Projections as Light: Nonotak
Posted: Fri Oct 18, 2013 11:26
NONOTAK is a collaboration between Noemi Schipfer, illustrator and Takami Nakamoto, musician and architect.
Music to our ears! For more info on Nonotak's latest project Late Speculation: http://www.nonotak.com/latespeculation.htmWe are interested in the relationship between space, light and sound. We try to express it through installations or audiovisual performances.
Over the past 2 years, we essentially worked on installations such as "ISOTOPES V.02" which was shown at Mapping Festival 2013 in Geneva. Each of our installations tries to create dematerialized spaces that can be controlled.
We wanted our visual compositions to go beyond the 2nd dimension, as if we were playing with an architecture made of light. This is also why most of our work is monochrome, we consider projections as light and not videos.
In order to make it possible we are projecting our visuals on different kind of textiles in order to make them look like holograms.
The technique used is projection mapping, obviously. The project Late Speculation is our first step into more improvisational live performance, where audiovisual elements are no longer looped like installations, but rather created in the moment. Each performance could have its own variations, generating different results, with an element of surprise even for the performers themselves.
Achieving this with Resolume worked like a charm. Resolume (especially the last one which fixed some speedy midi issues) is a really complete software for this kind of "live" purpose.
Basically we are using Ableton Live for the audio and sending midi to Resolume. The midi sent from Ableton is "written" and the same each time we are playing a song. But with some Max for Live patches and Ableton devices we are able to change midi notes and channels that are sent to Resolume. This is how we simply trigger different decks from a single midi note in order to create controlled variation that we can trigger via midi knobs.
Those "midi triggered" parts are basically After Effects compositions that we load into Resolume. Some parts of the project are made on Quartz Composer, but no panic because Resolume is able to load the patches and even load the sliders created on QC so we can easily map them to midi controllers! This kind of "highly" synced set up needs A LOT of Resolume decks and we were really impressed by the amount the software was able to handle according to our laptop setup.
There is one link that helped us a lot connecting some part of Resolume with Ableton for live purpose : https://resolume.com/blog/8717/max-for- ... me-patches This way I (Takami) am even able to send information to Noemi's Resolume from my Akai mpd32, so visuals can react with the effects I'm playing in Live.
In terms of projection mapping, Resolume does an awesome job by having output transform, warping, multiple layers, screens and slices options included. We are using 2 projectors and sometimes we are projecting the same visual from both of the projectors but they also act separately, one is off while the other one is on and this was easy to achieve within one unique software.
Performance setups need to be away from lag and bugs, thats why running only Resolume for the visual content was quite reassuring.