War Against the World

Recently, certain theocratic groups have been a constant source of news. It is my view that politics and religious fanaticism do not mix well at all.
Even in "liberal" Finland, there's been statements such as "the government has gotten its mission from God", and that God is to be feared. It follows that the government's mission is a fearsome one; and that much would seem to be true. Be that as it may, it looks like the powers that be have shed their pretense of being empowered representatives of the people, and elected instead to answer to a "higher calling" (other than the Christian Party, which has always been like that, I suppose).
In fact, on close inspection, a lot of finnish society is influenced by christian theism - and many would like to keep it that way (eg. certain songs being sung at school). There is also no separation of church and state, here: a few christian sects have the prerogative of collecting tax, and are formally supported by the state apparatus. Even the flag has a cross on it, by jiminy!
Here is a video production that plays with some of these themes.


It was originally meant for the Wild compo at the aptly named JumaLAN 2016 (Jumalan = of God). Unfortunately, I was unable to book edit times for the last parts before the party, so I sat on it for a while and now released it at Simulaatio 7, where it got disqualified. The name is from a series called Black Sails that deals with piracy in the West Indies. My political standing is firmly anarchist, but I've voted Pirate in the past.
An effect in the video, I'm sure you can tell which one, is a re-hash of pakkoruotsi by HTeL. Here's the video capture of that:

It is a protest demo against mandatory swedish education. Christendom came to Finland from Sweden by way of the sword, so I think the placement of this demo within my work is apt. But, rather than take the path of the aggressor and follow the finnish adage "what would remove evil if not evil?", I think we should adapt to this teaching of the Master, the One-well-gone, Buddha:

putting away all unkindness to sentient beings, he abstains from destroying life. He lays aside the cudgel and sword and, full of humility and pity, he is compassionate and kind to all creatures that have life

(emphasis mine)
And, thus, we come to the main themes of this productions, which are the overt and covert symbols of violence in our society. I, for one, feel a decrease, not an increase, in security, when armed thugs and neo-nazi paramilitary forces on patrol cross my path.

Mashup Work

Inspired by a thread on VJForums, here's a music video to a song by tzaeru. Now, I might say that I made it, but I would be wrong.

Meditation Steps

Meditation Step vol 4 - mixed by M-za by M-za

I previously mentioned Meditation Steps - a night of deeper, atmospheric dubstep and other bass massage. The night's performers were M-za, Sipitron, Late
and Vesicle, as well as DJ sets from Suburban Bashers and freeve.





I feel like there's far too little philosophical prattle in this blog, in comparison to the amount that goes on in my head. So, I thought I might as well write down some of it - and I shan't limit myself in pretentiousness, hypocrisy, or any of the other unavoidable vices that follow the arrogance of presuming to know, much less be able to enunciate, anything at all worth saying about the Deep Subjects.
The nature of meditation is splendid food for thought - or, yes, meditation. At its core, meditation is "simply" thought - or "extended thought". But extended towards what? This may be clarified slightly by the following definition:

[...]practices in which the practitioner trains his or her mind or self-induces a mode of consciousness in order to realize some benefit.

So, the thought should extend towards some perceived benefit. That's a nice sentiment, so I'll leave it at that for now, and return to a deeper scrutiny of the "bene" in benefit later.
Meditation, then, is not necessarily about sitting quietly with your eyes closed, in deep concentration; I feel that at its best, meditation is an ongoing process, and the mode of consciousness that strives to "realize some benefit" a permanent state. Then again, I'm a hopeless idealist - but consider: just by dropping one of the "tease", one arrives at "mediate":

to effect (a result) or convey (a message, gift, etc.) by or as if by an intermediary

 I think that's an apt description of the ideal state: to always consider oneself as an intermediary, channeling a better version of oneself into existence. As the I opens to the Spirit, so does the Spirit open the I (hey, you read the small print, didn't you?).

Existence

Since last year's event, I'd been looking forward to the Existence Festival. This time, I had the privilege of contributing: as part of my internship at Wavesum, I've been doing event visuals (lights & video). Here, I designed and implemented the chill-out stage, which was an interesting indoor venue: a polygonal hall. I used a  Matrox TripleHead2Go to project a panoramic view of a starry sky and some LED lighting to set the mood.



The song is buddhat2 by zov.

Concussion

Concussion from dep on Vimeo.

Concussion from dep on Vimeo.
For a few years now, I've been involved in Concussion Crew, a breakbeat oriented group from my town, Tampere. Concussion's got a radio show on NuBreaks every two weeks (podcast archive). In addition, we try to put together dubstep/drum'n'bass/breaks/etc parties when we can. The last such occasion was on October the 16th. The night was a blast, as you can hopefully gather from these pictures by Jussi Punamäki:

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I enjoy parties where I have a bit more time to prepare and plan ahead, which is one of the reasons that I like working as part of the Concussion collective. This time, we'd taken inspiration from the header image at our website, and gathered some old televisions to use as stage decorations.

