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This weekend was our opportunity to set up the VIXToscope for real at our wonderful Northwest arts & music event, Any Patch of Grass (http://apog.life). I’m very thankful to have had the opportunity to exhibit – it was a fantastic event, with a high density of really cool, chill local creators, supportive people and really bumpin’ music. The organizers were great, it was a class act all the way.

It was also a key opportunity to learn how to set up the piece – our very first time assembling the entire structure, LEDs and inner kaleidoscope. I’d assembled a portion of it in my driveway before the event, so I wasn’t totally clueless, but there were a LOT of learning experiences doing the entire structure. It didn’t help that this was six weeks earlier than I’d planned on being done, so a lot of pieces were flowing in at the very last minute and I didn’t have an opportunity to prep them — so we did a fair amount of on-site prep which added a lot of assembly time. Things like setting in the captive TSlot nuts at the right place took a long time – what should have been a no-brainer of “insert bolt here” turned into a 5 or 10 minute enterprise per nut… which forced our hand in ditching parts of the build to concentrate on getting the kaleidoscope and LEDs running, leaving out the vinyl skin.

Argh! It was a naked VIXToscope, how embarrassing! Inner guts all exposed, wires dangling, kaleidoscope mechanism showing, and none of my beautiful fractal art featured. Still, I think it was overall a success. We cleaned up as best we could, putting the vinyl fractals on the ground covering most of the wires. The key elements of LEDs and kaleidoscope were both operational and pretty impressive, at least according to the hundreds of happy faces and positive comments we got. Definitely a lot of positive feedback that makes all the effort worthwhile.

And what a LOT of effort! Oh my god. I’d had “One person, 1.5 days” as the time budget in my mind, yet it took something more like 4 people for 1.5 days to do it. Thanks a ton to the many people who spontaneously volunteered to help — I’m going to forget names, I’m terrible at names, but a few that I do remember are Becky/FunBoss, Gabrielle, CJ and Fermin… and most of all Kevin, our LED artist. Kevin was a rock star all weekend long, organizing everything, keeping people happy and engaged, and then spending many hours programming the LEDs and fixing some remaining glitches. The resulting LED display looked really awesome by the end of the weekend. We’d originally planned on outputting DMX over ArtNet to the controllers directly from Resolume, but Kevin’s work on the LEDs in native WLED software looked so good that we’ll just run with that. One less thing to worry about, which is pretty key given how quickly Burning Man is coming up.

The video and audio content for the actual kaleidoscope part was totally half-assed: I took what I ran in last year’s small ‘scope, added a few new effects, quickly mapped the new controller and called it a day – maybe an hour’s worth of tweaking. It was all somewhat random, and without much intention, just desperation to get something running. It was still VERY cool and VERY trippy; I’m happy with the results (as were the people playing with it) but I’m looking forward to composing something more together for the Playa.

One key element I need to get working is “perturbation based controls” — currently, just as last year, twisting a knob directly sets an absolute value for a parameter. The system I will be running for BM will instead set the value absolutely, just as now, but as soon as you stop twisting the knob, it will slowly decay back to a stable midpoint. The idea is that all 16 knobs have a midpoint that represents a straightforward, “normal” view, and if you don’t touch anything, it reverts to that homeostasis set point. Twist a knob, you perturb the system. This provides both immediate feedback, so you can see and hear what each knob does, but it leaves the ‘scope in a “reasonable” setup all the time, counteracting the tendency for people to always twist the knobs to max-right — human nature. “If a little is good, then EVERYTHING ALL AT ONCE must be EPIC!” Yeah, not so much. Although it still looks cool with everything dialed up to 11, things are much more interesting with a variety of non-max settings. One of the things I really like about what I’ve got is it has so many different “moods”, and I hope that this will let people explore more intuitively and not be overwhelmed.

One funny thing was that one of my audio effects I had on Friday night was called “Grackle” and it makes everything sound crappy, as if you’re playing through a blown speaker. Well, one person (who apparently was high as a kite) got so concerned they turned off the speakers… lol. I replaced Grackle the next morning. Great real-world feedback!

I have to say, having such a large oculus (22″ inches!) really changed the experience. It was awesome looking over people’s shoulder as they played with the knobs. The design constraints of fitting everything into a reasonable sized triangle for the outer shell makes the oculus lower than last year’s — which was definitely a standing experience. This one was more of a sitting experience to be comfortable, so I just left out a cheap fold-down chair there. For BM, I’ll design something more artistic to sit on. I also want to encourage people to more directly engage (eg, “stick your face inside”) so I’m also considering a padded kneeling platform or something… still thinking about how to handle the ergonomics. Sadly, for APOG, I hadn’t received my special order 22″ acrylic dome, so it was just a flat piece of plastic – you couldn’t stick your head in at all, so it was more like looking at a TV as opposed to falling into infinity.

Still, it was hella cool. The image was wonderful on these giant mirrors, and it was HUGE through the oculus. Oh, so trippy! Having much bigger powered speakers also made the sound more engaging, and I’m thinking of expanding that to quad or possibly a 5.1 surround setup to get stuff whirling around. I played with it for 40 minutes or so and had a big smile on my face the whole time, I’m very happy with the quality of the core art. And, just as at Burning Man last year, I had several people come up and tell me they thought it was their favorite piece of art there… man, does that go a long way to providing the energy to keep pushing ahead.

Burning Man is now feeling very real, very accomplishable, but also very intimidating. Setting complex stuff up on the playa is no joke, it’s really, really hard. APOG was a cakewalk in comparison, and it was a hell of a hard two days to get it all done… so in my remaining six weeks I’ve got an awful lot to do to prep everything. I made a lot of great contacts at APOG, including some folks who are going to the Burn this year, including Fermin who says he’s willing to help set up — including driving down a U-Haul box truck with all the stuff! Man, that’s huge! It all BARELY fit into my Suburban+Airstream, leaving zero room for anything else. Having the ability to haul both VIXToscopes down in a truck makes things MUCH easier to contemplate, and gives a lot more leeway on doing things that will be more efficient for setup. Things like bringing two ladders, two tables, more sets of tools, a big cooler for cold drinks and snacks, and most especially leaving some parts pre-assembled will go a long way to making setup more successful. I’m still looking for a few more setup/teardown volunteers (hoping for a team of 4) so please reach out (vixt_bm24@pottersaylor.com) if you’d like to help bring this piece out the playa!