Visuals projected onto layers of semi-transparent fabric hung in strips from the ceiling. A test I did for a gig with Trigger in Bristol, this footage looks better than the footage from the event, as I didnt get to set up the strips.
I made the footage myself, using a mix of filmed footage and After Effects work. I then ‘play’ the individual layers live using VDMX, along with twisted electro-breaks and electronica. The effect I’m trying to achieve is that of skewed perspectives. A co-ordinate system crash. The footage deals in multiple perspectives, with the 3D camera usually floating around some object. The footage can beam through several layers of fabric, and the effect is that the footage just hangs in the air. The whole thing constantly shifts, and never resolves itself, a kind of probability wave in a continuum of never-quite-thereness. I hope to do more of this kind of thing this year.
A mix of open-source infomercials from the 50s and 60s. I cut this selection from many hours of footage from the Prelinger Archive as content for an audiovisual set at Bestival 2006, along with Pussy Cat Palace (a portable soundsystem built by the legendary DJ Wheeliebag).
I built a portable projector system running from a 12V battery and we set up at random points around the site and played. It was a pretty chaotic affair, and all footage from the festival was lost, apart from these videos, which I used to play between songs. During the songs, I projected mixes of silent footage of rocknroll dancing and lovely B/W footage of strippers.
I wanted it to seem to people as if they’d stumbled across a berzerk public information broadcasting service from the universe next door. New narratives can be semi-randomly built up from the way clips are placed next to each other, mirroring Burroughs’ cut-up technique for literature.
The set-up I built uses a 12V Deep Cycle battery, going into a Pure Sine-Wave Invertor, to switch the flow yo, which I attach a 4 plug strip to. The laptop, projector, and my Edirol V4 video mixer are all powered up from that. I hired a rear-projectable fast-fold screen for Bestival, and we found a patch of grass and set up each night, playing ska and rocknroll to lunatics, and I beamed out footage of strippers from the 20s fondling pythons, along with snippets of the infomercials between songs. No footage from the festival remains, as it was a chaotic affair to say the least. This is the video we sent to them to get the gig though, it was shot in London Fields one Saturday night. We made a screen out of a fence wrapped in fabric. Local kids came and boogied, whilst warning us that if their older brothers come down here, all our gear would definitely be nicked..
Flash movie with some transparent video action over the top. With music from Vladislav Delay. Based on a true story.
Visuals created to be played live, using live video-mixing software. Set to some music by glitchy electro don ‘Tipper‘, this video sees the Structural Attemptor replicate itself into dense clouds of meta-scaffold, until it finally blossoms into a sort of unusually stable black hole.
When the Hadron Collider was about to be switched on, a few months ago, one newspaper announced that as well as potentially forming a black hole, which would sink to the centre of the Earth, the particle accelerator might release strangelets into the atmospehere. Strangelets.
I made this years ago, its a Flash movie, but I took it into After Effects and added the sound (not sure who it is) and the slight camera movement.
Flash movie made a couple of years ago, it was called ‘An Unsentimental Depiction of a Tiny Event’, and, I suppose it still is.
Some videos I made (using Arkaos, VDMX, and After Effects) a couple of years ago synced to various tracks, I can hear Lawgiverz, Si Begg, Clark, Vladislav Delay…
I haven’t done much of this recently - all last year was spent working online, but this year, as soon as I get some time, I’m gonna have another push at getting a live set together from the fragments I currently have. I used to be envious of the fact that my musician-friends had the fun of making the music, but also the bigger fun of playing it live, that was why I started making visuals for clubs.
I think this is my second portfolio, made about 7 years ago, around the time I was at Amaze and preparing to leave it, my only proper full-time job thus far. Most of the work on there was designing for ‘zoon’, a youth magazine site sponsored by Volkswagen - I was on that project for nearly 3 years, designing a wide range of things, from modular website design to music mixers to character design. Theres also the usual Flash experimentation on there too.
Be warned.. It plays quite intense audio at you, and has no sound off switch. Ah it was a crazy time..
Flash movie I made about 8 years ago. Not sure who the music is - maybe Sufjan Stevens.