So a while ago I interviewedFernando Llanos, a Mexican artist with a huge catalogue of artworks under his belt. Notably, this included the Videohuahua project – which involved a micro projector strapped to the back of his pet chihuahua. Turned out he was bringing a video blimp to Australia for the Splendour in the Grass festival, and was spending a few days in Melbourne afterwards – so we made plans to meet up.
A couple of days later, I was introduced to Gonzalo who runs the enchanting Magic Lantern Studio ( 155 Brunswick St, Fitzroy, Melbourne ), which is filled with puppets, optical illusion and vintage pre-cinema moving image devices. At some point I noticed he had a few paintings of chihuahuas on the walls, and we got talking about them – and then I mentioned Videohuahua – Gonzalo stared at me, then lead me laughing to his computer where he showed a series of paintings that feature chihuahuas with cameras strapped to their heads.
Inevitably Fernando’s Melbourne visit had to include a trip to Magic Lantern, where it turned out the art and chihuahua anecdotes flew thick and fast ( mostly in fast-forward Spanish). Below, Fernando on the left, Gonzalo on the right, in front of the shop and a painting of a chihuahua with an electric shaver as head. Photographed and blogged, so I can say, no, I am not making this up.
By the end of the week, after much tech configuration, island sampling*, and software wrestling, we’d concocted a work in progress that was deemed seaworthy enough for 3 x 45 minute audiovisual sets during the public exhibition night. And during that day the space was filled with people wandering around the inflatable sculpture, while cocooned by a generative surround installation busy mutating captured island sounds into new species. Turns out the accumulated ferry rides, nautical rust and winter winds were worth enduring in the end, as the performance seemed to go really well, much of the pieces falling into shape on the very last evening before the event.
For myself, it was very satisfying to have an opportunity to explore video composition in a great setting, and in a more spatial way – using an external graphics card to send a different signal to 3 different projectors simultaneously, using madmapper to position and map the video from each of these, and having the luxury of returning each day to experiment with equipment that was already set-up. And it was super-satisfying to be doing that with…
Jean Poole: spatial video composition and live video manipulation with 3 projectors, vdmx, quartz composer and madmapper. Dan MacKinlay + James Nichols: Quadrophonic soundscapes using field recordings, vintage synthesisers and heavily customised super collider patches. (They don’t have much vinyl, but their phd maths books weigh a tonne.. ) Sarah Harvie: inflatable sculpture, tailor designed for our space with lots of late night industrial sewing machine sweat.
Aside from the audacious setting, part of what made the residency great was the motley collection of artists also spending time on the island, each struggling with their own peculiar set of problems to solve. And it was inspiring to see everyone’s work evolving over the week. This extensive festival review gives a good taste of how the exhibition day unfolded, and these were some of my favourites:
Case Study – This was my pick of the bunch, 6 artists who had the aim of building a new colonial society in their allocated portion of the island. Which they built out of everything they brought in their suitcases, as well as using their suitcases themselves to build individual artist houses. There were telescopes and projected moons, ornate water features, mossy forests growing from open suitcases and test tubes, every step a new photogenic overload.
Younes Bachir and Strings Attached got the jaw-drop-spectacle medal – with their meat-suits, paint-splashy aerial choreography ( imagine a dozen people 4 storeys up dynamically moving about in space ) and flair in abundance. ( This gives a good taste of why it excited.. )
Brad Miller’s Data_shadow video installation was super-slick, an exploration of memory, technology and how lusciously you can make a database of photographs and video wander across 4 screens with motion detection cues from visitors. Biljana Jancic‘s wooden boxed shafts of light played beautifully with the smoke machines, silhouettes and the industrial space and SWANBRERO used inflatable car sales dancers to great effect in their piece – INFLATE MY HEART WITH 1000 GUSHES OF WIND .
