party in my office Thursday evening

If you happen to be in Victoria Canada tomorrow (Thursday Jan 29/04), there
will be a party in my office (A146 of the Visual Arts building at the
University of Victoria) starting at 8 pm. This is the kickoff to the
Interactive Futures conference organized by Steve Gibson. There's info about
the whole conference at http://www.vifvf.com/new_media.html

The party will feature one of Julie Andreyev's vehicles in the middle of the
office. Julie (from Vancouver) has put together a small fleet of cars decked
to the nines with streaming video/audio and other goodies. Julie will be
talking about this project of hers between 8 and 9.

Then at 9 pm, Steve Gibson will be performing several musical pieces. Four
of the pieces also involve a thingy I've been working on for a couple of
months called the Blitbopper. The Blitbopper is a Director executable that
takes a MIDI feed from Steve's three keyboards and MIDI guitar, and responds
visually to the music. The visuals are comprised of bitmaps by Randy Adams
(of trAce), who has put together several hundred jpgs in response to
listening to recordings of the pieces Steve will play. The bitmaps are
composed as sequences, ie, kind of animations, kind of not animations. There
are about 32 sequences. The blitbopper executable lets Steve configure some
MIDI channels+notes as trigger notes, ie, trigger notes trigger a sequence
either as an animation or as a sequence that advances when Steve plays
subsequent (non-trigger) notes. The blitbopper lets Steve configure MIDI
controllers to trigger effects on the current image or sequence. Australia's
Luke Wigley (http://lingoworkshop.com ) is a silent collaborator in this
piece in that Luke has kindly agreed to let us use his 'imaging Lingo'
effects.

The idea of the blitbopper is to develop an appropriately configurable app
that responds visually to MIDI music, and lets people import their own
graphical material into the program. Currently it operates on bitmaps, but
future revs will allow import of videos, vectors (Flash and otherwise), and
what not. We also want to develop lots more effects modules (once I get the
hang of 'imaging Lingo'). The Blitbopper is the first of several programming
projects I'll be doing with Steve over the next four years, and this is
version 1.0 of the Blitbopper, so hopefully it won't crash!

There will be cheap booze and good food at the party.

Then at 10:15 we'll head to the Open Space gallery downtown to take in some
short films, one of which is by Christina McPhee:

NAXSMASH Christina McPhee 8 minutes
NAXSmash is a performative cinema and sound installation via a revival of
Fluxus/John Cage style, incorporating digital video projection, live
gesture and digitally-printed transparent scrims.

The other films are:

WORMS Lasse Raa 5 minute excerpt
Worms explores the concept of start / stop, no playlength. The methods used
forced the director with time in many ways at the same time.

DEATH OF THE MOTH Rian Brown-Orso 20 minutes
Directed by Rian Brown-Orso and Hege Royert. Music by Tom Lopez. Death of
the Moth was inspired by a short story by Virginia Woolf. It is based on the
symbol of the "moth", which not unlike Icarus is a frivolous creature that
is drawn towards the light, but will inevitably burns its wings and fall.
Death of the Moth is a visual and aural meditation on mankind's "falling
from grace" and his out-of-balance relationship with nature.

SOFT, SOFT, SOFT Javier Marchan 22 minutes
Soft,Soft, Soft is a new form of visual essaying on the material world of
things. It focuses on socially regulated aspects of distribution-trade as
central forms of connectedness between people. The work was produced in
participation with the Jan van Eyck Academie, the Netherlands, Goldsmiths
University, UK and IKEA.

Hope to see you there!

ja
http://vispo.com