"Graf" (2008) by Dienstelle for Lithops

Karl Kliem (1969-) is based in Frankfurt am Main, Germany and creates video work under the name Dienstelle. He has worked with Jan Jelinek, Burial, Alva Noto & Ryuichi Sakamoto, Mouse on Mars, and others.

artist website

"Timber" (1997) by Hexstatic and Coldcut

Hexstatic is the duo of Stuart Warren-Hill and Robin Brunson who have been produced audio-visual work since 1997. "Timber" is the third part of the Natural Rhythms Trilogy, Warren-Hill's first experiment in video sampling. Created with the support of Greenpeace.

The music release of "Timber" was credited to Coldcut and Hexstatic. The song is in the 2001 Guinness Book of Records as "Most Music Videos For One Song".

In 1998 the video won the MCM Atlas, the French TV Award for Best Video Editing.

Belief Defect live at Atonal Festival 2017

on august 18th, 2017 we had the opportunity to premier our album along with the first public performance as belief defect from within the entrails of the iconic kraftwerk building which, among other things, serves as the church of atonal yearly.

Given the coincidences of multiple extraordinary circumstances that aligned under the exceptional commitment atonal has with their audience, we planned a show specifically for the occasion, the stage, the technical freedom and resources offered by the festival to annex oktaform and his skill set to the endeavor.

the visual counterpart to the album developed with the same instinctual impulse the music did: recurring to found footage evidencing the general despair emanating from all media juxtaposed with over stylized precision graphics as counterbalance, we aimed to build the experiential incarnation of the album and its narrative threads.

Visual Director: Greg Sullivan AKA Oktaform

"Live in Bruxelles" by 242.pilots

242.pilots were a live video improvisation group, active 2001-4. Comprising HC Gilje (Norway), Lukasz Lysakowski (Poland), Kurt Ralske (USA). On 20 February 2002 they performed with sound artist Justin Benett (UK/Netherlands) at Theatre Mercelis, Brussels. This was released on DVD as "Live in Brussels" (CarPark Records) and won the "Image" award at Transmediale 2003, Berlin. The jury statement:

The work is convincing above all in the play of collective live production, the presentation mode of large-scale image production, the contextualisation of live images in the scope of a contemporary image culture and the development of specific technological production tools as well as their distribution. The combined introduction of all of these "production strands" in the space of a collective process finally relativises the still prevalent myth of the image as a form of subjective and subject-centered activity. 242.pilots through their work, translate in a thoroughly convincing manner the multifarious aspects of image production under the conditions of digital, interactive and network-based media.



Utilizing their own custom software, 242.pilots expressively improvise rich, layered video works in real-time (both as a trio and as soloists). The performance software created by HC Gilje, Lukasz Lysakowski, and Kurt Ralske (formerly of 4AD group Ultra Vivid Scene and late 90s electronic outfit Cathars) allows video to be controlled on-the-fly in a direct and fluid manner. Improvising as a group, the three artists respond and interact with each other’s images in a subtle and intuitive way. Images are layered, contrasted, merged,and transformed. The degree of interplay and unspoken communication between the artists is akin the best free jazz ensembles. The end product is a complex visual conversation: a quasi-narrative exploring degrees of abstraction; a mesmerizing, immersive journey through diverse landscapes; or just raw retinal delight.

242.pilots have performed at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Montreal, Tranmediale.02 Festival in Berlin, Impakt Festival in Utrecht (NL), Steim in Amsterdam, and Kunstlerhaus Dortmund (DE). They have also performed at other museums, galleries, and theaters in the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, Denmark, Canada, and USA.

refs:
artist website
Medien Kunst Netz
Car Park Records

"Ritual Vitality" (2018) by Timo Novotny for Peter Zirbs

The Austrian artist Timo Novotny was born in 1973 in Böblingen (Germany). From 1993 to 1999 he studied Visual Media Design with Professor Peter Weibel at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Since 1995, Novotny has realized and completed projects and performances as a visualist and performer in almost all of Europe and the USA. He is co-founder of monoscope, Sofa Surfers, vidok, void, visual.displacements, inLoops, u. a. As early as 1996, Novotny was honored for his short film Wirehead as the youngest media art award winner in Lower Austria. In 1999, he co-curated the transcinema festival in San Francisco. His best-known film, Life in Loops - a Megacities Rmx, based on Michael Glawogger's documentary Megacities, was created in 2006 and, like the original, won numerous awards at international festivals. In the same year, his short film Neon was included in the permanent exhibition of the Center Pompidou in Paris. In 2004 he exhibited at the Venice Biennale.

