The piksel worklab will be followed scrutinously by moderator and toastmaster Per Platou and he will look at the work elaborated here during the week with eyes that can look over and under and beyond the code. He will keep you uptodate with the evolvement of piksel here, so please do revisit for updates and analysis.

Please notice :

Unfortunateley all piksel participants and others involved are so deeply absorbed by the various aparitions of the code that livestreaming of all events had to be put to lowpriority. We'll postprocess and put up an archive later instead.

 

about
software
participants
events
log
press
wiki

 

gathering 1

gathering 2

general kurtz


corner discussion


amy appears

salsaman

latenite shared memory


dj anders G

 

 


Kentaro


tough code


Jaromil


Carlo and Gisle


Tom and Yves


Yves


VeeJay crew


Martin


eye-ching


Gabriel


Lives


OSC meeting


Rice pudding


Smoking room fun


OPen discussion


OSC meeting


DJ Yves


admin


Documentation


I never wanted to be a star


salsaman


Happy Rama


Skeezo Crew and Rama


Sara


punk dancin


Kentaro


Kentaros Magic hands


Kentaros Matrix


Kentaro scratching


Scratching



Kentaros groupies


spit king

gentlemen start your engine


open source pizza

 

would you buy pizza from this man?


Amy lecture


Kentaro Sake


martin at work

 

 


sakeparty


møb setup


Møb crew


Ellen performing with Hooman


ellen and erich


purebergercrew


PUREBERGER


PUREBERGER


Erich after gig


dj Anders G


Veejay Crew


Veejay ange


Veejay abstract


Veejay abstract


Gisle and pepe


Veejay dance


double Gisle and Anders


pepe art


pepeart 4


Gabriel moon serenade


our friend


thorolf


Looking for a fox


total eclipse

 

 

 

 

PIKSEL BLOG 0+1


Day 0 - sunday:


Nearly missed my plain from Oslo. Arriving in rainy dark Bergen. A few complications with room bookings at Compact House, err Comfort House. Well, finally manged to check in - it's plain, simple, a bit cold, but at least clean! Posters with "no fancy extras" on the wall, which is
absolutely true :)

Heard from receptionist that "the others" (who is he working for?) were in the assembly room on the 2nd floor, so I went there and - big surprise - met a gang of hackers banging away on some code on their respective pc's.. I later learned they were Jaromil, Tom, Simon, Carlo and Artem. We all went eating at PastaCentralen, peeped into Landmark and then went to Dyvekes to meet up with Gisle, Ellen and the others. Later more people arrived: Yves, Pedro, Antoine, Gabriel. Last beers at Legal before they closed.

 


Day 1: Monday


Rain. Power break at BEK, server down, technical problems of all sorts. monitors didn't work etc. etc. And Carlo had his video cam and computer fucked up by a new xray system at schiphol.. Shit.

OK, I have very little knowledge of the actual coding in Linux, but know a bit about Open Source on a general/political level. I was wondering how this was going to work out, but I have decided to be open source about myself, and people here are friendly, helpful and understanding. Good vibes.

Short presentation round at BEK from 10.30. Seems that almost one third of the participants are PD/PDP/PDIP based.. interesting.

Anja & the kitchen gang had made a great effort to get us brunch & coffee/tea & fruits. Lots of wandering up&down stairs, in&out doors etc. to find the different spaces: VJ room 1, VJ room2, and the code room,A new participant joined us: Ole from Denmark.


OK - to the point:
The backbone for the whole workshop is the theme of Interoperability between the different programs people here are developing and using, mainly for live/realtime video work on an Open Source platform.

Main challenges:
1 local piping of video (DSP) between apps and modules,
2 streaming video (to a LAN or internet)
3 Common framework for (internal) control API
4 Unique API for plug-ins
---
5 Intermedia (audio/video etc.) synchronisation
6 external control devices

We decided to divide into two main groups, one dealing with 1/2 (VJ lab#1 at BEK), and the other in the code room (KHIB, 3rd floor) dealing with 3/4.

The upstairs group (Tom, Pedro, Simon, Rune, Ole, Yves, Thomas, Mathiijs and Rama) worked pretty anarchistically, and seemed to be pretty clear about their issues: For piping, uncompressed video is and should be the standard, and for streaming one should be able to choose between existing standards. Vorbis was proposed as the "vehicle" of choice for transporting the data, no matter what compression being used.

Group 2 downstairs seemed more organised, and more and more people from upstairs eventually joined them to have a very active and hefty discussion (physically ended up standing in a corner of the code room).

