Limitless Pulse

via create/communiqué

I’ve noticed the design work for Jazz at Lincoln Center for a while, always being impressed how its been handled.

This evening I saw a subway add that prompted me to take a look at jalc.org when I got home. What I found wasn’t nearly the same as what I’d seen, but was equally nicely done. Below are a few of my finds.

Above are two images made using Occipital’s 360 Panorama iPhone app. If you haven’t seen types of images, you can click and drag the image to see the 360° view. Here are the fullscreen versions of the top and bottom images.

As with the HDR images I’ve been shooting, I’m attempting to produce the pictures the apps weren’t intended to make. Yes, there are tons of apps that filter images shot with smartphones, but at the moment I enjoy making my own manipulations.

Again, it must be said, everything you see above was captured in camera.

On a tangent, when I first started attempting to place some of these images on this site I was embedding the fullscreen versions in iframes. This brought page loading to its knees. I don’t know when the featured finally appeared, but Occipital now has embeddable versions of all the images one uploads to their site. This is a much more streamlined way of accomplishing the same goal.

Who else is shooting with 360 Panorama? I wanna see your pics!

In the Hungarian countryside in 1999 I was confronted by an image that struck me, and that’s stuck with me since.

Walking through a valley at the festival I’d just arrived at, I saw an incredible display of light projected into nearby trees. The projections were static, but because of their patterns, details were forced throughout the trees, hitting branches and leaves both up front and extending all the way to their backs.

As I said, the slides were static. Additionally, they were simply white in color, and honestly, the patterns projected were fairly primitive. In spite of the simplicity of the elements, the one factor that made monkeys dance was the 3-dimensional nature achieved through the novel application of this light on its “screen.” To add to that, as one moved around the installation, features would be simultaneously heightened and obscured changing the viewer’s perception of, and relationship with, the piece.

Yesterday I described the installation at Cameo that I’m up against this Saturday. Considering my options immediately took me back to 1999.

I’ve spent a decent amount of time today preparing for the event. That time has been spent building JavaScript animations which will then be turned into loops before finally being filtered and controlled by VDMX. The image above is one of a dozen pieces I’ve built.

As I mentioned yesterday, the overarching objective has been to simplify the loops I’ll employ. After putting in the time today, I’m sure it can be done, and done to my satisfaction.

Elements of this video, composed of Cassini photographs of Saturn, are very much in line with what I want to do at Sound Noir come Saturday.

The installation at Cameo Gallery that’s used as a screen to project onto is fairly difficult to work with when using the typical raw material I’ve got for visuals. The installation is a large array of hanging strings. It’s beautiful, but doesn’t lend itself well to the video loops I’ve been using.

The loops Larry and I were using at the June 11th, Sprinkles / Sweeney party became ridiculously abstracted when viewed from any perspective outside of straight on. Only from where I was setup did the projections make sense. From anywhere else in the room, it was just mushed up colors.

After learning how the installation functioned the last time around, I decided I wanted to pare down the content of the loops that I intend on using at this Saturday night’s party. The animation above is my first attempt at creating the loops that I hope will make more sense in the space.

Actually, the animation above would still be too noisy to use. In it there are four images layered and set in motion. I’m certain that the speed of those loops would make for too much noise when thrown on the installation, but the extremely basic animations I’m making don’t make sense when viewed on this site. They’re just too boring in this context.

That said, I’ll likely build a couple examples that I should be happy with both at Cameo and here on Limitless Pulse, if an when I do build those examples, I’ll probably post them here for documentation and for my own experimentation and consideration.

I’ve got direction. Now it’s simply a matter of banging out the loops in what’s become a very short amount of time.

Anna and I hiked the Mt. Judah trail on Donner Summit, and more specifically at Sugar Bowl.

As we were coming up to a fork in the trail, a guy with his dog said, yes, we could go up to the top of Judah, but if we were to scurry up to the top of a separate rock outcropping, we’d be treated to some spectacular sights. Spectacular it was.

I’ve also got a full screen version of the image above. Similarly, here’s another shot of the space up top.

An artist found through a tip from Jessica Angel.

Click on the image to see it larger and to explore its precision and detail.

By now you’ve likely seen the flyer for the upcoming Sound Noir party happening back at Cameo on Sept 24th. As I have with previous events and previous flyers, I’d like to elaborate a bit on how this last flyer took shape.

Since reorganizing, we’ve been floating a bit in terms of the creative direction of visuals for our crew. We’ve moved into a new chapter and I’ve been working to differentiate where we’ve come from and where we are now.

The original flyers incorporated strong lines and angles formed by the neon lights we’d frequently mine for raw material. That changed gradually, often times incorporating elements from the installation work being showcased at the events. While the designs would stray a bit from our original branding, they somehow felt cohesive simply based on the way text was consistently treated.

One motif that struck with me was bokeh. Lenny had used it in the flyer for the John Roberts party. Also, I’d previously utilized bokeh in the projections for the fateful party we’d done in Long Island City in March of 2010, as captured in the image to the right by Jonathan Rhamani, so there was some sort of loose consistency.

Is it a stretch, or can you see the evolution of the theme being drawn through the two instances leading up to the finished product at the top of this post?

With influences and history out of the way, let’s take a look at how the most recent flyer was actually produced.

The image directly above is a sample of the screenshots I took of Bjork’s fantastic Biophilia app in action. I wrote about the app a short while back. The “play” portion of the app’s Crystalline chapter showcases the sounds of the track through moving and bubbling circles animated in tandem with the track itself.

What I’d done was to scroll through the entire track, taking screenshots of portions that I found particularly attractive. Next I combed through the samplings and found a couple that I thought might work in support of the information we were looking to convey in the flyer, namely the lineup. Next I tweaked the copy that was to be utilized in such a way that it flowed nicely with the graphic elements.

For myself, the way I’d justified using the Biophilia app was that the basic shapes mimicked the bokeh we’d been employing in the various places I’ve just described above. As for the copy, I approached it in line with the text in the flyer we’d done for June 11th. It was here, with the handling of the copy, that I thought we could build some consistency. Similarly the same treatment was applied to the flyer for the August 13th party with Chez Damier. From where I stand, the angular nature of the text we’ve most recently employed matches that same angularity that we’d originally started with in using the neon lights.

Then the partners came over.

I’m sure none of us really wanted to, but based on the last flyer, I think I can say we all thought we might be at it all afternoon and into the evening. Sitting down together I brought up the designs I’d been laying out. “YES!” came out of Jacob’s mouth instantly. Andrey was a bit more reserved, but also endorsed where it had come to. With a bit of tweaking we were done in 30 minutes.

Because the screenshot was of such low-res quality, from there it was a matter of rebuilding the bitmapped image of the screenshot in Illustrator with vector graphics. Though I’m not the best with Illustrator, that next iteration of the process took shape relatively quickly, and left us with an infinitely scalable version of the entire flyer.

Taking it back to a bitmapped form, I processed the flyer one last time to prepare it for printing 11×14 posters. I sent those off to AdoramaPix tonight and we’ll be picking them up tomorrow to be distributed in various places to help get the word out.

All in all I’m very happy with how this flyer came together.