Hydra.js

i last-minute* mocked up some background visuals for a party featuring ambient music. (i kept them running all night (12 hours) on a backlit screen near the dj booth and never really had to tune them. they were interesting enough to be entertaining while focused on, but didn’t dominate the space). i took a simple existing function from the hydra library and added a few lines for audioreactivity (color and distortion); black background was key to keep this looking more subdued and adding some forgiveness to the projected edges. ...

Made while I was ill and sequestering in my friends’ guest room in a cabin in New Hampshire. This is the first time I realized I could open a stream to one longer video, and access different points of the stream dynamically (I initially imported a lot of short clips, which was not workable memory-wise and reliably crashed the browser). tois is an array of “times of interest” that I preselected based on familiarity with the video. I’m playing mostly with layering and playbackRate, which I find to be an effective modulator when combined with the FFT of the audio playing. ...

slit scan capture #slitscan using #hydra.js on a half-time video of my best split-grip #pdayesha. would love to realtime-project this onto the dancer going out one side of the pole like this. right now speed of the trail is dictated by the amplitude of one of the fft bins for a bit of a dynamic effect — subtle in this more ambient track. ...

https://vimeo.com/1062659763?share=copy **spent 30 min tonight doing a rapid proof-of-concept for this multi-aerialist x multi-visualist hybrid performance i’ve been thinking about for awhile ty @myles_higher for being my test subject 🤍 oh and also giving me lots of real feedback on this idea in general for tonight, i set up very simple gestural control for reactivity using public #hydra.js sketches, but i want to add more cohesion soon with a mix of different sensors or controllers ...

r. tyler and i did viz for ciel, dj ladybug, and never not romance for crip rave during the plural prototypes gray area festival. solo viz for dj ladybug i did solo viz for dj ladybug with much more prepared material than i typically do for a hydra set (thus i would call this a hybrid of a livecoding set) step 1: preprocessing materials. when i asked dj ladybug for inspo she referred me to val de omar’s PLAT, which was a 20 min film comprising a series of still photographs. the only source we had for this was 480p. first i upscaled the photos to 4k (n=110) in stablediffusion. this process took about 12 hours. ...

played more with p5 generation, this time looking at more fft bins than i normally do (usually just hit the lowest bin because it’s the most obviously correlative, but this viz shows very clear correlates to all bins) // Fft ersatz 3d timeseries // p5 canvas recursion: p5 x hydra @errorbesque p.remove() p = new P5(); // setup cnv=p.createCanvas(400,400); oldCnv=p.createGraphics(p.width,p.height); p.noFill(); // reset p.background(0); v0y=p.height/2; v0y2=p.height/2; p.draw = () => { if ((a.fft[0]<0.4 && p.frameCount%5!=0)) return; oldCnv.image(cnv,0,0,p.width,p.height); oldCnv.loadPixels(); p.imageMode(p.CENTER) p.angleMode(p.DEGREES) p.push() p.translate(p.width/2, p.height/2); p.image(oldCnv,-12,p.sin(p.frameCount)*2,400,400); p.pop() a0=a.fft[0]+a.fft[1]; p.stroke(255,0,255,200); di=50 p.strokeWeight(2) if(p.random(-1,1)>0) p.blendMode(p.ADD) p.ellipse(p.width/2,p.height/2,di*a.fft[1]/2,di*a.fft[0]*2+2); p.stroke(255,255,0,200) v0y+=p.random(-2,2); p.ellipse(p.width/2+10,v0y+p.sin(p.frameCount/10),di*a.fft[1],di*a.fft[0]*2+2); p.stroke(0,255,255,200) v0y2+=p.random(-2,2); p.ellipse(p.width/2-10,v0y2+p.sin(p.frameCount/10),di*a.fft[1],di*a.fft[0]*2+2); p.blendMode(p.BLEND) } s0.init({src:p.canvas})src(s0).out(o0) src(o0) .scrollX(.05) .blend(src(o0).pixelate(1000,2).modulate(src(o2).scale(.999)), ()=>a.fft[2]/3).hue([0.32].smooth().fast(.1)).out(o1) src(o1) .scrollX(-.1) .scale(1.15) .modulate(src(o2).scale(1.01) .pixelate(1000,1000),0.0) .out(o2)render(o2)a.show()a.setSmooth(.4)

Basic canvas repetition with fft-responsivity First time using P5 in hydra. Importing packages was slightly challenging at first, mainly because I didn’t understand the js prototype importing order at first (:x). Got p5play imported and started using box2d with some particle behavior/generation mediated by the audio. ...

performed with dan gorelick at syzygy. really loved working with dan on our concept where we started from nearly blank screens (i started with only one function describing an fft spectrum and worked my way up from there), and was also glad i was able to integrate some realtime analog camera work of dan playing live cello. dan taught me how to do midi interface integration into hydra so that for a future set (when i’m more prepared!) i can control features with sliders. ...

As of this writing, imo this is the best hydra set i’ve ever done. mapped to a rollup door behind the dj booth i don’t have a recording since this was a last-minute idea (about an hour before, f. asked me to do visuals), but i followed my constraints well (monochrome, minimal, all visuals would be derived from the fft spectrum, an emphasis on linearity), showed restraint in letting ideas play out rather than shift too jarringly, clearly demonstrated the idea to the audience, and felt embodied enough with the music that i really enjoyed myself. i was really happy with the result. ...

i was one of the photographers for avclubsf’s event hexcode algorave. i was warned the light would be low, but the ever-changing light levels with very variable intensity were among the hardest conditions i’ve ever encountered. tried to rally and got some helpful advice from jason, and just continued to attempt to get the performers emoting as best i could. got good feedback on the set even if i was frustrated by a few of them being blurry… learned that maybe i should have turned up ISO earlier on even though i’ve never really gone over 1200 ISO in studio. ...