light chasm

light chasm from lukasz on Vimeo.

had the pleasure to team up with the very talented flutter lyon (robyn wilson) to collaborate on a audio / visual performance. we only had a week to prepare and decided to go with a black and white, op-artish theme for the projection visuals, matched with robyn’s very striking black and white attire which during the performance became part of the projection surface.

i wanted to create a custom vj app for the performance and have been getting more proficient in openframeworks so decided to give it a go as a technical and creative challenge. i began by coding the basic visual elements such as the black and white sun rays, the checkered background and playing around with blend modes in opengl. it took me a good 2 hours to work out how to do inverse blending… no reference for it anywhere! so here it is,

glEnable( GL_BLEND );
glBlendFunc( GL_ONE_MINUS_DST_COLOR, GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_COLOR );
// draw your shapes here.
glDisable( GL_BLEND );

i wanted to control the visuals through my iphone via OSC, that way i could put my laptop away and become part of the crowd… so i wrote a wrapper class for OSCemote (an OSC iphone application) that told my program what buttons were being pressed and the slider values. hope to extend it further for accelerometer values which i think will be far more interesting way of controlling visuals and with the possibility of using body movements in a performance to react visuals.

next i plugged in some FFT classes from the openframeworks forum and viola, audio-reactive visuals. it goes to show the maturity of openframeworks where you can grab a bunch of classes created by the community and plug them straight in without any hassle.

here is the source if any one is interested in running it, made for of_0.06

really enjoyed building vj software from scratch just because you have so much more control over what you can make. im now toying with the idea of taking it further and creating a nodel based interface, so something like quartz composer or pure data interface but for openframeworks. the mind boggles…