blog

31
Dec

VSx Visuals in Barcelona

By Peter|events, festivals, performance, video

Finishing off 2019 with a live audiovisual set in Barcelona: this was an opportunity to give the latest version of the live performance video tool a test run in front of a festival audience. With only minor UI issues that were easily worked around, the touchscreen-driven visual instrument performed admirably on stage. On return, I used VSx as a presentation tool (imagine a realtime motion graphics version of a PowerPoint deck) at a local Los Angeles forum to tell the story of the event and describe some key features of the application. With the full feature set now tested in front of live, discerning audiences, I’m looking forward to further visual adventures in 2020.

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14
Aug

A VS4 Discussion in DTLA

By Peter|creative process, performance, technology, video

In July at a venue in downtown LA I gave a talk that described some of the background, historical references and motivation behind the development of the VS4 project. This discussion touched upon a range of topics — from Wagner and early 20th-century avant-garde art, to UX and design of the current revision of the software visual instrument.

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27
Apr

VS4 Visual Synthesizer Beta

By Peter|performance, video

The VS4 (“Visual Synthesizer, iteration 4”) project is finally at a point where it can be called a Beta version, meaning the basic architecture and feature set of this tool for audiovisual performance and real-time motion graphics are pretty much complete and functional.

This is the first in a suite of three tools (and associated processes) currently under development for furthering realtime audiovisual experiences and interactive storytelling across multiple media. While each component has a distinct purpose and audience (ranging from practical to experimental, commercial to fine art, tactical to theoretical), they all share a common architecture built around symbolic structures and patterns.

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28
Mar

Art and Technics

By Peter|creative process, technology

“… we cease to live in the multidimensional world of reality … we have substituted for this … a secondhand world, a ghost-world, in which everyone lives a secondhand and derivative life. The Greeks had a name for this pallid simulacrum of real existence: they called it Hades, and this kingdom of shadows seems to be the ultimate destination of our mechanistic and mammonistic culture.” – Lewis Mumford, Art and Technics, 1952.

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18
Aug

RPG Musings

By Peter|alternate realities, games, narratives

“As I learned more about how these early role-playing games [RPGs] worked, I realized that a D&D module was the primitive equivalent of a quest in the OASIS [a multi-user VR environment of the near future]. And D&D characters were just like avatars. In a way, these old role-playing games had been the first virtual-reality simulations, created long before computers were powerful enough to do the job. In those days, if you wanted to escape to another world, you had to create it yourself, using your brain, some paper, pencils, dice, and a few rule books. This realization blew my mind.”

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07
Aug

Virtual Reality in Context

By Peter|alternate realities, creative process, events, narratives

Every medium is a context for a message, with characteristics that shape any narrative it conveys. At the same time, every medium has its own contexts: historical, cultural, and technological. These two assertions could not be more relevant in the case of what we call virtual reality – and an understanding of the various aspects of these contexts is valuable when imagining and designing VR experiences.

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17
Jul

Process vs. Product

By Peter|creative process

This is a story from a long time ago. It has come up again and again in various contexts, but the message, the meaning, remains consistent; an essential concept that remains relevant to just about everything I do:

Years ago, in art school, one of my studio classes was a drawing workshop led by Professor Walker. Usually a session involved three or four hours of drawing in charcoal or pencil or ink, often with models. From time to time there was a lecture before we started working, and on one occasion we arrived in the studio to find an array of varied images tacked on the wall – ranging from student works to recognizable drawings by well-known masters. The professor announced that we’d be having a discussion before we started drawing that day, and the topic was a simple question: “Look at all these images … and I want you to tell me which ones are … art.”

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18
Jun

The Face of the Coachella Astronaut

By Peter|events, festivals

Zedd AstronautEarlier this year I joined the Poetic Kinetics team in the creation of a 50′ tall animated art piece for the 2014 Coachella music and arts festival. This dynamic sculpture included fully articulated arms and hands and was able to move from stage to stage and all around the vast festival environment. During the day, the astronaut’s helmet visor was covered with a reflective gold cover (as we’ve seen in photos of NASA astronauts) – but at night, the cover could be removed, revealing a curved rear-projection surface. Working with our friends at Pearl Media Productions, we designed and installed a multiple-projector system that could fill the astronaut’s visor with dynamic images. This gave us a large-scale canvas to work with for visual effects.

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