Commencing in about 12 hours, Visionsonic 2009 showcases Audiovisual artists from around the world. The Thursday show is “for Young Audiences”, but I’ll definitely be watching The Odyssey of Rick the Cube.

L’Odyssée de Rick le cube (extraits du spectacle) from Jesse Lucas on Vimeo.

The festival program has 20 artists performing over Friday and Saturday, which you can view on the Visionsonic TV page, or load the WMV stream in your media player of choice (VLC works beautifully).

There are plenty of reasons to go to live performances, to be in the same physical location as the artists, and to experience them without any technology or production getting in the way. Of course, if the performance is happening on the other side of the planet, then streaming may be the only feasible way to get there. CDM has dabbled in internationally-streamed performance before with NetLag, which attempted to put together a “festival” featuring artists performing from various locations. This was great fun, but beset with various problems, as technical and especially bandwidth limitations are keeping us from the “everything streaming live in HD” world the mainstream media seems to think we inhabit. These limitations are falling away quickly though, so it just remains for us to figure out the most compelling ways to capture live performance for streaming.

For watching the stream? Well I’ve got a big stereo, a projector, a copy of VLC, and a weekend’s entertainment all planned out for me.

Following on from our previous Game On Set. Sam will be kitted out with Serato’s Video-SL (review on CDMo), and I’ll be bringing a brace of live camera feeds with the Vixid VJX16-4 video mixer (minisite | on CDMo).

Last time it went down something like this:

Sampology at Game On – AV Turntablist Set (Part 1) and (Part 2) from Herovision on Vimeo.

Video-SL is fantastic fun, and as a visualist it’s somewhat humbling to discover what a turntable worrier can do when their spinning plastic discs suddenly have power over vision as well as sound. Tune in tomorrow to see.

To sweeten the deal, we’ll be preceeded on stage by Yahtzee (of Zero Punctuation) and Matt and Yug (of Australian Gamer), who will have a screening of their show Game Damage, and then talk about games rather a lot.

Using web production studio Mogulus, the stream will be viewable on the CDMedia channel, and there’s a countdown and embedded player at Herovision.

Tomorrow, Thursday October 9th from 8PM-1AM (Australian Eastern Standard Time), as part of the Melbourne Digital Fringe, Melbourne’s fantastic Horse Bazaar projection bar will play virtual host to a globe-spanning lineup of artists in the inaugural Net-Lag: Vapour Trails.

Along with artists from Melbourne, Perth and the LightRhythmVisuals crew in Tokyo, Peter will be playing a breakfast AV set at 9AM New York time (1AM AEST), and I’ll be bringing collaborators Segue into the studio along with a dozen video cameras joined together with the groundbreaking Vixid VJX16-4 video mixer.

The event will be broadcast using the Mogulus live streaming production platform (at mogulus.com/netlag/), which allows streams from multiple sources to be combined with overlays, live chat, twitter streams etc. It’s a very capable system, and it will be interesting to see how it stands up to the rigors of a multi-continent audiovisualist show. For for set times and lineup details, check out the Net-Lag site.

After spending much of last year traveling thousands of kilometers around Australia in a rock band, I’ve been idealizing web streaming as an alternative to traditional touring. The response to the recent Wesen live streaming session was fantastic, and if this goes well we’ll definitely be looking at putting together future CDM-centric events. If you’d be interested in taking part in future streams hit the comments, and join the fun tomorrow night.

If you’re interested in audiovisual performance as well as audio, here’s an app to keep an eye on. Resolume “Avenue” 3, announced today, is a ground-up rebuild of a popular VJ app. Now, things like GPU-native video may not mean much to the musical readers of this site. But how about features like this?

• Beat-synced audio triggering alongside video – using the soundtrack inside video clips, or using separate audio files
• VST audio effects, synchronized to visual effects and controls
• MIDI and OpenSoundControl (OSC) support
• Cross-fading of audio and video
• Beat-synced loops

We’ve been playing with an early betas at the live visualist-oriented Create Digital Motion and will have detailed hands-on reports soon. In the meantime, here’s a detailed look at what’s in Resolume Avenue 3:

Resolume “Avenue” 3 Announced: The Audiovisual App to Beat? [Create Digital Motion]

You can see the results above with Missy Elliot, but naturally this could also be used with very different source material as a glitchy audiovisual experimental ambient set, or as a way of triggering videos and audio backing tracks alongside a band.