The discussion seemed to evolve around two main questions: whether to use DSO (Dynamic Shared Objects), rather than e.g. shared memory or external process execution (which, if I got this right, is Gabriels choice for his video editing software LIVES).

The main advantages of DSO are:

* portability issues (between linux distributions, between programs and also to other platforms such as mac os x)

* simplicity

Regarding the sync issue over a network, there seemed to be a general notion that one could use the networked time servers to synchronise the machine times over a packet-based network (tcp), however this might prove too heavy to be usable in practice. But some kind of time stamp would be necessary, maybe network/streaming programs should devote a dedicated channel for sync/control data. This is a challenge, and yet not solved, but one might look at how others are solving it (e.g. midi syncing as e.g. in Keyworx.). However Jaromil insisted we develop or use open source technical solutions. And he's right, of course.


At this poing Amy arrived, we started emptying the BCooler and soon
there was dinner time (spaghetti) and chatting.

At 9 o clock Landmark the film Revolution OS at Landmark. Great film, but apparently too nerdy for most people. There were quite a lot of "normal" people when we arrived at 9pm, however most left as the piksel people (who were actually watching the film) started filling up the room. But maybe it was the dark rainy monday evening. Anyway, Gabriel aka VJ Salsaman synced (mentally) up with DJ Anders G, and the show started. Nice visuals and nice music, a somewhat eclectic video mix of dancing people, animals and effect clips (explosions etc.), long colourful shots, nicely blended with Anders' german pervo-cheesy favourites.

The last gang to leave Landmark (we were almost thrown out) was Artem, Antoine, Simon, Gabriel, Martin who arrived during the Lmark show, and yours truly.

We headed for one last beer, were denied at (café) Opera and were warned against going to "Ugla" (the Owl). So we tried "Den Stundesløse", actually a nice big pub with relatively chill atmosphere. Shared memory seemed to was the topic of Artem and Gabriel, while I was pumping Martin
for tacky gossip about Richard Stallman, whom he has met a couple of times, in interview situations for Linux UK magazine.. Saw the big sign at the pub exit saying "be cheerful today, tomorrow you might not afford it". Walking home in the rain about 3pm, approached by some drunken prople looking for "hææmbørdjes . (sorry, can't help you!!)

In bed 3.30 pm. Big day tomorrow - 8 presentations!!

 

 

Day2 - tuesday

 

 

Tight presentation day today. Everyone seems to have said hello to each other, and there is a relaxed and "homey" atmosphere. When I think of it, it is not so strange, since lots of people have been placed in double rooms thus sharing nightly sounds and smells :)

The technical facts/specs and links from each of the presentations will be posted elsewhere on the Piksel site, so I'll just provide some freshman impressions and keywords:

****************************

Kentaro Fukuchi: EffecTV
- Kentaro, one of the pioneers within the Open Source/video movement, did a presentation based on slides ("powerpoint style"), which explains the basic concepts of this program developed in early 2001. Since the mid-nineties Kentaro has developed video apps, originally for his friend Shutaro Oku, and before that with innovative analogue/digital solutions (e.g. filming off a TV screen while twiddling the knobs).

EffecTV is a realtime video app with lots of built in FX, used for theatre, raves, VJ work in general or in installations. The most popular FX so far seems to be "Fire", "nervous" and "radioactive".

Kentaro showed a documentation from a 48h rave by mt. Fuji, where people danced in front of a transparent big screen connected to a single live camera. He pointed out that an interesting evolution of usage of the app has gone from a mere computer-user interaction, to situations where the user actually starts moving in new ways to accomodate a particular video effect, and how he/she then drags other people into the installation to share the experience.

EffecTV is based on videoloopback, and everything in the program is connected to performance with live people.

Except for the Interoperability issues, the immediate future for EffecTV  seems to be in Karaoke business, which is huge in Japan and would no doubt add new playful features.

******************************************

Jaromil is a great resource both in programming and on the field of social activism. He has a broad background from lots of different activities, e.g. performance, theatre, radio, and activism in general. He showed us som of the projects featured on his website rastasoft.org. Very briefly:

FreeJ (latest)
chaining effect, e.g. water, ripple etc. low latency, not simple but effective. Does not have an automatic feature so that the video plays in sync with the music. Jaromil pointed out that he prefers to operate the app manually via keyboard commands where YOU (the VJ) should be in sync with the music, not necessarily the machine.

Audio Streaming software MUSE is a bit older, and is an app to mix together different net-streams, and it also features an icecast streming net radio working right away. (ogg or mp3 format). Mixes 6 streams, from files, live inputs or other streams. scalable to different technical requirements/conditions.

