Skills edt. POP 08 May 24th

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It's been a month of production. Now, this weekend May 24th we will create environments for 4 rooms at Skill's POP 08. Tiesto again is headlining.
You can find out who all the DJ's are here.
It's the VJ's that are going to rock this party
Simplistiks WI in the DnB room
Brotherhood of Light SF in the Breaks Room
Opticus LA in the House room
VJ Culture in the main room
Plus, we will all be mixing it up in each of the various rooms.
Here are pics from last year.
This year's show is at the Cow Palace in S. San Francisco
18,000 capacity.
Our largest screen yet. 30x40ft + a LED wall for the main stage.

Beatport Stage at Remix Hotel during WMC ०८

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During Winter Music 08 Remix Hotel and Beatport hosted a stage at the National Hotel.
Edirol and I curated 12 VJs to perform over the 4 days.

Big Screen Images of San Francisco provided us with a 13x9ft LED screen for day and nighttime visuals. Everyday from 2:00PM to 9:00PM VJs and DJs rotated through the stage.
Heavy hitters like Ritchie Hawtin, M.A.N.D.Y., Bad Boy Bill, performed on the stage.
Edirol provided us with the unreleased P-10 Presenter and V8 video mixer, in addition to the CG-8 and PR-80. They were also kind enough to pay the VJs for their performance.
The video is a highlight of the 4 days. Most of it was shot on my little digital still camera. Thanks to VJ demencia for the extra footage.
The VJs that performed were:
Benton-C NYC
DVJ Optikal South Beach
Justin Kent Miami
United Vision NYC
VJ Culture SF/LA
VJ Demencia NYC
VJ Dubassy London/Marseille
VJ Omni Orlando
VJ Psyberpixie Miami
VJ Shakinda Ireland
VJ Tek LA
VJ V2 LA

Here is a link to the interviews from Remix Hotel. In this video I'm talking about the curating process.
Out of the 4 days, this was my favorite track.

VJ Workshop April 29th Los Angeles CA

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The VJ coarse has an official date.
Date: Tuesday, April 29 from 7-10pm
Location: TELIC Arts Exchange
975 Chung King Road
Los Angeles, CA 90012
213-344-6137
Teacher: Grant Davis. (VJ Culture)
Limit: 18 people
Fee: $35.

The Public School www.publicschool.org is offering a new format for learning. Anyone can teach and anyone can sign up for a classs. Once enough people sign up, the class is offered.
As a visual artist with a decade of experience I'll be offering classes taught on two of the popular VJ software on the market t today, Arkaos and Modul8.
This is a beginner course that will teach users compression formats, midi control for video, composition, cabling for installation.
The course will cover the fundamentals of Arkaos VJ and Modul8.
Students will get hands on experience with some of today VJ hardware (DVJ's, V4, CG-8, Kaptivator, Entrancer, motion.dive.tokyo, NuVJ and numerous midi controllers.
sign up at www.thepublicschool.org (Search, "VJ")
Bring your laptop and plug in.

Lunatic Fringe!!

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This is a video I created with Igor Len from Roland. We were commissioned to do an A/V set at NAMM in 06 to promote motion.dive.tokyo. This is one of the tracks.
The audio is Igor Len.
Most of the graphics are from the motion.dive.tokyo sample library. The live action is from various Red Bull Ascension parties.
Good ole Ronald!

Facebook Party during SXSW

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Facebook hired Lumens to create a branded environment for a series of parties during SXSW in Austin TX.
Our challenge was to use the existing space and brand it tastefully. The challenging part was the space itself.

I used Modul8 software to create the masks and replicate the logos on the sails. Then I rendered it to disk and made DVD's for the 4 projectors. The sails flanked the sides of the room and we used blue LED color washes to tint the room blue.

Amsterdam and the rise of the VJ

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In my free time during my travels I like to photograph street art and examine club flyers. One, for their design but two, to see if they list the VJs on the flyer. From my experience, Tokyo and Amsterdam seem to have the highest number of VJ listings on the flyers.

David Starfire and I took some time to explore Amsterdam after Musikmesse.
We met some incredible people and enjoyed exploring the city.

