A/V setup with The Suicide Of Western Cutlure - Primavera Sound 2018

The Past, Present and Future with Juanjo Fernández Rivero (aka Gnomalab)

February 5, 2019

In recent years one of the biggest contributors to the online and offline VJ communities has been Juanjo Fernández Rivero. Along with his work with VJ Spain and other organizations, teaching workshops and organizing meet ups, he is also known as Gnomalab, a prolific VJ who has been creating live visuals going on 20 years. We finally caught up with him for an interview looking back at his career and to find out about his latest projects!

3D Projection Mapping from Motus.Lumina and Nerdworking at the Solid Light Festival in Rome

December 3, 2018

In the running series of people in the field of live visuals that we keep seeing pop up in the VDMX community, and over due for an interview, is Motus.Lumina, a group of audio, visual and interaction designers based in Buenos Aires. In particular they make spectacular usage of a wide variety of tools and work on some incredibly interesting events, such as the 3D projection mapping project in collaboration with Nerdworking that showed up in our Twitter feed not too long ago.

1. Who are you and what do you do?

Live coding audio-visual DJ/VJ performance.

Motus.Lumina is a Buenos Aires based design collective that works on visual programming, indoor / outdoor stage design, VJing, animation, interactive design, video mapping, audio-visual installations and music.

Our main objective is to create interactive visual projects integrated with sound, music instruments, data and digital control devices. Motus.Lumina was founded by Temel Hüseyin Kuru a.k.a VJ Vidbeat / Istanbul-Turkey and Claudia Hiroki / Buenos Aires-Argentina. Since February 2015 we are programming audio-visual projects for many artists, musicians, festivals and art collectives from all over the world.

2. What tools (software, hardware, etc) do you use in your creative process?

We are using Quartz Composer, Touch Designer, Cinema 4D, After FX and VDMX for creating our visual content. We use 2 15-Inch Mac Book Retina laptop for programming and live performances, Black Magic Intensity Shuttle for capturing video and live mixing and finally for audio-visual works we use Roland Octa-Capture sound card for audio and MIDI input.

For most of our audio-visual performances and installations, we are programming our visual content with Quartz Composer. Then we do all the live sequencing, adding video filters and connecting audio, OSC and MIDI signals via VDMX. Generally, our live setup contains generative visual patches programmed with Quartz Composer or Interactive Shader Format. We use video footage only for very specific works.

VDMX has a great integration with Quartz Composer and lets us program custom plugins, visuals, FX and templates for our installations and live performances.

For the last 2 years, we are using Black Magic Intensity Shuttle to connect our VDMX software and mix between 2 laptops without using a video mixer. Native Black Magic support of VDMX is very handy for live performances.

Our visuals are mostly geometric and abstract compositions inspired by sci-fi and cosmos. Using musical data and external tools ( music instruments, HID devices, sensors etc. ) takes a big part in our artistic workflow. According to those needs we are using VDMX as a hub to send and receive all the external data to process our visual content for live performances. Also, it is great to build up custom control surfaces for custom needs. VDMX and Quartz Composer are always the most popular tools in Motus.Lumina studios !!

3. Tell us all about your latest 3D projection mappings in Rome!

After we were commissioned by Nerdworking for the Solid Light Festival / Rome we started to program our visuals and start working on a custom Quartz Composer VDMX setup for this project.

We modified Kineme GL Stereoscopic plugin for VDMX as a real-time anaglyph 3D plugin – So we achieved to convert all our Quartz Composer and video content to anaglyph 3D without making any render. Also, the plugin lets us switch between different masks and models. Once we have the plugin working we prepared different presets for each episode of our story and recorded our visuals responding to the different audio frequencies of the music track.

Another interesting detail was the distance of the object z-axis. After many tests, we have created a holographic anaglyph effect that shows frontal objects floating in the air about 1 meter from the audience's eyes.

Thanks a lot to Nerdworking and Solid Light Festival for letting us experiment on the walls of beautiful Sant`Agostino church. And thanx to all Vidvox crew for programming and developing VDMX!!

You can find more work from Motus.Lumina on their website https://motuslumina.com/ as well as vimeo and instagram.

Black Friday To Cyber Monday Weekend Sale 2018

November 22, 2018

Hey everyone!