 

The TV's were fed an image from vvvv, through a karlklomp style dirty mixer where it was mixed with the output from an aptly named Video Technology Rhythmic 8 synthesizer. The raw combination of the sound to the composite video signal results in some nice glitches, that can be controlled quite well with the synth's features. A nice point about the installation was that all parts were recycled.

Ministry of Sauna: Space

About a year ago, Spinni hosted their last Ministry of Sauna party. Check out the gallery by Jussi Punamäki!
MoS is an annual tradition, and one of my favorite recurring events. In addition to being an awesome party, there is an element that makes it stand out: as the name suggests, the chillout stage is an actual sauna. If you've never tried relaxing to ambient electronica in a sauna environment... well, it comes highly recommended by yours truly.
Unfortunately, there's been some pressure from the greyfaces at the student union for Tampere University of Technology. Long story short, if it's up to them, there won't be another installment in the Ministry of Sauna series - and, since Spinni is a sub-organization of the student union (like all clubs hosted within the university), not to mention that the union owns the sauna building that has served as the venue, it is up to them.
Well, here's hoping the people in charge will come to their senses - or, rather, manage to rid themselves of same for a while, and discover fun! Meanwhile, enjoy a short clip from MoS: Space.



The middle part showing the surface of the moon is NASA World Wind being controlled with a a Wiimote using a patch that I made in vvvv. This was running when I wanted to dance or, you know, go to the sauna, and no one was there to stand in for me running the visuals.

teemu t - De09 | De21

My friend teemu t made a couple of music videos that feature me:





They're shot with a Canon EOS 450D using EOS Movie Record. The editing is done in Resolume 2.41 (direct link), featuring some animations done with Bryce.

Researchers' Night: The Alternative Experiment

Update: here is a longer video of our performance at Omat Laitteet. Still no recording from Kouvola - I'll make a separate post when we get it.

Valmet Children performed as part of the programme for European Researchers' Night in Kouvola. Researchers' Night is all about making science & research interesting to the public, and this year's theme was "the brain as a tool", so it was an excellent fit for our show, which featured the Force Trainer in action for the first time, with both sound and visuals linked to its input.
Here is a short report of the event by AltParty, who organized some of the content, including our performance, in collaboration with the Kymenlaakso College.


 It was really great to play live again - it'd been two years since our last gig when we started practicing in earnest, and I think it's fair to say that we've developed a lot since then.
Our "dress rehearsal" for this show was at Omat Laitteet, a monthly electronic music open stage club here in Tampere with an emphasis on supporting the marginal. I've been blown away every time I've gone there, and I can offer my heartfelt recommendation for anyone in the area to go check it out. Their writeup includes a short video by ODMSys, who ended up playing with us at Kouvola!
We're hoping to put together a full-length DVD of the concert, so stay tuned.

Assembly 2010

Last weekend was spent as Assembly 2010. And what a weekend! Too bad I forgot my camera, so no pictures. Here are the entries, AssemblyTV coverage, full results and pouet page for the party, though.
I VJ'ed at the raves on friday and saturday nights. Shouts to Sequence for hosting them!
A modified version of the spiral effect I wrote about earlier competed in the Real Wild competition. Of course, the production is a demo in itself (it's realtime generated, after all), but it's actually more conceptual than that. The idea is that the "demo" functions like one of David Langford's BLIT images: it acts as a seed that triggers certain events in the brain. So, the brain is the "real" demo platform here. This production came 6th out of 7.
I also contributed slightly to bilotrip's entry for the demo competition. Here is the production:

Our placement was 9/11. This time, "we" means:

• Visuals: visy + dep + pahamoka
• Graphics: ilmarque + oasiz
• Soundtrack: Valmet Children (error303, ilmarque, letq, visy)
• Other valuable input: mankeli, miiro, setok, blueflame, 216, viznut

The name of the entry, as well as some other elements contained therein, is a reference to COINTELPRO, a series of CIA dirty ops against undesirables. This was at a time when Timothy Leary was called "the most dangerous man in America" by Nixon, for promoting an alternate lifestyle that included the use of LSD. Meanwhile, the CIA was also running another operation, codenamed MK-ULTRA. This operation was about experimenting on unknowing human subjects - with, among other things, LSD. So the US government was busy banning the use of psychedelics by her citizens, while, at the same time, they studied the use of these same substances for purposes of war and mind control. And the legislation spawned by this kind of thinking has spread all over the world through the United Nations.

More VJing

A clip from Spinni's NoStatus party, April 17, 2009.
Me on the visuals, Ville Lope DJ'ing.