It’s not without limitations. You can’t yet use VST instruments, so you couldn’t drop a synth or sampler into your visual set and play that – at least not in the first release, due in September.

But it’s clear an audiovisual convergence is happening. You can add this to the recent debut of GrandVJ, a live visual app with a virtual MIDI keyboard in the display and “Synth Mode” for triggering, or, at the opposite end of the spectrum, the addition of VST effects support in the visual patching environment vvvv. And we’ve likewise seen interesting ways of combining Ableton Live and other music apps with live visuals, as in Momo’s tutorial for A/V cutups with Lucifer.

vvvv, the free-for-non-commercial-use patching environment on Windows, already has a cult following among visualists. Now, it’s looking more interesting for music, too, with the 4.0 beta 17 release.

• VST plug-in support for adding audio/music instruments and effects
• Multichannel waveplayer
• eCue Lighting Control Support

In case you haven’t worked this out yet, what this means is that you can now add powerful visual interaction with a VST plug-in. That could be a huge boon to audiovisual shows. Max and Pd (among others) have had this ability for some time, so it’s not revolutionary as an idea – but it is nice to get this feature in this powerful, eye-candylicious app. (Thanks to Bjorn from vvvv for the heads-up.)

I may have to try out Kore, since Kore runs easily as a VST and hosts other instruments / effects in a way that can work live. FL Studio could be interesting, too, for the same reason – and, like vvvv, has a solid following as a Windows exclusive.

Details:

http://vvvv.org/tiki-view_blog_post.php?blogId=3&postId=256
http://vvvv.org/tiki-index.php?page=Change+log
http://vvvv.org/tiki-index.php?page=VST
http://www.ecue.de/products/interfaces/butler.html

vvvv Tag @ createdigitalmotion.com

vvvv also recently added the ability to develop your own objects (“nodes” in vvvv speak). Development looks unusually easy, with baked-in C# support, so there’s good stuff happening in vvvv-land in general.

Labels and artists are only now catching on to the idea of letting fans remix their music, and are even slower to give those fans access to individual stems. But where musicians have embraced this idea, they’ve gotten surprisingly big outpourings of support — thank a culture that’s gotten savvy with digital music tools and consumes more music than ever.

While that change continues to spread slowly, though, audiovisual remixing could already have a jump start.

Radiohead: Big news for fans of data visualization, the coding tool Processing, and Creative Commons: Radiohead have "shot" their latest video using only 3D scanning devices in place of cameras, and they’ve made source code and the data (in friendly CSV files) free. The whole thing is released under a non-commercial / ShareAlike CC license, which is well-suited to remixes in general.  So, to anyone who was disappointed that Radiohead didn’t use a Creative Commons license for their remix contest, now you’ve gotten something you didn’t even ask for — three-dimensional, animated data of Tom Yorke’s face. And because this is essentially raw data, it’s unusually open to interpretation.

Visual stems? By total coincidence, Create Digital Motion’s Jaymis wonders aloud if the entire A/V scene couldn’t be given a jump start by two obvious (but strangely elusive) decisions: 1. release video "stems" for music videos to give people free access to them, and 2. go get a real visualist. Some artists have done #1, of course, but there wasn’t a specific name given to the result, and they’ve more often than not released full videos — so here you go.

Both stories are covered today on Create Digital Motion:

Radiohead Makes House of Cards Video with 3D Plotting, Processing; Gives You the Data

To The Next Level of AV Remix Culture: It’s Time to Release Music Video “Stems”

But I think it’s well worth asking readers here on CDMusic, too. Music sampling and even remixing may be old news — even if copyright protection remains the norm. But could opening up visual remixes and free visual interpretation re-energize how people think about music?

Of course, this isn’t just for the sake of doing it. Jaymis launched his discussion partly because he wanted something more expressive at a performance, and Radiohead’s CC decision allows them to take an experience that would be pretty limited (a few minutes of cool video) and make it far less so (live data and code remixed by especially-savvy fans). Likewise, the CC license is essential in the latter case; there’s far less incentive to fans to code their own visual software if they can’t share ownership of the result, or — just as importantly — share the resulting code with each other. (The tool the band’s video used, too, wouldn’t even exist without the open source community that created it.)

So, what’s next — particularly if you’re not as famous as Radiohead?

