Posts in Travel

I’m not sure "liveblogging" is even a word but I’m posting this from the booth at OFFF Lisbon so I suppose it’s fitting (the WiFi actually works this year!). All the above images are from today’s festivities, it’s about 3pm right now so we’ve a bit to go still. The beer is flowing and the sun is shining so come out; even if you don’t have a ticket you can hang out in the main area where there’s lots of people, food, and drink. So far Lisbon has been great, judging by the things I saw out the window on the cab ride from the hotel to the event I have a lot of walking around to do once I have a spare minute.

We just got into Lisbon, already amazed. We had the good fortune of sharing a bus with the KDU on the way to the hotel, good people. I’m traveling with my youngest brother this time around, that’s him up there in the pics. This place definitely looks like a great town for photography so I’ll be doing my best to bring home some good shots. We’re here for the OFFF which starts tomorrow, we’ll be at the ISO50 booth all day so stop by and say hello if you’re in the area.

Headed out for Lisbon tomorrow morning for the OFFF. I’ll be bringing my camera and hopefully getting some good shots. I’ve never been to Portugal, just heard a lot of good things. If it’s anywhere near as great as Barcelona I’ll be happy. 

There will be an ISO50 booth at the OFFF Festival complete with shirts, prints, CDs, etc. Stop by and say hello if you’re in the area, the Mercadillo is free admission. See you out there!

Photos via rabataller, Matilde B. & rabataller respectively.

Leaving early a.m. this morning so spent the night getting prepped and packed for Toronto. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ll be speaking at FITC and playing a couple live shows. For the live stuff I’ll be doing an all new visuals set using a new piece of software I’ve completely fallen in love with. It’s the most enjoyable app I’ve come across, maybe ever. It’s a modular video app called VDMX and it blows the doors off anything I’ve ever used for the purposes of live video. You can essentially design the way it works to your liking, you design the interface and the functionality. There’s a bit of a learning curve but once you get over that you start to realize how powerful it can be. At $300 it’s not super cheap, but considering the feature set and functionality it’s well worth it. It can do quartz composer effects and blending modes all in real-time. 

I am using a Novation Remote SL and footpedals to control most of the parameters of the video portion, and a the same Novation with split parameters to control another laptop running Ableton Live. I’m also routing a set of audio outputs from Live to VDMX which then analyzes the incoming sound and modulates various parameters based on the amplitude of selected frequency ranges. Somehow VDMX is able to do this all in real time, I’m still not quite sure how.

There’s a show Saturday and Sunday night, I’m hoping to video tape the show on Sunday night at the Drake but it remains to be seen if we can track down someone to tape it on short notice. If you or anyone you know has proper video equipment and some skills to go along with it, let me know.

Joaquim has made a short documentary detailing his trip to Stockholm for the ISO50 Workshop there this past January. Above are parts 1 & 2. Part 2 has some brief footage of the workshop itself. Thanks Joaquim!

Thanks to everyone for the great tips in the comments of yesterday’s Portland post. We’re going to try and hit those places. Last night we ended up hanging out downtown. We had dinner at Voleur -  amazing mac and cheese, highly recommended. Then we hit a great little place called Bo’s for Martinis. We ended up at a really cool bar where a wall hit me above my eye opening up a nice little gash and drawing blood; I’m an idiot. In my defense the wall hit me unprovoked; I was pretty much minding my own business. Unfortunately none of us could remember the name of it this morning.  The middle picture above is the DJ at the place, if anyone recognizes it speak up in the comments.

Please excuse the picture quality, as I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I neglected to bring my camera so I’m using my friend’s point and shoot Canon. I actually enjoy using it, at the expense of quality of course. It’s just nice for a change to not be lugging some 10 lb. chunk of metal around everywhere.

Today we went to Floating World Comics (thanks to J.Cross for the suggestion). They have a nice little collection of design books there, got a couple cool ones, I’ll post some pics up when I get home.

In Portland right now and of course didn’t bring my camera again.  This place is always great; we hung out in one of my favorite spots today, the Pearl District. It’s a great little neighborhood which really reminds me of Midtown Sacramento and Wicker Park in Chicago. I’ve got my friend’s little point and shoot so I will try and snag some shots here and there. Trying to figure out where to go tomorrow night, heard good things about hollocene, any suggestions?

Wicker Park is a neighborhood in Chicago something akin to Williamsburg in Brooklyn or Midtown Sacramento. I stayed there the last time I was in Chicago and really enjoyed the area, lot’s of great restaurants, bars and clubs. A great electronic venue, Sonotheque calls Wicker Park home along with my new favorite, Rodan.  We ended up there last night, great atmosphere / people / music.

Please excuse the watermarked image, I found it on google and really liked it. I decided against bringing my camera on this trip just to keep the rig to a manageable size. But I did find some interesting shots of the Wicker Park neighborhood here.

Have start getting ready for tonight, see you all out at the MOMI.

Design is alive and well in Prague. There seems to be a very strong street poster scene there and unlike in San Francisco, the posters are actually well designed. I am not sure if this is a function of the fact that most designers in California are busy at agencies doing web design or that Prague just happens to produce great print designers. Whatever the case may be, it was great to be able to walk around and observe my favorite design medium in it’s natural habitat: pasted up on walls and poles, wet, decaying, torn, and looking magnificent. The great part is that no one seems to be taking down older posters so in some places the posters were stacked almost two inches thick. Some of the front layers would be torn away exposing layer after layer of old posters beneath, amazing stuff. 

After going though all the shots from Prague I realized how many I had to posters so I decided to split the post off into two parts. I will be posting the other shots from Prague tomorrow.

Comment on this post