For some reason I wanted to work on a video file I’ve been sitting on. As the visuals were my contribution to the project, you’ll need to unmute the video immediately below to see the audio reactivity happening in the clip.
On guitar is Zoran Vujanović from NO!Mozzart. It’s a pretty rough video as I was just walking out to smoke when I saw what the visuals were doing, how they were jamming with Zoran.
I’d setup some basic audio reactivity tied to a couple video clips and had just let it run. We were on and off that day, bringing ourselves together for our first performance that evening. In the end, we only did one pass through the piece and never really settled on how it would end. What happened was the controlled chaos of our improvisation. And man, it came together quite magically.
The piece was entitled, Sevdah Body. And this, our first performance was held in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina on 2019.09.23. The orchestration of the whole thing was handled by the phenomenal dancer and choreographer, mersiha messiha. Check the interview with Mersiha, Reimagining the Idea of the Body.
In writing this, the post took on a shape other than I’d planned. So I’ve kicked forward the video of the performance👇. Now at the bottom is a bit of a photo essay that I hadn’t intended on including. But going through the old pics to support the post allowed for a bit of time travel. I ran with it.
I was handling visuals in tandem with Andrey Radovski. We’d met Mersiha several months earlier where we did some motion capture recordings of her dancing for a VR project we were working on.
In terms of visuals I was working with a lot of found, openly permissive copyrighted material, but some stuff made it into the performance that I hadn’t received blessings for. I don’t do that anymore. I took the video clips as raw material and performed them using VDMX. In VDMX I worked with a lot of filtering and weaved those filtered clips together leveraging a MIDI controller as my interface. VDMX also offered the audio reactivity which was a large part of the performance.
Andrey was focused on processing live 3D, Kinect data of Mersiha dancing. From there Andrey would handle that data within a custom built Unity app where he styled it to fit the performance. Andrey was focused on one song specifically where I surrendered control of the visuals for that song, and instead piped in the data from the gaming PC Andrey was working with into VDMX on my Mac. This worked largely seamlessly.
On a gaming PC tangent, the whole setup fit beautifully into the bags I had to travel with. A friend commented, “It’s a kit!” when he saw it all pieced together.
Only problem … shit was too heavy. Well, too heavy considering the price of my ticket. I was faced with only one alternative: business class. From now on I’ll always only ever do the same.
The Mostar performance was phenomenal. Everybody was blown away. We who’d just performed were awestruck ourselves. There’s so much more to say … the tour went on to Sarajevo; the rest of the fantastic artists we collaborated with; we performed in tandem with Lime Rickey; we held a workshop teaching kids all about the performance and the tools we leveraged for it; exploring Mutha Fucking Bosnia and Herzegovina 🇧🇦! Enough with the words. Pictures and thousands of words and such, to close, what follows is a rather haphazardly assembled photo essay.