The first software they developed was Hasciicam, a webcam-type video encoder made for low bandwith/framerate. Apparently there are plans to develop it into a videoconference app.

DYNEBOLIC (which was also presented at Landmark in the evening) comes as a free GNU/linux bootable cd. It features a pretty full system including everything from internet apps, games, word processors, graphic programs, utilities, video and audio processing/streaming apps, and lots of other things (totally 444 Mb as per today). One main feature of Dynebolic is the ability to save "nested" preferences for your own setup on a usb device or on a cd, so that you can literally bring the cd and the prefs file and literally use any computer (well, pc only) to use the system.

Dynebolic is a radical and user-friendly solution, running on both slow pc's (586?) and Xbox. The system contains aspects extending far beyond the artistic community, and is possibly the most extensive collection of GNU/Linux suite of programs available. All software authors are duly credited, and the whole project is a great example of the power of collective work and sharing.
This is the first time for several years that I really wish I had a scrappy old pc instead of the shiny new apple 12" powerbook I've just ordered. (Well, at least I've decided to try install Yellow Dog on a partition, a linux distro that apparently is pretty OK on that machine)

 

************


Gisle and Carlo: MøB

Gisle started off by explaining the history and background for this software, and was quickly assisted by Carlo (who couldn't keep away). He soon invited himself to join Gisle at the presentation table and literally took over the show.

MøB is a master/module based system, a patcher for multiple realtime video in- and outputs. Re:actor is the well-known interactive dancehall system developed by Gisle and his Bergen crew, connecting i-cube sensors and laser lights to the multiple inputs, outputs and effect engines of MøB.

They will hopefully try a new version with 12 (!) camera inputs on friday evening @ Landmark. We have phoned Guiness Book of Records.

*******************


LUNCH: Spaghetti pie! (see yesterday). Tasted great though, thanx Anja and Peter + Nelle!!

 

*******************


Tom Schouten: PDP
Yves Dregoyon: PiDiP

Both PDP and PiDiP are modules/libraries for PD, (which can be said to be an open source version of Max). They both seem to be highly flexible solutions for live video work on a linux platform.

PD (short for PureData) is a patch-based framework originally developed for sound, (like Max/MSP), where PDP (a collection of video objects) runs "on top". PiDiP is an "effect rack" that then runs on top of PDP. Yves said that while other apps (e.g. GEM) has moved from a 3D approach into image processing, PDP/PiDiP takes the opposite approach.

Next version will (hopefully) be able to make standalone objects. In terms of interoperability, PDP could either be an object in other apps, or (in principle) the other way round.

It is interesting to note that PD and MAX has evolved from the same source in the first half of the 1990's, and that the audio engine in MAX actually is built upon and around PD (rather than the other way around, which seems to be common belief in the Max community)

Interoperability is a core feature in PD by nature, and it is nice to see that PiDiP originally was built as a port from EffecTV to PDP - 90% of the effects are ports from Kentaros EffecTV. The latest object is a colour/shape tracker - similar to e.g. the classic BigEye app for mac (developed by Tom Demeyer at STEIM in the nineties), or possibly the more advanced tracking features of SoftVNS for max.

*****************


Veejay crew
(Niels, Mathiijs, Dursun)

Veejay is originally a realtime sample-based sound manipulation/editing tool. However it also works with video samples, and is now a fully featured performance tool featuring non-linear editing and mixing from multiple sources. The program allows lots of different picture/sound manipulation, and filter settings/new files can be exported and re-imported on the fly. Veejay features a large number of video effects and frame blending methods.

If I understood the guys right, future development of Veejay includes a built-in time-based linear sequencer.

**************


Martin Howse: ap02 (02?)

As far as I understand ap stands for "Artificial Paradises". More than any of the other projects, Martins project is within the realm of "software art", where the code itself (and not necessarily its functionality) is the "content" of the artwork. One can also say that he developed ap02 last year together with Artem in Rotterdam, and is working on a new version (which will be named ap03 or -04 I guess :)).

Martin had his presentation written down as a raw text file in emacs - green on black, Matrix-style processed by ap02 software read aloud by the speech renderer flite. He then used the raw data from this text file as the input source for ap02, where the video images generated (rough, edgy green/black abstract images). I guess it's not too wrong to say that this presentation of ap02 is a meta-project, where the data used as input is only referring to themselves. Did I hear the term "pseudo-meta data"? (yet another layer)

ap02 is referred to as a virtual computer, an "organism which runs on top of the existing os", or a total environment - an operating system which dynamically re-codes itself, and is recoded in operation.