Cat in a store front window.
Cats are all over Amsterdam due to a rodent problem. (better than pesticides

StarCulture rocks Musikmesse 08

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Pictures from StarCulture set at Musikmesse Frankfurt Germany

David Starfire and I performed 3 times a day at the Edirol booth.
Using the Edirol V8 and P-10 (Just released this week), along with the CG-8 and motion.dive.tokyo.
David was using Ableton Live, Roland Hansonic, PCR-300 and a bass guitar.
MIDI was sent back and forth controlling and syncing the visuals and audio.
Ableton acted as the main backbone for MIDI.
In the near future I'll release a youtube video of mapping Ableton midi patterns to the CG-8. It's opened a whole new world for me.
David and I met some wonderful people at Musikmesse, now we are off to Amsterdam.

new Edirol products

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I'm working the show right now. I'll give a review later.
P-10 SD card visual presenter

The V8, the big brother to the V4

The back of the V8
The VGA acts as a scan converter.


Back of the P-10

Spring Schedule and it's looking Great!!

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March 9th-11th
SXSW, 2 events for Facebook at Pangea in Austin TX.
Lumens will provide visual support for 2 days of Facebook events.
Then, on the 12th we move it all to the Red Bull Moontower until the 15th.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/SXSW-Festival/7826953993
http://www.facebook.com/notes.php?id=8686384634&ref=pb
At the same time
I head to Frankfurt Germany
March 11th-15th
Musikmesse Frankfurt
It's like NAMM but bigger, smokeier, louder.
David Starfire and I will be unveiling new Roland/Edriol products for the VJ community.
(I'll have photos and reviews on the day of the release).
David and I will be presenting, "StarCulture" our A/V collaboration
March 26th-30th
WMC Miami Beach
Remix Hotel is hosting another 4 days of conferences, demos, classes and best of all....Beatport's poolside parties. (more to come on the artist performing)
I'll be working with Edirol to curate and manage 12 VJ's over the coarse of 4 days.
April 2-9th
Maui HI
Video shoots for Xarene's thesis and documentation of interactive pods.
April 22-25th
Houston TX
Video shoots for Red Bull Art of Can. (More green screen 360 artwork shoots)
May 24th
San Francisco CA
Skills presents Electro Techno POP.
Now at the Cow Palace with 15,000 raving kids.
3 rooms of immersive environments
http://skillsdjworkshop.com/pop08/
May 28th -31st
Italy
404 Festival
StarCulture Live A/V with David Starfire and VJ Culture
http://www.404festival.com/eng/home.htm
June 13-16th
Istanbul Turkey
VJ Fest.

Skills Electro Techno Disco love 2/16/08

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Feb. 16th 2008
Electro Techno Disco Love SF @ Regency Ballroom.
Animation of the flyer. Individual DJ name titles were also animated based off the design elements of the flyer. (I love it when they give me layered photoshop files of the artwork). that didn't happen this time.

For the main stage we had 2 8ft spheres in the upper corner of the stage provided by Inflate-a-bil.
3 screen surrounding the DJ booth on stage. The content could be separated for the spheres and screens. Mixing and matching at times.
As you can see in one of these videos. The LD was using the strobe effect WAY TOO much. All night long! I had to wear sunglasses because the strobes were positioned right next to the screens. LDs, take note.... Strobes are for accenting the environment. Maybe used 2 or 3 times during the coarse of the night. Not, for constant strobing to the beat.
It was a long night of mixing, (7 hours straight).
Sean Cooper held down the house room (As this party had 3 rooms and 3000 kids).
Since I was tied to the VJ suite I never took any photos of house room.
The theme was Valentine. Pinks, flowers, hearts, etc.
The audio is poorly recorded because it was captured on my digital still camera.

StarCulture Live A/V @ Culture Catch MacWorld Afterparty

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This is a quick little video of David Starfire and VJ Culture's live A/V performance called StarCulture. Filmed at the MacWorld 08 afterparty, "Culture Catch.

Earlier in the day David and I provided demos and shared our creative workflow for our live audio/video (a/v) sets.

Photos and video from NYE Vegas and San Francisco

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On NYE I over booked myself with two events I just couldn't pass up.
Literally, I agreed to do them within 14 hours of each other back in Nov. I thought if I use all of Dec. to produce both events and use my best personal resources I can pull it off.
We did, but it wasn't an easy ride.
San Francisco
Sea of Dreams NYE. I've done this event a few times in the past. Going back to 2001 it seems almost every other year. It's one of San Francisco's largest NYE events and for the past few years it's been held at the Concourse. A venue that can easily hold 8000 people.
I had an ambitious stage design concept of a mirror ball, circular truss and an "X" shaped screen design. (Never one to settle for just rectangular screens).
This is what our original design called for.
graphic design by inflatabill.
This was the main stage and in the second hall we had 3 large circular screens.
We used DVD's that I created with a circular mask and a Edirol v4 to create the circular mask shape. I wasn't sure about the throw distance with the projector so I made numerous size circles and then created chapters in the DVD to jump between sizes until I found the one I thought fit the screen best.
The "X" shape was created as a png file and hacked into the edirol PR-80 media server. It allowed me to mix two layers of content underneath the "X" mask. Specially designed content was created by Xarene, Kev lar and myself.
This was created by Xarene.

We designed video with the intention of bouncing it off the mirror ball to create a syncronized lighting effect with the video screens. Fragments of light would bounce off the ball and shoot across the "X" screen and 8ft spheres at the front of the stage.
Never mind the girl, you can see how the video was designed to work with the mirror ball. Photo credit tracy b.


Between the Red Bull Vegas gig and the San Francisco Sea of Dreams party I choose to be in San Francisco on NYE.
The Vegas show was in the parking lot of the Palms Hotel. Robbie Maddison broke the world record for longest motorcycle jump. It was televised on ESPN as the midnight east coast as the midnight celebration.
Here is a youtube video of the jump. The edit is a little dramatic.

However, I was flying back and forth between SF and Vegas everyday from the 27th to the 2nd. Then driving a van back from Vegas to Los Angeles on the evening of the 2nd.
I was fried..
Each morning I was getting up at 5:00AM to catch a flight between the two cities. In Vegas on the evening of the 30th I was working with John Taylor until 5:00AM in 33 degree temperatures in Las Vegas trying to fly Hexagon screens outdoors, with no stage backdrop. (I was promised a backdrop so I could hang these screens and register the projector). I never got the backdrop, something about the stage wasn't secure enough for a backdrop if the wind kicked up.

This was one of my toughest nights in my career. It was freezing, we had to jump into the van every 20 minutes just to bring our core body temperature up. Then, jump out and continue working. The budget had been slashed, I didn't have enough crew and most important I didn't have the backdrop I need to install these hexagon screens. It was only John and I late into the evening. In the end we never used the hexagon design for the backdrop. The television crew wanted to see the iconic Palms Hotel as it's stage backdrop. All the man hours creating content for the hexagons, the hours building the hexagon screens and of course that whole night trying to install them.
Back in LA Vello from V Squared Labs was creating content for the hexagon's and he was coming out the next day to VJ the event while I was in San Francisco.
Vello did a great job on content creation and the client loved what he did with the media provided. He ended up VJing on the large LED screens placed around the parking lot of the Hotel.
Here is a link to a flickr page from someone in production
And here is the link to the official Red Bull page.

Here is an interview with VJ Fader on VJ.tv. I'm talking about the challenges of producing two events on New Year's Eve in two different cities.

StarCulture Live A/V at Macworld and Macworld Afterparty Jan. 17th. Thursday SF CA

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VJ Culture and David Starfire present StarCulture a live Audio/Visual experience.

Jan. 17th Thursday.
At Macworld SF (Best Buy Booth-South Hall) 12:00, 2:00 and 4:00PM

MacWorld afterparty
E.A.T. NOW!
Entertainment - Art - Technology
A Party Celebrating Macworld 2008!
Sponsored by
Shure & Metreon
Thursday, January 17th
7pm - midnight
Metreon
(4th Floor, City View)
101 Fourth Street, San Francisco CA
(Adjacent to Moscone Center)
Celebrate and dance to today’s cutting edge djs and video artists
and their Mac-created, Mac-produced art and entertainment!!!
Live Music
StarCulture www.myspace.com/star_culture 8:15PM
Nyles Lannon www.nlannon.com
:: Z :: www.zyzzyzonemusic.com
Von Iva www.voniva.com
Performance Art
Torsten Kretchzmar www.kretchzmar.com
VJs
VJ Culture www.vjculture.com
Chuck Henderson www.fishrock.com
Spook www.geomagnetic.tv
Videolicious www.lucination.com
Live Digital Painting
Andrew Jones www.androidjones.com
Installations
Rabbit Holes www.rabbitholes.com

