In life, one must have a balance between the pre-rendered and the generative. So, because I’ve been spending so much time in After Effects lately, the goal for this weekend was to create something pretty in code. After a rather inspiring conversation with a fellow artcoder I remembered that I had been wanting to play with three.js for a while. And, here’s my first experiment. It’s not that complicated, just an array of very elongated spheres floating around with a single point light source and some bloom in post. But I think the effect is pretty nice.

Click on the thumbnail to open it in this window. It will work best on Chrome, it should work fine on Firefox, and if you’re running IE I feel bad for you son, I got 99 problems but the DOM ain’t one.

Many things to @jerome_etienne for the three.js boilerplate, Paul Lewis for the fantastic Getting Started Tutorial, and of course MrDoob for writing the thing in the first place.

A study in audio-reactive form and light. The song is an excerpt from “Aurora” by Ryuichi Sakamoto and Alva Noto. More on them may be found at http://www.raster-noton.net/anrs/

I got to thinking, people do all this stuff with particle effects being all bright and shiny, what would happen if you made particles … of DARKNESS? (also a friend showed me a nice trick with aux systems being used to create sparks on surface contact, so I wanted to play with that)

I uploaded and linked an earlier version of this, and then immediately saw a bunch of improvements that needed to be made, so I did. I improved the camera motion a lot, made significant changes to the lighting/ color correction, and made some minor changes to the particle system. Oh, and replaced the dummy floor texture I accidentally left in last time with a real one. It’s nice, though, that on this case my turnaround time between “this is awesome!” and “oh I can do this much better” is in this case measured in minutes. The original is still on vimeo if you want see the evolution.

I don’t know what it is, but it’s trapped in that tiny room with you, and It Wants Out.

This is a still from the video I shot at the Occupy Port of Oakland March, 12.12.2011. Color manipulation done in After Effects. Really I just made this so I could use it as a wallpaper, but you’re welcome to it if you’d like it. Click through for 1920×1080 version.

This is the video for Unwoman’s cover of Hurt, off of her album Uncovered. It was shot and edited (minimally) by me. This was originally meant to be the key shot in a more complex video, but when we watched this we both knew instantly that it carried itself so well that doing much more to it would risk overworking it. A gorgeous sunset, a beautiful woman, and a fantastic song; what more does one need?

This is a video I made for the Renegade Lights #1 compilation. Renegade Lights is a music/video art collective, and I am one of the VJs who gets to play with this incredibly talented collection of musicians. The downloadable version of RL#1 includes videos by myself and CSTNG_SHDWS, and this is mine.

The music is by me. The video is based around “Techniques of Hand Sending”, a WWII era U.S. Army instructional film on morse code, which is now in the public domain. All other material was either created by me for the film or modified recordings of my live sets. Fun fact: This was edited on my older macbook, which was incapable of rendering more than 1 minute of effected footage at a time, so the entire thing was rendered in chunks and pieced together into a final. Which is the main reason there’s not more going on.

If you would like to hear more of my so-called music, I can be found on bandcamp under my musical project Autopoesis

In other words, I’ve been working on a bunch of stuff lately that doesn’t really lend itself to regular updates. So this is kind of a scattershot list of a few important nodes in my world of late.

* Most relevantly, I have released a bunch of music! Both my older material and a full album of (relatively) new stuff is available under my musical moniker of Autopoesis over at bandcamp. It is of course the mission of fools to attempt to assign a genre to one’s own stuff, but it has been described by others variously as “post industrial”, “idm”, and “what were you thinking?” You can listen for free, check it out, and tell me what you think.

* I’ve been focusing more on video, from a directing/shooting and post-production/ motion graphics perspective. Specifically, I’ve been working with the fantastic Unwoman on a few projects. Some of them are still to be announced, but we can reveal that we’ve been actively working on a video for her cover of Hurt from her new Uncovered album. We’ll have some teaser footage of that up shortly, plus an announcement of a new and very exciting project in the works. Stay tuned for that, and also more news involving her. Cause boy howdy is there some.

* In the realms of video, I’m still doing a lot of development of realtime work. Most notably I’ve been doing a bunch of work with bangnoise’s exceptional Video Delay plugin for quartz composer, which allows one to delay video according to a greyscale image map, thus making it particularly straightforward to get some wonderful slitscan/timewarp effects with pretty much any video in vdmx. I was hoping to post some example videos of this, but,

* relatedly, lazyweb, does anyone have any suggestions for a reasonable portable DVR? I love my Archos AV500, but sadly its dock has stopped recognizing either video in or power, thus I have no reliable way of recording live video on my non-syphon enabled macbook. Optimally I would reeeeally love a nice tablet with DVR ability. Archos keeps teasing me with similar products, but they are so far a combination of too small and too discontinued, and they seem to have given up on this particular market segment, of which admittedly I am probably the only member.

* Also, I’m one of these guys. Renegade Lights, the music and video and production and general weirdness Net Label I am a member of, is releasing our first physical product! It’s a double album, with digital download, and all the trimmings, including an as-yet unreleased video (and song) from yours truly. Keep an eye on that page, and this one, for further details on release dates.

If I wrote more often, I wouldn’t have to write for nearly as long every time.

To everyone who follows me on google+:
You may have noticed that I never post anything here, and some of you are probably wondering why I haven’t added you back, despite the fact that I know you. I want to make it clear, here, that this is not a personal commentary, nor the laziness of yet another social network. I am not going to actively participate in g+ until their policy on pseudonyms is made more reasonable.

I have several friends here who use pseudonyms for various reasons. Several of them are known by their pseudonyms professionally, many of them I would not be able to identify by their so-called “real” names. And, more than a few of them are pseudonymous for safety reasons. Some of them work in fields ranging from political activism to sex work, where there is a very real danger of retribution if someone’s legal identity is made public. There is a long and established tradition of pseudonymity online which is often the only refuge of safety for threatened people, and google’s lack of reasonable response in regards to this very real issue implicitly reaffirms the tying of online identity to legal identity, a practice which is at least useless, and at worst can, quite literally, be lethal. That is not hyperbole.

So our poster boy for this fight has become Doctor Popular, who is a friend and fellow artist who, despite the fact that I have a very real relationship with him in the real world, I know only by his pseudonym. He’s a useful example, because really, if he can’t go by his pseudonym, it’s annoying and bad for his career, but not, in the greater scheme of things, that bad. But every time you think of the posts Doc can’t make, please also think of all the political activists, educators with unpopular views, domestic abuse survivors, queer teenagers, and oppressed people everywhere who are denied one more channel of communication. And ask yourself if google+’s identity policy is a useful solution, or, as I have decided, an act of aggression against personal rights.

This is the last post I will make on g+ until I see real evidence of a policy change. You guys have fun without me.

– mediapathic steen

#nymwars

This was half an hour ago and not a peep since.