Video Mapping with VJZARIA at Maraya Art Centre

Edgar Salmen, known to his Movida patrons as VJ Edmosh, presented about a dozen attendees with his extensive experience in video mapping in a demo workshop at Maraya Art Centre today. Edmosh, who founded and directs the VJZARIA group that specializes in this domain, has worked on a number of high-profile video mapping projects. This technology-heavy art form is great for clubs and EDM festivals, but has also made it to competitions and public art installations (including a scattered few in this region).

Remember this?

He started with a little history of video mapping, quickly moving on to a sequence of videos showcasing his work, including one at Sikka earlier this year. Far from being just an animated loop projected on an uneven target surface, video mapping requires careful environmental surveying, layout planning, surface mapping and computer graphics work, as Edmosh demonstrated with a sample project based on a picture of an antiquated building. He showed how the image is fitted to guidelines, divided into its component projection surfaces, and can have various effects and animations applied to it, all using specialized software and plug-ins.

Finally, he walked us through the mapping of a selection of random shapes stacked at the other end of the room. He showed us how to pick out and define shapes from a perspective, and play around with application of effects.

There were many, many audience questions - not surprising, given that this field is still growing in its range of tools and techniques. While we only covered static single-perspective video mapping (Maraya might be organizing a full hands-on workshop in future, for those interested), we also discussed some famous examples of multi-perspective and moving projection.

Sonic Electronic Kitchen Appliance Symphony Workshop at thejamjar

Having once been an electronics student, I jumped at the chance to do the Sonic Electronic Kitchen Appliance Symphony workshop at thejamjar this Saturday morning. The workshop was conducted by Juliana Espana Keller, a Canadian artist who is well-acquainted with sonic performance, and who happens to be a resident at Zayed University at the moment. Good for us, because this is fascinating stuff.

Somehow managing to haul myself to thejamjar early on Saturday morning after a serious DnB night, and after a quick encaffeination, I joined the other participants as we set to work putting together one of these:

It's a contact microphone. Basically, it's a standard piezo transducer component that rests on a bed of solid silicone glue in a bottle cap and is wired to an audio socket. A protective putty layer allows it to stick onto and pick up vibrations from solid objects, such as these:

It looks like a lot of random-looking kitchen utensils and appliances, but these were organized as per their ability to generate a sound that can be integrated into our orchestra.

Like Jedi padawans must create their own lightsabers to become knights, we had to construct our own contact microphones, using the above tools.

After stripping the ends off the audio cables and cutting them to size, we coat the exposed leads with lead solder.

Then we solder one end to a dismantled audio socket, which will be jacked into an amplifier and speaker.

The other end is soldered onto the leads of a piezo transducer disc.

After the soldering is done, the socket is reassembled.

Then, the cap is filled with silicone glue, and the transducer is pressed onto the glue just as it is about to seal dry.

The Fun-Tak putty is then used to seal the transducer on the glue. We had a great time using our mics to rehearse with the utensils and appliances, and I look forward to the performance at month-end.