This is an open call to performers, DJs, Sound Artists, VJs and Video Artists in the MIT community to participate in this project being presented in MIT's Media Lab Exhibition space, Building E14 - West Lobby, Friday Evening Jams in September. See website for details on the project
live generated video by VJ Supreetha K responding to 8 channel spatial sound mix by Ian Condry aka Leftroman @ MIT Artfinity Arts Festival 2025
Details for audio and video files for jam sessions and frame installation
Festival Henge: 8 free-standing hand made LED video frames. They are two sided and can have different content on each side. Seeking artists to do live or pre-set audio and video works for the Festival Henge.
Each Video Frame is about 7 feet tall and 2 feet wide with pixels on both sides (so can have different content front and back).
It is high tech but super low resolution:
15 pixels wide and 60 pixels high
Combined, all 8 panels form 120 pixels wide and 60 pixels high, each for the front and the back.
Content for the screens is created by making a 120 x 120 pixel video (live or pre-packaged). The top 60 pixels gets sent to the outside of the 8 Video Frames and the bottom 60 pixels gets sent to the inside 8.
You can put the same video content top and bottom so the inside and outside of the Video Frames match. The system can horizontally flip the outside if you want to match front pixels for back ones, or not flip so the content is the same but text etc is readable
Each panel will play one of the 8 15-pixels-wide sections of the 120-pixel-wide video. You can have a single video span the 120 pixels or have it divided into 8 sections, each 15 pixles wide, and have each of those play on a different LED frame. For videos that span all frames, it is best if there is content across the whole of the video or there may be frames with little or no content in them. For clips that have mostly content in the middle, I have those clips scroll right to left across the frames (using the offset filter so the scrolling is continuous). Similarly, videos that already pan continuously will work really well or have some other kind of continuous motion, like moving forward into a single point perspective scene.
For performances at Jam sessins, prepackaged video should be made on a blank black 1280 x 720 video with just the content in the upper left corner. The system will grab just those 120 x 120 pixels and send them to the Video Frames. Similarly if you want to do a live VJ set or generative video live, you will set your laptop to 1280 x 720 resolution and stick your content in the upper left corner. A USB video capture card will send the full screen to the media server laptop and it will grab just those 120 x 120 pixels. If you can give files in advance, then just 120x120 pixels is best. Or just give me two HD ratio video files and I'll convert them to one 120x120 file.
Audio will be played on 8 stereo 40 watt sound bars, one at the foot of each Video Frame. These are ok but low range speakers totalling 320 watts, but with a huge outside the circle sub-bass. Additional room speakers may be added. It will be in a highly reflective lobby so a lot of reverb. The 8 speakers point in to the circle surrounded by the Video Frames as a kind of dance floor. Together they will be 16 speakers (hexadecaphonic) and 320 Watts which may well fill the space depending on how many people are there to soak up the sound. In the Artfinity performance it worked well with many people dancing. If you want to do spatial sound, the listeners will best be in the center of the circle to hear the surround sound effect (better with fewer people). At Artfinity we did these performances earlier and had chairs in the center, later turning it over to DJs and a dance party. To do proper spatial sound you will need to provide your own spatial sound controller, I'll just provide the 8 stereo connections. I will have an 8 channel simple knob mixer and people like to play the knobs, manually sending different volumes to each stereo speaker, kinda a hacky way to move sound around: very klunky and it moves all the sounds. If you have your own 8 or 16 track ADA you can send different feeds to each speaker.
I will provide 8 stereo cables, mini-jack 1/8" or 1/4" jacks to plug into your equipment, or I'll have them all into an 8 channeo distro that you can plug your stereo feed into and feed all the frames at once. You can play with the location of sound by altering the volume level of individual sound bars from that distro unit
These are Jam sessions so we can play around and have fun trying stuff out.
