If you follow CDMu, you might have noticed Peter’s recent Kore@CDM announcement. Today I’m extremely happy to be able to officially launch of our first visual minisite; for the Vixid VJX16-4 video mixer:
Vixid@CDM, http://vixid.noisepages.com
The visualist world is in a real period of growth at the moment, and we think that Vixid are one of the companies who are doing great things to help this growth. From our first moments with a VJX we know that we wanted to spend more time and really get to know it. So we approached Vixid about partnering with CDM to create a site devoted to exploring the VJX16-4, and how it can help our art grow and develop.
How this partnership works: With a tool as deep and flexible as this, the traditional “couple of days or weeks” review loan wouldn’t really work. So Vixid have sent me a VJX16-4 to keep. This will allow me to spend time learning its tricks, trying it in different configurations in both live and studio settings, and to share what I’m learning.
In effect Vixid are paying for this content, but it’s not a “home shopping network advertorial” kind of situation. There will be no hand up the back of my shirt or sanitized autocue telling us what to say. We’ve built vixid.noisepages primarily because we love the mixer, and want it to become part of what we do. Getting paid for writing about it is an added bonus, for everyone really: Readers and users get new information and inspiration on what the VJX can do for their art, Vixid get a resource to help their existing users (or inspire new ones), and I get an amazing new toy to play with to spend some very serious and scholarly time doing educational research with a technologically sophisticated device.
I’m quite aware that some will consider this to be “selling out”. Peter and I have spent a lot of time discussing how we want CDM to progress, and we consider this kind of partnership to be an important part of building the visualist site of the future. We’re aiming to grow CDMo to a point where we can spend more time writing and creating, to document and to help this artform mature, and sponsorship from developers we think are pointed in the right direction is just one part of this plan.
So, rationale aside, what can you expect to see coming up on Vixid.noisepages? I’ll be going through some of the basics, like how to set up, and differences between “traditional” VJ mixers and the “Vixid way”, and more advanced stuff, like using MIDI to do crazy stuff with live inputs, and how to get the Vixid to operate as 2 virtual mixers outputting to separate screens. Oh, and I recently received 16 security cameras in the mail. The Vixid has 16 inputs… that should be interesting.