Video it would seem, is slipping from the screen into the world around it. Increasingly we expect to see pixels sliding around us in three dimensional space – dripping down heritage building facades, climbing across weird geometric clusters surrounding a sound system, illuminating the edges of random urban infrastructure. Although we’ve long held the ability to use software for custom tailoring projections to suit specific shapes, Madmapper seems to have struck a chord because it arguably makes the process easier and more intuitive than anything else before it. (Above image: Madmapper makes easy work of industrial machinery at Cockatoo Island, during preparations for the Underbelly festival. More images. )
Vat Ist?
At its simplest – Madmapper is software for mapping textures to surfaces. This approach presumes the textures have been created elsewhere, or are being created elsewhere in real-time and piped into Madmapper. This avoids unnecessarily cluttering or slowing down the application, and allows Madmapper to focus purely on techniques for aligning textures onto surfaces. It’s a recipe which seems to serve it well, although means the application can at times seem undercooked when looking around for functions you’d expect in video software, that they’ve decided are best dealt with elsewhere. Below, the madmap used for the triple projector image up top.
The Basic Ingredients
That purity of focus is immediately evident in the spartan split-screen interface. In the left hand column, we get the ability to choose our source material textures ( real-time video from other software via Syphon, or images and movies drag and dropped into the column ). On the right side we can see what our textures look like, the shape of the surfaces they are going onto, or textures and surface side by side. Within that, there’s a careful attention to detail which makes the mapping process as seamless and non-complicated as possible. Below, zooming into the interface, first the triple screen map, then a closer view of the map for the industrial machine.
Interfacing
There’s a lovely level of refinement to the Madmapper interface – it’s simple, but it works as you’d expect, and sometimes better. For example, click-dragging the corner of each surface to skew it in a direction isn’t too remarkable, but by pressing the left, right, up and down arrows on a keyboard, that corner is nudged in tiny increments – perfect for tiny alignment adjustments. No weird menu bottlenecks, it’s just there in front of you. Click on the surface inside the corners and the arrows move the whole surface pixel by pixel, and for the surface’s very handy scale and rotation buttons, the arrows again provide incremental help.
Bonus Features?
Plug in a camera and use Spatial Scanner to turn your video-projector into a 2d scanner. Grid warping ( similar to mesh warping in After Effects )
Ability to use existing photographs as a preview background, to test out a mapping design.
Ability to export your image as a PDF.
What’s Missing?
Sitting in a dusty warehouse with a projector pointed from a weird angle, projecting onto a weird industrial shape – is a fairly good test of it’s versatility, and once you get wrestling with very specific problems, it becomes evident how well thought through their interface and features are. On the other hand, this almost elegant sophistication makes it all the more jarring when some things are missing – Madmapper can feel a little too minimal at times – especially given its price.
Wishlist?
– an ability to create bezier curves
– ability to create lines or circles ( it only includes capacity to create triangles, squares and polygons )
– no ability to set shortcuts for keys / midi to trigger features, fade to black etc.
– no ability to switch between presets.
– can only receive one Syphon source ( it’s possible to provide multiple sources by making a collage in other software, but it seems like work that could be avoided )
– being able to control aspects of surfaces such as colour or outlines. Madmapper prefer that to be done elsewhere, but this would very conveniently streamline some aspects of mapping onto shapes.
(To their credit, some of these features are listed in their help forums for inclusion within future upgrades. )
Performance?
Given that the surface transformation ninja moves are likely happening on the graphics card, Madmapper seems to add hardly any major dent when running on top of VJ software. Haven’t seen a single crash yet and all of the interface seems really responsive.
Requirements?
An Intel Mac running Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.
To use the Spatial Scanner function of MadMapper, you’ll need either a QuickTime compatible Firewire camera
or Canon camera models that are compatible with the Canon EDSDK.
MadMapper v1.0 license for 2 computers €299
MadMapper v1.0 license for 2 computers for of owners of an existing Modul8 2.6 license €199
Educational pricing is also available.
Overall?