CDM has ongoing coverage from the Mutek festival; see more dispatches at events.noisepages.com. Liz talks to A/V duo Rechenzentrum for CDM — and there’s a bit of a revelation at the end of the interview. -Ed.

Rechenzentrum, which means “data processing center” in German, is a Berlin-based duo who create live audio-visual performances by combining austere film visuals with their own brand of minimal techno, fusing elements of jazz, dub, and early industrial. Marc Wieser handles the music half while Lillevan navigates the visual landscape. Their 2003 DVD release Director’s Cut, originally out on Mille Plateaux, went on to win the Ars Electronica prize. Marc and Lillevan sat down with us after their sound check for A/Visions 2 at Mutek 2008.

Liz: What goes on in a live Rechenzentrum performance?

Lillevan: I do the video; Marc does the music. The video is live in the sense that I determine which image gets shown at which second, but obviously I’m not creating the image in real time because I’m not really interested in that. Real-time-created video usually looks pretty “blocky,” and I don’t really like it that much. It’s a mixture of pre-recorded video coming off a hard disk and live stuff reacting off of Marc’s music. But we’re not connected by any kind of MIDI connections or sound analysis. I just listen to his music and create stuff based on that. It’s a connection between our persons and not between our computers.

Marc Weiser: This way it’s improvised, for sure.

L: [The performance project is] called Silence like the last DVD, so it’s a live re-working of [the A/V album] introducing new elements that Marc has created in the last month. It’s based on the last DVD but it’s an updated, newer version.

M: It’s not 100% the same every time.

In the press release for Silence you said you consider video as an instrument. What do you mean by that?

L: We wanted to make sure people didn’t misunderstand our project — as in one guy’s doing music and there’s visuals accompanying music. We wanted to say it’s equally important; [it's] media being presented to the public. It’s their responsibility to put these two media together in any way they see fit or to ignore one and focus on the other. And so we said that sound can also be a color, music can be a color, music can be a “filmic” narrative element in the same way as film can be an instrument. That’s where that quote came from.

How did you two come together to work with video and music?

M: Totally by accident—we met in a squatted house around 11 years ago in Berlin—we had a club there and were both working there. After that we decided to work together. It wasn’t planned.

L: We were also part of an eleven-piece live drum and bass band which was a lot of fun. But we also realized how tiring it could be with eleven people who have very different focuses in life, willing to dedicate various amounts of time to this. We were willing to take more risks, willing to put stuff in Marc’s car, drive off somewhere, play somewhere, and see what happens — and that’s easier to do when you’re two people than eleven. Then we started actually getting gigs in Berlin for techno parties, where the promoter would have some pretentions to be artistically inclined and wanted to have a chill-out room with some more interesting stuff than just “four [on] the floor,” So they asked us to do it because our influences in those days were incredibly varied. We would play for hours and hours just mixing as much material as possible. Like Lee Perry said, the mixing desk is the instrument—for me it was video, lots of TVs plugged in and stuff. And we played everything—the whole history of experimental media mixed to layers over more layers. And over the years we whittled that down from 11-hour shows to a one hour performance. There was never a concept where we sat down and thought, “What shall we do? Let’s try this.” It kind of evolved over the years.

Along the lines of evolution, it seems that in electronic music there’s been an increasing focus on integrating music with visuals–although within the history of art it’s had a long history in its own right. Why do you think this relationship of music to to video has become so important of late?

L: The history is very long. Hundreds of years ago Leonardo da Vinci tried to make pianos that also create light with candles and colored paper, so this idea of using various media is nothing new. Warhol was doing it in the 60s, by projecting his own film Chelsea Girls on the Velvet Underground as they played. I always found it interesting with him that when he noticed the audience was starting to like it, he would get irritated and immediately change the films. It wasn’t supposed to make people feel lounge-y and happy; it was supposed to be irritating. We never had a concept when we started; it was just that Marc was a musician and I’m a filmmaker, so we said let’s see if these two things work.

Over the years I’ve seen some things where I was surprised that some musicians would allow video [projection] that they hadn’t seen before by artists they’d never met before. At some video festivals I’ve seen stuff where I really felt that the videos destroyed the music, and I’ve felt sorry for the musicians when that happens.

Rechenzentrum at Mutek 2008 from Create Digital Media on Vimeo.

