Nov 20 2024

The Gravity Waaaves DSK kickstarter is all set up and ready to launch on December 1st! I guess you can click a button on that site to show that you are excited about seeing it launch, so seems like a thing to do.



Sticker Club Month 2 selections are in!  This will be another bundle month, don’t get too excited yalls b/c starting december it will only be 1 sticker per month.  The test prints of the GWDSK pseudo holographic stickers and a sampling of whatever gets leftover from the remnants of the VSEJET retirement stickers will be the main features this month!  reminder to sign up for sticker club, print club, or both at my ko-fi!




and seems like there might be a *sale* coming up for VSEJET instruments starting on like black friday or something.  jeez, all i’m writing about is fucking sales things, what is happening to me.  blah blah buy buy blah blah bleg. 



forget i said anything, stop buying stuff, ponder the nudibranch and consider how different their life is from ours.  is it better?  is it worse?  are these even the right questions?  



heres some actual news: did you know that Meetings with Remarkable men is now a major motion picture starring terence stamp?  i sure didn’t, gonna have to check this out with my loved ones this holiday season.

Nov 1 2024

I’ve just finished up packing up octobers Sticker Club rewards for everyone who signed up.  Just as a heads up, most monthly rewards going forward will only be 1 sticker, but for at least the first month (maybe next month too) I’ll be bundling together batches of stickers i’ve already got on hand, both as an extra reward to folks who sign up early and to offset the general monthly active costs of this projec



I’ve also got a test print up of what’ll be the first bi-monthly print club reward (to mail out at the end of December 2024). Print club will be bimonthly for now, theres like some weird psychological thing with monthly costs to rewards thing i’m trying to figure out here, and also trying to make sure i’m not signing up to rip myself off.  feel like this part of the ko-fi could be pretty unintersting to most anyone who ends up on that page but who the fuck knows?

Heres a little update of my current studio space.  Its working pretty well so far!  still looking forward to getting some kind of larger space in the winter proper but prett



and heres a little shot of some projects i’ve been working on with footage of elemental mercury...

October 22 2024

Earlier this summer i set a reminder thing to go off every two weeks to “update news on my website”.  clearly this has not been working lol.  Sales of everything has been pretty decent, Video Sync was pretty awesome, classes are all going well, and


as always tho, i’m a little more broke than flush, and just a little too poor to invest in my general biz, so i’m trying another new thing to shill that might be kind of fun.  Doing a monthly sticker club and print club over at ko-fi.  Its pretty simple, give me some money every month and i’ll send you physical representations of my artworks every month!  I’m hoping this can help offset costs of a couple of new peices of hardware i’m looking to get at my new studio space, a vinyl cuttter, a 3d printer, and a large format printer.  Seems like something folks might want.  Seems also like the kind of thing that i get really sick of hyping up, not too many people sign up for, and i cancel in a couple months b/c i just figured out a different way to make money.  So i guess maybe sign up soon if you want any stickers cause maybe the whole thing will become abandoned before too long lol.

August 24 2024

lots of flyers to share!


I’ve got another session of my vysnth class up for registration at polyphasportal.xyz! 




and another session of my obs class as well, also at polyphaseportal.xyz!



Video Sync & Immersion Fest are happening in just a couple weeks, will be well worth travelling out for this one no doubt!

and the prices go up on pre-order sales for everything in the next couple weeks, you’ll want to lock down something soon if you don’t want to pay any extra!

June 19 2024

Here is a real soft anouncement for a video art chatauqua i’m helping put together in Champaign-Urbana, Il.  *soft announcement voice* Video Sync is a video artist centric mini fest, decentralized convention, general video synth meet up and hang that will be held at a couple of locations in champaign September 6th and 7th.  There will be live a/v performances each night as well as a semi private space set aside for folks to set up video gear and jam out.  We will have some more formal annoucements and info coming out quite soon but just wanted to drop a link here to a form folks should fill out if they are interested in participating in performances and/or looking to rideshare and/or share housing somewhere in the area that weekend!

June 6 2024

Welp i’ve certainly got some news.  some of it is not great, some of it is potentialy cool.  Thats the way, of the world!



Since the last update, VSEJET has gone into EOL production, with this fall being probably the last time i’ll be selling any more of those synths, at least at any kind of scale.  Going for the presales options for these is most likely the best option overall b/c supplies are low, prices are unstable, and this is the last reliable chance!  For more info on how to order, check out my shop.

My video synthesis class in Vsynth is going great, had a pretty good turnout and i expect to do this class at least one more time this year, subscribe to the Polyphase Portal newsletter to find out when!



I’ll be doing a mini tour of workshops, shows, and other such video art fun times this summer as Phase Shift, we have plans to visit Iowa City, Champaign Urbana, Minneapolis, and possibly some other midwestern locations.
 


In other video art event news, i’ll be able to announce a pretty cool event i’ve been working on with a group of like minded friends.  I can’t say too much more than folks might want to start planning on travelling out to the midwest in early september if they want to attend a pretty amazing video art & video synthesis centered event! 

May 21 2024

Welp it has certainly been a minute since i updated any news.  not really b/c i didn’t have any news, more like i had too much going on and something had to give.  Maybe i’ll get back to regularly posting here!


I’ve got an upcoming class at polyphase portal called Digital Video Synthesis in Vsynth!  We will meet for 4 sessions over 4 weeks and cover all the basics of composing in space and time with video oscillators, video feedback, and basic components of mixing, colorizing, and filtering using the Vsynth package for Max/Msp designed by Kevin Kripper.  Check out this link for more info and to register!  

 




There will be some old and some new things returing to the shop this time.  Old stuff includes the audio reactive & audio based VSERPI (Auto Waaave and Auto Mesh), and new stuff will include Artificial Life HD for VSEJET and the new VSEJET and VSERPI master systems!  The master systems for each system will include everything needed to run all of the available synths for each ecosphere + a full set of preflashed sd cards for easy switching between the different instruments.  




I’ve got some travels planned for this summer as well.  For now the main thing we’ve got on the calendar is a Phase Shift workshop at Public Space One in Iowa City.  We will also be organizing and video artist meet up in Iowa City earlier that week, and might have some fun stuff planned for Champaign-Urbana and Minneapolis as well.  

