Video equipment is getting smaller and performance software is getting easier to handle. Every once in a while I like to take a step back, drop my fancy modern equipment and complicate things again.

About two months ago I ordered Gies Gieskes‘ Hard Soft Synth (left) from Bleeplabs and it was instant love. This machine makes noise audio and glitchy video patterns and it can sync the rhythm of an audio input. I brought it as a little extra surprise when I was teaching at the Audiovisual Program at the University of Dalarna several of the students got really intrigued. We had it hooked up to Ableton Live and a Peruvian noise synth.

But I wanted more, so I put some other Gieskes gear on my christmas wish list. You would think my wife would be fed up with my geeky projects? No, she got me not one but two little fellas. These are not pre fabricated products that you order from a big web shop. The machines are built on order after emailing Gies Gieskes from his home page and paying to his bank so it takes some effort (especially from a non geeky wife). But with the help of the very friendly video guru it got here in time. You can get the synths as kits too if you like soldering them together yourself but these are a bit too complex for me.

So the second addition to the family is the GVM1 (center) which essentially is a glitchy video mixer which has two composite video and one audio input and one video output. It has really nice lo-fi wipes which can lock to the rhythm of the audio input, and other various types of visual effects. The output is black and white and the image always scrolls since it can’t lock the signal but that’s the beauty of it.

The third baby is the GVS1a (right) which is a 1.5 bit video sampler. Yes, 1.5 bit! I don’t know how it’s possible but if Gies says it is then that’s how it is. It has video and audio input and a video output. It can loop 20 frames of sampled video – to the rhythm of the audio input I guess, but I haven’t gotten that far yet.

I promise to show some video soon but to be honest, it’s not that easy to record this stuff so it might have to film the wall or my monitor. These machines do not send out stable time base corrected video signals so some equipment choke. I’ve spent a lot of time these last few days figuring out the best route to get a stable video signal. Some of the equipment liked going through my V4 mixer but the Hard Soft Synth wanted to be connected straight to the projector with a composite cable but also worked on my LCD monitor when going through a video scaler.

I killed a scan converter in the process, it literary went up in smoke and gave out a funky smell. I was furious at the manufacturer at first but then I realized that I was using the wrong power plug. I’ve been making a good habit of marking all my power plugs with what gear it belongs to but I own a few products by the same brand which confused me this time.

One thing people ask about very often is how to make things move to the beat in Modul8. So I thought it would be a nice Christmas gift to make a tutorial that gives the answer to that question.

I’ve been a bit busy lately and forgot to post the tutorial I did on how to set up TouchOSC to work with Modul8 over Core MIDI. All the info you’ll need is in the video and on the Vimeo page.

I was in Berlin about a week ago for the Create Art & Technology talks and workshops. That happened to coincide with the Shiffihack at the Readmill office so I decided to spend some time there and hang out with my buddies Henrik Berggren and David Kjelkerud. A lot of interesting people showed up for the hack weekend: Eric Wahlfors and Alexander Ljung from Soundcloud, the Amen guys, Tor Rauden Källstigen from Loopcam, a whole crew from Oktavilla and a bunch of other nice people. Spirits were high and the beers and the Club-Mate was flowing.

I decided to contribute with a little hack as well. To honor my hosts I decided to do a project based on the Readmill API. BookClub is a Quartz Composer file for the VJ software VDMX that displays book covers from Readmill users. You have to enter your Readmill AppID and a User Name or User ID to get started. Attach a data source to the trigger in order to walk through the covers.

In my first attempt I was using a third party plugin in Quartz Composer to pull in JSON data but that ended up crashing VDMX so I had to switch to XML which worked fine.

In the video I’ve added some effects to the covers, all done in VDMX. First it’s a smear and then I’ve used a gausian blur and Bangnoise’s Video Delay with some rotation and size changes. It gets a bit abstract but in the end, that was the only way to keep it fun.

Thanks for a great weekend and thanks to Alex Ljung for the name idea.

Click this link to download the Quartz Composer file for VDMX.
Click here to get your Readmill AppID.

I made my first two time-lapse videos during my summer vacation. Maybe I should have looked up some how-to pages before I got started to avoid some basic errors. The first movie is from the Thai island Koh Tao. We were staying at a resort in Shark’s Bay with a beautiful panorama from our balcony.

The second attempt from bangkok was kind of a failure. I had set up the camera to shoot through the window of our hotel room in Bangkok. I set the timer to start shooting at dawn but by that time it had started raining and all my camera settings were obsolete. It turned out kind of surrealistic.

iTunes2Syphon is a iTunes visualizer made in Quartz Composer that sends mp3 track info as an image to a Syphon server so that it could be picked up and displayed in another application that supports Syphon. This tutorial shows how to install it and make it appear in Modul8 and in VDMX. It also gives you a brief look at the Quartz Composer composition and gives you an idea how you could modify the visualizer to your own personal taste. Download the iTunes2Syphon Quartz Composer source file here: iTunes2Syphon.qtz

If you are interested in learning how to enable Syphon input in Modul8, read this tutorial first.

[Edit:] This visualizer won’t work in iTunes on Lion if you are running iTunes in 64-bit mode. While waiting for the Visualizer bundle for Quartz Composer to get upgraded, the only trick is to swich iTunes to 32-bit mode. This is done by highlighting the iTunes app in the Finder and select Archive/Show info (or press cmd+i) and check “Open in 32-bit mode”. Thanks to Destoke for pointing this out. I won’t upgrade to Lion myself anytime soon.

While waiting for Modul8 to get real Syphon input you can use this method to achieve it.
The files you need to make this work could be found on these sites:
QC Rehab plugin at Kineme.net
Syphon plugins

Me and Synthetics performing visuals for Nomaton. Thanks to Anders Carleö for the camera work.

I had a good time at Volt again. There were more people this year despite the sunny weather. The music acts held very high standard. Ben and I were teamed up with Nomaton which happened to be a really good combo. Our grainy old school graphics went great with Nomaton’s dark gritty sound.

To amuse myself I created a little analog glitch composition in Quartz Composer and fed it in to Modul8 via Syphon (and the QC Rehab trick). A little clumsy way to go about it but whatever works. We’re in the process of editing a little video that we will post on Vimeo in a few days (or weeks… or months… you never know).