Before there was Jade, part 2

Tue Jun 07 08:01:00 +0000 2005 (Posted by Tim)

Jade
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In the Autumn of 2000, I had a performance at the Seoul International Electronic Music Festival. The performance was by the group KromoZone, which I had founded with Stephan Moore while living in Baltimore back in 1998-1999. The performance in Seoul featured both of us, together with Seongah Shin (wacom-controlled powerbook) and Paul Rudy (amplified cactus) on stage and Rich Jaime (video production) back in Kansas City.

The plan was to collaborate on the performance across the network. Unfortunately, the organizers of the festival did not provide us with the promised network connection. They instead showed a network cable that we could use – which was a bunch of bare wires with no connector (the mixer also went up in smoke at the intermission prior to our performance – so we had a variety of challenges). Fortunately, we had a backup plan in place, and the performance came off successfully.

The reason that this particular performance comes up in the context of Jade, is that it was the first performance I did using the qlist object. At the top of the patch, clicking the “event button” would open up an interface for the qlist, copied from the qlist help patch by Richard Dudas. This was used for automating the processes in the patch. It worked the same way as the qlist example in Jamoma. The contents of this qlist can be found if you click below.

This particular patch (there were 7 computers with patches) was for the video projection. It used Nato for the movie playback, pre-performed rendering, live video processing, and the combination of these elements. It also used Trond Lossius’s lut-level object for controlling the look-up table attached to the 242.lut object. The patch is structured as a series of sections (with a set of video processes) and transitions between these sections.

We agreed on a structure prior to the performance. A score was created on graph paper, then scanned, and included in each performer’s patch. Multislider objects on the top and bottom then scrolled across indicating the current position in the score as the clock advanced. This allowed us to all follow the score. The clock was generated over the local network (which did work for the performance), so we were all synchronized.

The seven machines were in the following roles:
  1. KromoZone network server
  2. Seongah’s Powerbook and Wacom tablet
  3. Stephan’s Powerbook / Peavey Sliders
  4. Nato video processing patch (live input was the cactus)
  5. Video analysis machine (nato-based, watching the cactus video feed)
  6. 4-channel spatializer, driven over the network by the video analysis machine.
  7. (unused in the actual performance) Video control machine back in Kansas City.

The video processing patch could be controlled over the network by Rich Jaime, or the qlist could be triggered by the performance clock, which is what we did in the non-internet performance situation.

The contents of the qlist looked like this: 
------------------------ 1: BURST (0:01);
0 1 cross-fade1 65535;
cross-fade2 65535;
the_pic off;
displace off;
jj_films off;
hj_films off;
live-toggle 0;
input_gate 0;
t4-toggle 1;
switch1 0;
switch2 0;
circadian 0;
gamma 100;
gamma_bypass 1;
collage2_bypass 1;
t4-fade 0;
t4-bypass 1;
burst-film on;
burst-film start;
practice_k bang;
preset 1;
------------------------ 30: STOP (0:30);
0 30 burst-film stop;
------------------------ 31: (0:31);
0 31 burst-film off;
the_pic on;
------------------------ 32: (0:32);
0 32 the_pic start;
------------------------ 165: (2:45);
0 165 input_gate 1;
------------------------ 181: (3:01);
0 181 displace on;
displace start;
cross-fade1 0 30000;
------------------------ 210: (3:30);
0 210 the_pic off;
------------------------ 280: (4:40);
0 280 jj_films on;
collage2_bypass 0;
------------------------ 285: (4:45);
0 285 gamma_bypass 0;
gamma 0 15000;
jj_films start;
------------------------ 315: (5:15);
0 315 jj_clearmode 0;
displace off;
preset 1;
------------------------ 350: (5:50);
0 350 live-toggle 1;
------------------------ 360: (6:00);
0 360 switch1 1;
------------------------ 370: (6:10);
0 370 switch2 1;
------------------------ 375: (6:15);
0 375 cross-fade2 0 15000;
------------------------ 400: (6:40);
0 400 jj_films off;
------------------------ 420: (7:00);
0 420 t4-bypass 0;
t4-fade -100 51000;
------------------------ 475: (7:55);
0 475 hj_films on;
------------------------ 480: (8:00);
0 480 hj_films start;
t4-toggle 0;
live-toggle 0;
input_gate 0;
------------------------ 485: (8:05);
0 485 circadian 40 75000;
------------------------ 510: (8:30);
0 510 hj_clearmode 0;
------------------------ 575: (9:53);
0 575 cut bang;
circadian 0 20000 ------------------------ 600: THE END!!!;
0 600;

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