December 14 2023

As the sales for GW and WPHD continue to do extremely poorly and as i recently discovered that theres EOL raspberry pi 3b/3b+ on sale these days, VSERPI are back on sale!  This means there are not much more affordable options for folks looking to get in on the action with the OG Waaave Pool, Artificial Life, Spectral Mesh, and Temporal Vortex!  Sales start today and will go until the end of March 2024 or until supplies run out, whichever comes first!

in other news, assuming that sales of literally anything go well enough for me to not just have to go get a diswashing job somewheres, i’ll be looking into porting the VSERPI onto the Pi Zero 2 boards to keep these affordable video synths out there, alive, and potentially keeping me decently fed and sheltered in an ongoing basis.

As usual, if you’d like to help out with development, buy some synths, spread the word irl or on social medias about the current sales run, and/or head over to my patreon to help keep the lights on and gas in the tank over here!

December 13 2023

I’m going live today at 3pm EST to do another Video Signals AMA as a part of Polyphase Portal!  You can either view on my youtube or on the legit Polyphase Portal server, but i’ll only answer questions folks ask over on the Polyphase Portal sides of things.

I’ve also extended the sale dates of GW and WPHD until January 31 2024 b/c enough folks have asked for more time to save up.  

I might have some more information to share very soon about more affordable video synths for sale, stay tuned here and on my instagram to see whats up.

December 7 2023

For folks in the NYC area, I’ll be leading some educational video art events at Wavefield, a media art collective run out of the former Phase Space location in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

On Sunday December 10th from 7-10pm I’ll be leading an Introduction to Analog Video Signals and Systems.  This class offers a guided, hands on intro to using broadcast & consumer video gear for live performance.  No experience necessary.

From Wednesday January 3rd-Sunday January 7th, 8pm-11pm , I’ll be leading Video Art Boot Camp.  This is a multi day affair intended to lead participants through all of the necessary steps to preparing, composing, and performing with broadcast and consumer video gear.  

As Phase Shift, we will also be opening up for booking more video art educational events from Feb-May 2024, focusing mainly on locations in the Northeast and Midwest USA.  Give us a shout via our contact page if you’d like to get involved with organizing something in your area!

November 28 2023

I’ve been quite busy keeping up with sales, dev, and promotions for Gravity Waaaves and Waaave Pool HD!  Heres a bunch of new youtube videos for yalls to peruse

Is some recent visuals i created using Artificial Life (VSERPI version) as an input to Gravity Waaaves.  I can’t wait to start messing around with the new ALHD along with WPHD and GW this winter!  The music is an old XZX album i made back in 2019 called Arrival.

And here is a video from the live performance that Paloma Kop and I did as Phase Shift at Coaxial in los angeles near the end of our 2023 tour!  I was using gravity waaaves + media players, camera feedback, and liquid lights for my video portion of this performance!

November 25 2023

And while i’m at it, got a new video demo for some fun modes in gravity waaaves up on the tube youse as wel!

November 24 2023

And Yo, I’ve got a nice and succinct intro video to whats up with WPHD on the youtubes now!  This bizz is still on sale for the remainder of 2023, grab up a pre order soon before the sands of time fall through your fingers like grains of sand from a broken hourglass that measures 1 month and 6 days!  And don’t forget that yalls just get a bonus image of WPHD for free along with Gravity Waaaves, so just something to keep in mind.

November 22 2023

In some rather unexpected and potentially exciting news, i’ve decided that in addition to selling Gravity Waaaves, I’ll also be selling the new Waaave Pool HD port!  As many folks have probably noticed, this is because Gravity Waaaves is Not Selling So Hot.  Not that i’m incredibly surprised, in my travels i definitely noticed from meeting a lot of small developers and working with synth shops and whatnot that sales of all video & audio synths have been in a significant post covid slump (tho as to whether this has anything to do with the covid era sales of electronic devices being a gigantic bubble and the current slump being more of just a normal zones is up for debate.  i lean towards the bubble theory).

    Sales down probalby also reflects the basic fact that i’ve been quite distant from social media this year!  (except for my mastodon, where i really don’t post much about video art or video synths at all, and i basically never have and never will use as aggressively as i do my instagram for promotions).  I did spend about 2-3 months straight hyping up the final development stages of gravity waaaves before the kickstarter got off the ground so that probably helped quite a bit.  this time i just popped out of no where (from many social media focused humans perspective) and said “hey remember me, want to buy some shizz?”

   But most likely the biggest one is that the overwhelming response i’ve gotten from gravity waaaves users is “wow, this looks really cool but is way more complicated than i was expecting!”  Which is somewhat dissapointing but not completely surprising.  TBH Gravity Waaaves is exactly the kind of instrument that I love to work on and love to use for jamming out and for live performances, but i am well aware that my tastes are not exactly normal, even for video artists.  Maybe i’ll do some work on a alternative version of Gravity Waaaves (lil’ g Waaaves?) that ONLY has block 3 (i.e the main mixing & color processing portion) for folks who aren’t up for going through all the excercises in the manual to help with learning the (admittedly) complex structure of this absurdly powerful instrument.  But yeah,the word of mouth, which I heavily rely on, has probably not been great on GW, which is dissappointing, but real.

    But basically what i hear that ppl are missing from GW is the immediacy of Waaave Pool, so i figured what the heck, why not just sell the HD port of WP too, so folks have the option of getting a cheaper option (i don’t doubt that global recession and the price hike on GW made a pretty big difference too!)  Because what is also real is that i need to make some cash in order to survive, even in my new low rent existence!

In other news of things that I am doing to generate income, i’ve got some new classes coming up at polyphase portal for winter/spring 2024!  Introduction to Video Art with OBS is a brand new one i’m particularly excited about, the main goal with this is to take the kind of techniques i’ve been teaching for use with hardware mixers and teach them using obs instead!  Been wanting to teach more technique based online classes but didn’t really want to try and fuck with hardware mixer based stuffs so this seemed like the best way to go about it!

And I’m happy to announce the return of Magick, Video Art, & Narrative!  I’ve taught this one before and it was a pretty big hit! don’t know if any of my online classes have been as well received as this one so was kind of a no brainer to do another session as soon as i had the time!