SURPRISE!

For the first time ever we are doing a Black Friday / Cyber Monday sale, getting in the spirit and jumping on the bandwagon of this runaway train we call capitalism!!!

The sale runs from Friday, November 23rd through the morning of Tuesday, November 27th!

During this time we’ll be taking 100 USD off every purchase from our online store!!!

And this sale stacks with our regular educational, just send us an email with a picture of your photo ID (or other similar proof of enrollment) to get your coupon code to double down your discounts and get VDMX for only 99 USD!!!

Or if you are not a student, we also offer a “starving artist discount” – do a small community giveback project, such as sharing videos loops or making a tutorial to get an extra discount.

Concert: Gordon Photo: Rémy Grandroques @ La Gaité Lyrique

Talking with La Gaîté Lyrique, the 19th century Paris theater with 21st century productions

November 14, 2018

Over the last few years La Gaîté Lyrique has become one of the most well known venues for live visuals, serving as a place for musicians and other artists to work on special events that make use of the 360 projection space and skills of the resident on site team.

In this interview we are joined by Martial Gallorini, one of the video specialists currently working at La Gaîté Lyrique about the space, their production process and some of the artists they’ve hosted.

What is La Gaîté Lyrique and what do they do?

La Gaîté Lyrique is a former 19th century theater. After a long period of inactivity it was left abandoned and classified as historical monument. In the early 2000, it was re-built from the ground-up and it the re-opened to the public in 2011 as now a cultural center dedicated to digital art and cultures.

La Gaîté Lyrique is located in the center of Paris, France and is a polyvalent center where we attend about 1000 events a year, from smallest ones like workshops to big festivals.

We are running every types of events related to digital arts and emerging cultures like. The building is divided into main sites like an exhibition space, a small auditorium for film projections and conferences, a bar, a digital art dedicated library, video games booths, a small immersive room called La Petite Salle, and a concert hall called La Grande Salle which can accommodate about 750 people. Besides we also have exchanges with local schools to introduce creative coding and digital arts to young students.

Paris Music Club, Production: Collectif Scale, Photo: Teddy Morellec

We also host artists in residence and start-ups for them to work on their projects.

The special feature of the venue is La Grande Salle and its ability to run 360° projection shows using 8 video projectors. La Petite Salle can also do 360° video projection using 6 projectors.

In this concert hall we welcome private events, concerts, film festivals or music festivals.

For the record, here is some artists that we welcomed:

concerts : Atoms for Peace (Thom Yorke), Death in Vegas, Phoenix, Gran Daddy, Beat Assaillant, Christine and the queen, Zombie Zombie, Parquet courts, The Breeders, Terry Riley, Mondkopf...
exhibitions : Vincent Houzé, Matt Pyke, Stefan Sagmeister, Kyle McDonald...

What tools (hardware, software, other...) do you use in the creative process? How has this changed over the years?

I can only speak for my job which is leading the video department alongside my close collaborator David, but due to the aspect of very wide number and type of events, we need a lot of different hardware and software tools meet the needs of each type of event.

We have a fleet of video projectors from 3000 to 10 000 lumens and different aspect ratios and full HD screens. We also have plenty of media players like Mac minis, brightsign players, SD Card readers, cameras, streamers etc... And obviously due to the wide type of video signal types and sources with each their pros and cons, we do have a bunch of converters, matrices, extenders and different type of scalers.

With all those type of events and different artistic styles, we can't master every type of technology but we need to understand each project technically speaking and have a wide variety of skills. For instance, we are not motion designers, but we need to know a bit of After Effects to adapt contents to our infrastructures. We are not master coders, but we need to understand code and use it to adapt interactive installations and create tools to help control our devices...

For example, our day to day software tools are VDMX, Touchdesigner, Millumin, Resolume, Modulo Pi media servers Max/MSP, openFrameworks, Processing, Arduino... and protocols such as OSC, MIDI or NDI.

Honestly, we unfortunately don't have time to do much creative contents but we rather welcome artists and assist them with their needs and sometimes help them adapt their video installation for an exhibition or video content for a show.

