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Introduction

Node based VJ System

ProZeuxis will be a compositing system to generate visual effects for enhancing liveperformances of any type. The system will be flexible and easily allow the user to createexpressive visuals that incorporate aspects of the performance that will drive the effects;including live beat detection, MIDI input, and motion tracking. Using these features, myconcentration will be to facilitate improvisation on the part of the visual performer, or VJ, as wellas the performers that their visuals are supporting. To do this, ProZeuxis will be based on anintuitive, tangible user interface that provides fluid controls for linking generative visual effects tothe live sources of audio and video data. This interface will be created by mainly using aReacTable(reacTable) surface on which a user can create compositions of linked nodes. Theinterface will be designed to incorporate interaction through the use of tangible markers withaffixed fiducial symbols as well as multi-touch, finger input.The ProZeuxis system will seek to improve on the performance aspect of improvisationwhen compared to other DIY and commercially available VJ systems that also use multi-touchand tangible interface components. These other multi-touch systems focus on controlling visualsmuch in the same way that existing hardware or software systems have in the past. They createa virtual counterpart interface to reflect these methods, and extend the functionality onto a multi-touch screen, and in many cases, couple this with tangible controller knobs and sliders as well.The layout of these systems, however, still revolve around the existing methodologies of creatinga live visual composition by layering banked video clips, and applying effects through the use of variously controlled parameters. ProZeuxis, while subscribing to a lot the same ideas as thesesystems, will also try to depart from the way in which a composition is created in a live setting.Generative visuals that make use of ProZeuxis' uniquely data rich environment will replace thetired visuals of manually layered video clips with predicable effects and mix modes.Although setting up for a ProZeuxis performance may include the necessary steps of configuring nodes that analyze audio and video data before hand, using these will provide aresource that can be propagated to many visual nodes within a visual compositions. This mantraof computing once and reusing many times over, will be a common theme in the designconsideration that will make ProZeuxis truly able to augment any type of performance visually.

Approach using connectible modular nodesInput data for Tracking / Audio detection sharedFocus on Improvisation / Expression from VJ and Performer shared

pg. 445 Arnheim - Thus,

we define expression as modes of organic or inorganic behavior displayed in the dynamic appearance of perceptual objects or events

. The structural properties of these modes are not limited to what is grasped by the external senses; they are conspicuouslyactive in the behavior of the human mid, and they are used metaphorically to characterize aninfinity of non-sensory phenomena: low morale or t he high cost of living, the spiraling of prices,the lucidity of argument, the compactness of resistance.

pg.

455 Arnheim - If expression is the primary content of vision in daily live, the same shouldbe all the more true of the way the artist looks at the world. The expressive qualities are hismeans of communication. They capture his attention, they enable him to understand andinterpret his experiences, and they determine the from patterns he creates.pg. 151 Significantly, gestalt therapy contrasted spontaneity both to the automatic and to theconscious act. Spontaneity was characterized by a flexible awareness turned to the gratificationof organic needs. “Spontaneity is that seizing on, and glowing and growing with, what isinteresting and nourishing in the environment.”pg. 155 In

Gestalt Therapy

, Goodman valorized painting and poetry as synecdoches of how ahealthy individual should function in the social-animal-physical field. In writing about the artist'sspontaneous creativity, he described a process specific to the “plastic dialog” that was beingpioneered by his friends and contemporaries...His distinction between spontaneity andautomatism identified a crucial theme of the postwar culture of spontaneity, He insisted:The important part of the psychology of art is not in the dream or in the critical consciousness, itis... in the concentrated sensation and in the playful manipulation of the material medium. Withbright sensation and play in the medium as his central acts, the artist then accepts his dreamand uses his critical deliberateness...The artist is quite aware of what he is doing...he is notunconscious in his working, about neither is he mainly deliberately calculating.

Cultural/Historical/Scientific/and Social Aspects

Significance of art form

pg. 17 During the field's long, half-forgotten early development, it centered around the “colororgan,” a device which embodied the light-as-music metaphor that continues to influence thefield today. The first color organ was designed in 1743 by Louis Bertrand Castel, amathematician and a priest.. associated the seven notes of the major scale to seven differentcolors, which were displayed by colored papers moving in front of candles.pg. 11 ...it was in the 1960's, first in America and then elsewhere, that the light-show became astaple of rock gigs and hallucinatory 'happenings'. Before computers... the creation of light-showswas cumbersome and haphazard. It involved bulky projectors, and usually lots of them. Oil waspoured on to glass and mixed with water; chemicals were exposed on photographic slides; andhand-painted glass plates were subjected to multiple exposure and were projected throughspinning wheels. The results were kaleidoscopic, hallucinatory and sensational.pg. 19 ...Seymour Locks, an art professor in San Francisco, gave improvised visualaccompaniment to a jazz combo by using an overhead to project wet paints that he swirledaround in a glass dish. This was the beginning of a dynamic, abstract- expressionist techniquethat came to be known latter as “wet shows” or “liquids”pg. 21 A few light artists, used live and recorded video during the late 1960's. In 1969 NamJune Paik began experimenting artistically with the Sony Portapak, a mobile video unit developedfor television reporters covering the Vietnam War. But for the most part, the technology was tooexpensive to catch on widely.pg. 22 Another technical mini-revolution happened in 1984, when Australia's FairlightCorporation came out with the Fairlight CVI (Computer Video Instrument)...Fairlight operatorscould superimpose graphics, produce solarizations and other color effects, show “trails,” and dolots of other things that you see an awful lot of in videos of the mid-1980s...the introduction of the Fairlight opened a brief window of opportunity during which designers could satisfy clients bysimply pressing the right button on a new tool, before overuse rendered the results recognizableand uninteresting.