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Channels

Teaming up with Kiwi media artist Oliver Ellmers, we’ve started up a new experiential design company Blunk.  Our goal with Blunk is to use emerging technologies to create previously impossible experiences and one of our first pieces is a technical demonstration of the new Spout video sharing framework for windows.  Channels is a made-for-vimeo interactive installation built around a lovely old TV I found on the side of the road.  Six “channels” are created, each having a video output produced in a different realtime graphics framework as well as a colour palette.  The user is able to select different channels using a USB remote control which will then switch the TV to a new source as well as control the projections rotating around the TV.

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Resolume served as the hub for the system.  Five sources were spouted in to Resolume: Processing, Max, OpenFrameworks, VVVV and VIZZable.  A video file was used to represent Resolume.

Max was used to interpret keystrokes from a wireless USB remote which were then converted to OSC and forwarded to both TouchDesigner and Resolume.  In Resolume, the OSC messages were used to switch between Spout senders and in TouchDesigner the same OSC messages were used to control the graphics being projected on to the ground around the TV and to apply transition effects to the source video.  As there is currently no native Spout support for TouchDesigner, we used SpoutCam to bring the source video in from Resolume using the video in TOP.  Finally, two video streams were sent from TouchDesigner,  one to the projector and one to the TV via a scan converter and RF modulator.

 

We shot the video at Melbourne Medialab and the shoot ran for about 5 hours.  Happily, there were no crashes, no stumbles and everything purred happily with all 8 applications passing video between themselves and with Windows deciding to update unannounced in the background.  Many thanks to Melbourne Medialab and Super Team for their support.

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Spout

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Spout is out!  About a year in the making, Spout is similar to Syphon but for Windows and was made by my Dad.  Today it was released into the wild and you can go get it here.  With Spout you are able to pass video between Max, Processing, Resolume, VVVV, openFrameworks, Cinder and VIZZable as well as any 32bit application that can accept a webcam stream with the virtual webcam SpoutCam.

Blunk, my new venture with ex-kiwi Oliver Ellmers put together a short interactive piece spouting every possible application into Resolume and then sending the output into TouchDesigner using SpoutCam.  Check it!

For some more practical examples of Spout in action, check out these tutes:

High-fives, world!

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organ hacking 101

For several months throughout 2013 Virtual Proximity AKA James Annelsey, Tristan Courtney and I would hang out in the Melbourne Town Hall devising new ways of using computers to pump vast amounts of air through 3-storey high steel pipes.  My particular role in all of this was to find a convenient way for the two others to send sysex (the nerdiest of MIDI commands) to the organ via Ableton Live.  This is not something Live usually likes to do and, compounding the issue, building sized MIDI controlled instruments can be temperamental.

The Melbourne Town Hall Organ is the largest instrument in the southern hemisphere with almost 8 thousand pipes plus bells and drums.  The instrument is retrofitted with a MIDI system by SSOS.  This system can send and receive note information on separate channels for each manual as well as CCs for controlling swell.  The stops are opened and closed using sysex messages which is the complicating factor when working from within Live.  The system I ended up devising was a combination of Max for Live devices recreating the stops of each manual which would send sysex messages over to a separate Max patch via UDP/OSC. This patch would then forward the messages to the instrument.  In this way we were able to step around Live’s sysex limitations.

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The two musicians were both running live, James using his EWI and a live MIDI looping setup to control the four top manuals of the organ and Tristan controlling the pedal manual with a rockband keytar and also running drums and percussion out to the PA.  The note information from the two musicians was passed over to myself, also running live and VIZZable where I was able to visualise the note information, mix that with a live camera and send the resulting  video out to two projectors, piping through mad mapper and quartz composer along the way.

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The biggest hurdle we had to overcome was with the organ getting stuck notes.  The organ would stick on a particular note and we’d need to turn it off and on to get it going again, a process that took five to ten minutes.  This turned out to be caused by flooding the organ with too many sysex messages in too short a time.  By cueing the messages and then emptying the list at a steady rate we were able to open and close stops reliably.

The end result of all of this coercing of old and new technology was a 40 minute improvised audio-visual set intended to bemuse and perplex.  If you have a spare 40 minutes you can view the entire set and judge for your self as to wether we were successful.

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new home

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Zealousy.com has been put in to witness protection, moved to a new place, changed it’s name and memorised a convincing backstory.  Meet zeal.co.   This move was for a couple reasons:  I wanted to get away from my old host,  this new domain is short and snappy, and there are some upcoming projects which deserve their own subdomains.  The first of these is VIZZable which now resides at vizzable.zeal.co.   I’ve migrated all the old Zealousy posts (from as far back as 2008) across as best I can but please let me know if anything’s broken or of any inevitabel spelling errors.

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VIZZable 2.1

VIZZable2 is a suite Max for Live plugins for video manipulation and performance in Ableton Live 9.   Originally based on Max’s VIZZIE devices, VIZZable has been rebuilt from the ground up to take advantage of gen which allows for very fast and efficient video processing on the GPU.  VIZZable is suitable for live audio visual performance, VJing, interactive installations or audio visual composition and production.  OSX users can use syphon to route video between VIZZable and other applications.


VIZZable has a new home!
For more info and to download VIZZable goto

vizzable.zeal.co