And heres just some more cool pictures i been taking from my travels! 

November 14 2023

Oh Heyy, Gravity Waaaves is Officially On Sale Now!  Here is wheres you can buy it; make sure to get in there before January 1 2024!  This’ll be the last opportunity to pick one up from me until winter 2024 at the very earliest.  The big news here about this sales run is that the GW image will be updated with bonus images of HD updates of Waaave Pool, Artificial Life, and Temporal Vortex (and maybe SM??).  This means that you get an additional 3 video synths to play with on the same platform!  You might even want to get 2 sos you can do HD Artificial Life as an input into Gravity Waaaves...

The secondary big news about this sales run is that the updated images of GW will have save states and midi macros going on.  This also means folks who already gots their GWs will be able to update to these features too!  Should be a real game changer for anyone looking to do live performance with GW.  I’ve been doing more than a couple this year and can say that i definitely want save states for the future lol.  



And in completelly unrelated news, heres some cool pictures i’ve been taking on the road.

October 18 2023

I’ve very softly opened up the next sales run for Gravity Waaaves here on this very website!  Will start doing more promotions for it in earnest starting in November but folks are welcome to put in orders (or at the very least start saving up!) already.  Orders will close up at the end of December, or when I get too many, whichever comes first!

Semi related, i’ve noticed a couple of use cases of the Gravity Waaaves Font out in the wild just recently! This book about the Transcendental Painting Group from New Mexico has it everywhere inside!



Just days after I saw that art book in a friends living room, I saw billboards for the new San Diego tourism board campaign on the highways in the bay area and was mildly mind blown!

And What Is This Font Exactly?

Marvin Visions, a font inspired by an older typeface used heavily in sci fi paperbacks and other pop culture ephemera of the 1970s.  I had been using good old OCR-A as the general logo typeface for the VSERPI b/c i enjoy monospace fonts and thought the general gritty computer aesthetic fit well with the scrappy raspberry pi video synths but wanted to make sure that the ecosphere on the VSEJET had an immediately different recognizable aesthetic.  Gravity Waaaves itself had a bit of a science fiction sounding name right off the bat so I did some research on common fonts from 70s and 80s sci fi paperbacks and found the original Marvin font and then a bit more research led to the recent reboot from Matthieu Triay!  I thought that this might also be a low profile font that would lend itself to a unique and immediately recognizable use case for the VSEJET but its also cool to see this font getting some more mainstream usages.

 

August 15 2023

Two weeks later, we are hanging out in montana!  We’ve got another 3 weeks until our next event, the seattle workshop which has ticket links below.  Got a couple more events to share for september and october!

In portland on september 16th we are hosting a video mixer at CETI institute!  folks are welcome to bring their video rigs out and share their setups with other video artists and the general public!  tickets are free, can get thems over here!  Thanks to jon daries for faciliting this and the intro to live visuals workshop that will be the very next day (tickets coming soon).

In eugene on october 6th we are leading an intro to live visuals class at pinebox studios!  tickets are here, please add on an extra donation b/c we are running on a real tight budget over heres :)

and here is just some cool pictures i been taking.

August 3 2023

Two months on the road and things are going great!  Our van is in excellent shape and we are more than halfway across the country of the USA at this moment, geting ready to hit the west coast by early Sept!

Speaking of which, tickets are on sale now for our seattle workshop at Patchwerks on September 9th!  Thanks to Sleep Patterns, Tesseractive, and Connie Fu for their help putting this together!

We’ve also got workshops coming up in Portland & Eugene Oregon, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, and LA in Californa, and working on one more in Tuscon, Arizona.  To find out more about these events, you can visit Phaseshift.zone and/or sign up for our mailing list!

Theres been a bit of a drop off on my patreon page.  I could definitely use a bit more support over that a ways, even if its only 5usd a month!

And if you’d like to support both paloma and i on our travels you can head over to the Phase Shift Ko-fi page and make either a 1 time or recurring donations there!

May 29 2023

Its been a minute since i remembered to update this shit, but here i am!  I’m less than 2 days off from hitting the road (first stop: long island!) and have some cool stuffs to announce!

On June 8th at 7pm EDT i will do the first of my ongoing series AMA about video signals hosted by Polyphase Portal!  I’ll do the first couple streamed on both my youtube channel and polyphase portal, but i’ll only answer questions from folks asking via the chat on polyphase portal!  You can also ask me questions in advance by emailing contact@polyphaseportal.xyz.

I put out a mixer guide for the roland edirol v4 as well, if you like 3 hours of psychedelic menu diving, this video is for you!

PK and I just dropped a recording from one of our practice sessions as Reality Orp for the final Phase Space Show ‘Out Of Phase,’ you can check it out here.

And I’m pretty stoked on how the flyer turned out as well.

Speaking of Paloma Kop, we have a bunch of workshops planned out across the nation for this summer and fall, you can find out more about our plans, sign up for our mailing list, and contact us about trying to set up stuff in your neighborhood over at our website phaseshift.zone!

AAAnd with the help of some cool folks i put together a prerecorded version of my Intro to Analog Signals class that i’ve been teaching over at phase space for the last 4 years!

I really need to overhaul this website, considering migrating the whole thing off of cargo but i dunno if i’m up for that kind of work quite yet!  But hoping to get started on making some sideways websites focused more on writing using github soon enough either way, stay tuned for more updates

Februrary 23 2023

Happy valentines day from some amorous cuddlefish.  Several news updates worth considering:
The DIY instructions for putting together Gravity Waaaves are available!
The schedule for the final season of Phase Space is up.  Make sure to sign up for my last Intro to Analog Video Signals class if yr in the NYC area and haven’t taken one yet!
I still find it mildly aggravating how many people think that we should offer streaming versions of all of the hands on Phase Space workshops that would literally be impossible to duplicate without some kind of teleportation device.  The whole point of a hands on workshop is that you aren’t just sitting on your ass passively staring at a screen.  Actual, useful education requires active engagement.  Most everything we do at Phase Space requires a giant pile of gear and tools set up by one of us in a very specific way.  Just because your college was able to turn all of its already boring ass power point lectures into zoom courses during covid doesn’t mean that everyone should then turn everything even slightly resembling a class into a livestream.  But in the long run i think the proper solution to that is to stop reading any comments on instagram (and/or just stop looking at instagram at all) going forward :)

We have a loose schedule for Phase Shift activities, classes, and residencies for 2023.  Potential stuffs happening in Rochester NY, Erie PA, Portland OR, Bay Area CA and LA CA so far, please hit us up if you’d like to work with us, espcially if in Wisconsin/Minnesota/Dakotas/Montana/Idaho, and Arizona/NewMexico/Texas/Arkansas/Tenessee/Kentucky/Carolinas.  Email at ex.zee.ex @ gmail.com to book something.

