As my visuals project has evolved, I’ve named each version after the event I was working towards. Last week, hopeSYSTM gave way to aeroSYSTM.

vade and I played like rockstars with the amazing and lovely Aerostatic for last Friday’s Eyewash. Back in 2007, Anton did a music video for one of their songs which had some footage of me in it. For the performance, we played a live remix of Funck, and it was fun taking a more active role this time around.

After the frustration of the first interface written in Processing, I ported it to Max 5. I’ve always grumbled about learning Max, but all of the niceties of the interface widgets made my life so much easier. Yay for bona fide buttons, sliders, and knobs.

old:

new:

I’m very partial to code that looks like code (that is, text editor windows full of text) in general, but breaking with habit saved me a lot of frustration. In Max, I worked faster, was better able to tweak values and placements, and had fewer bugs when duplicating and reconnecting sections (very nice when the only visible text is the params that have to be changed for each control).

I’ve come a long way since I first tried Max in 2006 and refused to wrap my head around it. So far, I have the interface and OSC communication working really well, so my next job is to fix some of the mess in the effects code and build more of them.

PS: I had to look up the Eyewash URL, and googling “eyewash monkeytown” brought up this photo from when Anton played there in July 2007. That’s me in the middle with my pink tipped hair and odd shirt. :)

My debut as outpt playing at HOPE went really well. :) After some eleventh hour efforts to write the controller, it went off without a hitch and I had an excellent time jamming with Anton and Paris. The next step is to squash the bug in the assembler code effect, rewrite the controller using Mrmr, and find out just how much I can add to it before Processing bursts into flames.

Some video shot that night:

Music @ the Last HOPE from Collin Cunningham on Vimeo.

And some new captured footage straight off the screen.

SYSTM (music: Plaid - Assault on Precinct Zero) from outpt on Vimeo.

This weekend is the last HOPE, the hackers conference at Hotel Pennsylvania. Tonight is my debut as a visualist playing a set with Anton and also mixing with Paris. I’ve written two brand new Processing sketches for the occasion to munge and visualize some UNIX kernel code.