Bellingham WA Electronic Arts Fest.

www.vjculture.com


Edirol invited me to perform at the Bellingham Electronic Arts Festival www.bellinghamelectronicartsfestival.com/ as part of their sponsorship for the event. As one of the Edirol guys said, "You have a whole warehouse full of toys to play with" and that I did. With all that gear at my disposal I decided to use a 3 screen synchronized setup. To accomplish this I used Edirol's 3 PR-80's media servers that stream dual channels of DV quality video. 3 V4 video mixers, a CG-8, 2 DVD players and 2 laptops. Each laptop was receiving a camera in feed for the VJ apps via firewire coming in from the PR-80's. So basically I can effects channel on the laptop and dry video straight from the PR-80's.
One touchscreen controlled all 3 PR-80's so the movies would always start and play at the same speed. They were all connected via a KVM switch so I could control each one independently.
The biggest challenge was creating the movies at 2160x480. Even using a Mac Pro 2.66GHz machine it took a week of rendering. Once the massive movies were complete I had to then break them up into 720x480 videos for the right, center and left screens.
The combination of rendering and loading into the PR's took days. I was still rendering all night in my hotel room. Friday nights show wasn't completely loaded until 10 minutes before the show.
I have to give Ted from Edirol big props for all his help in both the tech assistants and the setup/strike.

Bellingham had just been dumped on by the season's first major snow storm. So major it was setting records and closing schools and business from 2-4 days.
It was questionable how well the festival would be attended, but by Friday night people were ready to go out and get down.
The festival organizers were great hosts and the festival itself was well organized. From the artists to the participants everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves.
For me the highlight of the show was Kinesthetech Sense, combo dance multi media max patch, camera sensory video delay thingy. check em out at Kinesthetech Sense