Arrive on the 9th night at Lisbon airport expecting 4 full days of audiovisual, friends and wonderful landscape. Coming back almost straight from Puerto Rico seminary, it was really natural to catch a lot of similarities between S.Juan and Lisbon. Both cities so colourful, so slow and amazingly submerged by the sun.

I met there my friend Paky, Marisa and Nuno. Paky plays live video in our audiovisual performance Too Many Pests and Marisa and Nuno are working with live visual too under the name Uninvited Screw Vjs – http://www.myspace.com/uninvitedscrewvjs.
Didn’t have so much time to visit the city, on the 10th we had our first show at O Seculo for the last take of InterAcção, monthly review about audiovisual live performance organized by the super kind and energyful Elsa Vieira – Roguewaves.net.

O Seculo is a cool location situated near the Bairro Alto in Lisbon. The place is set up with 7 projectors, nice sound system and a familiar atmosphere: chairs, tables and sofa.
Few people there watching our show, but good and relaxed atmosphere. In the end talking with Paky we recognized that was probably the best performance we made with TMP project.
I will always remember the ugly climb coming back from O Seculo with all the hardware, believe me!

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The day after we had the second show at Crew Hassan, great squatt-cooperativa cultural in the center of Lisbon. The place looks like a big house set up with bar, sofas all around, a room for live show and dj/vj sets, chill out room and many funny people & objects. After an interesting conference about architecture and society we played again Too Many Pests. Set up on the floor, big projection in front of us and more people interested in the work.

They told me that the show was catching their attention because of the cool union between my aggressive electronic tunes and the massive antisocial video flow of Mr. Paki.
Nice to know… After the performance we finally had great times all toghether with Uninvited Screw Vjs playing live video jam session on two projectors giving body to the funky selection of Dj Sly.

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The last two days were the most relaxing. Hanging around the city, eating well, going to clubs. Well done!
My last cool memories are about this wonderful terrace which overtop the city of Lisbon. An amazing open view of the buildings and the estuario… check this and imagine a super strong wind blowing in your hairs… amazing.

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You can check all the pictures of these fou days in the European Tour 2008 gallery, click here.
Soulful thanks to Marisa, Nuno, Elsa and all the other people who made us enjoy this brief but colourful journey to Lisbon..
dois bolas?

An old but really useful article posted on CreateDigitalMusic. For all those that are used to visual programming and they never used PureData. Here you can find some interesting notes about this powerful instrument for real-time audiovisual processing.

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By Peter Kirn

Related: DIY, free, Linux, Mac, Max/MSP, open-source, patching, Pd, programming, pure-data, Software, ubuntu, upgrades, Vista, Windows & more

Photo by the talented aoifejohanna, via Flickr.

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Pd, Max/MSP/Jitter’s free and open-source cousin for Mac, Windows, and Linux, has long been a favorite of software DIYers. It powers the synthesis and processing capabilities of the ReacTable project, made famous recently by Bjork. And its open nature has earned some followers even among Max/MSP/Jitter users (nothing stopping you from using both).
One thing Pd hasn’t been — even assuming you know how to patch — is easy. That’s unfortunate, because there are would-be patchers who can’t afford Max, or who want a full patching environment on Linux, or want some unique features in Pd and its libraries.
Hans-Christoph Steiner has been working for a long time on “Pd-extended”, adding a lot of that polish and documentation, and making the whole thing easier to install. There’s a major new, finished release that came out last week. “Easy” might not be the appropriate word — but “easier”, combined with “powerful” and “free”, might get your attention.
Hans-Christoph himself checks in to explain what Pd is about, and this build, even if you have no previous experience with the environment. Take it away, HC:

Pd (aka Pure Data) is one of the Max family of patcher languages. It is a close cousin of Max/MSP. Pd and Max were both created by Miller Puckette.
It is a visual, dataflow programming language for sound, video, 3D, etc. Basically, anything you can do with Max/MSP, you can do with Pd.
Miller Puckette started Pd as his “version 3″ of Max, and therefore there are some essential differences, but if you know Max/MSP, then Pd will be easy to learn.
The Pd-extended distro is the Miller’s Pd plus the work of over a hundred contributors. It includes a large array of libraries for working with all sorts of things.

