Archive for the ‘vj’ Category

dcinput daily for Fri 9th Feb, 2007

Friday, February 9th, 2007

I’ve just spent an hour writting a great post and just before I was about to post it my XP machine, for no reason at all, just totally hung. The damn thing hasn’t needed a reboot for about a month and when does it decide to act up? Just when I was feeling ok that I stayed back at work late on a Friday to write a post, that’s when.

So in the interest of me getting home quickly some nice Friday links with a little explanation…

Big Love…

Love hateHugh MacLeod has been busy traveling around the UK doing a special Valentine’s day promotion for Stormhoek wine. He’s got a video camera and an editor with him and releasing small shorts as he travels around. I met Hugh a few weeks ago and he’s an awesome guy. If you are only going to read one thing of his read his piece on How to be Creative.

What is the web? Why is it so cool?

It’s weird that when you are so deeply involved in something for a number of years, something you think is great and wonderful, but it’s so big and complex that you don’t really understand entirely why its so cool…you just kind of do.

Then someone makes a video clip like that which takes all the loose ends that have been swishing around in your head all this time and pulls them together, and everything just becomes clear and lucid again.

I love the web and I love moving images.

Another magic video

I got a similar feeling when Toby Harris first showed me this video edit of the first Avit VJ Festival back in 2002. This was when I first started to understand the power of the web. It might take a while to download but its worth waiting for.

Toby (*Spark) is currently involved in some really incredible projects. Watch this space.

dcinput daily for Wed 3rd May, 2006

Wednesday, May 3rd, 2006

TapThose of you who visited the site over the weekend might have noticed this page here instead. I managed to exceed my bandwidth for the month and have had to double it. It’s nice to see more people are reading! Sorry for the outage.

I was up in Nottingham this weekend with Toby Harris (*spark) doing the visuals for a huge bank holiday Sunday club night called Detonate. The night brought together the Rock City, Stealth and Rescue Rooms venues to create one big drum & bass / hip hop / electronic bonanza with a few live bands thrown in for good messure. We were in the main room and Toby’s incredible VJing onto two enormousdetonate screens each side of the stage was the focal point for the 1000 strong crowd during sets by LTJ Bukem, Andy C and others. Many thanks to James and Kath
from Detonate for putting us up in a lovely hotel and thanks to Toby for showing me the world of VJing.

I’ve been finding Ze Frank pretty funny. Especially the ‘poop’ showdown with Rocketboom in last Friday’s episode.

Creative planet have put together some video footage of interviews at NAB 2006. Great if you couldn’t be there.

The Burning Man 2006 funded installations. I like the sunflowers.

The Wall Street Journal tells of how hedge funds are getting into movies.

There’s been much talk of the LindenLabs online game/virtual community Second Life recently. Adam Curry has been having parties at his virtual Castle attended by listeners and podcasters alike.

Second lifeI bumped into one of the producers / designers of the game last week and had a very interesting chat about future plans for the game. The infrastructure they are building to accomodate their predicted number of users is simply stagering and it seems they are looking at improving image quality too. The sort of definition they are talking about is going to take some serious bandwidth. When countries like Japan can get Gigabit speeds to their mobile it’s no wonder they are planning big and it’s no wonder they are looking at what part mobile technology will play aswell.

Project Entropia which competes directly with Second Life is offering a real world cash card to gamers so they can spend the money they accumulate in the virtual world…in the real world.

BBC News: “Last year $165m passed through the game and the founders of the online Universe expect that to at least double in 2006″. Is there a virtual tax man too?

Engaget: “Apple patent embeds thousands of cameras among LCD pixels”. Old news but I hadn’t heard about it till last week.

Jobserve: “The successful candidate will have excellent experience of Web editing/content management within the on-line space and ideally have experience or an understanding of blogging, on-line communities or user generated content”. Oh how new media.

I’m on a Redhat Linux training course all week in the affluent suburb of Guilford. The course has been pretty good so far, maybe a little slow though the pace seemed to be picking up a bit this afternoon. The commute is taking me a little over 2 hours: bus, underground, overland fast train and finally taxi. For such a small place, Guilford sure has a serious congestion problem. I’m not keen on getting up at 5:45 but it does mean I get to catch up on all those podcasts I never get to listen to.

I’ll be at the Gronland Records Showcase tomorrow night at 93 Feet East. It’s the beguining of my effort to go to interesting gigs this summer. Thanks to MK of NYUB for making me remember how much cool music is still out there.

The touchscreen VJs dream about

Tuesday, February 21st, 2006

Amazing touchscreen demoI was really happy to find that Kosso is again writing in his new Kosso’s Braingarden Wordpress blog [Hehe - Snap!] and really currious about his treedia.com site. Not sure how you get an account but I’d love one! He posted a few days ago about a demo of this amazing touchscreen that featured on YouTube. This is quite honestly the coolest thing I’ve seen in ages. Also very blown away.

I’m sure that if my buddy Toby a.k.a *spark could use this in one of his sets he would cause even more sensational club night visuals. Looks like he’s just cut a brand new showreel which brings together some of his best work all to a kick ass tune. Hey and its ipod friendly…very modern. I spent many a night shift with Toby when we both worked at the Creature Shop learning about his adventures in vjland. He’s one of the original guys behind AVIT, a truely global VJ festival. This video really caught my imagination when I first saw it. A MUST see.

And by the way how great is YouTube?