********************

Gabriel: LIVES

LIVES is one of the first video editors on a GMU/Linux platform, and is originally not a program for live streaming of video, but - as Gabriel demonstrated yesterday at Landmark - it is perfectly possible to grab little snippets of live video and put into the sequencer/editor and play with them in a live situation.

One of Gabriels main concerns for LIVES is that it should have a familiar GUI/interface, so that it is practically available to as many people as possible.

The basic function of LIVES in a live situation is manipulating clips; speed/rgb properties/transparency, direction, loop, copy/paste. It cannot really use realtime video, although one can grab frames from a camera input (or any other adressable screen property, e.g. a screensaver) and use them in the master mix.

The application has lots of effects, some of which are built upon the EffecTV algorithms.

Gabriel showed us the first 8 sequences of his project "eye-ching" (based on i-ching), where the 64 symbols, representing different forms of energy are represented by a dancer doing a 30-sec movement sequence. The dancing girl always start and stop in the same position, so eventually it will be easy to randomize the order of each sequence in a live VJ situation.

Since this is mostly a linear video editing system, Gabriel says he has to leave the cpu-intensive realtime effects to other apps, which again emphasizes the need for interportability - tomorrow's big issue..

*********
*********

The evening programme at Landmark started at 9pm with the screening of "the code" - the finnish-produced documentary about Linus vs. Stallman (same theme and same main characters as yesterdays film "revolution os", but with a noticeable difference in the political angle the producers presented the persons and discussions around the philosophies and pragmatics surrounding the terms of GNU/Free software/Open Source/"corporate" linux.

I had seen the film before on norwegian TV, there arriving a few minutes into Jaromil's public presentation of Rastasoft and Dynebolic. There was a peculiar, church-like atmosphere when I arrived. I have never experienced Landmark like this; almost full of people all sitting completely quiet listening to the evangelism of Open Source and Free Software. Besides everything else, Jaromil is a great communicator who manage to hold a crowd easily (despite the usual "demo-syndromes" of having to restarting the computer, changing prefs, re-figuring the video card etc. etc.). He also has his own fantastic way of answering complex technical questions (I think they were) with sentences cut straight out of the vocabulary of Dalai Lama, or mr. Chance (Peter Sellers in the film "Welcome, mr. Chance").

In the end I think we were all "saved", and people cued up to get the free Dynebolic CDs before Jaromil was joined by Pedro for a spontateous VJ/DJ jam. In the end, long after they closed the bar, people were dancing all over the place. A great day, and definitely a night to remember.

 

 

 

day 3 - wednesday

 

Very slow start this morning, most of us were a bit late for the scheduled morning meeting. In addition there is some confusion about spaces, breakfast, timetable, technical infrastructure and what is actually going to happen when, where and with who.

There were some additional networking problems, the airport/wifi transmitter seems to have taken a break. Well.. well well... We eventually decided to let things roll and to gather people in the cantina at 1pm for lunch/brunch. The Skeezo crew (who arrived yesterday; Lluis, Sara and Jordi) presented themselves briefly.

- The challenges of Artistic Software
After lunch Artem presented challenges he and the V2 gang (under the project name V2-jam - see pdf) are facing when working on "artistic software". He pointed out there are two main directions:

1 Software written for specific artistic purposes/projects.  
Most artists like this solution (because they as a default want to be "avant-garde"), however from a programming point of view its a lot of extra work, and generally a waste of energy. So rather than inventing the wheel every time, one should look for solutions involving pre-existing software with maybe a few line of code implemented on top.

2 The "universal" software approach, where the aim is to develop a software that is highly flexible and modular and could be used for lots of different purposes.
The PD/Max framework is built this way, another solution is for example Keyworx (developed at Society for Old & New Media, Amsterdam), which is a "multi-user, cross-media synthesizer", containing modules for video/sound/text/midi/images where users work on the same canvas and any property can be used as an input for anything else. In practice, Keyworx is a (Wiki-style) live jamming over a network. I have used this software a lot myself, and I think it illustrates practically very well how one can work collaboratively.   However, the drawback (from this workshops point of view) is that the software is mac-only, and not defined as an open source project.

OK, this is how far I got - the programmers/coders got together to discuss further the Interoperability issues. See the wiki page here:

http://www.piksel.no/pwiki/InterOperability

There seems to be a general agreement that OSC (Open Sound Control) is the protocol to pursue for compatibility. This format is simple and powerful and widely used on all platforms (including mac and win) - however the linux libraries are not complete yet.

