Visual, musical, physical, and — let’s face it — chemical stimuli, along with butt-moving bass-heavy grooves, have been the basic ingredients of the dance scene for decades. In recent years, DJs have begun to tinker with this intoxicating formula, and have sought to enhance and intensify the power of the club experience via elaborate lighting and video design.
Pioneering Brazilian DJ/producer Amon Tobin is going one step farther, thinking outside the box to reimagine what an electronica gig can be. Well, to be more accurate, Tobin is actually thinking inside the box, embracing the geometric possibilities inherent in that concept in cities across the globe.
The artist’s current tour, in support of the 2011 experimental studio ISAM album, features a series of fabricated cubes — a 14-foot tall custom-built Tetris-like structure — onto which 3D imagery is projected.
Tobin’s ISAM tour has created a buzz in the live electronica event world since mid 2011 — and for good reason. Less a sweaty dance workout and more a mind-altering art piece, the show blends visionary music with an 80-minute, sci-fi-based cinematic narrative. Through custom 3D mapping and show control software, the monstrous modular screen mutates into something resembling a colossal computer circuit board, a futuristic skyscraper, a gi-normous network of gelatinous cubes and, as some observers have suggested, unnaturally huge formations of rock salt.
Designed by Heather Shaw of Vita Motus Design Studio, the architectural set structure was inspired by simple two-bit digital graphics, similar to those found in vintage Atari home video games. Although the dimensions of the structure have changed since its initial unveiling (more about this in a moment), the overall appearance of the set holds true to Shaw’s original designs.
“[Tobin’s] music is so technical and digital, and his sounds are so cinematic,” says Shaw, who used Autodesk Alias Studio visualization program to design the set. “I wanted to break that down: I wanted to get down to the digital root. To me, the visual digital root is the pixel.”
Jokingly referred to as 2-Bit, or the 2-Bit Structure or, simply, The Cubes, the structure is oriented at a 45-degree angle. When video is projected onto the set’s built-in negative space and gravity-defying cantilever cubes, it creates “the illusion of holographic effects,” says designer Shaw. In the piece, “Lost & Found,” for instance, 2-Bit appears to glow in a soft amber light, as if each square is being lit from the inside by a burning lantern.
“What we’re doing is re-projecting exact matching 3D geometry [of the cubes in the virtual world] back onto the 3D geometric structure, with built-in distortion,” says V Squared Labs’ Vello Virkhaus, co-creator of the tour’s video content. “We also did a projection study and shined light [in the virtual world] on [the set] to look at where shadows fell.”
To help eliminate distortions in the projected images and to stop pieces of the structure from rattling or coming loose due to bottom-end/bass vibrations, the set has been constructed of steel and birch by Stefano Novelli Designs & Fabrication. “It’s all through-bolted from piece to piece,” says production designer Alex Lazarus. “The birch paneling, which has been painted white, doesn’t vibrate, because it’s attached to the steel frame via screws every two inches or so.”
The modular set breaks down into 18 separate pieces that fit snugly into four massive crates, saving the crew time before and after a show. “It was a challenge for me, as the designer, because the set has to be packed up and moved from city to city,” says Shaw. “It also has to be built in three hours and torn down in two to make touring viable.”
“A lot of shows are back-to-back,” Lazarus notes. “It was imperative that it wasn’t a seven-hour build and a five-hour strike. I think the fastest we’ve ever built the set is an hour and forty minutes.”
The Semi-Visible Man
Clearly, the show-stealers are the mass of magnified pixels and the programmatic, panoramic visual spectacle that’s being projected onto them. Some observers have noted that the groundbreaking set takes on an unnerving life of its own, as if it were being operated by an agenda-driven artificial intelligence.
Still, for all the digitized processes making this experimental music possible, ultimately any electronica event, even one as cinematic as the ISAM show, is about human interaction and connection. Attendees want to know that there’s a real flesh-and-blood artist DJ-ing and VJ-ing on the stage, steering the musical ship.
Even so, Tobin has noted that he would rather not be the focus of the live event. Creating a club-like atmosphere, amassing a variety of fixtures and flooding the stage with lighting wasn’t a chief concern, in fact. (Four Martin Atomic 3000 strobes, one in Tobin’s cube and three others downstage, are used only sparingly — and only for one song.)
Tobin was happy to trigger real-time effects using infrared technology while hidden in his 6-foot-plus by 6-foot-plus DJ booth-pixel, inside the belly of the great cubic beast.
“Amon was adamant about not being seen on stage,” says Lazarus. “I told him, ‘People are paying to see you. You can’t hide in your little cube all night.’”
To humanize the proceedings, and keep ticket holders happy, Lazarus suggested that two panels of smart glass, each measuring 48 inches by 48 inches, be installed in the DJ/producer’s pixilated man-cave. When the glass is not activated, Tobin can be spotted, clear as day, in his cubbyhole. However, when Tobin engages the smart glass mechanism, he and his cozy confines are obscured. It’s a fun little aspect of the performance that retains an artist-mandated aura of mystique.
“I remember at the start of the very first show,” says Lazarus. “Before Tobin turns on the glass, people were wondering, ‘Is he even appearing tonight?’ Of course, he would. Amon is very big on building mystery.”
