Following on from my recent video compositing and editing experiments, I have become interesed in VJ-ing. From Wikipedia:

The word VJ is used to represent video performance artists who create live visuals on all kinds of music. It originates from a parallel with DJs, although most VJs nowadays have more to do with musicians than with DJs.

I have been looking at the video performance software GridPro. It seems to have a really nice intuitive and powerful interface. Like most VJ software it allows you to integrate audio and video elements into a cohesive artwork. For example, the software can analyze a live audio signal and use the beat or other elements of the audio signal to drive effects and filters over the video footage. I am really excited about incorporating techniques such as this in my artworks and look forward to learning how to use GridPro.

There is also a great collection of video artists/VJs featured on the GridPro website. One of the artists whose work I enjoyed watching was Johnny DeKam. They have a great excerpt of one of his pieces on the site:

Click image to view the excerpt, 6.8MB Quicktime.

I caught up with Seth last Thursday night at Kent St bar on Smith St, Collingwood. He's been doing some interesting experiments with interactive audio mixing with video on his blog. See here and here.

The video clips loop continuously with separate audio tracks. The audio can be altered by mousing into one video frame which mutes the audio on the other frame.

It's been a busy past few weeks and I haven't had much time to think about blogging. Here's a short summary. We all went to Earthcore 25-27th of November. It was a really good weekend; fantastic music and a great retreat from city life. The standout music acts were Shpongle, Hallucinogen, Lab 4 and Juno Reactor. Unfortunately there were some major issues with the showing of my DVD. However, I did pass it onto one of the main VJs at the event, so hopefully it showed up in one of his sets. Check out Mike's blog for a full run down of the event, including plenty of photos.

As we are heading to New Zealand in a week, I have also been very busy finishing up some work for Smartpath. I have been working with Macromedia Flash and SOAP Web Services. It's been a great learning experience - I'm really enjoying getting away from HTML and CSS for a while and working in a more visual authoring environment.

Shari, Mike and I enjoyed the Juno Reactor set at Earthcore so much we decided to go and check them out last Friday night as well. They are a goa trance group, but labeling them in one genre is near impossible. They have a wide variety of musical influences and their live sets include various live instruments such as tribal drums, modern drum kits, electric guitars, singing and even blowing through animal horns. The other sets on the night were Tsuyoshi Suzuki and Ott. The Tsuyoshi set was powerful and pumping as usual; a fantastic set to dance to. I was really excited to hear Ott live. He has worked with Simon Posford on a number of works, including Shpongle and remixes of Hallucinogen. His musical style is psychedelic ambient or chillout. He incorporates dub, a progression of reggae in his music, which gives it a fantastic unique feel. His music is incredibly multi-layered and he mixes in a wide variety of other musical styles, from classical and jazz, to distorted voice.

I was so inspired by hearing Ott's music I went and bought his album Blumenkraft from audiolunchbox.com. Audiolunchbox is a great site I found recently that allows legal buying and downloading of MP3s from independent artists that aren't in the Apple iTunes Music Store (especially in Australia).

Finally, Mike decided to move into 109 Kay St, Carlton with Shari. That means there is exactly one house separating us! We can even share our wireless network. It will be great fun having him nearby to hang out with.