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Pushing boundaries with the Karlax controller…

NAMM 2010 was the death of VJ as the industry did not have anything new regarding the control and integration of music and video.

It looks like innovation was there at the Frankfort music and sound show, the old continent has something new and very cool regarding control. DA FACT did introduce the Karlax and we added support for it in GrandVJ just in time for the show. And now at ArKaos we have a proposition for artists that would like to explore this with us, read this, watch the video and the details are at the end of this article…

It’s all about maximizing control and using your body to express your ideas. 10 fingers running on a MIDI keyboard can allow triggering many events but as Nintendo did show to the game industry gestures and your body can add a whole new fantastic layer to expression and control.

This is the idea of the Karlax. It’s a MIDI instrument that generate key press and control values via standard pads and sliders on the instrument but it has also gesture support to generate even more MIDI controller.

It’s a delight for GrandVJ because when designing it we made sure that everything can be controlled via MIDI. In this video you see the mixer interface mapped to the various MIDI notes and controllers generated by the Karlax. In this first implementation we did map 5 controllers to the intensity of the first 5 layers of the mixer. You can use 2 keys to select the next and previous layer so you can edit live the state all layers directly from the controller. Other controls can affect loop speed, triggering visuals from the patch, select next previous effects, moving the visual position, changing effect parameters value… the gesture itself is mapped to loop speed.

In this video you see GrandVJ controller in the same time with an audio processing application.

We have received an interesting proposition from DA FACT, we would like to receive submission from GrandVJ users living around Brussels or Paris. DA FACT will provide a controller for one month, we will provide software and support. During that month the artist must create an original piece both audio and video. We will shoot the progress and record the final presentation. This will be used as an example of what can be done today when you use such powerful combination. Send us your proposition via mail at contact at arkaos dot net.

A big thank you to Christophe Martin for making this happen!

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Ambient Video : Serge Devadder – Nadir

I just finished a new video: “Serge Devadder – Nadir” from the compilation Euphony 1.
I am a long time friend with Serge and last time we met he gave me the Euphony 1 compilation. During this meeting I did show him some of my video work and we talked about visualizing his music. Serge gave me some suggestion and asked for a black and white video. I started listening to this track and liked the progression with the percussion coming at the end. I quickly made a proposal for Serge and reworked it during a few months and here is the final result. I collected those video loops in 2009-10 on various locations : Californian and Irish coast, Polish Mountains, water reflections in Belgium and some stones from Cyprus.

Here is the video:

You can play it in HD if you watch it directly on YouTube.

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A new way of driving LED devices ?

At ArKaos we are writing software to drive LEDs since many years. We have our standard media server software MediaMaster and our VJ software that is used every day to drive LED walls and LED fixtures. We have also our LED mapper that is a cool way to drive LED fixtures based on DMX or ArtNet.

Still it’s too complicated and/or expensive to use. It’s too complicated because simple LED fixtures do rely on DMX or ArtNet to work, and there are too many magic numbers that can go wrong and prevent the magic pixels to blink. On the other side bigger LED walls have expensive hardware interfaces and make it unpractical financially for too many performers and clubs.

There must be a way to create LED device having an ethernet connection and there should be a way for a LED device to say hello automatically to a Media Server and to describe itself to it. It would be so cool if a LED device could contact MediaMaster and configure itself automatically, it would explain it’s capacities saying “I am an LED device having 48 by 12 pixels and I expect pixels in the formats of 5 bits or red green blue”… Of course to make this economically practical the LED devices should not have a too expensive processor, you don’t want to add a PC behind every light 🙂

That’s the prototype we built lately, it uses an inexpensive open-source electronics prototyping platform called Arduino, here is a video explaining this:

If you want to know more details, here is a start:

A technical introduction to Kling-Net

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Job opportunity at ArKaos

It’s always a cool moment when you can grow your team and make some place for new employees in the company.

Looking for developer is a difficult task, I always say, and I am proud of, we are an atypical company. First we try to be as agnostic as possible regarding as many technologies as possible. We are cross platform, we talk to many video APIs and we sell from very inexpensive product to customized and very powerful hand crafted servers.

But how can you do that ? With a lot of passion and by spending a lot of time learning every day. We optimize our software to push the limits as far as we can. It can means trying to work around undocumented bugs in OpenGL drivers, using poorly documented APIs, spending days tracking hypothetical memory performance issues…

Also important to ArKaos is what I call our Punk mentality. We don’t expect others to help us, to be self-sufficient is very important. It’s normal to want to do things that no other have ever done, just expect a lot of problems and expect to fail many time before you eventually succeed. We write code not to make our life easier but to use the least possible memory, the least possible bandwidth from the disk and to avoid unnecessary decencies from the operation system.

The world of real time video is a fascinating one; so many people did not yet perceive the potential of creating perfectly synchronized audio visual performances. So many things are still to be created and defined. It feel hard for me to write that because I started creating real-time video tools at the beginning of the 90s… 20 years ago. Just look at the different VJ applications or at the different media servers used by the lighting industry, they are very different tools that can be used to create amazing real time audiovisual performances.

The last important thing is our social behavior; we are a software company that likes a lot to speak with hardware companies. You can only do that by spending a lot of time networking during many exhibitions, building friendships and trying to convince companies, sometime much bigger than you, that a collaboration is always the way forward. During our history we did forge many alliance that helped promote the concept of real-time video performance. We contributed significantly to what you see today when you go to a concert and enjoy a nice moment.

You don’t go to an event to just “listen to music” but to “see a nice concert!” Right ?

If you think you could help us, here is the more formal job description job detail