Oh yeah and my video mixer guide to the edirol v4 is out too!

January 11 2023

I’ll be doing an ama over at the VSE discord throughout most of the day on january 31.  Anyone curious to find out more about Phase Shift plans, future development projects, or other random minutia should head over there.  There is a channel set up for the ama already, feel free to preload the channel with questions in advance!

January 1 2023

Heres a pretty big announcement for some future plans!  

WHATS GOING ON?
    I'm moving out of Brooklyn on May 31 2023 in order to travel across the country for an indefinite amount of time.

WHY?
    1. I would like to spend more time working on projects with all of my friends across the country.
    2. I would like to explore different forms of day to day living and working that radically reduce both my personal expenses and dependency on wasteful and non sustainable practices.
    3. I have spent too much time on instagram and not enough time in caves, this is a serious issue that must be resolved soon
   
   
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR FUTURE DEVELOPMENT?
    A very large motivation for this change has come from my analysis of my general creative productivity over the last 10 years. I've realized that a very significant part of my process for developing software and hardware systems has depended on having long periods of time to myself when I did not have to prioritize generating income. I learned this through multiple bike accidents I've had over the last 10 years that put me in the hospital and left me with various forms of welfare & insurance pay outs and seriously reduced physical mobility that ruled out pretty much any other activity than working on a computer. It is in no way an exaggeration for me to claim that getting run over by cars is one of the main things that made the VSERPI, Video Waaaves, and Phase Space possible.
   
    While I realized this in full about 4 years ago, shortly after getting run over by a car, my first response was simply to try and make significantly more money in a regular basis with the hope that I could then budget large chunks of personal time to developing new experimental video art tools. Long story short, that approach led to a feedback loop of just devoting more and more time to the mundanity of marketing and self promotion.
   
    About a year ago, in the wake of the global semiconductor shortages, I decided that selling shit like VSERPI full time was not in any way a sustainable goal for the life I wanted to live. Since making lots more money just seemed to be mostly boring and annoying, I decided instead to just make plans to shift to a lifestyle that required significantly less money on a regular basis to get by and give that a shot for at least a year.
   
    Overall there will likely be a initial apparant lull in my activities of development and youtube videos as I adjust to the new lifestyle, but in the long run I expect that I'll be able to better spend time on serious projects that will benefit the community in larger ways (seamless software installers for video waaaves, a hardware video sampler/resampler, potential fpga/soc platforms for open source DIY video synthesis development, porting the VSERPI to raspberry pi 4) that I've otherwise had little time and energy to devote to.
   
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR YALLS
    Another project I'll be focusing on since Phase Space will be formally closing down in May 2023 is a new DIY collective called Phase Shift. I'm trying to keep things vague at first because I'd like for it to evolve organically in reaction to how people engage with it, but the initial goal would be to have a loose knit structure of small scale art collectives across the country that focus on educational and community driven events and resource centers. My ideal end point would be to have a bunch of different interconnected collectives that function similar to some intersection of hackerspaces, synth libraries, and community colleges. So a big part of travelling will be meeting with video artists and other like minded folks across the country to brainstorm how exactly something like this could manifest itself!
    Similarly, I'd really enjoy getting an opportunity to lead workshops where ever I can find the resources to do such a thing, i would just need to have local help finding spaces and equipment to use (i'm not planning on travelling with a giant news van filled with video equipment, at least not at first).
    And finally, I'm interested in working on collaborative audio visual recording sessions with artists across the country, with the potential goal of starting some kind of multimedia 'label' kind of thing.
    If you have any interest in being a part of these events, processes, or discussions, please reach out to me via email, ex.zee.ex @ gmail.com. I will intentionally become much more of a hard ass about not checking or responding to dms via any social media, message board, discords, or whatever things when i'm living on the road, so email will be the best for getting me to respond in a reasonable amount of time :)
   
PATREON SHOUT OUT
    Finally, I want to give a huge shout out to everyone who has been supporting my patreon. I understand that most likely more than a couple of folks will want to bail on supporting that thing because they would not like to think that I'm just gallivanting across the nation getting stoned in caves on their dime, but I'd still like to thank everyone for their support thus far, even everyone who is gonna cancel their subscription next month. Patreon support has been a crucial part of not just GW development, but also of my ability to even conceive of a lifestyle as a vagabond video artist and tool maker. Yalls are the best and please let me know if you have any suggestions on what kind of stuffs I can do while on the road to help yalls feel appreciated.

December 12 2022

My new a/v album, TANTRICK ACID is released!  All recorded and assembled over the course of 2022, this is an experiment on editing and composing long form peices, working with rotational symmetry and camera feedbacks, and exploring visuals that are reminiscent of experiences one might have while enjoying sexual encounters during some form of psychedelic ‘trip’/ 

November 20 2022

Tomorrow we launch the Gravity Waaaves kickstarter!  Click here to follow the kickstarter page and here to follow the local infodump.

October 18 2022

GRAVITY WAAAVES is coming soon!

September 30 2022

I’ll be presenting my new talk/performance piece entitled “YOUve STOLEn my (he)ART” at fubar this year on Sunday October 2nd at 12pm EDT, stop by for the live premiere and Q and A afterwards and don’t forget to check out the full fubar schedule! 

July 03 2022

We are still open for VSERPI sales for another couple weeks or so, you can purchase via my shop here or the old etsy shop as you prefer.  

I’ve prerecorded all four lectures for my Introduction to Video Synthesis on the Raspberry Pi course and shared the first one on my youtube page.  The remainder of the class, along with homework assignments and feedback from me is available to select levels of my patreon, as well as for stand alone purchase over here!