There are other free and paid software choices for projection mapping, but the elegant focus of Madmapper minimises the amount of time spent bogged down in complicated processes. It’s expensive software, but by removing some of the technical barriers, it opens up projection mapping to ever more complicated futures. Super-like.
Above, after much hair-pulling : VDMX merrily sending out 2400 x 600 pixels across 2 screens and 1 projector, via the set-up below.
ie – 2010 Macbook Pro –> mini display to DVI convertor –> DVI cable –> Matrox Triplehead2go Digital Edition –> DVI to VGA adaptors x 3.
According to Matrox, only the Triplehead2go DP ( Display Ports in/out) edition is compatible with the 2010 Macbook Pro. I wasn’t able to get that to send a signal to projectors, using display port to VGA adaptors. The DP-VGA adaptors by themselves worked fine on the ends of other cables, but when put after the TH2GO DP box, no signal. Weird science.
[[ UPDATE :Finally got Triplehead2go DP edition working with DP to VGA… with some new DP to VGA *active* adaptors. These adaptors apparently come in active and passive flavours, and active is needed. The previous batch of adaptors I’d received from ebay were supposedly active, but didn’t work. I found some others locally recently, and they worked fine. Seemed capable of 3 x 1280 x 720 and 2 x 1920×1080 without a problem. Didn’t try 3 x 1080P because of the projector set-up.]]
Was just about to sell the older Matrox Digital Edition, which ended up incompatible with my last machine, but aaaaaanyways. THREE SCREENS OUT. And with less than 3 hours til airport-to-Sydney time, for tomorrow’s video installing on Cockatoo Island, this is a good thing. Also good – the holy software trinity of VDMX, Syphon + Madmapper all worked perfectly across the 3 screens.
Below, Madmapper stretching across screens, even as computer leads are being stolen away from it and shoved into a bag.
Have been doing some experiments recently with Troy Innocent, involving laser cut characters, everyday scenes and projection mapped video. We’re trying to figure out what works well for us, with an eye to fleshing out something some kind of developed work later. Troy has access to a laser cutter at work, and obviously the attraction there is to play with the unique levels of intricacy that a laser cutter allows with materials such as plastic and thin plywood. Taking that a step further, we thought it’d be fun to develop some simple low frame animation loops with these physical characters and record them moving about in stop motion. We’ve done some simple tests outdoors which worked well, surprisingly popping to life when played in sequence onscreen, and most recently we tried an indoor shoot, which gave another chance to test out Madmapper.
Re-Routing Video in 2011
First up, the whole routing video clips between video applications thing, enabled by Syphon, is really fantastic. For me, this means VDMX to Syphon to Madmapper to the projector. Manipulate video in your preferred real-time software, then at the end of the chain remap this video onto what Madmapper calls ‘surfaces’, creating, positioning and reshaping as many of these surfaces as you like. This makes sense and so far the addition of running Syphon + Madmapper alongside VDMX hasn’t seemed to dent the performance of VDMX at all. That might change with more complicated projection mapping – we’ll see.
Some Madmapper Observations
As seen above, the Madmapper interface is minimal and intuitive, and this helps mapping happen super quickly. For our test mapping onto some paper skyscrapers, it was a simple process of selecting which part of the video to be sent to a surface, then clickdragging the corners of the virtual surface until it the video filled the actual surface of the paper skyscraper in front of the projector. Total time to line-up video on the sides of 3 buildings? About 5 minutes. This is a very simple example, and possible with other existing software – but this software certainly makes the process a breeze. Am going to post a full review of Madmapper soon, and discuss some of it’s strengths and weaknesses for dealing with more complex scenarios. In the meantime, it’s worth noting that although it’s pitched as a solution for reconfiguring 2D imagery onto 3D shapes – Madmapper’s ease of use also makes it a very attractive option for just even compositing imagery within 2D environments. From the close-up below it should be evident how straight forward it is to select portions of video, and quickly composite this into desired shapes. More laters!
