Thu 10/03/2011, 4:30 PM – Artist Talk

I will do a small artist talk/Q&A session at The Jyväskylä Art Museum. I will also do a small performance using The Beat Blender and Made In Iron controllers.

Fri 11/3/2011, 6 PM – The Future Roots & VJ Månsteri

I will be VJing to the sounds of The Future Roots in The Jyväkylä Art Museum. The visuals will be based on the cover art made by Minja Revonkorpi & Rita Vargas.

Sat 12/3 & Sun 13/3 – Arduino Workshop

On saturday and sunday I will do an Introduction to Arduino workshop. I’ll try to post some pictures about that during the weekend All the places for the workshop are reserved already.

More info about the whole Live Herring ’11 event. Lots of exhibitions, gigs, artist talks etc. Check it out.

Some of you might have seen the Animoitu liike -workshop I did in collaboration with Päivi Hintsanen and Live Herring in Jyväskylä public library (September 2009) http://www.liveherring.org/animoitu_liike/

This week I’m going to do part 2 of the workshop in Jyväskylä in collaboration with Loiskis. The Kinect sensor has greatly improved the project as I no longer need to use IR markers.

Here is a small demo. Running with a customized build of OSCeleton, Quartz Composer and Animata.

For demonstration purposes, I’m changing the character and the background by clapping my hands.

The drawings were made by students from the Keski-Palokka elementary school.

Trying out the very awesome OSCeleton http://github.com/Sensebloom/OSCeleton with Quartz Composer.

What is OSCeleton?
“As the title says, it’s just a small program takes Kinect skeleton data from the OpenNI framework and spits out the coordinates of the skeleton’s joints via OSC messages. These can can then be used on your language / framework of choice.”

It works straight out of the box with Animata and many other software, but the OSC formatting is not compatible with Quartz Composer. So I made a little Max/MSP patch that converts the messages to a format QC understands. I will try to write a tutorial about how to get the whole thing running pretty soon. But here is a quick rundown.

• Install OpenNI http://www.openni.org/downloadfiles/openni-binaries/20-latest-unstable
• Install KinectSensor http://github.com/avin2/SensorKinect
• Install NITE http://www.openni.org/downloadfiles/openni-compliant-middleware-binaries/33-latest-unstable
• Download OSCeleton http://github.com/Sensebloom/OSCeleton
• Download my OSCeletonToQC Max/MSP app and open it. (I think you need to install the Max Runtime from http://cycling74.com/downloads/)
• Dowload my QC example and open it
• Run OSCeleton with this command:

./osceleton-osx -p 8110 -mx 2 -my -2 -mz -1 -ox -1 -oy 0.75 -oz 1 -a 127.0.0.1

The options are to scale the values to something that makes sense in QC. You can play around with them. Check the OSCeleton readme for more information about the different options.

Let me know if the Max/MSP app or something else is not working properly.

Update on the Iron project. Not perfect but it’s starting to sound pretty decent. Listen through proper speakers or headphones to hear the full effect of the bass.

Testing my new instrument and ironing my wrinkly papers at the same time. This is the beat slicing mode. Still needs a lot of work but I wanted to shoot some documentation anyway.

It’s a wireless controller for making music.

Features include:
- 6 different modes
- A mega wobble bass generator
- Beat slicer
- Sampler
- ???

Tech specs:
- Senses the grayscale values of the surface
- Accelerometer
- Tactile feedback (vibration)
- RGB LED
- Completely wireless

Stay tuned for more.

Also on YouTube (for slower connections)

Feather light or deadly serious? 


Ville Walo’s solo performance, Mortimer, is a contemporary circus theatre performance where juggling and electrical sensor technology come together. The focused, subtle performance juggles sound and video projections, brings small fluffy things to life and laughs at mortality. The performance’s soft hint of breath brushes the viewers’ skin.

Walo juggles with video projection and plays music by juggling objects equipped with movement sensors. Sensor technology and programming turn the stage into an interactive electronic instrument that reacts to Walo’s movements in perfect unison. Although the performance relies on sophisticated real-time computer controlling, its visual style is far from technology oriented sci-fi aesthetics. The stage is filled with humanely warm and clumsy everyday objects and jerky hand-drawn animations that create an intimate atmosphere.