From the start, we've been using Mac Pros and VDMX for projection purposes on concerts and video installations in exhibitions. Originally we were using 4 computers to play clips in sync clips in the concerts 360° setup but with the evolution of computers power it has become much easier and setting up a show has become a breeze and we can now save time for the artists to work on their show during sound checks.

Tell us about the most recent projects in development at La Gaîté Lyrique!

Well, La Gaîté Lyrique activity remains the same and we are still working hard on programming great shows and festivals. One of our next big project is setting up the incoming exhibition opening next March.

Technically speaking, the opening season's big challenge is the full upgrade of the La Grande Salle video infrastructure and workflow. We are upgrading our projectors to laser source technology and rework the whole signal infrastructure to HDBaseT and fiber optic. Unfortunately it is still a bit early right now, but still, we are working towards a base infrastructure that would be compatible with the foreseeable IP video distribution. For now we are using NDI where possible as a transition to IP world at low costs, and it is really great because NDI protocol is really spreading in the software and hardware industry, making a lot of soft / devices compatible. But i think the future is uncompressed or mezzanine compression video signal distribution will be the future as soon as we see an agreement for a standard.

If you live in Paris, or happen to be visiting, make sure to visit La Gaîté Lyrique for some amazing shows. You can also find more photos and videos on the La Gaîté Lyrique Instagram page.

VJ MEKANIX 1ups his game with Vuo x VDMX

October 18, 2018

Caught this artist feature on MEKANIX over on the Vuo blog this week discussing his usage of Vuo and VDMX for live performances:

Brooklyn-RaízDroidBehavior-1 cropped_0.png

“In our recent spotlight, Azy (@krezrock), a Los Angeles VJ, talks about his work, his creative process, and making unique Vuo image filters and image generators to use with VDMX. A frequent Vuo contributor, he's added several of his daily experiments, which he calls 1ups, to the Vuo Composition Gallery.”

“Running a VDMX patch processing ISF’s, Vuo FX and Vuo image generators. All pre-rendered content encoded with Hap. This combination gives you the ability to process 4 layers and output to multiple HD devices. Which are needed for the larger stages at festivals. All controlled via MIDI device and live audio analysis.”

He’s also one of the biggest contributors to the Vuo community itself, https://vuo.org/user/3462

Read the whole story on the Vuo blog: https://vuo.org/mekanix-1up-vdmx

and I guess we’ll need to do our own follow up interview at some point to cover this awesome work…

Announcing VV Edu: A free and open source curriculum for teaching live visuals and VJing

September 19, 2018

Along with making great software and open source projects, one of the areas we have tried to focus on is creating educational materials to help visual artists at all levels help improve their craft. Over the last few years our website tutorials section has served as the main outlet for our various lessons, demonstrations and conversations of the various techniques used for all aspects of live visual performance.

Today we are extremely excited to announce that we are taking the next big step in our educational offerings, and as you might imagine, we’re doing it open source style: https://vidvox.github.io/vvedu

New VDMX Update With OSCQuery, NDI® send/receive, eGPUs and more!

September 4, 2018

Today we are excited to announce the release of a new update to VDMX that adds several major new features and some noteworthy smaller additions and improvements!

Introducing OSCQuery Protocol

September 4, 2018

One of the most useful techniques for artists working with audio and visual software is the OSC protocol for sending control information from one application to another. While MIDI is great for a lot of situation, OSC was designed to be more extensible and allow for a variety of different datatypes, greatly expanding the possibilities within the community of real-time digital art. Over the years the ecosystem of tools that support the protocol has grown and now we are excited to release a new extension to help the community take OSC to the next level.

The OSCQuery Protocol is an agreed upon specification that extends the base functionality of OSC to make it easier to construct impromptu or improvisational interfaces between different systems…

ID:Mora, Hola de Barcelona!

July 15, 2018

As previously mentioned, we had a great time at Splice Festival back in June and one of the biggest highlights was getting to meet so many different artists using VDMX.

Today we are featuring ID:Mora who gave a mind blowing psychedelic visual performance on the opening night of Splice and along with this interview he has shared a set of video loops from the show!

Angie Eng and an open call for the 2018 'Visual Music Vortex' in Boulder

July 12, 2018

In another blast from the past we've just received an email from Angie Eng about a new visual music festival being organized in Boulder, CO. it sounds like an awesome time and you can find out more about the open call for works below.