A question connected to the use of OSC is the choice between UDP and TCP transport protocol. Most people in the workshop seem to agree that its best to leave the choice open to each user.

Those of you wanting to know the technical stuff please have a look at the Wiki, I have to give up here!

****************


Dinner! (fish/potato/leek soup and bread. chocolate pudding for dessert)


****************

The Landmark program in the evening started with Pedro talking about his work with video in theatre. Some beautiful imagery, projected on moveable screens on stage, controlled by the actors via sensors. He mentioned some of the technical difficulties connected to the use of cpu-hungry applications (Max-based), where they ended up having to use three computers for video processing (one for each video projector), and one computer to control them all. He brought up the explicit needs within complex stage work, where cue points have to be in absolute sync between actors and technical machinery.

Mathiijs had brought the BEK-Shuttle with him to show a 15-minute presentation of hi-res audio/video - however there were some technical difficulties so we decided to postpone this show to friday or saturday.

Tom and Yves were next, an audio/video performance using PDP/PiDiP. Loud, mostly abstract sound and video feedback, colourful, high framerate, sound and video extremely tightly connected in the style of either early video experiments by e.g. Woody Vasulka or Joost Rekveld - a young contemporary dutch filmmaker (http://www.lumen.nu/rekveld.html). Artistically this was very consistent - my compliments!!

DJ Anders G was back at the vinyl decks with a friend (U-tek?), playing nice grooves. Kentaro put on his red dancing shoes again, Amy was nodding to the beat and Gabriel was swaying happily in the corner while the Veejay Crew sat got the three screens going with some fresh imagery.

To bed around 2.30 pm, not too bad!! Still 4 days to go.. (but late start tomorrow luckily)

 

 

 

day 4 - thursday

 

Anarchy rules - people show up when they want to and nobody seems to be motivated for organised meetings anymore. With this gang it is a good sign though, loooong nights and too many discussions might get us drunk, but no good for the actual coding.

Artem had to leave today unfortunately, but we were joined by Janet Casey from the Free Software Foundation, and Erich Berger. BT - the local newspaper sent a journalist to interview Gisle, me and Janet. Hopefully something in the paper saturday..

Yves made a comment about artistic software (see yesterday - V2jam). He says the problem is often that artists refuse to learn about existing software, or decline to explore their possibilities - which is why programmers are often asked to do rather uninspiring tasks of inventing the wheel over and over again..

********

The new interoperable framework starting from today is called "Piksel", and most of us have by now joined a discussion group at Savannah to be found at this address:

http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/piksel

The Savannah site as of today contains 252 GNU projects, and 1.694 non-GNU  (of which Piksel is one). Here is Jaromil's posting about LiViDO - Linux Video Dynamic Objects

This project aims to create a general plugin host library to easily embed a shared pool of video effects in multiple software applications.

The library processes plugin chains defined by the application, providing automatic colorspace conversion between filters, extended functions for VideoPiping and support for OpenSoundControl commands.

The implementation of LiViDO emphases on performance optimization and API simplicity, makes use of ccvt YUV/RGB conversion routines and *dlopen(3)* dynamic objects. The video frames are passed as memory pointers and as such a pointer to the resulting processed frame is returned; in case additional memory allocation is required by the selected plugins, the library itself handles their freeing at the close.

***************


Pedro made dinner for us: beautiful indian-style vegetables with nuts, potato mash and fruits for dessert. Great!


***************

Landmark started quietly tonite, although the Skeezo Crew and Rama already had made quite an impact with their quitcase computer setup (see pix).

We are honoured to have Janet Casey from the Free Software Foundation here - she handed out credits to the local BLUG (Bergen Linux User Group) and to all the Piksel people, without whom.... (etc. etc.) For info on the FSF and GNU, please click to http://www.gnu.org .  Some of us were lucky and managed to get out hands on the brand new t-shirts (with "happy hacking" on the front and a beautiful arabic-ornament-style gnu on the back).

Kentaro was next, talking about his SmartSkin project, a sensor architecture based on capasitive sensing technology. As far as I understand, the project is developed at Tokyo University on behalf of Sony. The demo was quick, dirty and funny - especially the demos of "battling hands" went down very well with the public.

Then hell broke loose with Yves on the mp3 players, and Rama + Skeezo Crew on three projectors. Electro, then oldskool punk rock made everyone get on their feet and shake the hips and fists. This went on for about a whole hour. Landmark was literally a VJ war zone, any young Bergen babes or wannabees who entered quickly went out again shaking their heads. Catalunyan, dutch, italian, swahili, english and french were the default languages, louder and louder.. Ecstatic!!

