Blair Neal

Author: laser

  • Quick update

    Haven’t posted much in a while. I recently completed some touring visuals for Hooray for Earth and got to play with them live here in Brooklyn. I also just wrapped up a music video for Banjo or Freakout’s song Idiot Rain which will be debuting any day now. Here is a screenshot of that:

    Slowly putting together something for a sort of “projection mapping how to” to the best of my abilities. In the meantime, I’ve been working on my own projection mapping project with a buckyball shape. Building everything in quartz composer with a lot of Kineme and 1024 plugins…then eventually will farm everything out to VDMX for any other live elements. I’ll hopefully be able to share any useful pieces I make as well, but the kineme and 1024 things make stuff work so nicely already that it’s hard to improve anything. Here some pics of what I’ve got as some test setups:

    IMG_6904

    Screen shot 2011-03-24 at 3.04.49 PM (2)

    IMG_6902

    IMG_6898

    And the rest here

  • It makes sense in pictures…

    Someone found this note on the ground while passing by an elementary school

    Text:

    The world is a place
    made of land and water
    and even though it makes
    sence [sic] in pictures
    i do not understand it.

    [via Reddit – I found this on my way to class after passing by an elementary school]

  • Demo Reel 2011

    I finally put together a demo reel of a bunch of my previous work, most of which you can find in the rest of my portfolio. It includes some of my live visuals work, some of my interactive installation work, and a few of my music videos (both official and unofficial). I’ll be adding onto it eventually. All of the material on the reel was shot, edited, programmed, and tweaked by me.

  • Top 10 Albums of 2010 (and other musical miscellanea)

    It’s been odd putting together my list this year. The last 6 years, I was music director at my college radio station, and would always post my list on our old blog. I was also exposed to about 40 new cd’s every week, so it became easy to get exposed to new stuff. Now out of school, it has become difficult to stay up on all of the new stuff as consistently. I did spend about half the year though so I still got a decent dose of most things.

    It’s always hard to give myself a sort of grading rubric for ordering the albums, but it’s a combination of gut feeling, total playcount, and album consistency (i.e. one good song does not make a great album), originality, and whether I listened to it for longer than a week


    1. Freelance Whales – Weathervanes

    Now, this album sort of came out in 2009, but it was picked up by Frenchkiss and given a proper release this year, so I’m counting it. This is an album that fits a lot of good situations, and I’ve always enjoyed listening to it all the way through…even months afterward. On top of that it has several standout tracks for me for shorter listening bursts. Suggested tracks: Broken Horse, Ghosting and We Could be Friends

    2. Sufjan Stevens – The Age of Adz

    I caught onto Illinoise a bit late in the game, and didn’t really listen to any of the in between stuff that Sufjan Steven’s put out, but this one was just an immediate hit for me. I listened to it several times in a row as soon as I got it and was struck by the unusual range of things going on inside of each song. The 25minute track at the end even turned out to be one of my favorite songs on the album. Suggested tracks: I Want to be Well, Age of Adz, Impossible Soul

    3. Phantogram – Eyelid Movies

    Now, of course this one is a bit of a given for me. Even after listening to the album way too many times while working on their live set videos, it still has a special place for me musically. I still listening to it and love going to the live shows, even though I’ve essentially been listening to the album for almost 2 years now. Really looking forward to them cranking out some new material soon. Suggested tracks: Let me go, Turn it off, When I’m Small

    4. Beach House – Teen Dream

    Previously, I hadn’t really counted myself as a Beach House fan, but this album just caught me in a weird way. It took a little getting used to, but it definitely became a sort of go-to album to put on when doing work or other activities. I’m still listening to it even though it came out way back in January. Suggested tracks: Walk in the park, Silver Soul, Take Care

    5. The Books – The Way Out

    Most albums from The Books for me have only a couple songs that I really fall in love with, but with their most recent album, I was able to love almost every song. There was a consistency there that really appealed to me, even though the songs change character quite a bit. There really isn’t another band that sounds quite like The Books, and in this album they managed to push their sound that much more. Suggested tracks: I didn’t know that, All you need is a wall, Thirty Incoming

    6. Land of Talk – Cloak and Cipher
    I was really encouraged by Land of talk’s 2009 EP Fun and Laughter and was really eager about getting a full album of those kinds of songs. I think they delivered with Cloak and Cipher. Although nothing quite came up to my favorite track “A Series of Small Flames,” I think I picked a few up for the vault. Suggested tracks: Quarry Hymns, Color Me Badd

