Mindriot Productions just uploaded a clip of myself, Arctic Sunrise and bITjAM performing at Pecha Kucha Coventry Volume 14:
I had no idea that I was so animated when performing :-/
Tag Archives: arctic sunrise
Pecha Kucha Coventry Volume 14
On 11th June I took the fast train to Coventry to take part in Pecha Kucha Volume 14, which was curated by Ludic Rooms for Coventry Mysteries Festival.
Game Boy Camera photography
Game Boy Camera set-up
One of my two primary reasons for being there was to take pictures using my Game Boy Camera. Despite it being a piece of kit that’s 15 years old, the camera was quite a hit, with over 60 people lining up to have their portrait taken in four shades of grey and printed out onto a one-inch sticker.
There are, of course numerous phone apps for Android and iPhone that aim to reproduce the 8 Bit aesthetic of the Game Boy Camera, but nothing can be better than the real thing! To transfer the photos I was using this method, which worked flawlessly! There was a 10 minute wait whilst I developed the film transferred the pictures, but this was still much faster than using the Mad Catz Camera Link cable.
hellocatfood/Arctic Sunrise/Bitjam performance
The other reason for my appearance was to perform with Arctic Sunrise (one half of Ludic Rooms) and Bitjam on a post-Pecha Kucha noise fest!
As usual, I took to the VJ deck whilst they kicked out the jams. Here’s a sample of the output
This was created using video synthesis in Pure Data. There’ll be more talk of that in a later blog post.
It was a shame that I missed most of the talks, but I was otherwise glad to be part of such a successful event! Thanks to Ludic Rooms for inviting me over!
Visualising BitJam
On Thursday 4th February I was Stoke-on-Trent for BitJam. I still don’t have anything ready to show on stage but thought I’d use the night as a testing ground for some of my ideas. I wanted to investigate ways in which to interpret what was happening around me. The main performance of the night was from a chap called Arctic Sunrise
For my first test I fired up Alchemy and attempted to draw the music. Alchemy fortunately has a few tools that can make your sketches react to sounds. They are Create > Mic Shapes and Affect > Mic Expand. Here’s the result of using both of them together
And a nice little animation of those done using GIMP and Openshot.
The next method was to use the Echobender script on a webcam pointing at the stage. Obvious errors in the sound recording actually kinda complimented the video. However, I’m a lil bit disappointed by the speed of the script at the moment. I may investigate doing something similar in Processing.
The final method involved a bit of post-processing. I made a short compilation of clips I shot at BitJam and then opened the video in a text editor and replaced loads of text with other text. The output was then reencoded using Avidemux
So, there you have it! Now to figure out how I can turn this into some sort of performance