Convergence III

2011.05.28



It's been called the "festival in a building." Get free body work, participate in salon discussions on various topics, sample local wine, see performances, dance all night long and meet new, interesting and beautiful people.

The Convergence is born from the conscious collaboration of a community.

Join us as we bring together shamans of the electronic arts, ancient technologies of embodiment and sophisticated salons of wisdom.


I was really lucky to be invited to VJ for this event. I've done a couple of gigs like this, but this was by far the biggest show I have done visuals for.  Also, there was a typo on the flyer... I normally go by iVVVj as my VJ name, and iEEEj as my DJ name, but vEEEj was printed on the flyer... I actually like this a lot more and have decided to keep this as my VJ name!

The night started off with shamanistic blessing of the space and African style dance and drumming... very Boulder. The night then kicked into full gear and there were workshops, salon style panels, and of course music all night long.  I met lots of new and interesting people and had a really great time providing visuals for the music the night.

Shpongletron

201104
The Boulder Theater







So I'm pretty much over this acid-techno type of music, but I am still interested in seeing what these artists are doing visually as well as with their music.  Simon Posford is a world-famous DJ from the UK and tours under many monikers, such as Shpongle and Hallucinogen.

Shpongletron

Communikey11!!

20110413-20110417

Opening Night at Bombay Bistro

Wow, it was only a week ago, but time is just flying by.  Communikey, for those of you who don't know is Boulder, Colorado's Festival of Electronic Art and Music.  Check out past year's festivals.  I've been involved for the past 3 years, and attending for the past 4.  This was the fourth edition of the festival, and it was a tremendous success.  My role is to act as technical lead at various venues and assist with tech issues as they arise.

Normal Ones and Jason from offthesky in the ATLAS Black Box
  
This is a fairly media heavy post, so please bear with the loading times :)  And there's lots more after the break and on Flickr and YouTube.

 

Pulshar at the ATLAS Black Box

A Digital Media Explosion

Well, the end of February and beginning of March certainly kept me away from my creativity time.  Fortunately, now that my employers are all on Spring Break, I've had the chance to work on some music, video, patching, and all kinds of art.

A sample from one of my Glossom collections...
I suggest you try it for at least give it 1 second,
it is interactive and is a unique concept.

My main goal has been to continue to increase my net presence... to I've added quite a few social networking sites to the mix.  Twitter (@iEEEj), Scribd (a site to publish papers), and my personal favorite, Glossom.  This site lets you create a collage of your work (video or picture or text w/ links) in a grid you must conform to.  It is a very interesting concept, and I suggest checking it out if you have any things you want to share on the microwebs.

Additionally, I've been making lots of digital art, both music and video.  I even overloaded my Vimeo upload limit, so I have to wait a week to post "Digital Paint : in 2 movements" (the second video).  So here are a some of the videos that I made over the past few days... I'll give some details after each one.

Fact of Life

This is a sound responsive physical and digital melding. The video is of TriLEDs (LEDs that can output any combination of red, blue, and green). They are controlled by filters that respond to the music being played. There's a little editing at the end, but it was just to keep the piece short.

... Yes there's more; I figure if you're interested I might as well just keep it all on the same page...

Let's make some hip-hop... why not?

So my friends Mike and Morgan have been making some hip-hop songs at their cabin up in the mountains.  This inspired me to mix some lyrics to a couple of my songs.  The first is a combo of Five25 (an acoustic song of mine) with Method Man and Redman.  The second (after the break) is an old Latchkey Kids song spliced up with ODB lyrics.

These aren't the most kosher lyrics in the world, so if you offend easily, just don't listen.

OGcheebacheeba (feat. Method Man and Redman)



  OGcheebacheeba (feat. Method Man and Redman) by iEEEj

DIY is easier when you actually have time to do it yourself...

Customized Electronic Music-Stand

So a tremendous advantage to existing in this liminal period between graduation and the 'real world' is the amount of time I've had to work on projects that I want to do.  Before graduation, I had 8 posts to my blog over the course of two years.  Now, after backBlogging, and with the work I've done this year (17 posts in January so far) I have officially made it to 50 posts (actually the most recent post was #50, but who besides me is really counting?).  Another advantage of all this time is that I've been able to tackle some DIY projects I had been putting off.

Electronic Music-Stand:

Front of Hardware

I have a customized music stand that I made some time back (featured in my article on Scoring for Film).  Instead of just being a music stand, I added some hardware that I harvested from an old flatscreen monitor.  This lets me mount it to the stand.  The clever part of all of this is that there is a release button on the backside of the monitor that would normally be blocked off.  So I drilled a hole for the button so that it can be pushed from the other side of the stand. (Notice I did a lot better job the second time). I can then see what is on my computer screen without being hunched over a laptop... very convenient.  However, when I first built it, I placed it to far off to one side, and the whole stand was very unstable, sometimes threatening to fall over onto some of my other instruments.  

The Arc... and The Future of Music Controllers

monome.org - The Arc

 

 

So, one of the things that I like (but also one of the things that scares me) about technology is how quickly the hardware and software we use changes.  There are many approaches to address this problem, and one is to read as much as possible about what is on the cutting edge.  Recently, on createdigitalmotion.com they featured a new digital music controller made by the same folks at monome.