “minimal” and repetitive, at least in Cologne, it made perfect sense to work with simple, abstract forms.
But, alas! The projectors available were quite shitty in those days and you were forced to work with high contrast and monochrome images to squeeze some persuasiveness out of them. That’s how the “superimpose” effect to be found on the classical Panasonic mixer became my best friend.
md8.us: What was the public reaction to your work like back then? Was there an awareness of what you were doing?
Urban Art Forms 2010 – videos by the PXLZ feat. Bruno Tait & Okinawa 69
Tasso: At first only friends were aware of what we’re doing there. I can remember lots of occasions where people asked me:
“So what are you doing here tonight?”
“I’m mixing the videos”
“What videos?”
But with the growing availability of projectors there also was more need for content and people to play it. Everybody had some friends investing in the matter and so the network started to grow. VJs started more and more to play at festivals, commercial and cultural events reaching a much bigger audience. In the meantime promoters have been convinced that the VJ should be on the flyer as well… if those haven’t been also designed by the VJs themselves.
md8.us: Getting back to your own time line, where did yours and Shumi’s VJ work evolve from hallmackenreuther?
Tasso: At the soma festival we teamed up with dirk and kjell from the bruno tait video trio for the first time. We threw together our equipment and skills and started to play bigger shows at festivals besides preparing visuals for bands and labels.
bruno tait was also vj’ing for quite some time, also used a clean grafical style so we got to be best friends. Our parties and budgets got bigger and this gave us the opportunity to buy our own projectors and create individual set ups that allowe the audience to better see the visuals.
md8.us: You mention a shift towards a more of a clean graphical style. Can you expand on the advantages of this approach? How does a graphical approach differ from that of an ‘image’ based one, as in using solid shapes vs. photographs?
Tasso: It was again on one hand a availability of software and a matter of style at that time. software like Adobe´s Illustrator/ After Effects and Cinema 4D worked better and better together. Since we mostly played all night and didn´t want to play any imagery twice we needed a lot of content. When working with graphics it is much easier to combine different clips together.
Urban Art Forms 2010 – videos by the PXLZ feat. Bruno Tait & Okinawa 69
Our approach in vj´ing together with a dj is to mix from record to record. That´s because we were raised with vinyl and tracks on vinyl have a beginning and an end. They are produced to be played from beginning to the end and then be mixed into the next one. So that´s how we mixed. We followed the records and tried to introduce a new set of clips with every record. Of course we had our pop moments with sampled footage or photos. We even shared or remixed clips from other vjs. It depended very much on the moment, on the music, the crowd, the location and the setup. No night was the same!
md8.us: How did Modul8 contribute to this approach?
Tasso: Oh, m8 was a revolution! It was clean fast, and graphic. It was exactly what we needed. From PSD and AI we were used to work with layers. Duplicating them and having control of everything very fast was just what we were looking for.
Our set up was always to use a Edirol mixer and a couple of MacBooks. Everybody was preparing his content live and we would play ping pong together. So one would mix in a clip and then the next one would take over, and so on.
For this m8 was perfect. We could easily sync over LAN and still would have to respond to the clip the other one just played. It was always very important for us to make “the perfect” mix, just as the djs.
We didn´t use almost sync anymore cause we couldn´t control it with MIDI. other softwares like resolume or isadora we couldn´t identify with. m8 was made by vj´s for vj´s like us. Duddenly we felt like we were part of a culture.
md8.us: Do you have any ideas about the direction this medium is taking? Where do you want to go with it?
Tasso: If you mean in general, it´s more and more dividing into the preproduction scene like mapping and processing. The industry is putting a lot of money in it cause it´s a good way to advertise their products in public with an arty touch. It´s a new kind of billboard. Mapping just looks awesome and it will be one future of architecture.
In classic live visuals, vjs work closer with bands, acts, djs and labels to visualize their music on stage and for netpromo/DVDs etc.