I also have set up the first Video Art Boot Camp at Phase Space which you can sign up for starting today!  This will be a full course covering all of the practical information I have to share on the topic of live video art performance!

June 15 2022

The VSERPI shop here on my website, as well as the etsy shop is open once again for sales!

I’ve also been quite busy with making youtube videos discussing Video_Waaaves: the Desktop App b/c i realized that lots of folks who have been following me for a while had literally no idea that i’d been creating free open source software for non raspberry pi computers for a while now!

Part of the goal is to get folks psyched up about using the desktop apps b/c the raspberry pi shortage is making VSERPI prohibitively expensive, along with essentially driving me out of business as a hardware synth developer.

Partially I’m trying to drum up support for my patreon b/c as mentioned earlier, raspberry pi shortage doesn’t just mean folks are having a harder time getting VSERPI, it also means that pretty much the main business i had for a couple of years is more or less kaput.  I’m still very interested in video synthesis design so I’d definitely like to keep on with that even if its in a somewhat part time basis, but is necessary at the momement for *some* kind of income to be coming in for that otherwise i’d have to spend pretty much the majority of my time on wage labor and/or video gigs.

But also i’m interested in discussing a lot of what i’ve learned first hand from design, trying to start a video synth business, my general discomfort with the world of advertising and marketing, my total discomfort with the perception of artistic tools as being commodified in general, my thoughts on why folks can be so resistant to the basic concept of DIY approaches to tools, and my thoughts on how i and literally everyone and anyone else has the ability to try to change things for the better in an non capitalist non consumerist non heiarchical fashion.

It strikes me that by way of my willingness to share information on video art techniques, video synthesis softwares, or just video feedback in general, plus my willingness to share the tools i’ve designed for my own fun times with anyone willing to put the effort into figuring out how to build them has afforded me a very small but not insignficant audience of folks who are at the very least mildly amused by my essentially anarchist socio political values. The standard capitalist approach to this would be to market and exploit this by some kind of business.  Which i certainly gave a shot!  i’m at the very least open minded to being completely wrong about my anti capitalist values tho I can’t say i’m suprised when i find out from personal experience how truly stacked the deck is against the small, creative, and poor.

So i guess i’m becoming more and more interested in trying to see how i can use my incredibly tiny soapbox to try to see if i can make even the tiniest difference in how even a small subset of electronic artists think and act with regards to consumerism, capitalism, and our increasingly corrupt and ineffective political systems!  weird right?  can’t make a living at that lol!  but i guess i’m also trying to redefine the common sense assumptions about what exactly ‘making a living,’ both for myself and anyone else willing to listen, actually means as well...

April 17 2022

April 7 2022

A limited sales run for VSERPI is opening up on my website for at least 1 week, possibly up to 2 weeks!  Click here to purchase something!  Make sure to note that shipping on these orders will not be until June at the earliest!  

Also make sure to check out the new classes I have open for registration!  We’ve got another run of the Video Synthesis on Raspberry Pi 3b, a new Chaos Theory class, and a new Magick, Narrative, and Video Art Class to choose from!

March 25 2022

I’ve got another series of month long online courses up for registration!  I’ll be repeating another session of Video Synthesis on the Raspberry Pi and bringing in two new classes.  Chaos theory, generative art, and experimental coding will focus on topics in chaos theory and modeling nonlinear systems using the programming language Processing and will be open to folks with no experienc in coding.  Magick, Video Art, and Narrative will involve no coding whatsoever and instead focus on exactly what it sounds like it focuses on!

Februrary 25 2022

I’ve finished mailing out all the hard copies of the ULTRATERRESTRIAL vhs tape and have released the online version for viewing at my youtube channel!

If you’re interested in picking up a copy, please sign up here and if I get enough interest for it to become cost effective to repress I’ll set something up!

Februrary 18 2022

we have opened up VSERPI sales for a limited amount of time, you can now purchase stuff through the etsy shop or via my new shop on this website.  sales will close at some point between feb 25th and march 4th so now is the time if yr looking to purchase things.

Februrary 1 2022

I have set up a couple of online courses that I’ll start teaching in March 2022, to find out more information and to register check here!  My patreon support seems to be growing as well, head over here to pledge if you so desire!

I’ve put up a very large number of videos going into some of fun details of whats happening with the new VSERPI updates, heres a fun one I just posted that goes into how I like to use Chromatic Aberration with video feedback!

January 26 2022

we have set up a mailing list you can subscribe to to get notified whenever limited runs will be announced!

January 24 2022

Fun (and potentially not fun) updates in store!

*I’m currently finishing up the absolute last day of VSERPI 1.5 updates. We will now have a grand total of 12 images available for download, including a new titler program called Hello_Word, juicy updates of the existing synths, the new audio reactive Auto_Mesh, and more!  

*I’m starting a new Patreon page and hoping to enourage more folks to donate on a regular basis to support development of VSERPI, Video Waaaves desktop apps, and RnD costs for new open source hardware and software stuffs!

*I’ve had to close down the Etsy shop until further notice due to the lack of consistent availability of raspberry pis!  While I don’t intend to stop selling the VSERPI 100 percent, I will be operating on putting together small batches with whatever amount of components I can scrounge up whenever available and offer them in limited editions.

December 28 2021

a beta of the updated 1.5 version of Auto Waaave is available for download here.

December 14 2021

a beta of the updated 1.5 version of Artificial Life is available for download here

November 30 2021

betas of the updated 1.5 version of Waaave_Pool and the all new audio reactive version of spectral mesh (auto_mesh i guess?) are availble to test out for anyone curious!  there is a text file included with each image that gives the info on how to control the new additions to each.  Click for Waaave_Pool_1.5b and Auto_Mesh_0b.

November 5 2021

The Ultraterrestrial preorders go up at midnight tonight (12am 11-6-21) and will last exactly 1 month, so if yr interested in picking up this album as well as the book, posters, and or t-shirts here will be your only chance for the forseeable future!

September 20 2021

Yes I have been too busy to update this stuff for like forever since I moved.

*Phase Space is active again, check the link for our weekly events!

*I’ll once again be contributing to Fu/bar and Vidicon this year!

