Corin's Journal: Blissfields 2013

Congratulations to the whole blissfield’s team who pulled of yet another fantastic year of fun and frivolities.

This year's lineup had some stonkers in it but none moreso than public service broadcasting. This fantastic outfit perform live soundtracking (which I already love) to CC licensed visuals provided by footage from the internet archive (which is very clever). You should give them a listen and watch here.

This was particularly interesting to me as I’d accidentally ended up installing and running live visuals at the Elysium Lounge at Blissfields. Though the team has run the fire area and chillout system in the past this was the first year we had attempted projections. As such there was a massive amount of material that we needed for the VJs but not a lot of time to produce it. So the idea of creative commons licensed material became very important.

Much like public service announcement I started with historical footage found on the internet archive. This is a wonderful resource for visuals featuring old broadcast films that have fallen out of copyright and some slightly bigger names such as night of the living dead that simply messed up their licence ages ago. Check out the archive here.

This was all very well and good, but it does take an age to cut into something meaningful and useable. Also vintage B&W film stock has certain connotations in itself setting aside the content of films like duck and cover. We really wanted something a bit more geometric and colourful. Thank god for Beeple.

Beeple or Mike Winkleman is a video artist whose previous work includes videos for the like of flying lotus produced for Warp. Very generously he’s put a lot of his visuals available for free online along with the cinema 4d files used to create them. I thoroughly recommend that you check them out as they are amazing.

Inspired by Beeple I’m doing the same in return. I produced 2 original ten minute ambient loops for the overnight chillout show state. These are now available and CC licenced for people to do what they like with.