Real-time Visuals for Performance, Gaming, Installation, and Electronic Environments

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The use of real-time visuals and visualizations are now commonplace in a variety of publicly recognized practises, including by VJs in dance clubs, by game designers in online multi-player games, by filmmakers for remixing their films as live cinema and by designers for the prototyping of larger physical products and environments. Some artists working in traditional mediums such as narrative film, have moved into the realm of live cinema. This includes British filmmakers Peter Greenaway and Mike Figgis who now work primarily in live cinema, remixing their films as performance.Increasingly, musicians are adding live visuals to their work. Visual artists are working with sound as a medium alongside image. Computer programmers are employed to create cultural content that creates interactive relationships between different media. There is a need for researchers from these disciplines to share knowledge. A musician's mastery of time and live performance will benefit the filmmaker as she creates a non-linear interactive film. The visual artist's sense of composition and colour will be instrumental knowledge for a computer scientist as he develops software to allow new forms of game-like experience.The network will be concerned with establishing various forms and norms for visuals as a performed and "live" medium. Traditionally visual mediums have been primarily experienced as "playback" mediums, in which the visual material is fixed in time and is played from beginning to end. Older examples of time-based mediums such as narrative film and video can be considered as representative of simple playback. Editing forms the core of the work that goes into preparing these forms, but when these editing structures have been finalized and applied to tape, film or DVD they run their course and experience no live variation in playback. Even complex menus with multiple options for playback on DVD (with or without commentary) cannot in anyway be considered genuinely real-time or performed. Real-time visuals on the other hand require the intervention of a performer or a user. In the case of the VJ or live filmmaker, he or she chooses the video clips in real-time, selects the options for effects and determines the compositing of images and effects. Similarly in multi-player games the users can move freely in the environment forcing the game to adapt in real-time and produce new environments in response to both the predictable and unpredictable actions of the users. In both of the above cases some automatic processing occurs (i.e. digital signal processing of the incoming sound in the case of the VJ, prediction algorithms for drawing backgrounds in the case of multi-player games), but there is a live element that has some similarities to live music or theatrical performance. The research network will ultimately focus its efforts on the ways in which the visual medium is undergoing a radical shift into a live, real-time and performance-based medium. This medium takes its cues from music, computer science, theatre and natural ancestors in film and video including such forms as montage. This transdisciplinary background will form a core of the research presented and as such will present work from researchers who exist in between the borders of several disciplines.