*I have a full length a/v album that I’ll be releasing on VHS by the end of this year entitled ULTRATERRESTRIAL

*Orb Weaver is the next forthcoming VSERPI along with audio reactive upgrades for Spectral Mesh.  Expect both by the end of 2021!

*episodes of Exploring the Video Synthesis Ecosphere still come out about 2 times a month give or take!

*maybe i’ll finish the temporal vortex manual some day...

April 23 2021

Wow heck things continue to be busy!  We have just announced the first ever VSERPI contest!  More details over here but the short version is, take the new VSERPI logo, run it through yr VSERPI instrument and capture some videos, and we will put thems up on the VSERPI instagram and let folks vote on which one they like by commenting! Winner will get to choose anything from my redbubble shop that costs less than 50usd

April 22 2021

I released a new mix this afternoon!  Just some odds and ends video stuff and a bunch of songs I wanted to listen to more.  Dug into the vaults for some of the video stuff, ranging from a couple of years back to stuff I just recorded like last week.  

I’ve also updated the Video Waaaves section to have more info on using NDI to screen grab stuffs!  Id been meaning to add more info on that subject for a while and the Echo Park Film Center video waaaves workshop this weekend was the perfect kick in my buns to get it finished up.  Much thanks to everyone at the EPFC and everyone who signed up, this class filled up very quickly and it seems pretty likely we will have another one on the schedule soon!

Also thanks much to hacklab and everyone who signed up for my Processing course.  The level of interest vastly exceeded all of our expectations so we will have to take folks on a first come first served basis.  If anyone out there is interesting in helping me organize more classes like these lmk!  I love teaching this kind of stuff but I also do not love setting and organizing online classes lol.

April 20 2021

I’m hosting a free online creative coding and video art course in about a month from now!  Sign up quick as this will likely fill up soon!

April 19 2021

The new (and first) episode of my new show “Video Synthesis Tarot” is live on youtube!  In this program i’ll be looking at the concept of nonverbial semiotic communication and how to apply motifs from the thoth tarot to video synthesis!

April 15 2021

Episode 1 of “Exploring the Video Synthesis Ecosphere RPI” is live!  Join Starr and I as we dig deeper into some of the geometrical features of Waaave Pool and talk about how to set things up for no input feedback modes!

NYC area folks feel free to swing by Phase Space this coming Saturday for an informal out doors meet up!  We will be clearing out some of our stores of partially functioning video gear and trying to find some new homes for stuffs!  

April 9 2021

Once again, much business is afoot!

Instagram decided to delete the heck out of my old account @andrei_jay_creative_coding.  I might end up getting it back but seems unlikley that it’ll happen anytime soon.  In the meanwhile stop by and follow my new account @andreijay_videowizard and help share the news!  I had over 5k followers when i gots instazucked and having to start over from scratch really does a number on my ability to stay reasonably self employed in these days!

My friends at Echo Park Film Center are hosting and organizing a Video_Waaaves workshop series!  All zoom based stuff and sliding scale prices, seems like a fun way to get some help with learning the video_waaaves worlds and get introduced to video feedback and video synthesis!

Aaand I’ve got an onlyFans account now!  Not positive if it was the incredibly mildly risque content that helped get me kicked off of insta but figured it might be fun to have a different space for my experiments with more body and sex positive video and still image stuffs.  Subscriptions are free and I probably won’t do a lot of paid content in the forseeable future. 
 

March 25 2021

Wow its been a hot minute since I made an update here!  I’ve just been super busy working on stuff that hasn’t quite been completed yo but I’m getting caught up just now!  First thing to note is that the first episode of Mathemagical Motifs is live!  This is a talk show that I and my friend Juana Molli are putting together!  We talk about Creative Proceses, Mathematics, Physics, Esotericism, and Video art!  

And then I finished up another music video for the song A Cilia Life Rift from my last album, tranceformer!  This is another video made from footage of me dancing, but I doubt anyone would figure that out if I didn’t explicitly mention it lol.
 

Februrary 27 2021

Hahahaha, heres something silly/.

Februrary 22 2021

I just finished up recording an interview with Matthew Bergey for their radio show Smiling in Stereo on WFMU. You can check it out this Sunday Februrary 28th at 10pm EST!  I’ll also be doing a little a/v remix of the interview to host on my youtube starting the following Monday!

Speaking of a/v remixes, here is a remix of an old nova special that I did live on scanlines.xyz the other night!  My favorite part of this doc is how harsh they are on Newton.  Like yes, it is true that their massively useful and revolutionary foundations of modern physics and science was not very well suited for analyzing nonlinear behavior.  On the other hand it would be hard to conceive of what science and society would even be like without newtons contribuitions so i think we can maybe cut them a little slack?

Februrary 15 2021

Here is an archive of my live performance from last evening!  Much Fun, Much Mixers, Much FM synthesis, Much wavedrumming, much worrrrrrrrrrms!

Februrary 14 2021

This is Today! This evening, zoom zones start at 6pm EST, to join in click on this link and enter the password “666”!

Februrary 4 2021

I’ve upoaded another version of Paloma Kop and mine’s for Vidicon 2020.  The original version from the live stream and hosted on the Vidicon Archives had a couple issues with regards to the mixing of singing saw levels which I tried to alleviate via some post remixing of the individual instrument tracks!  Nothing new was added really, just spent more time trying to get the levels and eq in a better spot!  

In other news I’ve been working a lot on implementing OSC as an alternate control scheme for the VSERPI instruments!  Interesting possibilities include being able to use the same midi controller with multiple instruments, being able to set up modulation and sequencing sources a la modular synthesis systems but using wifi or ethernet for transmitting signals!  

I’ve been reading some nonfiction mostly since the last post.  Specifically “Behave” by Robert Sapolsky.  They are an engaging and entertaining author with a knack for (nearly always) presenting many sides of the various debates wrt human behavior in pyschological, sociological, anthropological, and biological perspectives.  They resist encapsulation and black boxing and instead present human behavior as an incredibly complex phenomenon with a great deal of feedback loops occurring at many levels from neurological to genetic to cultural.  A good example is that some folks think there are genetic reasons that make individuals more likely to behave in collectivist ways.  These genetic markers are highly present in societies that depend heavily on rice production vs wheat production for sustenance.  The difference is that one family can potentially farm enough wheat to help sustain themselves potentially with a surplus, while it is highly highly unilikely that one family can maintain a rice farm that can sustain themselves.  So which came first?  Societies built around rice that then select for folks with more collectivist tendancies?  Collectivist tendancies being already selected for for completely nonrelated reasonse and then as a result the societies are more likely to organize collectivist rice production?  Or maybe just the genetic thing is a complete red herring/wishful thinking on the scientists part and its all entirely culturally learned behavior?

