I designed and programmed visuals (projections) for the OKGo performance and Fendi installation at Design Miami 2009. OKGo were playing modified Les Paul guitars mounted with laser beams in the headstock, designed by Fendi in collaboration with Moritz Waldemeyer. Using a PC equipped with a high-speed firewire camera, I developed custom software to track the laser beams and generate visuals around the spots they hit the wall. These visuals were also audio-reactive, responding to the live audio feed coming from the sounddesk.
More images & video coverage coming soon.
P.S. For additional laser tracking goodness, checkout the Graffiti Research Lab's Laser Tag.
"Reincarnation" is an off-shoot from a visual performance for the Rambert Dance Company's "Iatrogenesis" at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, South Bank, London UK - visuals for the latter directed by my good friends at flat-e.
The project began when I started working with footage of the Rambert dancers. Inspired by the footage, I wrote custom software to track the motion and generate the visuals you see in the video below... and "Reincarnation" was born.
For the Rambert's "Iatrogenesis" piece, I created similar visuals, abstract visual layers containing subtle hints of human forms and motion, which would tie in with the movement of the dancers on stage. These were used by flat-e and composited with various other layers and projected on a see-through gauze in front of the stage.
The video (and music) you see below is not representative of the visuals (and music) of the Rambert's and flat-e's "Iatrogenesis". This is just a standalone piece born from working with the Rambert choreography.
When the clip starts, you probably won't recognize a human shape at first, but your eyes and mind will be searching, seeking mental connections between abstract shapes and recognizable patterns, like looking for shapes in clouds. You'll be questioning what you see, is that it? is it sitting? is it crouching? is it kneeling? Then all of a sudden, it'll be crystal clear. Then you'll try and keep it in focus, following it as it moves around, tracking each limb, using the motion to construct an image of the parts you can't see. It'll fade in and out of clarity. At times you'll be clinging onto just the tip of it's hand swinging round, trying to identify any other recognizable parts. You might see another arm or leg and grab onto it, fighting not to lose it. Then it'll be crystal clear again, and then all of a sudden vanish, literally in a puff of smoke, and your eyes will start searching again.
I'm delighted to announce that my "Gold" installation has been selected to be shown at the Tent London exhibition as part of the London Design Festival. 24-27th September 2009, at the Truman Brewery, London, UK. Stay tuned for more information.
The video below is an early demo of the installation.
“Gold” is an interactive installation which explores our obsession with super-stardom, and the extravagance that accompanies it. Through a ‘magic mirror’, revel in a world of excess where you are the super-star. Shower in glittery gold, experience almost omnipotent powers as you materialize, morph and dematerialize into pure sparkling gold dust. Immortalize yourself as a shimmering golden statue, before you collapse and fade away.
The installation uses custom software written with openFrameworks and the OpenCV computer vision library. The software analyzes the video feed from infra-red cameras in real-time and generates 1080p HD output using OpenGL.
My Secret Heart is a music and film installation & performance commissioned by Streetwise Opera with music composed by Mira Calix and sound design by David Sheppard. Working with video artists Flat-e, we created a film to accompany the 48 minute performance, as well as versions for an installation and short film.
Streetwise Opera
Streetwise Opera are a charity who use music as a tool to help people who have experienced homelessness move forward in their lives. They run a weekly music programme, resident in 10 homeless centres around the country - and also stage an annual production which gives their performers the chance to star in quality shows where there are high-expectations, no compromise and no patronising. The voices you hear in the music, and people you see in the film, are from Streetwise workshops around the UK. 100+ Streetwise performers also sang at the My Secret Heart premiere at the Royal Festival Hall in December 2008. My Secret Heart is about their story.
The film
The film has an abstract narrative derived from individual conversations with each of the Streetwise performers. It is a direct emotional response to their stories combined with the haunting beauty of Mira Calix's composition. Instead of focusing on a specific plot, the film embarks on a complex journey through various states of emotion, starting from pre-birth through birth, curiosity, exploration, excitement, playfulness; through to fear, anxiety and isolation. While it maintains a relatively dark and eerie mood overall, intertwined with the feelings of desperation are strong elements of hope.
The visuals were designed and created primarily with custom software written in C++/openFrameworks, with some Quartz Composer elements, rendered AfterEffects sequences and live action footage. The custom C++ app is audio-reactive and user-interactive, allowing the visuals to be 'performed' live with full control over the behaviour of the virtual inhabitants of the cylindrical aquarium-like rig.
Over the course of a few months, and after many conversations with Mira Calix and listening to the soundtrack over and over and over again, we decided roughly what the visuals should do and what kind of behaviours we wanted the visuals to perform at specific points in the song. After a lengthy coding period, I had an application that when you ran, did... nothing, but it had the potential to do everything I wanted. The application was a live performance tool with full control over its environment as well as audio playback and control, and an input recording / playback system.
Once the application was complete, I sat down with Robin from flat-e, and pressed 'play' on the app - this started the music playback and the physics recorder. While the music was playing we could control the inhabitants of the virtual world with many sliders, knobs, touchpads, mouse etc. As the music was playing we would respond in realtime by sending messages to make them move gracefully, erratically, flocking together, swimming apart, getting excited, slowing down, speeding up, telling them to die, slowly start twitching, come alive, swim to the surface, sink to the bottom etc - our actions being recorded gave us the ability to later go back and scrub to certain positions in the song and overdub and mix new behaviours we might have missed in the first round. In the end we found that actually we had to do little to no editing. The best overall performance was the one we recorded in a single 50 minute take.
