Trailer

Full performance

You can see more about the performance here.

what do you do when your own custom software has a zillion parameters that you want to cue easily, but over midi?
you inherit the standard cocoa controls and make their right click insert cues for themselves in the cueing software via applescript.

when we got it to work, we sent a small clip to our chris, who’s the developer behind qLab, our preferred cueing software.
and he put it in his blog, here’s a tiny blip from behind the scenes of our geekery:

http://figure53.com/blog/2010/02/06/qlab-scripting-custom-software-win/

every time we do this it seems crazy to sit an compile software in a theatre rehearsal, but it’s fun. and we’re not crashing that much anymore (sorry dancers)

Here it is, the documentation of Recoil’s TimeMap#3 performance. Tina got the edit up today, and it is a full video of the 2nd act of the show.

The three dancers have worked from a base of true stories from past, present and future. They meet here in the court room in a battle with words – from taking orders to making them fly across the screens.

Ole Kristensen and Jonas Jongejan created the videoscenography using motion tracking implemented in openFrameworks (see the video “Timemap software programming” for details – vimeo.com/3548185 ).

Dancers: Laura Lohi, Anna Pehrsson, Kasper Ravnhoj.
Light design: Michael Breiner and Soren Knud.
Music: Pelle Skovmand
Choreography: Tina Tarpgaard

Enjoy!

Here’s a quick edit of a few shots of the ’09 crew of Caravan Stage Tall Ship Theatre going for a little spin aboard the beautiful Amara Zee, which is to be our home and stage for the summer.

We are currently in production in Galaxidi, Greece. We were docked starboard side, but as we would want our set on deck facing the harbour when docked port side, we had an excuse to go out for a little spin in the waters.

For many of us it was the first tiny little taste of how it is to see Amara Zee at sea, she’s a beautiful wessel. We started learning basic seamanship, tying the right knots, doing watches, using radios and navigating.

The Caravan Stage Tall Ship Theatre Company is quite an experience, it is based solely on donations and sponsorships from companies, private persons and cities along the way. All aboard the show work for free, save the weekly ‘allowance’ of 20€ – which is immediately recycled into the beer fund.

The company is a registered as a charitable foundation in the US and Canada. You learn how to made do with what you’ve got, live a simple, but good life.

For more about the incredible Caravan Stage, the captain and director Paul Kirby and his wife and producer Adrianna Kelder, have a look at:

caravanstage.org

have a look at cbc visiting them, and get a guided tour of the ship by my good friend renee…

Jonas and I playing around with our multitouch table. we’ve rolled our own.

All the software is done in openFrameworks and using the tBeta tuio tracker.

The code will become opensource when we get the time to straighten out the code.

Jonas Jongejan and i were fortunate to be invited to setup our installation Stop Motion for this year’s New Media Meeting in Norrköping, Sweden.

New Media Meeting was a really nice event. Lot’s of interesting participants, talks, bands, dj’s, vj’s and yes – lot’s of party and dancing. Plenty party geeks. Super cool organisation, great hotel and a personal host assigned to each artist. And I wondered if i should bring my sleeping bag…

Norrköping is a beautiful city. It lies along a river that has provided power and torque for the city’s industry since the 17th century. People are fishing salmon from the streets.

Stop Motion was originally brewed up in 2 days using processing, but we soon fell short of Java’s 2gb ram limit.

Coding Stop Motion

So this time we decided to port the whole thing into openframeworks. I had no prior experience with c++, but Jonas’ father is a professional programmer, and he helped us sort out some of the quirks of pointers and such.

In the original version we had used a video-camera for the stills, so it could definately look better. We decided to use a real camera instead, and read up on the ptp protocol for remote capture control. Jonas had a Canon G9, et voila, it almost worked. We could not make it respond to the standard commands, and after some days of poking around, it seemed that the camera speaks an undocumented dialect of ptp. *sigh*. It was actully more reliable to applescript a crappy Canon software, that crashed if used on an intel mac. Fortunately i’m broke enough to still use a PowerBook G4. Again closed source software, undocumented and buggy. But images were snapped, scaled and transfered via wifi to jonas’ macbook.

Before going to Norrköbing we set up the prototype at the Copenhagen Pecha Kucha. And it worked, though the Canon software was still acting up once in a while.

As the Canon G9 didn’t really work we had to work on the code, so we missed all the talks at NMM ( But the late night parties and the other art installations were of impressive geekiness.

The mixture of selfreproducing machines, lovely asskicking ladies with a sneaky vj, fab lab entrepeneaurs, and a guy with a record player for knäckebröd and lego brick sequencer was eclectic alchemy to say the least.

Indoor camera test setup

We ended up borrowing a Nikon D80 from the organisers thinking that such an expensive SLR should have a super duper ptp implementation. It worked … sometimes. The camera insisted on returning bullocks instead of an image whenever it pleased. After firmware updates and lots of poking on the usb port we again suffered the realisation that people who want to remote control cameras with software are a minority. It took us the whole friday to finally come up with the voodoo commands that would make the camera fail less than 20%. And we found out that when the battery level dropped below half, the camera started to act up again. So we made sure to charge.

And saturday night it worked! The guy who had borrowed us his camera didn’t have a power supply, so we were forced to close down the installation for recharging, but it did work.

Reason to celebrate and the after-party was great. Ended up dancing in kraftvärket till 7am.

In the process we learned not to use or even think of buying cameras with undocumented ptp implementations, that laybox rox, that alla som inte dansar är våldtäktsmän, how beer is apparently really dangerous for swedes and how to use svn and google code.

Thus, the Stop Motion source code is therefore online at http://code.google.com/p/stopmotion
If you know c++, run a mac and are of a patient nature, feel free to have a look at the mess – and contribute if you will. Especially if you know about ptp, or how to use either the mac framework or gphoto correctly. We newbies ended up piping commands into a gphoto shell, hrem.

And please respect:

1. contribute your changes to the codebase.
2. run at your own risk.
3. and observe that any commercial use of the software is hereby prohibited.
4. which is why you should contact us before exhibiting the work in public.

if the written and the spoken are inversely proportionate, writing a bit here will get my tounge more spare time to do funny stuff.

me and a friend posing for our thesis at roskilde university