Of course I say nearly always because the one main issue with which I disagree with their look at human behavior is their stance on “free will”.  Free will is a notoriously tricky concept to work with in science, mainly because it is incredibly poorly defined with wide range of philosophical, religious, and cultural connotations for each individual.  Sapolsky puts forth a Straw Homunculus theory which they heap derision on (in a clearcut example of the principle of anti-charity) and point out that according to neurobiological science everything is deterministic and there can be no magical fairy homunculi making decisions.  I think the low level problem with this concept is that throughout the entire book (including in the chapter on free will) Sapolsky themselves repeats a pattern of first looking at biological motives for human behavior and then noting all the ways in which humans seem to then make decisions which then counter this behavior.  To quote them on free will wrt to how justice systems work they mention first that humans have a biological desire to punish others who break societal rules and the “..nearly impossible task is to overcome that.”  If humans cannot make decisions then how does anyone ever overcome biological urges?  

I’m working on a longer piece wrt to the mathematics of complex systems analysis and misinterpreations of Chaos, Randomness, Determinism, ‘free will’, and Complex Systems which will address some of these concepts in more depth.  The short answer is that I think the traditional branch of mathematics which westerners have used as their main tool for doing science since Newton, calculus and differential equations as models, is very poorly equipped for dealing with complex systems.  The overwhelming mindset of scientists does seem to be that differential equations don’t MODEL systems in the natural world but instead, to quote Stephen Strogatz, “Nature—cue the theme from The Twilight Zone—somehow knows calculus.” The map is not the territory, calculus is a branch of mathematics which can be very helpful for modeling the physical world but it is an act of faith, not science to claim anything further than that.  Furthermore, this mindset does very little to help anyone do science and in more complex situations that resist black boxing can actively harm research.
 

January 26 2021

aaand heres a new episode of video feedback techniques!  check out more from the full series here!

January 25 2021

Lots of fun things happening and scheduled to happen in the future!  First off, Phase Space and some of our friends are putting together a zoom party for valentines day!  Live A/V performances, games, highly distanced dancing, and more!  Check out the phase.video site on the day of for entry to the zoom room and/or just hop on zoom and enter ROOM CODE : 334 781 1321 PASS WORD :666 up in that biz.  We will have a direct link set up day of tho so no sweat either way.

The full selection of audio visual art peices for the show I curated for NYE, Ephemeris Time is up now on Vimeo!  Tried to get the whole thing up and playlisted at scanlines.xyz s peertube page but for whatever reason peertube just refuse to transcode 1 section of this show and after a couple of weeks of intermittently attempting to troubleshoot I just said fuck it and put em on Vimeo.  Theres more than 4 hours of amazing video art here, I highly recommend checking this out if you haven’t already!  Links and info to all the artists can be found over at the descriptions on the vimeo page!

Been making a little bit of progress on Chromatic Aberration: The Search For Sasquatch, my colorizer/solarizer unit for the VSERPI family!  Getting things set up for an extended video recording session as a part of my video feedback tutorial series where i’ll talk about how to use colorizers and other effects for processing video feedback outside of the feedback loops!

I’m trying out redbubble as a printing service as I’ve had a couple of quality issues with teepublic!  I’ve only got one pattern up at the moment but stay tuned here and check out my redbubble shop to see what you can get with this test print at the moment!  I’m picking up a pair of socks and a teeshirt!  I’m pretty sure I’ve been my best customer wrt to purchasing my prints on teepublic so far lets see if I can actually convince anyone else to pick up my stuffs over here lol.  I probably need to like advertise more or whatevs.

And finally I got a decent rough draft of the Temporal Vortex Manual up, its probably only like halfway done but has a lot of info and links on slitscan photography, animation, and video, as well as a full parameter list!  Stay tuned over for updates and lots more info!

As far as books go I’d been doing a bunch of rereads of Cixin Liu’s Ball Lightning and collected short fiction, all of which I highly recommend.  Liu’s work is invariable of the style of “Lets extrapolate the engineering principles of this extremely fucked up potential ecological/technological/social/astronmical catastrphe to an extreme degree” which tbh is an extremely durable premise in science fiction! 

I also reread Iain M Banks Consider Phlebas which I would still consider the weakest of their Culture novels but still pretty great!  It is characteristically perverse of them to start out a loosely connected space opera series centered around a galactic Culture (yes its called The Culture lol) that seems to embody Fullerian post scarcity utopian principles to a t with a novel written from the perspective of someone who loathes The Culture and is a secret agent working to destroy them.  The Principle of Charity is kind of an ongoing theme in all of their novels, each of which manages to explore some kind of large scale concept in politics/sociology/philosphy but in a uniquely Banskian manner loaded with some awe inspiringly imaginative set peices.  Excession (one of my favorites for example) looks at the ideas of moral relativism between cultures (well alien species in this context) as well as all of the problematic and questionable tactics used by cultures who assume they are morally superior to others and let that affect their political decisions.  But you can also just read it as breakneck paced first contact story where the first contact is from another dimension/hyperspace/universe (?) as opposed to another planet!

January 21 2021

Welp Heck and Dang I finally finished the Phosphorm Manual!  Kind of took me a while b/c I wanted to make sure that it would offer a full explanation of wtf exactly is going on with vector synthesis and scope art by providing a LOT of historical and technical information in a theoretically beginner friendly fashion!  Did I succeed?  I definitely wrote a lot of words.  Will it take me this long to write the Temporal Vortex Manual!  thankfully not, i’m at least halfway done with it rn and will be focusing on that in the coming days!
Dont forget to sign up for the Giant Feedback Loop happening January 31st.  Scroll down for more details.
Stay tuned for more info on the Phase Space Valentines Day Cyberpunk Cyberprom happening in the Hell Party Zoom Room this Valentines day!  Live A/v, Punk bands, games, dancing, a pleasant simulation of being in a room full of folks and having a weird cyberspace chat room party!

