I was in a bar yesterday and just happened to watch through the entire Eurovision song contest. I noticed that along with the usual stage antics of dancers, lights, rotating mirrors and flame throwers the show sported computer-generated visuals. This reminded me of an article in Helsingin Sanomat that I cut out one year ago. It is about the team behind the lights and visuals of the whole contest. Apparently they rely on sponsors who like to test the newest light, projection etc. technologies there. And showy and flashy the stage was. But what about the visuals themselves?

I dare say it looked like any club visuals you would see in Helsinki. Colorful abstract patterns flowed across several screens, as interesting as tapestry, and I couldn’t help noticing many old demoscene effects such as the flame and plasma were rehashed. But maybe they were just fullfilling the very function of visuals in a larger sense?

Nevertheless, it is a VJ’ing career opportunity for those who it might concern.

Jeff Minter, a cult figure in the computer game industry, has gotten his latest “light synthesizer” Neon built into the Xbox 360. Its a piece of realtime software that syncs on both audio and four joypads. I like the sample movies - they take the hypnotic, multi-layered Winamp plugin aesthetics to the extreme, but with certain style and at least visible audio syncs. You should read his light synths’ history as well: it seems this guy has been combining psychedelia with computer programming already in the early 80’s. Computer shows, realtime art, Pink Floyd, “smoked spliffs” and Atari ST’s. Well, I find it curious.

Inventive, idiosyncratic and international! Or how would you describe a dozen artists from several different nationalities performing inside an inflatable bubble? This is how I spent my Friday night a couple of weeks ago. Below in the pictures by Antti Ahonen the bubble is first constructed by Amoeba and then used as a projection medium. During the evening, Amoeba Technologies [US], 2012 [RU], Kokeellisen Elektroniikan Seura, Amphibio [sic!] and Pseudotoad did their damnedest to fill the air with laptop music, strong breakbeats, experimental electronic sounds, curious speech samples, video clips, dia projections and audio synced code visuals. As one would imagine, it proved to be very interesting.

The people at piksel.no are putting together a liveCD (which is a bootable Gnu/Linux CD) with Piksel software and artwork. Actant Automatique by Antti S, a small display of audio sync which is an excerpt from a larger VJ software of his, sees its first appereance there. Antti provides two mp3 tracks with the package, but you can use it with your own songs as well.

The program unfortunately only works in Gnu/Linux at the moment. (But if you know what you’re doing, compiling for Windows or Mac OSX won’t requre drastic changes.)

Khronos Projector by Alvaro Cassinelli is an interactive installation that allows people to explore the temporal dimension of a movie by touching the screen. Just watch the demo video - it explains how clever it is!...

Fantastic blogger we make money not art has published her notes from Golan Levin's keynote at Cybersonica festival - titled 'Audiovision and Computation: Landmarks, Paradigms, Futures'. Good read for everyone of us working at the sound and vision department. Levin...