Live Visuals 101

OK, here it is! The blog post with the gory details.

Obligatory New Year's Post - 2015 edition

For the last few years I've been doing a round-up post at the end of the year (2014, 2013), and this year has been the craziest I've had in a long time. I find it really useful to get things down in review, if for no other reason than it's handy to keep myself in check. Admittedly I almost slacked off this year, but actually more than ever I have an important (and possibly surprising) new year's resolution to set out for 2016. I'll probably miss a bunch of stuff, but here's the gist.

So, the big news then was undoubtedly the arrival of baby #2 - Edward (Eddie) Hett:

Generative print series

For the last year or two I've been doing a lot of live visual performance work - initially via the Algorave movement, leading on to countless chiptune gigs and even the odd festival. This has been a lot of fun, and is very creatively fulfilling, but of course in my usual manner I've tried to keep the momentum up and use my live work to power other stuff.

The latest outlet for this is my new print series, which I've started to put together using my livecoding work as a source. The transient aspect of performances is what really interests me about doing things live - once the set has finished the code no longer exists - and I wanted to really try and capture that in some way.

Obligatory New Year's Post - 2014 edition

Right, so: 2014 is about up, and it's been a blast. I thought I'd try and bash out some words like I did last year. It's quite interesting looking back at what I wrote last time around - I definitely did achieve most of the resolutions I set out for myself, and failed on a few too, but either way the direction everything has gone in this year caught me by surprise as much as anyone (this is definitely a good thing).

Dan vs the Manchester Algorave

So last week I finally got to try out some visual work in a live setting, at the Manchester Algorave. It was easily the oddest thing I've ever done with computers, and has absolutely sealed the deal on me doing more of this kind of work - I got to prove to myself I can throw down in a live setting, it was a great opportunity to find out what works and doesn't work (both in terms of my approach, and the software), and most importantly it was hugely inspiring watching so many killer devs/musicians/creators making so much amazing noise!

Coding and raving and workshops, oh my!

If you follow me on twitter/facebook/whatever you'll have no doubt seen me excitedly waffling about the livecoding stuff I've been noodling with recently - I thought it might be wiser to put it all in one place and then you guys can have your feeds back.

I've been working with Cyril a lot recently - it's become my go-to weapon of choice for live-coded visuals, and I like it so much I've started breaking it open a bit and added stuff I want in it. I'm certainly neither a C++ guy or an openFrameworks guy, but what better way to learn than by dicking around with something you barely understand, right? Right. Of course, aside from the fact I selfishly wanted a few features adding right this second, it's also a good chance to start unselfishly giving something back to one of the open source projects I love, and Cyril has been a solid place to start.