And for everyone who missed it back when, I uploaded the remastered Recursive News broadcast up to youtube.  This was made entirely live along (except for the samples we was triggering duh) with Allen Riley, Robert Yohe, Paloma Kop, me, and Thalia, and streamed for fu:bar 2020.

January 12 2021

Its happening again!  January 31 11am-1pm EST.  Here is a link to hydra discord for more info and a Face Book Event if you;r into that sort of thing

January 4 2021

My music video for the Nighteyes/XZX collaboration track “Anticrystal” is up on youtube now



For anyone interested in a/v collabs I’m hoping to be able to focus more time in 2021 on group efforts and less on solo works, depends on the circumstances I guess but feel free to reach out if yr interested!  I’m much less interested in “hey bro do u want to make a free music video for my song” than I am interested in “hello entity, would you like to work on some audio and video stuff together in an ongoing creative conversation?” btw.  (I will continue to occasionally make music videos for some bands but kind of only for large sums of money/bands I highly enjoy/old friends etc etc)

After a massive rehaul to my VSERPI workshop I’m back in business getting all the teeny and not so teeny bugs fixed on the 1.4 updates, assembling the manuals, and finishing up recording the demo and tutorial videos. 

Reminders to everyone that for bug reporting its best to post something on any of the boards (scanlines.xyz or the video_waaaves facebook group) first and include every single possible pathological detail involved + pictures of your full hardware set up and signal flow (including what yr power supply is plugged into).  If you are not cool with message boards or social media you can contact me at ex.zee.ex@gmail.com for help. 
Under no circumstances will I be continuing tech support for anything for anyone via social media DMs!  Pass it on and tell yr friends!  I want to help everyone and make all my stuffs run as smoothly as possible but in order to do that I need to have all my bug report infos consolidated into useful formats, of which social medai DMS don’t really qualify as LOL.  Plus if you post in the boards maybe someone else can help u with a quick fix far faster than I can!

I’ve got all the archival footage from the Ephemeris Time show up at videos.scanlines.xyz



For example here is the submission from some unknown xenolinguistics ambient artist! Mysterious and beautiful...

January 1 2021

a digit has shifted! if yall missed my live NYE party av experience i gots an archive up here!



I think we will be teaming up with some other folks to do more Phase Space live events in Zoom party format.  Stay tuned for Valentines day...

December 31 2020

Happy new years eve!  I’ll be doing a live AV set at some point in this evening (midnightish??) at a zoom party, the link is 
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/3347811321 (Passcode: 666).  hope to see yalls there!

December 20 2020

The frenzied onslaught of promotional and tutorial videos for the VSERPI 1.4 update continues with Artificial Life!

December 19 2020

And off we go!  Video demo of the new Waaave Pool features and with a bit of bonus Artificial Life action as well!



Video demo of Temporal Vortex, my brand new video slitscan processor! 

December 17 2020

The new images are up!  Motion recording, Waaave Pool as a video processor, Temporal Vortex, they are all live and ready for download over here!

December 7 2020

Lots of fun little bullet point facts to share today.  lets get bullet pointing!

*I’ve just released a music video for a new song by ambient music legend Don Slepian!  And I’ve got a detailed write up of the process over at scanlines.xzy.

*If you missed my live streamed performance from Wonderville NYC you can check out the archive on their twitch page!  (skip into like 45 mins in for the actual start)

*and on the subject of Wonderville, I’ve donated a Waaave Pool with custom hand drawn artwork for a charity auction to help out with their costs during this pandemic situation!  

*We have discontinued the CAPTURE EDITIONS of all of my video synthesizers and processors and replaced them with a less expensive and overall more useful CAPTURE BUNDLE which includes usb dongles for capturing both analog (yellow rca/s-video) and digital (hdmi) signals!  This is a real game changer and a perfect gift for any and all of your loved, liked, tolerated, or *fill in specific relevant emotional verb* ones in your life!  These are on sale now and shipping looks like 4 weeks from order dates with this new bundle!

*While Phase Space will be closed for IRL events indefinitely we will be hosting a solar new year celebration live stream at scanlines.xyz!  Stay tuned for lineup and exact time and date and basically every other relevant peice of information lol.

*Even though Phase Space and my nonlinear classes will be shut down for now, I’m still available for online tutoring in any number of fields!  From just basic logistics of getting started with video art tools, how to code in hydra, how to write shaders, chaos theory, cellular automata, computational complexity, real analysis, fundamentals of cooking experimental pastries, or if you’d just like to understand what exactly the Riemann Hypothesis is, I’m always happy to work with and tutor motivated individuals and groups!
 
*It probably goes without saying but I enjoy the new Autechre album.  I finished the Cixin Liu book Supernova Era and enjoyed it.  It felt much much smaller scale than their other works and if you’ve read nothing else by them I’d recommend starting with Ball Lightning first, and then the 3 Body Problem series, and then catch up on shorter fiction and this one!  I am also finishing up the Daevabad Trilogy by S. A. Chakraborty and have to say I am enjoying it quite a bit!  Still on the second book of the trilogy and am enjoying the constant motion and character development happening at breakneck paces!

November 30 2020

I’ll be doing a live a/v performance on december 1st from 8-10pm EST as a fundraiser for Wonderville NYC.  To check out the stream head on over to https://www.twitch.tv/wondervillenyc and if you’ve got the spare scratch why not hit that paypal button and donate to help out a DIY space at a time when they need it the most!  I’ll be debuting a new audio processing effect that i’ve been working on as well, a strange little stereo glitch granular delay chaos processer so heads up this audio might get a little *experimental*

For anyone that missed the terence mckenna live stream i did with paloma kop last week we’ve got an archive up here!

I haven’t been reading much books lately because of some crippling back pain, I have been watching more movies tho and can recommend folks dig into sergio martino giallo films.  They have their own brand of cinematic surreal ridiculousness that definitely hits the spot when i am unable to physically move!  All the Colors of the Dark is a good place to start if yr unfamiliar.