Setlist:
Martie vs Stevy Forello – Fragile Thoughts (Cressida Remix) [Colorful]
Ville Lope – Sun Will Follow You (Marko Kantola Remix) [Subtraxx]

No Status AV Clip from dep on Vimeo.

Some videos

Finally, I got around to uploading a clip of my VJ'ing. This is from Spinni's Splendid House (May 2009):

Splendid House AV Clip from dep on Vimeo.

DJ'ing by Sam Lainio.

This one is a remix of Size Antimatters by ASD. Music by Valmet Children. It was made for the Size Antimatters remix event held by Enough Records.

Size Antimatters (Valmet Children Dark Ambient Mix) from Valmet Children on Vimeo.

For comparison, here is the original demo as a video capture:

time for the percolator

With a disk cover like this, you can't go wrong!

This weekend's Finnish Amiga Party gave me the motivation I've been looking for to try out VideoTracker, an Amiga program designed for making audiovisual productions. The Amiga module format makes syncing to instruments a breeze. The VideoTracker software is quite sophisticated for its time, with features like a plugin API. I've just barely scratched the surface of what's possible in this video. I hope someone who's actually capable of coding their own effects on the Amiga becomes interested enough to do something with this program.
Anyway, here's the video, with a banging track by aegis. Oh, it placed second out of four.

time for the percolator from dep on Vimeo.

WJ-MX10 Luma key mod

I finally got around to attempting to add luma key capabilities to my video mixer. My device is, in fact, a Blaupunkt DVM-1000, but since it is a 1:1 clone of the Panasonic WJ-MX10, and the MX10 is far more popular, I will refer to it as an MX10.
So what's this project all about? Well, the MX10 has the ability to key out elements based on luminance ("luma key"). However, you cannot use the other video channel as the background - only a solid color. This is pretty stupid, but luckily, there is a relatively easy mod that's supposed to get one around this limitation. Having tried it, I can say that not only does it work, it actually adds a lot more creative potential to the device than I ever hoped for, becase the way it works is that the "White" channel is replaced with either input channel. This means that in addition to using it with the Superimpose effect (to get luma key functionality), you can use it with the Fade control as well. By setting the Fade control out channel to White, you can fade between the two input videos, and use the wipes at the same time! Of course, you can still fade/key to white by using the background color.

Alright, let's get moddin'! Cracking open the mixer reveals the circuit boards. Our interest is in the mixer board, which is in the center in the picture.

mixer board in the center

 The DVM-1000 boards are riddled with MX10 markings

Our two targets are IC 6 and connector 4:

IC6 and connector 4

The original instructions tell us to "cut the grey wire that runs to connector 4 - pin 7". Here's a closeup of the connector:

The grey wire is connected to the center pin of a SPDT switch. The other pins connect to pins 4 and 7 of IC 6:

IC 6, with new wires

I added a piece of electrical tape under the connections

And there you go. Now when you select "white" as your background (in the "Colour select" section of the superimpose effect, not the back color selector), you should get the video channel instead. I might put up a video demo later, but I think you get the idea.
I've rehosted the original instructions (originally hosted at http://x.sysx.org/vsv/MX10mod.html, which is now dead, and modified by LEVEL6 of leper.org, which also seems dead at the time of writing), as well as a series of pictures by vjforums member Kyle.

FFGL Plugins

ScrollStrip and Static plugins at work
Last summer, I made some FFGL plugins for use with Resolume Avenue. I've been thinking about doing more and eventually releasing them, but haven't gotten around to it yet, so here are the ones I have. They're mostly just simple functionality that I felt was missing from Resolume 3 (coming from 2.41) when it was released.
On a related note, I've started an Assembla space for FFGL plugin developers. You can find it here. Assembla offers some useful functionality for developers, such as a Wiki and version control. It should be joinable for all, so all you need to do to take advantage of it is join Assembla (it's free), log in and join the space.
Anyway, here are the plugins. They are Windows builds, but sources are included for all except the first two:

• TimeSwitcher - A simple FFGL mixer plugin, like the Timeswitcher mixer in Resolume 2. Unfortunately, I've lost the sources.
• Stroboscope - A simple FFGL Stroboscope source plugin. Same here - no sources :(
• Static - Simple whitenoise, with options for grayscale and two-tone noise. Has sources :)
• ScrollStrip - A filmstrip-like FFGL plugin (see image). Shaders not required.
  

Sine wave generators for Resolume 3 and 2

I wanted to take a look at the new ActionScript support in Resolume 3(.1.1). So, I ported an old test I had done, with much the same purpose, for Resolume 2.41. It's a simple sine wave generator. Too bad Avenue does not support sending FFT data to Flash, like Resolume 2 did - this would be really easy to turn into a spectrum analyser kind of thing if it did.
Download links (including Flash project files and Resolume compatible swf files):

• Resolume 2 
• Resolume 3 Avenue