    7. Gayngs – Relayted
    What at first felt like a sort of joke album, ended up really sticking with me a lot more than I thought it would. Suggested tracks: A Gaudy Side of Town, Faded High, The Walker

    8. Hammock – Chasing after shadows, living with the ghosts
    Probably my favorite ambient group of all time. I had been a little disappointed in their previous two albums, but this one felt like a real return to form for me. Their debut, Kenotic, is one of my favorite albums ever. In a way, this album it felt like “Kenotic part 2” but with a more mature sound.
    Suggested tracks: The Backward Step, Tristia, Breathturn

    9. Arcade Fire – The Suburbs
    On most everyone’s list this year. I wasn’t very captivated by it at first, but I felt myself sort of drawn in by everyone else’s enthusiasm and ended up finding a new favorite track every few days. Suggested tracks: We used to wait, The Suburbs

    10. The Velvet Teen – No Star EP
    So excited for their upcoming full length. I’ve been waiting for something, anything, since their amazing 2006 album Cum Laude, and this is the first whisper that had come out. I have listened to the entire EP 14 times since it came out only 2 months ago, not a bad track on it. Hoping to finish an unofficial video for the title track in the next few weeks.

    11. Kanye West – My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
    12. Menomena – Mines
    13. Typhoon – Hunger and Thirst
    14. Jonsi – Go
    15. Broken Social Scene – Forgiveness Rock Record
    16. The Album leaf – A Chorus of Storytellers
    17. School of Seven Bells – Disconnect from Desire

    Best songs (In a sort of order…)
    For me there wasn’t necessarily a “My Girls” or “Two Weeks” this year, but there were definitely some that I ended up playing way more than others.

    The Velvet Teen – No Star
    Sufjan Stevens -Impossible Soul
    Typhoon – CPR/Claws pt. 2
    Beach house – Walk in the Park
    Phantogram – Let me go
    Menomena – Tithe
    Land of Talk – Quary Hymns
    The Books – All you need is a wall
    Broken Social Scene – All to All
    Annuals – Loxtep
    Gayngs – Gaudy Side of Town
    Hammock – The Backward Step

    Most anticipated albums of 2011
    Braids – Native Speaker (January)
    Bright Eyes – The Peoples Key (February)
    The Get up kids – There are rules (January) …sure why not
    The Velvet Teen (rumored)
    Starfucker (early 2011)
    Battles (rumored)
    Radical Face (rumored)
    Phantogram EP 2 (Working on it?)

    Wish list: Sigur Ros, Son Lux, Talkdemonic, Azeda Booth

    Here is my Best of 2009 list and Best of 2008

  • 1024 Bezier Warp – Expanded QC Comp for VDMX

    First, make sure you have 1024’s amazing Bezier Warp QCplugin: http://1024d.wordpress.com/ (get it from their “box” on the left side of the page)

    Second, grab my expanded version of their example patch for use in VDMX: Quartz Composer – 1024 Bezier Warp – Expanded Example Patch (2600 downloads )   (see below for comp that includes POINT STORAGE)

    This comp will be really useful for those of you with VDMX beta 8 access. Although it still is extremely functional for other versions, you just won’t have mouse interaction in the VDMX preview window.

    I did the rote work to make all 16 warp points available and gave them additional offset controls for more fine-tuning within VDMX. Next I just need to figure out how to tackle point storage, since most of the would be reset every time you reload your VDMX preset…unless you’re just using the sliders for offset values. Then again…all of this kind of work will probably be moot when the actual MadMapper app comes out…but I’m really impressed by the ease of mapper…seems like it will certainly come in handy. Here’s some screenshots, and below that is Vidvox’s very helpful video on getting it all up and running

    EDIT: Got point storage working..sort of. It’s a bit clunky, but it definitely works. Requires a whole lot of tedious patching and Kineme’s File tools and Structure tools, but I’ll try and post a working version soon.

    UPDATE: Here is the hacky point storage method. Make sure to read the readme..it’s not all self explanatory: Quartz Composer – 1024 Bezier Warp – Point Storage (2584 downloads )  You need kineme’s file tools and structure tools installed for it to work! Would love to hear if there’s a more streamlined way to do it!

    (Click for full size)

  • Jit.freenect examples

    Download the patch here: Max/MSP/Jitter – Jit.freenect examples (3502 downloads ) (or right click and select “Save as”)

    Using Jean-Marc Pelletier’s amazing Jit.freenect grab tool I was able to join in on the Microsoft Kinect party. I haven’t made anything nearly as impressive as the myriad of videos flying around youtube and vimeo, but it was fun to play with the depth information for the first time.