But as a long time user of VDMX we weren't going to let Angie go without a quick interview of her own work as well...

Interview: Johnny DeKam

June 27, 2018

I am Johnny DeKam. Many of you know me as the founder of VIDVOX and original creator of VDMX. Ever since I stepped down in 2004, I’ve been a video designer and director, working mostly in the music industry, as well as Fine Arts and a myriad of other projects. VIDVOX has now reached an epic 20 year anniversary! David and I thought it might be interesting for you to hear more about me, and the humble roots of VDMX that you all love.

So let's start with a deep history. VIDVOX's roots grew directly from making art, and in this regard, has always been creator focused. I started VIDVOX alone, on a mission to build better tools for my own personal work... but how did it all begin? This is an origin story.

ISF from Silvia Fabiani

June 14, 2018

One of the best parts of open specifications for file formats is that artists can create visual generators and FX for one piece of software and share their creations with others, regardless of what tools they use.

A few months ago we received an email from Silvia Fabiani asking if we could provide any tips for how to get started with remixing and writing her own shaders, and with a few links covering the basic ideas, she was ready to go. Over the following weeks we noticed that she had posted some of her own compositions on the ISF sharing site and we thought it'd be a great story to bring to the blog for an interview.

The history of VDMX in images

June 6, 2018

The history of VDMX dates back to the late 1990's when Johnny Dekam was developing the software in Max/MSP using the infamous “Nato.0+55+3d” plugins as a follow up to his first software release as VIDVOX called Prophet. Over the next 20 years the project would grow through many iterations to become the software that it is today.

Here we will take a look at the evolution of this project and some of the major release versions since the beginning through images.

Lucy Benson's beautiful worlds

June 1, 2018

A few weeks ago we had the pleasure of getting to go to Splice Festival for the first time. Along with getting to participate in workshops and check out great live A/V performances, the inspiring artists talks were a big highlight of the trip. In particular we finally got to meet Lucy Benson and hear about the creative process behind her amazing work. Videos from each of the talks from Splice will be online at some point in the future, and we recommend checking them out, but in the meantime we've got a little advanced interview with Lucy!

Ctrl-Z Music and Visuals

March 23, 2018

My name is Charles-Zoltan (better known as Zoltan or CZ), my path is quite eclectic, I started by studying at the conservatory of music in piano. Subsequently I played and formed rock / dub groups as bassist and guitarist. At the same time I discovered 3DS Max and photoshop and video editing self-educated.

I completed my career by studying sound engineering where I discovered electronic music and its methods of creation. I had the opportunity to collaborate with contemporary artists and other musicians as technical director which led me to discover VDMX as a solution to manage live visuals in 2013. I am quite curious and have a great pleasure learning new things and experimenting with anything.

vjZaniZ, Audio Reactive Visuals In Brazil

March 16, 2018

One of our favorite things is getting to see videos of people from around the world posted online. Last week we caught some visuals from vjZaniZ in the VDMX Facebook Group and had to reach out for more details.

Rocking Visuals From Mike St Jean

February 8, 2018

Catching bits of action from people using VDMX via Twitter is always great for us and one of the best parts is that we get to connect with people like Mike St. Jean who share with us photos and videos from their latest gigs with amazing musicians... along with the behind the scenes details of how it is all put together that we crave.

Charles Atlas: Tesseract (and way more)

January 22, 2018

For this artist feature we had a chance to talk with someone who has been doing this way longer than we have – by a few decades. It's always a particular pleasure for us to know that the tools used today connect back to a rich history of analog film and video that still have a fingerprint on the modern visual arts. With that experience Charles Atlas is one of those artists who has the special talent of bridging different genres of performance and production into a single cohesive piece.

When asked to send over some videos and images to include with this post Charlie put together an amazing collection for us that goes back 15 years, so strap yourself in for a bit of time travel through video.

Funken: Particular

January 20, 2018

To be filed under artist features that have been too long in the waiting is the work of Funken, who have been on our radar of visual artists for a few years and now are excited to finally follow up with for some behind the scenes info.

January 2018, Back To School Sale!!!

January 16, 2018

To celebrate the start of 2018 we're running our annual back to school sale on VDMX through January 31st for the special price of only $249 and $99 for students!