artist website

Tame Impala Concert Visual Package (2017) by xitelabs

Xite Labs created 17 visual creations for Psychedelic Pop Group Tame Impala for their headliner performance at the 2017 Panorama Music Festival in NYC.

Our roster of 3D artists, motion designers, editors, VJs, programmers and producers burned many midnight’s worth of oil developing a visual spectacle for one of our favorite bands. As per the vision of Willo Perron and his creative staff at Willo Perron Associates, the show’s visuals are a constant dance between real time generated visuals, image-based animation and live camera-feed effects. The combination of these styles dropped attendees into a 1960’s – 2020’s time warp.

With a largely chromatic palette and many twists of both analog and digital knobs, the content playing across the 200-foot wide LED screens doused a blissful crowd with sporadic peeks at lead singer Kevin Parker’s apparition as he floated into focus, reflected in fractals on the screen and in the minds of the super-psyched fans.

Software packages employed include: Maya, Lightwave, Cinema 4D, After Effects, Premiere, Touch Designer, Luminosity, and Resolume.

project website

"Atemporal" by The Light Surgeons

"Atemporal" is a new experimental live AV set by UK live cinema pioneers The Light Surgeons which has been specially put together for Testcard. Performed by audio visual artists Tim Cowie and Christopher Thomas Allen, it will weave together existing and previously unseen work into a poetic, contemplative live audio visual essay that explores the themes of memory, time and space.

Its draws on a collection of visual material originally created for a one-off performance at Graphic Festival with Cinematic Orchestra at the Sydney Opera House, audio visual elements from their critically acclaimed SuperEverything* live cinema performance and new audio visual material developed through a residency at Oddstream in the Netherlands.

These different sonic and visual elements are fused together and contextualised with the words of novelist, painter and poet John Berger who sadly passed away in January this year.

The Light Surgeons website

"The Visual Project" by Pretty Lights & RadioEditAV

In our most ambitious film project to date in both size and scope, a year’s worth of shooting, editing, and custom video effects went into crafting a video accompaniment for Derek Vincent Smith’s first full-length release in over two years “A Color Map of the Sun”. Pretty Lights pulled out all the stops on this one and so did we.

For this album Derek decided to take a much different approach to the creation of his unmistakable sound and actually orchestrated recording sessions with studio musicians to comprise all new sounds, eventually to be pressed into his own vinyl records to sample from. At the inception of the visual side of this project we decided that we too would take the analog approach.

So we grabbed all our old lenses, film cameras and digital alike, and created our own visual effects catalog rather that relying on computer generated ones that have become so common place in the industry. The experimental video days were filled with trips to the local science store for high powered lasers and magnets, anything we could get to glow or burn, and a variety of diffracting crystals. To put it over-the-top we turned to a true master analog visual artist, Brownshoesonly, to create a collection of effects created through a custom modular video synth and host of old-school video and electrical equipment.

To capture the look we were going for took us all around the country. We took to exploring the decaying and otherwise forgotten buildings around The Rust Belt, capturing the eery beauty of industrial neglect. We had a rare opportunity to follow and film an underground street artist in San Francisco, careful not to reveal his identity. We spent a day filming oil and gas refineries in Wyoming at a super high frame rate, capturing the maze like architecture of their pipes and fittings. We astrolapsed Joshua Tree National Park while doing light experiments to enhance the already alien surroundings.

This project was a pleasure and a challenge at the same time and we are truly delighted to see its release after being so dedicated to it for so long. Working with Derek always pushes us to progress and innovate and we love the process almost as much as its completion.

project website

interactive dance performance by Juladi

For the VJ Festival, Nuremberg, Germany, 2014. Music by Miktek.

I left it afterwards as an interactive installation for the guests.

Juladi website.