For me visuals need music. I always believed that visuals should rather just look nice and react to the music than tell a story and catch too much attention of the crowd. My favorite dancer is the one with closed eyes. That is why my work is so abstract and just works with forms, shades and light. It´s about retina reception. Club culture was always about leaving reality behind, forgetting time, dancing and not wanting to leave the club.
So if you ask me where i want to go with it… I´d say more stage designs for labels/events and more tour visuals for musicians. Both should be accompanied by videos and documentation.
<< end >>
Artist: POPNONAME
Titel: Hello Gorgeous (KOMPAKT)
Video: Bruno Tait & Okinawa 69
Prod: Tasso Treis • Dir/Edit : Dirk Rauscher • Techn. Dir: Kjell Rijntjes • Raum: Jonathan Hähn
Contact: promo@kompakt.fm
popnoname.de • kompakt.fm • okinawa69.de • brunotait.de • dirkrauscher.de
This past week was Bread & Butter here in Berlin , the international fashion fair. And what is a fashion fair without after parties and visuals to decorate these events where new trends are concocted and consumed simultaneously? A series of photos by Kriszta Turna provide a glimpse of a setup by David Szauder for a Custo after party at CHB in Berlin. David (aka Pixel Noizz) works a lot with Quartz Composer and Flash and was able to integrate these elements together quickly in order to have control over the atmosphere in the entire room. Color plays an important part in mood and this series of photos demonstrate Davids understanding of what is necessary in order to acheive this. David says “I was able to bring together my material quickly, QC compositions, .swf files, still images. No MIDI controller, mouse or any other external device. Amazing how quick and simple it was to put everything together. On top of that the client was really happy with the results.”
I recently modified my keyboard. Look closely. I don’t need to look at the keys anymore when I type, but when I am using my keyboard to control modul8 I like to have an alternate way of changing layer sets and for this I use the 1 through 8 keys. Fine for the numbered keys that control group A. But what about group B? The solution? Grab the 1 through 8 keys from my older, backup laptop and swap them out.
Our recent move gave us access to more space and finally ready is the production space for t-shirt printing and box assembly.
Installation, created by Fred from the Le Zoo crew in the Kab club for last weekends 4th edition of the Drum & Bass + Hardtek party. It was a 4 output setup with a Mac Pro. Connected the MacBook Pro in FireWire transfer mode so I could use my own system. Most charming. The tech was pretty much the last minute and setups were scrambled for at the last minute yielded the following setup:
After creating compositions with all of the layer sets using the library of foreground material at my disposal it was just a matter of re-arranging layer sets over time for variety sake.
If anyone has their own Korg NanoKontrol that they want to share please let me know. Would be fun to see what other people are doing with the same controller and I would gladly test them out and then post them here.
Finally would like to give a big thanks to Visual Berlin and fh.Meppen as well as all who attended the workshop this past Saturday. It was a small but very friendly group of people. Not only did they have a lot of good questions that kept things rolling along, they also communicated with each other giving the whole thing a sort of communal affair. There have been a few requests to do another. Likely in August. So if you are interested in a workshop, live in Berlin or happen to be coming to Berlin this summer please be sure to communicate so we can all get together.
The year is brand new but already there are several modul8 workshops lined up. The first of them is in Berlin within a few days, hosted by the near and dear Visual Berlin at a share studio space that I recently started to occupy called fh.Meppen.
This is an excellent chance to learn a lot of the basic operations of the software, and as usual, learn some methods about mapping midi controls and organizing your projects. I will also cover some of the new features such as the Sound Analysis and a quick run through controlling lights with DMX.
The workshop will be in English. The workshop is free for members of Visual Berlin and 20 euros for non-members. The proceeds go to Visual Berlin and fh.meppen. No need to reserve. Just show up and we’ll find a seat for you.
The address: Schliemannstr. 37
Time & Date: Starts at 13h00, ends approximately at 19h00.
If you have any specific questions please do not hesitate to email me at support at garagecube dot com.
Look forward to meeting all who attend.