Tickets: $10
(payable at the door)
Cash Bar

Information & Performance Schedule:
www.CultureCatch.com/events

Video Riot and Video Salon on Tech TV 2004

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In 2004 Tech TV came to one of our video Salons and interviewed us about a segment on video art. They also covered our annual Video Riot.
Video Riot takes Video Salon outside (across the street literally) onto the side of a building in downtown San Francisco. Lasers, projection, slide projection, lighting and liquid lights all are projecting on the building. Across the street at the Dimension 7 studio DJ's spin music and pump it out to all the car stereos via a 1 watt transmitter.
This might best be watched without the audio.
I left it on there for nostalgia.
There is also a clip of Red Bull's Ascension in this video. Ascension was a celebration of underground dance culture art.

New Years Eve -Sea of Dreams SF CA

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I'll be managing and creating content.
We are creating a really unique screen design for this event. Plus, a second room of visuals as well.
go to Sea of Dreams to get more info and tickets

Bassnectar & Kraddy Snakecharmer mashup

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This is a video mashup I did for Lorin a few years ago. It took awhile redo it after Lorin changed the intro. (I like his and Kraddy's latest version)

Mary J. Blige Performance at Nokia Theater Nov. 20th

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Returning to the Nokia Theater I was treated to a backstage that was actually empty. After Sunday's American Music Awards show and seeing how crowded it was, it was a pleasure to be back there and working with the local 33. This time they actually had time to work with us. The environment was so much more chill.

Tonight we only used the Versa Tubes for Mary's, "Just Fine" Track. After that we rolled it off stage and broke it down.

backstage with my powerbook, uc-33 controller and table.

Backstage at the American Music Awards

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Nov. 18th Nokia Theater Los Angeles CA.
I was hired by Vello from V Squared Labs who was double booked. I provide visuals on Element Lab's Versa Tubes for Mary J. Blige at the America Music Awards which were broadcast live on ABC. Vello developed the content and I mixed it live using Modul8 software.
I had lots of celebrities hanging over my shoulder, (Kid Rock, Slash, Chris Brown) watching the show and watching what I'm doing. No pressure, there were only 7.5 million viewers watching the awards and I never got a solid rehearsal without some technical difficulties. Not to mention the camera feed they gave me was suppose to be a wide shot of the stage so I could see what I was doing, but in the end the camera kept getting tight shoots.
The versa tube design was based off of Mary J. Blige's music video, Just fine".
They wanted to repeat the same look. With over 40 acts we didn't get a lot of time to rehearse on stage, so it was really a, "flying blind" kinda performance.
However, it worked and I nailed every cue.
It worked out so well that they wanted us to come back and do the same thing the following Tuesday night for her solo performance at the Nokia theater.

VJ Culture in DJ Times Sept. 07 Issue

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Thanks to Jay Spero for writing the article.

Oracle World SF w/ The Magnetic Poets

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Nov. 10th-15th The Magnetic Poets performed opening and closing sets for Oracle World's main conference hall in San Francisco CA.

(a low down shot of the CG-8)
Magnetic Poets- The same band that I performed with in Torino for the 2006 Winter Olympics. Could Beijing be around the corner?
Each set was audio/visual and was compiled during our break between sets.
Scott Dewar, Christopher Hedge, Julian Smedley, Ed McCLary and myself.
Scott and I on the visual assault. Scott served up textural images and I added motion graphical elements.


(a shot of the back of Julian's head)
Ed on drum kats triggered visuals off my PC which was one channel of 5 coming into the Edirol HD440.

(The screens spanned the whole D hall at the Moscone).
However, most of the time we were only playing on plasma displays.
The band was on it, despite our 6:30AM call time.
Keep in mind this footage is of a rehearsal!

Video footage is from my crappy little canon power shot camera so please forgive the audio. (higher res video should be coming soon).