    I’m more of a max/msp guy, so I just threw together a few examples based on what came to mind in the first few hours of playing with one. Haven’t really touched it with Openframeworks or anything like that yet, but that’s definitely the tool of choice for most people. The first time I played with the tool in Jitter, I had trouble getting the right kind of data treatment in order to get interesting looking things, but this time i was able to cobble together things based on suggestions from users on the Cycling 74 forums. Hopefully my simple experiments will be helpful to someone else. Unfortunately, I was borrowing my kinect so I’m sort of flying blind in terms of updating the example. Hopefully I didn’t break anything when I cleaned it up…

    In the example you can get a slice of the depth info and use that as a simple controller, you can control a goofy theremin, map the depth info onto 3d nurbs, and colorize the depth info.

    Screenshots are below…I have video, but it’s not very interesting, so a photo will have to do.

    (CLICK FOR LARGER VERSION)

    Freenect-screengrab

  • The Wobbulator

    I was finally able to cobble together a video for Nam June Paik’s Wobbulator. It was one of my favorite pieces of equipment during my residency at the Experimental Television Center, and I was confused about why there wasn’t a lot of information out there about it on the web. There are a few grainy youtube videos but they don’t show a lot of the exterior of the device or any of the real time manipulations, so I wanted to make a little educational video. Most of the Wobbulator’s source images in this video were either from a camera pointed out a window, or just from straight video feedback.

    For a lot more information, check out the Experimental Television Center’s website in their Video History Project area. There are tons of great articles on early analog video tools and techniques, but in particular there is a very detailed article on the wobbulator. Just to give you some more info, here is the first paragraph of the article on the device:

    A raster manipulation unit or ‘wobbulator’ is a prepared television which permits a wide variety of treatments to be performed on video images; this is accomplished by the addition of extra yokes to a conventional black and white receiver and by the application of signals derived from audio or function generators on the yokes. The unit is a receiver modified for monitor capability; all of the distortions can thus be performed either on broadcast signals or, when the unit is used as a monitor, on images from a live or prerecorded source. Although the image manipulations cannot be recorded directly, they can be recorded by using an optical interface. The patterns displayed on the unit are rescanned; a camera is pointed directly at the picture tube surface and scans the display. The video signal from this rescan camera is then input to a videotape recorder for immediate recording or to a processing system for further image treatment. The notion of prepared television has been investigated by a number of video artists and engineers; this particular set of modifications was popularized by Nam June Paik.

    I also made a quick music video with the wobbulator as a key component…check it out here

    For more on my experience at the experimental television center check out a few of these links
    [1] [2] [3] [4]

    This video is now featured on Rhizome, Create Digital Motion, Hack a day, Makezine, Wired and Notcot among others

  • Warm-up Exercise for a Visualist

    Enter a pitch black room. Bring nothing inside with you.

    1. Using just your body, make every kind of sound you can think of. Use you hands, feet, and voice or interact with the room itself. Careful, it’s dark in there.

    2. Using just your body, light up the room.

    The exercise is finished when you have generated enough light to find your way out of the room.

  • Quartz Composer Example: Toss image

    When posting Twitfeed and Wiipaint, I forgot about this other example of mine. It was one of my first attempts at using QC 4’s physics patches and it came out pretty well just by messing with the Apple examples. It allows you to give it a folder of images, and based on a simple pulse trigger (in this case, the space bar), it spits out another image on top of the old one. They all kind of pile on top of each other and have a nice, natural spring motion to them. It’s not the cleanest patch in the world, but let me know if you have any questions about deciphering it…a lot of the magic is in JavaScript for ease of logic, but I am the world’s sloppiest JavaScript programmer.

    Quartz Composer – Toss image quartz example (2510 downloads )

  • Quartz composer examples: Twitfeed and WiiPaint for VDMX

    Just a couple old examples that people used to ask for or could possibly find useful. The first is good ol’ WiiPaint which is a sort of lame way to use a Wiimote with VDMX or quartz composer, but it allows for drawing, erasing and color changes.

    Quartz Composer – WiiPaint (1307 downloads )

    I also made a quick patch out of the RSS feed reader patch in Quartz and set it to search for tweets and display them in real time. It is a good choice for overlays at an event where there is a specific #hashtag. It displays each tweet and allows for control of color, and duration of each tweet, as well as accepting text input for a search term. Enjoy! PLEASE NOTE: DUE TO TWITTER API CHANGES IN JUNE 2013 THE RSS FEED NO LONGER WORKS. Sorry 🙁  Quartz Composer – Twitfeed quartz comp (2593 downloads )