Rechenzentrum at Mutek 2008 2 from Create Digital Media on Vimeo.
Far from randomly throwing some VJs in the background with music, there are some cases in which musician and visualist build a real relationship — just the sort of thing we care about here. CDM writers Liz and Peter Dines have been roaming the MUTEK festival in Montreal, and their dispatches and interviews are starting to come in. The word: audiovisualism is thriving.
Check out all the reports as they come in at our new “events” site, which we launched last week and we hope will grow into a kind of global event radar for music and motion:
events.noisepages.com
Peter was particularly taken with A/Visions, which is dedicated to audiovisualism. It’d be great to see this become more widespread at festivals here in North America (I gather it’s more common in Europe/UK). One very good sign: it was extremely difficult to get in.
Highlight so far: Liz has an interview with Rechenzentrum, the German A/V duo. Now, this bit may sound like a challenge to the Create Digital Motion community:
The video is live in the sense that I determine which image gets shown at which second, but obviously I’m not creating the image in real time because I’m not really interested in that. Real-time-created video usually looks pretty “blocky,” and I don’t really like it that much.
Curiously, though, he goes on to say:
It’s a mixture of pre-recorded video coming off a hard disk and live stuff reacting off of Marc’s music. But we’re not connected by any kind of MIDI connections or sound analysis. I just listen to his music and create stuff based on that. It’s a connection between our persons and not between our computers.
…. which sounds reasonably live to me. (I’m assuming he’s reacting badly to VJs unintentionally running lo-fi video not for aesthetic effect but just because they don’t know how to do anything else. And I expect we feel him on that.)
It does make me want to go do a big, blocky live visual set, though.
Full interview, with lots of good commentary about aesthetic issues, making it as A/V artists, and the relationship of sound and visual:
Interview: Rechenzentrum, A/V Duo at Mutek [Create Digital Music]
More from Mutek soon; stay tuned. (Below: more visuals from our friend Joshue, who’s really getting around with SuperDraw, his live generative visual tool built in Processing. Congrats!)
