the really useful media company

We can’t wait to see video from The Octopus Project‘s show in Dallas last night!

Dan was happy to help out again for this latest round on some behind-the-scenes design and programming to sync the lighting with the theremin-controlled colorsynth.

It’s always a pleasure to work with visualist Wiley Wiggins. He and Dan first collaborated last March for the Hexadecagon show at SXSW, which was a very ambitious, multi-channel audio and multi-channel video performance under a tent in the Whole Foods parking lot in Austin. Dan pitched in with some design and technical problem solving, like performance tuning (i.e., making all the video software run efficiently), making a multi-animation playback system so that different animations could pop up on the screen in different places, and most exciting of all, making a theremin colorsynth. The band and Wiley wanted a visualizer that would take the audio feed from the theremin and turn it into big, glorious fields of color. Watch the video below to get a feel for the show. For more of the nitty gritty technical details, read Wiley’s Hexadecagon wrap-up post.

HEXADECAGON – The Octopus Project from Zellner Bros. on Vimeo.

For anyone who wants to check all of this out live, The Octopus Project will be playing their next show in Austin on December 3rd.

One of our recent major projects came to a close last weekend. Throughout the month of September, we directed the video, audio and lighting design for Yard (To Harrow), William Pope.L’s reinvention of Allan Kaprow’s seminal Yard installation. This piece was presented as part of the opening of the new Hauser & Wirth gallery in New York.

The design was a collaborative effort with the talented Benton-C Bainbridge (lighting) and Chris Burke (audio).

You can see some of the critical response in reviews from the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and Time Out New York. Most of them get a couple details wrong; for instance, there were no strobe lights — just ordinary incandescent and fluorescent bulbs that were programmed to flicker (nowhere near as fast as a strobe). We’ll have more details and video posted here in the near future.