The sensation of performing and recording the visuals was that of actually directing a film with thousands of virtual actors, commanding an army, digital puppetry - an approach I'm sure I will be revisiting in the very near future.
Early tests of visuals on the 'aquarium' (rig built by Gaianova):
"Roots" is an interactive musical/visual installation for the Brick Table tangible and multi-touch interface, where multiple people can collaborate in making generative music in a dynamic & visually responsive environment. It is a collaborative effort between myself and the Brick Table creators Jordan Hochenbaum & Owen Vallis. It will premiere at the Minitek Music + Innovation Festival September 12-14, 2008 in New York.
The essence of the interaction, is that you control parameters of a chaotic environment - which affect the behaviour of its inhabitants - which create and control music.
To breakdown very briefly without going into much detail:
There are vinelike structures branching and wandering around on the table. They live and move in an environment governed by chaos.
Audio is triggered and controlled entirely by how and where the branches move.
You - the user - control various parameters of the chaotic environment. Parameters which range from introducing varying amounts of order, to simply changing certain properties to let the chaos evolve in different directions.
There are varying levels of interaction, ranging from traditional one-to-one correlations - 'this movement I make creates that sound', but also to more complex relationships along the lines of 'this movement I make affects the environment in this way which sends the music into that direction where it evolves with a life of its own'. The visuals are purely generative, as is the audio, and as user you can play with the parameters of that system and watch and listen to the results...
Demo of drawing with roots:
Demo of using fiducials to create magnetic force fields:
This is a demo of creating and visualizing magnetic (kind of) fields in Processing and controlling with a tangible multitouch table and Quartz Composer. It gets more interesting after the 1 minute mark :P
"Pi" is an interactive audio/visual installation commissioned by Trash City of the Glastonbury Festival to be shown at the festival in June 2008.
Working with arts and technology collective Seeper, our concept was to take a 50ft tent, and convert it into a giant audio/visual instrument - all of the music, audio and visuals inside the tent are generated and controlled purely by the movements of the occupants.
The space was divided into 6 zones. Two of the zones were purely visual, this was the waiting area. Here people could dance, chill, run about and do what they pleased. Two cameras tracked their movement and applied it to the fluid/particles visuals - so people could 'throw' plasma balls at each other, or send colorful waves propagating around the space. The other 4 zones had the same visual interactions, but in addition were also connected to an audio system. Each of these four zones was allocated an instrument type (drums/beats/percussion, pads, bass, strings etc.), and movement within these zones would also trigger notes or beats - depending on precisely where in the zone the movement was triggered. A lot of effort went into designing the sounds and notes triggered to make sure the end result would almost always sound pleasant and not be complete cacophony.
The first psychedelic fluid/particles interaction prototype developed in processing.org:
Camera -> osc/midi interaction tests (developed in Quartz Composer):
The two concepts strung together and written in C++ with openFrameworks:
This is a little teaser for an audio visual interactive installation I'm working on for Glastonbury 2008. It'll be projected around the entire (almost) 65ft interior of a 50ft round tent with multiple channels of audio. Everyone inside will be contributing to the audio/visual experience. Located behind the Laundrettas' crashed plane / laundrette in Trash City.
All visuals and music is entirely camera driven (by my waving arms and hands) and real-time. Originally started this app in Processing, but realized I needed as much power as possible so switched to C++ / openFrameworks. Not using the GPU as much as I'd liked due to time restraints, v2 will be fully GPU hopefully ;)
Realtime interactive psychedelic fluid simulation with processing for an upcoming installation. Watch the video below to see it in action, or click here for the interactive version (you will need Java). P.S. it takes a while to load so please be patient!
This is a little test using GLSL in Quartz Composer 3.0, and controlling via VDMX. All happening in realtime and completely audio-reactive with no post production or timeline animations etc. The potential is humongous and very exciting!!
Soundtrack "Caliper Remote" by Autechre (from LP5 - 1998)
Who needs autechre when you have a bunch of mad girls!
P.S. I have hours of footage of this if anyone is interested :P
Another example of an AS3 3D Sprite based particle system. This one is using my 3D sprite engine but will port this to papervision asap. See it here.
The source code is by no means generic enough to be considered an engine or library, but is work in progress. I will extend the Node3D, SpringyNode3D classes to use Papervision3D and the Billboards for the rendering, and will definitely carry on working on the particle systems. I've also been converting a lot of noise functions to AS3 and will post them soon... its all getting quite exciting in the flash world! :P
Onset assistant director and visual effects supervisor, also responsible for post production on 60second commercial for clothing brand Riva. 3-day shoot in studio (mainly greenscreen shoot) in south France. Post production work involved keying, tracking, virtual set building, stabilizing, compositing, particles, cloth simulations and motion graphics.
This is my motion graphics reel as of May 2007 using traditional motion graphics / animation apps such as AfterEffects, Combustion, Motion, 3DSMax, Cinema4D.
Please contact me or browse the site for information regarding more recent work including generative and interactive pieces.
(e.g. see work)
A short musical animation inspired by and dedicated to Soledad Miranda's (RIP) performance in the movie Vampyros Lesbos. Modeled and animated in 3DSMax, edited with Premiere. Footage shot with DVCam. Motion graphics and effects done with AfterEffects. Particles, compositing and post-production in Combustion. Audio track 'The Message' by Manfred Hubler and Siegfried Schwab from the soundtrack of Vampyros Lesbos.
A short film looking through the eyes of someone looking to get home in the early hours of the morning after a long night. Audio track 'Frost Investigations' by Chris Clarke from warp records.
