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Synthetics & The Midi Thief were invited back to the Volt festival to do visuals for Le Petit Orb, a smaller version of the legendary British techno group The Orb. Unfortunately we had to work almost up until the gig started due to a computer crash the day earlier so we missed some of the other acts we really wanted to see. Volt had once again a nice line up with everything from the more obscure and experimental electronic acts to high energy techno DJ sets.

We had decided to go 16:9 this time and it introduced some problems in combination with our technical setup. This is one of those situations where Toby Spark’s D-Fuser DVI mixer would have come in handy. But apparently you can do 16:9 through an Edirol V-4 mixer and even record from the mixer to DV-tape if you do some clever squishing.

The VJ set went very well and our graphics were more in sync than ever before. Maybe loosing a little bit in eccentricity but what the hell, it was tight! We had tried to get hold of Alex Paterson and Thomas Fehlmann through their management before the gig to be able to gain some knowledge about how they had planned their performance. We never managed to get hold of them that way but I bumped into them backstage a few minutes before the gig. What a dynamic duo, the calm Fehlmann contrasting the rowdy Paterson, something that was also very present on stage.

We thoroughly enjoyed the Le Petit Orb gig and Volt 2010 and we wouldn’t mind coming back next year.

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I’ve never worked with a real dancer before* and I’ve never done any concrete attempts with the WiiMote. So for my uncle’s 60th birthday party I decided to team up with my cousin Cajsa who is a dancer and see what we could do with the WiiMote. We live in different cities, quite far apart, so we couldn’t really rehearse together before the b-day. I used a screen capture program which I turned in to password protected vimeo clips to show her the concept. We didn’t have so much time to spend on the project so whatever we did it had to be fairly quick and easy.

We decided on the tune “Rockit” by Herbie Hancock after going through a selection that Cajsa made. The tune suited Cajsa’s popping style and it reminded me of my old b-boy days. I had already decided on using the VDMX VJ-software because of it’s native WiiMote support. I picked out a couple of Quartz Composer files made available by other artists that I could use together with the WiiMote:

1. WiiPaint by Blair Neal which was already prepared to be used with VDMX.
2. Mouse_Ribbon.qtz - the example file that comes with Quartz Composer. I modified it so I could assign X/Y values to the WiiMote in VDMX.
3. I did a Quartz Composer video feedback effect for VDMX by using a tutorial by Goto10.

We wanted to be able to do two things with the WiiMote:

1. Interpret the dance in animation.
2. Draw letters.

I figured out pretty quickly that you can’t really do these two things with the same routine. For drawing you need IR-LEDs to give the WiiMote some sense of orientation. The WiiMote has a built in IR camera that actually could track four different IR-LEDs (thanks to Markus Hamburger for that knowledge) and you could track all four by using the OSCulator software. In that way you could put LEDs on the dancer and keep the WiiMote steady in a steady position. But since these facts came to me the same day as the performance, I couldn’t try it. I stuck with a battery driven IR-Bar that I bought cheap on-line. It was a crappy little piece of hardware and I had to shake it to make it work. The WiiMote had some difficulties communicating through IR which made the drawing part pretty difficult. Since drawing means you have to be turned towards the screen it didn’t work well for interpreting the dance, so I used the WiiMote’s accelerometer for that.

For some extra style, I added the video feedback effect and a midi controller that I mapped to the feedback fx values and the colors of the ribbon and the WiiPaint brush. That was enough content and style for the 3 minute performance.

Cajsa had to extend her movements to give more action to the WiiMote’s accelerometer which she thought looked a bit wack after seeing the video. I hope we will have to try more things with dance and visuals further on. I really want to try out the methods that Markus sugested among other things.

* I’ve made some performances with amateur dancers and a Xbox dance matt before with very questionable results.

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This is a little video of Daniel Savio from the last Skwee gig we did visuals for. Mike (The Midi Thief) teamed up with Torbjörn Life who is back in the game. Fun to play around with some old techniques. We used two laptops, a DV camera and a V4 that did the luma key mixing.

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Mike a.k.a. The Midi Thief made a custom Modul8 module for the Heineken’s Green Room Sessions at Malmen, Stockholm. Jakob Grandin at Grandins Flying Circus hired the Vidots to set up a 3-screen video installation showing of video and photography from a number of different artists. The Vidiots involved Mike to write a custom module that switched images plus video and set off a strobe light every 8th second.

Read some more about the project at the Swedish VJ Union.

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A few clips from the visuals to Rigas Den Andre’s live performance at Lilla Ukraina in Årsta, Sweden. The music is of the genre Skwee which has Scandinavian roots.

For this performance I was trying a different approach. I have just started using VDMX again after 6 years. It has so many possibilities but it’s pretty frustrating getting in to again because of it’s complexity. I had been playing around with the beta for a week or so and bought the software the day before the gig. My goal was to learn how to incorporate and control Quartz Composer objects in VDMX and that about what I had time to do. I was only using VDMX for Riga’s gig and then switch back to Modul8 for the rest of the night, since that’s what I’m comfortable with.

The old school video glitch effect was done with Vade’s v002 Glitch Quartz Composer plugin and hand tweaked with a midi controller in VDMX. The footage is from Synthetics and from Riga’s latest home made music video.

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Clips from The MIDI Thief’s performance at the Swedish VJ Union’s VJ jam, OSC09 electronica festival / Färgfabriken, Stockholm on august 15th 2009. DJs: Head Office.

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Mike and Anders busting the graphics at the 2008 Swedish Union VJ Jam during the Pixelvärk festival. Date: October 17th, 2008.