Although Mortimer is a solo performance, Walo is by no means alone is the stage. He communicates with the objects he holds in his hands, with the puppet figures that share the stage with him, peculiarly assembled form various bits and pieces, with the skeletons and birds of the projected animations. Together they form the population of this special universe.

It’s a twisted little fairy tale world filled with death, naivety, playful cruelty and dark humour. Mortimer is a performance that provokes silent internal laughter.

Mortimer was first performed on the 16th of September 2010 in Kiasma Theatre, in the Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland.

Creation: Ville Walo, Anne Jämsä
Performer: Ville Walo
Lighting design: Meri Ekola
Music and sound design: Samuli Kosminen
Programming and projection design: Matti Niinimäki
Set design, costumes and drawings: Anne Jämsä
Choreographic assistance: Jyrki Karttunen

Kallio 26/8/2010

Image by Kirsi Tuura

We couldn’t do a rehearsal on Wednesday so I was a bit worried about how everything would go down on the first night. Everything had worked fine the week before in Tapiola, so I was still quite comfortable… At least I was until Mr. Murphy once again proved that you should really take his law seriously.

Problem #1

No signal to the projector with a long VGA cable, so I had to move all my gear to a different location in the last minute and setup everything again. That left me no time to properly test the motion tracking and everything else.

Problem #2

All of the dozens of WiFi networks on this particular street corner disturbed our wireless network we had set for sending data and pictures. This increased the delay between the tracking and animation to several seconds instead of the normal tenths of a second.  It took me a while to figure out that this was the problem and of course no ethernet cables anywhere. Fortunately, Severi – our technical producer – somehow got a hold of a cable and we finally got the tracking working quite smoothly in the end.

We still had a problem with the communication between my computer and Markku’s laptop, so we couldn’t really update the character as it was planned. Somehow, we still managed to limp through the night and the last hour was actually quite enjoyable.

Emmi Vainio and Kalle Kuisma shot some documentation video.

Giants of the Hoods, Kallio 26/8/10 from Giants of the Hoods on Vimeo.

Kontula 27/8/2010

Kontula worked out a lot better technically as we had ironed out all the problems in Kallio. The mood was also quite different as we had a lot of children coming to dance and also because of the commitment of the people that took part in the workshop some weeks ago. It was also the “Night of the Arts” in Helsinki that day and I think it was nice that we did this in the suburbs of East Helsinki and not downtown where everything else happened.

Giants event in Kontula from Giants of the Hoods on Vimeo.

Tapiola 28/8/2010

Technically, Tapiola worked the best, but there weren’t that many people around. The cold and windy weather was against us, but we still had fun and it was nice to see some people who had been there the week before also when we did some testing.

No video yet, but i will add it here once it’s online.

Next

We are doing two more shows this week. On Wednesday, we are at the Aalto University Opening after-party in Otaniemi and on Saturday we have the event at the Lasipalatsi square. For more details: http://www.giantsofthehoods.com/

“A van with a mobile interactive media set parks at late evening time in the neighborhoods giving local citizens a chance to participate in a street performance and VJing to momentarily change the nature and purpose of a few chosen public places.

The passersby participate by collectively creating images of representative avatars – Giant characters of their neighborhoods, and by dancing in front of a video camera and computer system to make the Giant follow the movements of the participant. The dance of the Giants is projected in big size on a nearby building…”

So basically what that means is that we will project giant characters onto buildings around different neighbourhoods in Helsinki and Espoo. The passers-by have the chance to come and animate the characters with their own movements and even modify the giants by “donating” a part of their body to it. It has some similarities to the Animoitu liike -workshop from last Fall, but the overall concept and even how it works is quite different from that. Should be interesting.

More info coming soon on the website at http://www.giantsofthehoods.com/. Also check out the videos:

It was hanging by its neck from a tree in the festival area. You could power it up by turning the handle on its chest. This would cause it to come back to life and then die again by hanging.

I wanted to play with the idea of life and death of artificial beings – especially when it was the festival crowd that gave the robot its life and then left it to hang to its death. The theme also suited the festival site as it was used as an execution site during the Finnish Civil War.

Jättömaa was a nice small festival with interesting bands and artists, including Joose Keskitalo, Jaakko Laitinen & Väärä Raha, Katja Tukianen, Sara Milazzo (the lovely lady appearing on the video above) and many others. I have some random video clips from the festival that I might edit together in the near future.

Also some new stuff like this excellent video from Boys Noize: