Visual Berlin have just announced their “µ:avit”, a one-day vj meet amongst their ongoing shenanigans at the DMY design fair. Expect a community-led, do-it-yourself feel and a day full of faces-to-names and interesting works. I’ll be there running a full-day Quartz Composer workshop, and the action is sure to run till late via club gigs […]

Its been an opportune few weeks for visualists in Europe, with a spread of three festivals all with their own take on the field. Here’s a quick tour through the eyes and itinerary of one *spark.
Late at Tate: The AV Social; 4th April
NODE08: Forum for digital arts; 5-12th April
Mapping: VJing and Audio-Visual Festival; 10th-20th April
Vision’r: Festival VJ; 17th-20th April
Resolume 3 & Freeframe 1.5
On the horizon: Visual Berlin and Live Performer’s Meeting

Its been an opportune few weeks for visualists in Europe, with a spread of three festivals all with their own take on the field. Here’s a quick tour through the eyes and itinerary of one *spark.
Late at Tate: The AV Social; 4th April
NODE08: Forum for digital arts; 5-12th April
Mapping: VJing and Audio-Visual Festival; 10th-20th April
Vision’r: Festival VJ; 17th-20th April
Resolume 3 & Freeframe 1.5
On the horizon: Visual Berlin and Live Performer’s Meeting

It’s no secret: the once wildly-popular ArKaos VJ software has been looking a bit long in the tooth lately. And upgrades only get you so far: sometimes, as software matures in its life cycle, you have to redo the foundations. That’s what ArKaos has been working on, and the results, renamed GrandVJ, are due out […]

Blending patching, performance, and timeline metaphors, with a healthy dose of effects and sound capabilities, VisualJockey is a unique tool you can now have for free. Need an excuse to load Boot Camp, Mac users? The Mac may be in the spotlight these days, but Windows may boast the broadest access to freeware and open […]

Squint closely at that interface: you’ll be seeing more of it soon. 3L demands a MacBook Pro, and scoffs at your softcore MacBook AIR. And it’s likely to make a big splash in the visualist software world. 2008 is looking like an extraordinary year for visualists: there’s an explosion of new software tools for live […]

More reasons you love OSC? You can get input from a SpaceNavigator 3D mouse, and translate the data into Max/MSP/Jitter, Quartz Composer, VDMX5 (as mentioned earlier today), Processing, and other tools — plus everything else, via MIDI. The solution: the inexpensive Mac utility OSCulator, covered this evening over on CDMusic: OSCulator for Mac: Alternative Control, […]

VDMX, the “realtime video studio” from the makers of Grid, semi-modular live visualist tool for Mac, and very possibly the “world’s most mature beta software”, continues to pack goodness into each new beta release. But the most recent addition, just now available as part of the primary public beta release, warms my heart. The latest […]

We know what visualists like, we know want visualists want. Whatever holiday you celebrate in December, you’ll be really happy if it involves you getting cash to buy this stuff. But it’s not all a material world — much joy can be had from free inspiration, free software, and free learning — really. Some readers […]

Plug N Play – ByteMe Festival – Perth from Create Digital Media on Vimeo. Being in Perth, Australia with some of our favorite VJs/visualists was a real inspiration. We’re still processing some of that inspiration — and, literally, all the footage and words we captured while there. One highlight was undoubtedly the Byte Me Festival’s […]