Then suddenly all quiet. Up on a chair went Jordi from the Skeezo crew, in a street performance somehow about Bergen, involving some comments on the weather and lots of spitting! Fantastic!

After that Marike took over the DJ desk, and Jaromil + Kentaro played at Ramas console, writing sly little comments on the bright screen.

Everything has to end, this nite too, but Marike was kind enough to offer a little nachspiel in her flat at Nygaardsparken. I counted 8 dutch people (sorry Tom, you're one of them), 5 catalans, 4 norwegians and 1 french. Four bottles of beers and a joint in the park. Dursun did a rolling stunt.

To bed at 4pm - Dursun did a downhill rolling stunt. Moon is getting fuller and fuller. Help!!!!

 

 

Day 5 - friday

 


The moon is getting bigger and bigger, weather's still fantastic!! Bright & sunny in the mornings (I guess Carlo is probably the only one to notice - he is walking up & down to "Fløyen" every morning), and moooooonlite at night.


Woke up very late today, with a badass headache. The wear & tear of 24/7 activity is now becoming very visible to most of us. 2 valiums and three cups of strong coffee made me feel somewhat human again.


If you arrive somewhere in Africa for a meeting, lets say its scheduled at noon, and nobody's there, you might ask: "When does the meeting start"? People will look at you as if you are really really stupid, because the answer is: "The meeting starts when people have arrived, of course!". The workshop part of Piksel is by now working the african way. Groups of people are doing different tasks (of social or technical nature), and Gisle & I have decided to postpone the "final draft meeting" until tomorrow.


Piksel has turned more and more into a festival, although the hardcore gang is still those who eat breakfast, lunch and dinner at KHIB/BEK inbetween coding, cigarettes and configuring machines.


Today Jaromil took on the task of making pizza for all of us - 4 different ones with only one oven!


******


Landmark again, this evening confortably full but not overcrowded. I arrived just in time to see Amy Alexander's screensaver (Microsoft '98 logo) flying around the screen. Amy Alexander started her little lecture around 10pm, excusing herself about that logo but at the same time stating jokingly that in this collective she is probably the only true anarchist! :) Her presentation was a quick show&tell about her work within the field of net.art (e.g. plagiarist.org ) and visual experimentation with text layering as the performance artist Übergeek. She is also one of the people behind the software repository runme.org , together with a.o. Florian Cramer and Alexei Shulgin.


After Amy's presentation, Ketaro threw a spontaneous Sake Tasting Party (mmm!), before we were interrupted by Übergeek herself, in her shiny silver jacket. To a soundtrack of pumping techno this character whirled around with all sorts of techy gadgets ("air-mouse", keyboard in a neck strap, cd as jewelry), while doing google searches of themes like "love", "valium", and more elaborate sentences - the results all rendered out in old-skool psychedelic patterns, sentences cut off at exactly the right suspense moment (e.g. "I stopped using valium while masturbating because.."). A great show, and big applause.


A quick rigging break, and then Martin Howse was set up at one of the tables with a laptop and the BEK machine, and a weird looking blue USB microscope. His audio output was abstract synthetic loud sounds, and were for some reason (the barman?) soon blended in with some techo chill by resident DJ Anders G. Martins setup is "auto-generative" (partly based on ap02) in some way, meaning that the input of the microscope picture generates the activity on the rest of the screen, mainly abstract formalist 3D-shapes, drawing and re-drawing in different colours and shapes. The peak of the show, in terms of live performance, was no doubt when Kentaro and Gabriel did a jackass-style body exploration with the USB thing.


Carlo is by nature not a night-worker, and Gisle has had 6 million and two other things to do this week, so the MøB presentation unfortunately didn't show its capabilities until at the very end of the night, when most people had left the building. But then, almost as they turned on the lights, some very nice live pictures of the room showed up, blended rhytmically with a movie of a dancer, which was again tracked to generate some abstract shapes. No time for a 12-camera setup as promised earlier, but at least we got a glimpse of some of the possibilities this software can do.


Most people headed home by now, but Thomas took Yves, Martin, Rama, the Skeexo crew and myself back to the art academy, where Jaromil also turned up (he'd been sitting at BEK the whole evening enjoying the fast connection). We found a few beers in the fridge, and a cassette with catalunyan hiphop music. Soon the discussion turned to scripting languages etc., and Jaromil launched the idea of using s-lang in the libraries in the Piksel framework. More about that tomorrow.


