Visual Music Residency

I’ve just come back from the Visual Music residency, part of the Dyski programme in Cornwall. It was hosted by writer and musician Dion Star and led by artists and performers Lea Fabrikant and Tarik Barri. It was a chaotic and exciting week.

I had a full day’s drive to get there, so I arrived a day early and spent the extra time walking and sketching before everyone else turned up.

The residency was about Ableton Live and VideoSync, Tarik’s software for working with video musically inside Ableton. The first couple of days were about treating video as material you can phrase, time and warp as you perform. It got me thinking much more about rhythm, and about moving image as part of the performance itself.

I took MarkSynth, the audio-video responsive visual synthesiser I built for Performance Fingerprints. My main goal was to connect what it draws more directly to events in the performance it’s responding to. Being around artists and musicians who perform with video and sound soon made me think more broadly than that, and I learned a lot about how they work.

By the end of the week I’d made a Syphon integration for MarkSynth, so it can send its output to other live video software such as VideoSync and Resolume. Longer term, I want to connect MarkSynth more closely to Ableton itself.

I also made asciiVideo for one of Dion’s forthcoming projects. Everyone there was generous and open, and I came away with new friends.

Some of my strongest memories are of the projects people made and showed, the walks through the bluebell woods and down to the water, the meals together, and one evening when we projected visuals onto the trees around the house.

I don’t know yet where this leaves Performance Fingerprints, and I’m not in a hurry to decide.