Music and sound design, words and narrative, a growing set of visual assets, and ultimately a live performance: these are the components of the “postmodern rock opera” The Continual Return of Dr. Ordinaire.
(more…)Category: performance
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VSx Visuals in Barcelona
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 (after “VS3,” “VS4” and “VS5” I’ve given up on numbers as a naming convention) 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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A VS4 Discussion in DTLA
In July 2018 at a venue in downtown LA I gave a talk that described some of the background, historical references and motivation behind the development of the VS4 project.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.
The venue was spec.la, a monthly salon-sort-of-event for inventors, artists and various types of mad scientists. While the sessions are invite-only, videos of many of the varied presentations are freely available on YouTube.
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VS4 Visual Synthesizer Beta
The VS4 (“Visual Synthesizer, iteration 4”) project is finally at a point where it can be called a Beta version. While I’ve just been running simple test patterns through it so far, the basic architecture and feature set of this tool for audiovisual performance and real-time motion graphics are pretty much complete and functional (though there are still a number of secondary features and options that need to be implemented before it’s really usable; “Bare Bones Beta” might be a more accurate title).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. (more…)