In bed 04.51am..zzzzzz


 

day 6 - saturday


Yet another slow start, people are now sleeping everwhere in the BEK/KHIB building, on sofas, chairs and under the desks. The hacker-myth comes true.. (only things missing are the jolly colas and half-empty pizza boxes).


A positive little article about BEK and Piksel in the paper today, read it here <>. It says something like: "Bill Gates - beware. These people are gonna take over the world" (or something like that).


Brunch by Anja - fantastic as ever, today with pasta salads, breads, juice, coffee and lots of different cheeses (among them the dreaded "gammelost" - very old norwegian cheese). Some strange faces.

At 3pm the last general assembly for the Piksel workshop. Some concluding remarks - this is probably full of holes, so hit me with your rhythm stick:


* Jaromil suggested to use s-lang for scripting libraries. Seems like an old (1992), pretty simple and well-proved language, possibly smaller and simpler than Python, but with lots of flexibility and it is definitely effective.

* OSC will from now on be referred to as OMC (Open Media Control, previously Open Sound Control) still protocol of choice, see previous postings.


* Tom and Jaromil started working on the video plugin specifications, which will soon be ready and postet to the Savannah site.


* Streams should anyway be multiplexed, and control&data embedded in the same multiplex stream. Gabriel proposed to embed port specifications witnin the signal to specify where signals should go. Ogg is the default transport protocol (or "container"). As far as I have understood there aren't yet any video compressionalgorithms (as for audio e.g. the wellknown Vorbis), but theora seems to be a start. However video compression hasn't really been an issue at this workshop, what everybody really wants in the end is uncompressed video.


Working conclusions:

* The Svannah site is now up

* FTP site at BEK is up. All videos and pictures etc. etc. will be found here


* The domain piksel.org seems to be available, Gisle will register it and host it at BEK

* The Piksel mailing list will keep running

Pedro has written (oops, sorry compiled) lyrics for the Piksel song "no user no cry". Here is the recorded demo version in Ogg Vorbis and mp3 (where? - loglady)
format featuring Jaromil, Yves and Pedro (thanx to Gijs for transferring). The backing track is here (midi file), and here are the re-written lyrics (Jah bless):


*************


No user, no cry;
No user, no cry;
No user, no cry;
No user, no cry.
said said said i remember trying 2 compile
video software in bergen
download Veejay from sourceforge.net
but im missing all the libs
so i turn my eyes to the Free-J
try 2 install in 3 different ways
only jah knows whats wrong in SDL
if only LIVeS could change our lives
No user, no cry;
No user, no cry;
No user, no cry;
No user, no cry.
Said Said Said i want to make experimental avi
so i turned my work to ap
but the framerate it goes so slow
its the graphics card, you know
try to install P i D i P
but only got as far as P D P
I found mob but carlo was walking up a hill
so all that was left was effecTV
on playstation 3
everythings gonna b alright
everythings gonna b alright
everythings gonna b alright
everythings gonna b alright
everythings gonna b alright
everythings gonna b alright
everythings gonna b alright
everythings gonna b alright
no user no cry
no user no cry
A little darlin', don't shed no tears:
no user no cry
said said said but then janet she came to piksel
and jah send his blessings down
we found the flags for gcc
and we chain the filters with yuv y'see
install s-lang and use ASM to optimize
then we see the new sunrise
jah bless free software it all works
except for some user jerks
but until they've gone
no user no cry
etc.


*************

Before going to Landmark this evening I went with Pedro, Ellen, Sara and Jordi to see Hooman Sharifi's show at Teatergarasjen. An old show (I learned later) consisting of some very dynamic hard body movement, then a badly projected movie ("Harvest" by Anne Lise Stenseth, I have seen it many times before - the ultimate wrinkleporn classic). Then they went into a "political" mode quoting numbers of killed people in Israel and Palestine etc. etc., and thenb engaging with the public. I don't really like this kind of stuff, the piece has a basically postmodern structure (with non-acting theatre as a major part), but I have a feeling they are shopping credibility with the "political" statements, which makes it even less credible. Anyway, Ellen had to lie on the floor for a bit, and I eventually got a kiss on the cheek from the female dancer. So it wasn't all bad.

Saturday evenings at Landmark are for the "others" in Bergen; while the rest of the inhabitants are out in the streets or in noisy discoteques screaming their lungs out (Brann! Brann! Braaann, the Landmark gang is a polite and arty gang. After the second screening of "The Code" (see tuesday), it was time for Peter Votava (aka Pure) and Erich Berger.

