Visuals

I worked on exporting a p5/hydra effect to Touchdesigner. I found this to be a much more productive way of learning how to use it than following a tutorial, which is how I’ve previously implemented Touchdesigner ideas. I wanted to replicate this sketch that I often use as a building block for visuals. td chain example I built an audio spectrum chain, then first used a torus instead of a circle to generate the base, and then with C.’s help realized I could be using a 2D equivalent. ...

Was excited to be asked to do visuals for Night School + Phillip Otterbach at the Crown <3 Documenting this was also my push to get hydra canvas rendering working in my toolchain (see below!), which is a lot easier to document than videos. However I learned that audio isn’t loading in examples (mb by design? I opened a PR), so I can’t show these demos with audio reactivity. For Night School’s set, I wanted to play with these trios of soft blobs, and gradually overlay them with a moiré effect. ...

invited n. and m. over to do some movement while i played with projection. i showed some basic slitscan functionality i had, but i found a few things lacking before i would try it again: camera quality projection brightness (maybe) back-projection (maybe) backdrop quality while trying to improve the contrast of the projected image, i had m. hold an rgb light, and we found an unintended pleasing of feedback loop with the dominant color changing the background. ...

another experimental foray into td, using the pole as the axis of symmetry, limbs extending out. inspo: intro from “dark”, the tv series, as well as twigs’ video “striptease”. i’m also time-shifting a bit here and layering another delayed version of myself with a mult filter. need to figure out background-subtraction, but the version of td i have doesn’t have the nvidia chop that i need that most tutorials are referencing. ...

i last-minute* mocked up some background visuals for a party featuring ambient music. (i kept them running all night (12 hours) on a backlit screen near the dj booth and never really had to tune them. they were interesting enough to be entertaining while focused on, but didn’t dominate the space). i took a simple existing function from the hydra library and added a few lines for audioreactivity (color and distortion); black background was key to keep this looking more subdued and adding some forgiveness to the projected edges. ...

This echoing effect over time is one of the things I’m really drawn to regarding aerial movements (which I’m most drawn to in multicordes, where you can see in the reverberations of the cordes, and other spinning apparatuses), and I wanted to emphasize that digitally. I wanted to use a video capture of my recent multicordes performance at KAC (recorded by Lucy) to generate a trail effect of movement to explore this concept. ...

Made while I was ill and sequestering in my friends’ guest room in a cabin in New Hampshire. This is the first time I realized I could open a stream to one longer video, and access different points of the stream dynamically (I initially imported a lot of short clips, which was not workable memory-wise and reliably crashed the browser). tois is an array of “times of interest” that I preselected based on familiarity with the video. I’m playing mostly with layering and playbackRate, which I find to be an effective modulator when combined with the FFT of the audio playing. ...

Thoughts on reading from ‘Live-Coding: A User’s Manual’. The reading My favorite is the “thinking in public” definition. I like to interpret this as working through problems while the audience has transparency to what you are doing. If there isn’t the observed tackling of an issue, then it’s just the performance of a known process (which itself is also interesting… I love process videos on instagram that document cooking or carpentry – however I think these process videos aren’t live-coding if you aren’t allowing the audience to see the process in real-time). [For this reason I often like to incorporate a constraint or a challenge during my devised live-coding performances, because I want the audience to see me struggle in the process.] ...

slit scan capture #slitscan using #hydra.js on a half-time video of my best split-grip #pdayesha. would love to realtime-project this onto the dancer going out one side of the pole like this. right now speed of the trail is dictated by the amplitude of one of the fft bins for a bit of a dynamic effect — subtle in this more ambient track. ...

https://vimeo.com/1062659763?share=copy **spent 30 min tonight doing a rapid proof-of-concept for this multi-aerialist x multi-visualist hybrid performance i’ve been thinking about for awhile ty @myles_higher for being my test subject 🤍 oh and also giving me lots of real feedback on this idea in general for tonight, i set up very simple gestural control for reactivity using public #hydra.js sketches, but i want to add more cohesion soon with a mix of different sensors or controllers ...