I bought a giant plotter.

I bought a new toy. Specifically - I bought an insanely massive and very heavy, A1-sized, Roland DPX-3300 XY plotter from the 1980's. It is now sitting in my office taking up all the space until I sort some studio space out, and I'm very happy with it.

Anyway, I have big plans (creatively and physically) for it, and I've already discovered a few neat things, so I thought I'd jam a post together with some photos and musings.

The most important part for now is... it works:

Live visuals image dump

As detailed in my last post, I've been capturing my live visuals sessions and creating print pieces from them:

Sharing is caring, and I promised I'd upload every single image I captured. It took a while, but I've uploaded the complete set of Manchester and Sheffield Algorave captures to Flickr at full resolution. I used their basic but quite handy Uploadr tool, which you can just point at a directory and leave running, which is useful. The only drawback I found was that it sets everything private by default, so afterwards you have to batch the permissions, but apart from that it was painless (albeit a bit slow).

I also have the complete set as a compressed archive if anyone really wants the whole lot, let me know.

These images are distributed under the Do What The Fuck You Want license, and I invite you to take them and do whatever the fuck you want with them, as per the complete terms in the license:

0. You just DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO.

The total image set is comprised of 5,665 images split into logical sets, making a total of just over 10.5GB of data. This is after trimming out any black images that got caught up between sets etc, and the Flickr uploader also removed anything it deemed to be duplicated, so each image should be wholly unique.

Here's some links to the individual sets:

• Manchester (part one) - 1836 images
• Manchester (part two) - 865 images
• Sheffield (part one) - 889 images
• Sheffield (part two) - 673 images
• Sheffield (part three) - 1402 images

And of course the finished prints are still up for sale if you feel like supporting your friendly neighbourhood printmaker.

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.