CS4040 VJ Set Show Reel 2019

For this project, students were encouraged to source materials (video clips, music) available under open licenses, to use as components in their own live video performance. Adobe After Effects and Modul8 were the primary tools. The following are excerpts from the full performances.

"Video_Games" by Jordan Langley

The inspiration for this work came from 80’s video games such as Battlezone, and sci-fi movies such as Tron and Bladerunner. These games and movies share a common aesthetic of bright colours and geometric shapes, often accompanied by synth driven electronic music. The music is usually characterized by the use of 80’s synthesizers such as the Yamaha DX-7, with arpeggiated lead lines, big brass-like swells and rich pads. This aesthetic has been popularized once again of late and can be seen and heard in many shows, movies and video games, especially in Virtual Reality. Artists like Kavinksy, Daft Punk and The Weeknd have brought this aesthetic to the top of the charts, and shows/movies like Stranger Things and Tron Legacy have done similarly in the world of film. Music: "Video_Games" by Jordan Langley.

"Nerves" by Lee Davitt

"Nerves" is a live-visual metaphoric interpretation, portraying the nervous system as a work of art. The piece uses minimal video sources along with varying effects to characterise human nerves as an art medium. The intention was to create a live, paroxysmal performance, depicting neural oscillations to match a fast-paced and hard, driving beat. The work uses footage of shaking human hands, various wavelengths, colours and text to provide a new outlook on the human body as a work of art. The piece should be performed live, incorporating the artist into its display. If neural waves did not drive the artist’s movements, the piece would be infeasible, therefore the live element to the piece is crucial. Music: “Escape Velocity (end.user Remix)” by Metalogue.

"Entangle" by Emer O’Reilly

Venturing through space and time, it shows the audience the surrealism of the concept of wormholes and alternate universes. After Effects was used to create the alternate universes, while Modul8 was used to present an artistic and abstract depiction of the wormholes. Music: "Memories" by Audiobinger, "Rewind" and "Angelina" by Makaih Beats.

"Atmo" by Shane Murphy

The concept was natural landscapes and elements that would be manipulated and destroyed
until they were unrecognisable, and simply resembled different unnatural elements. Then
these unnatural elements would pulse and evolve in a natural manner, resembling their
original natural form. Ambient electronic music [...] was perfect for the piece as it evolved slowly,
almost to the point that the listener would not notice the changes unless they had listened to
the start and the end in contrast. Music: “lock down” by Blue Dressed Man.

"Obscuring the View from My Window" by Phillip Naessens

The driving concept behind this performance was the collision of two worlds. On the one hand there is the forever developing macro world inhabited by humans and on the other there is the micro world of technology inhabited by information. Often in mainstream media there is this idea that the virtual is a physical space not too dissimilar to our own reality. Characters in films such as Tron or The Matrix even manage to cross over into this space. This fantasy perhaps stems from humanities ever growing urge to integrate totally with technology; for man and machine to become inseparable. This cannot be the case however, as humanity are mortally bound to their biological forms. So like the singularity hiding behind the veil of the event horizon, this fantasy will, for the moment, remain just out of reach. Music: "Creeping Shadows" by Sobrio.

VJ Juladi

In had a chance to meet VJ Juladi when I performed at Sonic Dreams in Waterford recently. She works with a very simple idea. A cheap webcam feeds a signal info some basic VJ software, that she leaves on a simple kaleidoscope setting.

She wears gloves and manipulates coloured paper, bits of plants, coloured gels... all sorts of things. Here's some photos I took of her setup.



The results are always changing. Something abstract and compelling derives from simple materials.

Live Video Ensemble

Live Video Ensemble is a live generative video project conceived by Claudio Sinatti and performed by a 10 element ensemble together with a musician. The shows follow a 2/4 day workshop in which 10 people are prepared for the execution of the performance.

During the show the musician and the ensemble compose a single, abstract, completely improvised, yet perfectly synced, audio-video stream. The visual track is performed in real time, using a custom generative software.

Images are controlled by the ensemble through a set of midi instruments connected to a single computer. The software receives the music and the performers can link it to different image parameters as well as controlling the scene manually. The result is a highly organic audiovisual show in which the sounds seem to be produced directly from the images.