More, and best seen larger at COLT+RANE.

via @whoisstan

Directly above is the first video I’ve uploaded to my rayweitzenberg YouTube account. Combined with the few from the original lightwerk account, I’ve now got 4 videos up since October 2005. You can expect this pace to quicken, as I’m working on creating clips for Sound Noir visuals.

For the last several weeks I’ve been frantically working in several directions to pull material together to be used as visuals for this upcoming Friday’s Sound Noir event.

I knew I wanted to work with VDMX, as in a conversation a while back, Benton had recommended focusing on it. I started there and began working with Quartz Composure to create compositions to mix with. I was quickly overwhelmed trying to learn two new substantial pieces of software at the same time.

Thankfully, when Rebecca was over last week she was able to help me focus and suggest a bit of direction.

In showing her all of the media I’ve been collecting, Rebecca pointed out that Brian Eno’s 14 Video Paintings (1981 & 1984), as found on the great UbuWeb, is so ambient that it could be looped throughout the entire night. Sounded good, but what then? Rebecca next suggested that with the slight amount of time I have left, I should focus on collecting or creating loops to mix into the ambient background.

I’ve got maybe 70 short, very glitchy video loops that I showed Rebecca as well. She was into those, but also recommended building out more of an archive to pull from. Problem is I don’t know much about video art / motion graphics, so I asked her how to find more material. She said, the same way I’d found 14 Video Paintings.

She was very right. I put more time into the UbuWeb Film & Video collection. There’s a ton up there, but to keep things simple I’ve focused on creating short loops from the Pipilotti Rist compilation.

And that brings us back to the video above. I don’t know video editing software at all, or didn’t a couple hours ago. So this afternoon I set myself at learning how to cut clips out of the Rist compilation to be used as loops. The video you see above is one of my first edits, and so you know, the track playing is DJ Mujava’s Township Funk.

With the time I’ve got left, I can’t say what more of the documentation of this process will be collected on Limitless Pulse. But if I find the time, or need the diversion, I’ll look to post more material in this space.

Well, yes… it’s August! What did you expect??

It had been a long time in the coming, but a couple weeks ago we launched the updated version of CScout.com. I’d held off on telling people about it until the bugs had been worked out, and now it’s finally at that point.

Today I made just one more adjustment to the site. The displayed image for the Trend Blog panel in the lower right is dynamic; it pulls the first image in the latest blog post. Initially it was grabbing the full sized image and only displaying its upper right portion, but today I coaxed the images to scale to 300px wide and have any vertical overflow hidden.

Have a look, and let me know what you think.

RT @koopstakov: Whatever you do tonight, do not take acid and watch this video

http://www.whosthecutest.com/

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Overt, but very much where I’m at at the moment. It’s been a rough night, but I’m very much appreciating those around me.

As previously mentioned, I experimented with bokeh for the visuals at the last Sound Noir party.

We’re working on our next event, and at one of our last meetings, Jacob suggested I just do more of what I’d done last time around. This has come up before, and my feeling is that one wouldn’t enjoy, and would likely loose respect for, a DJ who always played the same set every night. Why then would a person be satisfied with a simple rehash of the visuals from a prior party?

At the same time, because the last party ended prematurely, and because significantly fewer people were able to see the installation, I’m thinking there’s still room to incorporate some of those preexisting ideas.

What I don’t want to do, is to simply duplicate what we’ve already seen.

For research on a particular project at CScout, I found the two images in this post. In particular, the one to the left made me realize the same theme still has room to grow.

I’ve been collecting lots of different types of material for the next party. In addition to the static slides, there are a bunch of animations I’m building and turning into video loops that’ll be mixed with one another, but I think, yes, bokeh could hold its own next to these other elements.

Watch this space to see how the visuals are progressing. With some of the tools new to me, this will be as much an exploration for me as for you. However, I intend on this documentation to be as esthetically pleasing as (I hope) the final result.