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.

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