I played an audiovisual show last Thursday for the first time in around a year. Dusting off this line of work, I kept the materials I was using fairly minimal in order to have a better chance of making something coherent. Tried to keep my short attention span syndrome in check and make my playing more about listening than it maybe tends to be.

I spent most of my preparation this time writing a new visual toolset. I think part of why I don’t do more live visual work is out of frustration with the existing tools for it. Cycling ’74’s Jitter (now part of Max 7), which I helped write, is capable of doing just about anything with live graphics, and it’s what I’ve always used for shows. But sometimes its particular brand of flexibility can be a liability for me, creatively.

So the tools I’m using now are C++ and OpenGL. They are available on every platform, are wicked fast, and are open standards. If I want to switch to a Linux box for my next computer I can do that. Most importantly, I find it easier to read a big C++ program I wrote ten years ago than a big patch I wrote last year, and readability encourages me to reuse what I’ve built.

Thanks to Chaya, here are some camera phone videos from last week’s show at Kremwerk in Seattle. I opened up for the always-masterful Pole, who was touring with fellow Berliner MFO on visuals.