There are many features hidden inside of Pd that are basically undocumented. Typical of free software developers, the Pd devs write a lot of interesting code, but are not very good at documenting it (me included).
For this release, we tried to bring more of that code to the forefront. The first part is getting it easy to install, the next part is making the documentation. For this release, the focus was on getting the visual libraries Gem, PDP, PiDiP working and interoperating. Gem was started in 1995 around OpenGL, it also has some pixel operations.
PDP is short for “Pure Data Packet”, and it is based on a 16bit signed yuv format chosen for efficient processing, and PiDiP is a library for streaming and effects for PDP.

This code has been working for years, but is very under-utilized. For the first time, PDP/PiDiP work ‘out-of-box’ on Mac OS X (you’ll need Apple X11, which is an extra install on your Mac OS X DVD).
Gem has support for shaders for at least two years, but there has been no documentation or examples, so very few people used it. Also, there were a couple of key bugs that preventing accessing the full potential of the shaders in Gem. They have been fixed, so there is lots of potential there.

On the usability front, there have been some key changes. You no longer need to mess with the preferences to use the standard libraries, they are all loaded by default.
Anti-aliasing is enabled, and the font has been changed to a more readable one. There is also a .deb package for Debian and Ubuntu, so it’s really easy to install there.

I would like to dedicate this release in memory of Jamie Tittle. He was one of the main Gem developers, and was a key contributor to lots of really great code, like Gem’s shaders and the PDP/Gem gateways.

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Visual programming, yadda yadda, open source platform for liberation of … okay, this is really about making sonic mayhem, as are these folks. Pictured: Francesco Rosati and Kurregomma perform the final live set of a three day-long Pure Data festival, co-organized by Francesco and the BuGsLab hacklab/collaborative in Roma, @ Strike s.p.a. Photo by pierlu (who writes to say he climbed a latter to snap this one!), aptly titled Pd Abuse. See: franzrozati.com.

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This is the end of this interesting article. I would like to add some useful links to go deep in the Pure Data world. I collected and selected them working in these two last years:

• Pd Installers
  This is the best page where to download the latest version of PD. Fundamental.
• Pure Data – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Public reference and explaination of PD on Wikipedia.
• http://umatic.nl/workshop/objects.txt
  Description of all the most useful objects you can find in PD.
• DELACREW BRUTE VEEJING ++ DRUM&BASS ++ MOTION GRAPHICS » EVE (open source project)
  Cool, interesting and super active spanish crew working with Vjing in PD. They developed their own software (EVE) with PD to make vjing.
• Qeve development
  Project of Husk an italian artist and friend. He’s working on a new personal version of EVE.
• Bienvenue sur le site Free Hardcore Improvisation Ltd | Free Hardcore Improvisation Ltd
  French audiovisual project. The rough one… I Love it! They build theyr own hardware and software.
• telenoika.net – portada
  Telenoika.net audiovisual open creative community (Spain)
• OpenSoundControl
  More weird and nerdy stuff:
  (”OSC”) is a protocol for communication among computers, sound synthesizers, and other multimedia devices that is optimized for modern networking technology and has been used in many application areas.
• PortAudio – an Open-Source Cross-Platform Audio API
  PortAudio is a cross platform, open-source, audio I/O library. It provides a very simple API for recording and/or playing sound using a simple callback function.
• Arduino – HomePage
  Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It’s intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.
• YouTube – Pure Data Video Mixer
  This is a tutorial that shows how to make a software video mixer using open source object oriented graphical programming environment Pure Data
• I C::ntr::l Nature
  Software (C::NTR::L) and performance developed by Marco Donnarumma aka The !S.A.D!.
  The electric bass guitar is used as sonic source to process in real-time, but also as video controller, thanks to a complex system of audio analysis which recognizes notes, frequencies and RMS, and duration and translates this data in parameters employed to control in a new and specific interaction scratch, speed, length, fading and selection in real time over the video output.

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hope this will help some of you!…

Accepting the invite of the spanish artist and teacher Blanca Bustamante-Perez (aka Whiteemotion) i’m arrived in Puerto Rico to support her workshop on the audiovisual production and live performance. I gave a speech about my work and I introduced the philosophy and the use of open source software (in specific PureData)
Besides we gave lessons about FlxER and Modul8, softwares that the students have used for their final performances. This performances took place during the final event of the seminary, which ended with a performance by Whiteemotion and the first intercontinental show of my project ‘I C::ntr::l Nature‘, free audiovisual improvising.
The whole experience has been really constructive and the group formed during the seminary definitevely seems to have the right potential to become the core of the future audiovisual community in Puerto Rico. Good luck guys!!
Check the website of the project with infos and pictures here:

http://vjpuertorico.wordpress.com