M: We were never interested in synchronization; maybe it’s a powerful thing that we never thought about things like that. You have to be “this is your part,” “this is [my] part,” be as good as you can, bring it onstage. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes not.

L: It’s interesting for us to watch how people have tried to plan their careers within a certain genre—they go to festivals and see what’s happening now and try to order their set to that. Without trying to sound too punk-ish or rebellious, we were never like that, at the risk of getting less shows at times or more shows other times. You’d see people would be like, “Oh, you’re not really into tech and you’re not programming all your own software,” and we just never did that. I mean now I’ve gotten into programming Jitter and Max/MSP in the last years, and even that bores me and I get someone else to do it for me—a student of computer arts in Serbia, because I just have no interest in programming whatsoever.

I think a lot of what we did was we actually, like, irritated people, as well — it’s in our nature to not always give people what they want because it can be very clinical and very boring. We were invited a lot to play, for example, in museums, museum openings and such. It was very interesting for me to look “OK, why is a museum asking us to do this?” and it was quite obvious that the museum needs street credibility, [needs] youth culture … to get people to actually visit the museums and buy tickets so they get more money. So we thought, in this case let’s not be really arty. Let’s give them really asocial hard techno. And then at other times we’d be invited to play in really techno places and we’d do remixes of Miles Davis, which earned us lots of Coca-Cola cans being thrown at us. And it wasn’t about trying to be bad boys. It was just trying not to be too precious about your career and “oh, don’t make a mistake here, there’s an important curator in the audience, let’s not make a mistake tonight.” You can do that, and maybe you’ll have a successful career doing that, but I find it very boring.

I see that the Silence DVD is out on Weiser music; why did you start your own label now?
M: We were unlucky with all our labels, more or less. The first they didn’t understand what we were doing — the first CD only had music, the second we had only one visual track, the third on Mille Plateaux… it takes so much time from creating the music and the visuals until the release — years. I decided [to do] it by myself, because all the labels don’t exist any more. Kitty Yo, Mille Plateaux doesn’t exist any more. All the other labels in Berlin where we have contacts –- we haven’t talked to them but it’s obvious that they have their own problems, in a way, because they really don’t know what to release. It’s too risky for them. We are not a rock band, it’s not folk, it’s not techno, it’s not club, it’s not art enough, so we ended up sitting beside jazz.

Do you want to tell us about any new projects you’re working on?

L: We’ve got lots of exciting projects coming up, but the sad [news] is that this is one of our last shows as Rechenzentrum—we’re splitting up!

Rechenzentrum at Mutek 2008 from Create Digital Media on Vimeo.

The lucky attendees at Mutek’s A/Visions 2 on Thursday experienced sets by Freida Abtan
Németh + Hess, Nokami + Sans Soleil as well as Rechenzentrum’s.

Photos by Andrew Lochhead

 The Prevolt has put up some photos of his Ableton Live controller, dubbed Ambassador. I love that it shares a moniker with the AMC Rambler automobile, though I suspect that wasn’t intentional (pictured at right, photo: Ty Sonneil).

Prevolt describes the gear, which features analog-y, arcade-style hardware controls and a custom case:

This is what I’m using to control Ableton now. All arcade hardware, aluminum top panel by FPE, and a nice wood case courtesy of my man Michael Yates. It uses all key commands through a custom driver to handle playback, effects, editing, warping, UI, mouse clicks, scroll messages, and more, with a lot of tweaks (some strobe, some send double messages, etc):

Finished Ambassador Pics (blog for the Aux Armes VJ/DJ collective)

I got to look over Prevolt’s shoulder while he used the Ambassador in an epic music set in Austin at our SxSW party. It’s really remarkable: those controls may look like overkill, but he’s managed to map just about everything th Live software does to hardware control. To anyone who complains Ableton hasn’t yet done their hardware, this illustrates why that might not even be a good idea — Live users seem to come up with endless control schemes, all different.

Not to mention, with this controller you could get a little Street Fighter in between sets on nice, arcade buttons.

And yes, you even get a little trackball.

After the jump, the whole AV collective in action at SxSW’s closing:

Aux Armes at SXSW 2008 from Aux Armes on Vimeo.

Edirol V-8 Mixer: 8 Ins, 3 Outs, Computer Ins Mean V-4, The Next Generation

With this arriving this month and the boutique Vixid mixer to play with, it could be a great year for audiovisualists.