The aestethics of the Pure/Berger show is very connected to the now world famous Vienna scene of glitch musicians and artist, mostly gravitating around the record label Mego. Visually it connects very well to the film/video distribution company Sixpack. Erich and Peter's show is aurally and visually very pleasing, a kind of hi-res formalism floating in and out of a/v sync, an organic digital carpet consiting of ambient noise and mostly rectangular visual shapes of colour and retro-counterparts of black, white and gray. Very soothing, and consistent. This could very well have been made into a videotape which would probably have done well in festivals (Rotterdam Film Festival, Viper, Impakt etc. etc.). Oh, I forgot you are all nerds - Peter/Pure is using Max/MSP for the sounds, while Erich does the graphics in PD/GEM.

The Easy Listening project by Gisle has been going in the early evening hours (6-9pm) of Landmark everyday through the Piksel workshop. It is an old project of his, with basically a couple of microphones "listening" to the conversations in the room, and using a speech recognition engine to interpret the sounds and project them as green-on-black words/sentences on the wall. The results are often extremely funny, and if one tries to play with it - it gets worse!!

The end of the evening was Anders G back at the decks (with a friend), while the Veejay crew had a go at the three projectors. It was a rhytmical and colourful mix of diverse video loops, and after a while they connected the live cameras and went through most of Kentaro's EffecTV effects: Nervous, Radioactive, water etc. etc. Some strange behaviour around the tables when people saw themselves on the screen, as if everything finally came toghether then.

Everyone stormed out from Landmark at around 1.45pm, not because the Veejay crew did a bad job, but because the wise man in the sky had decided that the moon would be undergoing a full eclipse this very night. And it happened, very very slowly a shadow came from the upside of the moon and squeezed the light out of the yellow ball. Finally just a tiny smileyface at the bottom, which was about when Gabriel fired up his laptop with some swooshy ancient techno music.

Some of us didn't want to stop after this, so a gang of about 10 people went back to BEK to kill the last beers and a big bottle of Glenfiddich (a gift from Martin), playing Erik Satie mp3 files and discussing war, life and death in a rather philosphical manner.

To bed 05.12, with my radio on (program about Jaques Brel).

 

sunday - day 7


... and on the the seventh day Jah took a siesta.

Great lunch/brunch again by Anja, pasta/pie and fish!

Today is a goodbye day, a few tears, handshakes, smiles and big hugs as people are leaving the scene.

Linus (ellen's 1 year old son) appropriately joined us for lunch, reminding us that we're doing this for the next generations..


Fog enters bergen, it is chill outside and people are red in the eyes.


The "No user" soundtrack will be finally mixed tomorrow.


Tonite features a freejam session at Landmark. Those hardcore souls who are left are: Jordi, Lluis, Sara, Rama, Kentaro, Pedro, Yves, Martin, Tom and Carlo. Gisle, Ellen and Thomas are staying here to clean up and prepare for next year (??).


No doubt this has been a marvellous week, thanx to each and every one of you/us for a great time! Esp.

thanx to the BEK crew!!

(Big applause).

 

FIN

 

 

 

Nature by Pedro Nature 2 by Pedro Nature 3by Pedro
Nature 4 by Pedro Nature 5 by Pedro Nature 6 by Pedro
Bergen seen from Fløyen Another view of Bergen Jordi and Sara fixing it
Just ask me about PiDiP The Bar by Pedro Yves and Tom show

 

>>> Those afterthought pictures were courtesy of Pedro. Tusen takk!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Artem

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rama

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yves and Mathijs

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Related material from wiki:

http://www.piksel.no/pwiki/InterOperability

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Related material from wiki:

http://www.piksel.no/pwiki/Ap02Presntation

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


gijs

 

 


Mathijs

 

 


nightfever


simon and half antoine

 


Thomas Ian party

 


Janet Casey FSF


Pedro the crooked cook

 


spit prince

erich arrived

battling


japanese quotes


complaining customer

 


marieke hostess

 


holy night


enjoying jaromils pizza

 


big fan

ubergeek


ubergeek 2

 


martin in tha mood


Martin making it work


rastacook

Amy lecture


mmmsake


Carlo working overtime

 


camera art


Smoking room fun


Ellen Hooman performance


Janet Casey Easy Listening


Easy Listening



PUREBERGER




PUREBERGER


PUREBERGER


Carlo mediating at landmark


gang


Veejay crew


Veejay desk


Erich, Gisle and mr X


Veejay fire


pepe art 2


pepe more art


Veejay fire


jaromil jordi lluis


waiting for eclipse


Yves and Pedro


Ketaro eclipse