Three modified 3.5 inch floppy drives that can record and playback analog audio from a normal diskette.

The audio effect of playing sound from the drives is similar to a reverb/delay. The heads can also be scrubbed across the media to create a kind of random-access Mellotron instrument.

Last Thursday’s 8BITSF/DUTYCYCLE party at DNA LOUNGE was my first go at the Video Jockey game. Considering that I started learning to VJ less than 7 days prior, the fiasco could have been an epic fail. However, all hurdles were cleared and the sets I did for COMPUTEHER and NULLSLEEP went over without any unintentional glitches!

My journey began with a pile of free/opensource software to try and run on a MacBook Pro: CoGe, Gephax and Onyx.

CoGe was great at handling folders of images and gifs—I used it to create a few clips I uploaded to videopong.net (think ccMixter for video). But to do a full set with it I felt like I’d have to learn QuartzComposer and when I left CoGe running for any length of time it would unexpectedly quit.

Onyx held my heart because it’s an AIR application—meaning I could get into the hairy Action Script plumbing if I felt the need, but I didn’t even get that far: Midi control through a socket connection is supposedly possible but I’ve only seen people on PC/WIN doing that successfully. Gephax was an even shorter trial when I couldn’t get it running in either OSX native or VirtualBox.

So in the end of my software testing, I reached out to friends for commercial advice and wound up running VDMX which costs a pretty penny but is modular, does clean midi detect, and has advanced sequencing/lfo/sync capabilities. And yes, it does crash but not nearly as regularly as CoGe.

As far as source material went, I was sitting on piles of gifs and stills I’d collected in tumblr click trances over the past few months. I had to save the gifs as mov using quicktime for VDMX to recognize them but as far as conversion processes can go, it was fairly painless. Additionally, the veterans nocarrier, jeanyk and abuliaconcepts dished me some clips and advice along the way.

The last interesting bit of content was receiving all of the trial/wip material for the collapsed desires tour poster created by videogramo, which I turned into this video loop using the flash timeline.

Despite the fact that I was still patching, midi-detecting and clip-cropping at DNA Lounge, the greatest trial was that no one had asked ahead about what video inputs were available and I was left trying to plug digital (VGA) into either S-VIDEO or RCA. So 30 minutes before doors opened I biked to the unhelpful Best Buy and then Radio Shack, which I walked out of with a Grandtec PC to TV box.

After all that, I was ready to party and had a great time dancing around on the dials and sliders! I was only planning on doing the NULLSLEEP set but Lubaboop, who was also VJing, needed a break so I wound up doing the COMPUTEHER set as well. It was a good warm up and let me play some of the more colorful, fun gifs that weren’t appropriate for NULLSLEEP’s grayscale & red mandate.

The midi controller I wound up using was the Korg Nano Kontrol. It was really nice having butons to slam on for tap tempo, downbeat, and timer reset. Then I had 3 layers of video set up with basic controls like scale and playback speed/direction. The rest of the controls were an ad-hock arrangement of effects and I didn’t wind up using the scene switching feature of the Kontrol at all. All of the clip cueing and switching was performed on the laptop.

In sum, I had an Epic Win, in the full sense that Jane McGonigal uses the term. I had the impression Video Jockey work was involved, but now I know why VJs never sleep. But since I’ve collected all the pieces needed to project, I’ll likely be at it again soon and look forward to collaborating with friends through videopong or in the booth!

enso:

Done for the starPause/K9D/Dinoaids Maker Faire zine

myspace music previews:
Broken Figures | Nonfinite | WDUWSTS | Drown Radio | Mushen

workshop nfoz:
Learn the ropes of nanoloop for iPhone with Drown Radio! Aimed at seasoned producers and curious chip music connoisseurs alike, this informal workshop will touch on all the screens by taking you through the making of a track. Get nanoloop now while it’s still .99 cents to follow along =) And if you’re already a user, come answer questions or make your own track to contribute to the Diplodocus2 compo

facebuk rsvp:
http://www.facebook.com/#!/event.php?eid=123425744336267

when/where:
Friday, May 7th | fivepoints arthouse | 72 Tehama St., San Francisco