Space Continuum
The Hollywood Squares-on-acid structural centerpiece isn’t the only dimension of artistic depth in evidence on the ISAM tour. In the past, Tobin would manipulate .wav files and create electronica music that straddled the lines of several genres, such as jazz and trip-hop. But for the ISAM album, Tobin, who’d been tweaking this material for years, dove headlong into research and aural textural development.
After sampling and exploring the timbre and sonic frequencies of natural elements and household objects (i.e. the clinking, ringing noise of two light bulbs striking one another), Tobin “played” these digital snippets via a flat controller pad, called a Continuum Fingerboard, which its inventor, Lippold Haken, has said is much like a “fretless piano, in that it does not have individual keys.”
The Continuum responds to left and right and also back and forward finger movements across the playing surface. Because the Continuum is a pad and not really a keyboard, it’s entirely interactive: it re-imagines the physical space a keyboard might occupy and what can be done with it. By sliding his fingers across this multi-dimensional control surface, Tobin manipulated custom noises to create hybrid musical elements, which resulted in a decidedly un-danceable electronica record.
Such an extreme musical departure from Tobin’s earlier work cried out for revolutionary video accompaniment. For years, Tobin had been rethinking the visual components of his show until, finally, he sat at the helm of the ISAM tour’s video creation process.
“Tobin almost acted as art director on the project in driving what he wanted to see content-wise,” says Lazarus. “The video team would do revisions as per his direction and get it to a point where the show has a seamless flow.”
Inspiration for the show’s imagery was derived from many sources, including H.R. Giger’s biomorphic creations (more Necronomicon than Alien, says Virkhaus), NASA deep space imagery, Brothers Quay animation and modern sci-fi movies, such as the Vin Diesel flick, Pitch Black. The narrative, which took two days to storyboard, shuttles the audience members through a deep-space journey in which they witness a fiery, rumbling rocket ship launch; that same spacecraft hurdling through the cosmos, later to be bombarded by asteroids; a Star Trek-like engineering room emergency and other such close encounters with sci-fi adventure.
“It was Amon who came up with the idea to loosely attribute the whole story to some kind of cosmic quest,” says Virkhaus, who worked closely with Tobin on shaping the narrative. “You come to understand that [Tobin] is the pilot of this craft, and not only is he piloting it, he’s manipulating it, and the music, at the same time.”
Beyond Derivative
The two-month content creation process was facilitated by custom hardware running a suite of modeling, rendering and animation software programs, including Adobe’s After Effects, Maxon’s Cinema 4D, Apple’s Final Cut Pro, Steinberg’s Cubase, Autodesk’s Maya, Derivative’s 3D rendering/animation/multi-purpose platform TouchDesigner, Trimble’s Sketch Up, and many others.
V Squared collaborated with Chicago-based video design firm Leviathan to create their own custom application within TouchDesigner (informally dubbed EPIC MK II) for projection mapping, video playback, and Kinect real-time animation for avatar rendering, among other duties. Thanks to Leviathan, a control surface, such as an iPad, can perform rapid video projector calibration within TouchDesigner. “There’s a kind of pool of shared code that’s evolving the Derivative program,” says Virkhaus. “It’s influencing the course of program development.”
TouchDesigner also handles show control. “We have our show rehearsed, and there’s manual control during the show,” says Peter Sistrom, V Squared Labs’ real-time graphic artist and interactive media maven. “The [Microsoft] Kinect camera effects happen completely live, because the whole point is to capture [Tobin] as he moves around in his booth. But TouchDesigner has made automation easier. Using TouchDesigner it was easy to create my own show control system that conforms to the way I wanted the show to run. It takes some time to learn it, but I think it’s a new paradigm that allows [me] to escape a ‘cue stack mentality.’ If a show needs to flow in a particular way, or if there needs to be a part of the real-time programming always running … it is very flexible that way. For us, our customized version of TouchDesigner literally runs the video part of the show.”
Radical Relaunch
After months of touring ISAM, Tobin was anxious to test-drive a new, larger 2-Bit structure, which would soon be dubbed Version 1.5. But, because the plan was for 2-Bit to bulk up to nearly twice its original size, it forced the entire creative team to reexamine and re-purpose its previous work.
“Basically, what we had to do, what I had to do, was take the old content and apply it to the new parts of the structure,” says Sistrom. “So, it was a kind of puzzle for me to complete; an exercise in creatively readapting content to fit the new structure. But, again, this was another part of that process that was made incredibly easy because part of it was done in TouchDesigner.”
Under immense time pressure to finish the project, the crew spent only week at Felix Lighting’s Los Angeles-based warehouse to work out logistical kinks and troubleshoot various technical aspects of the production. (They’d spent nearly a month there prior to the launch of ISAM V1.0.) “That allowed us the ability to have a blackout area and enough space to beta test everything,” says Lazarus.
Then, in April 2012, a bigger-and-better 2-Bit structure, with an additional “wing” on either side of the original set, was revealed at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. The set is simply huge. It’s so big, in fact, that during changeover on Coachella’s Mojave Stage, more than 15 people were required to move the 6,000-pound behemoth, which rested on a standard flat deck equipped with locking casters. (At press time, Tobin was planning on using the new structure, and even considering increasing its size, for his fall dates in the U.S.) “The set is now 45 feet long,” says Lazarus. “We used the existing structure, the 25 feet long by 14 feet tall by 8 feet wide structure, and added additional cubes from scratch. We also increased the size of the cubes from 16 inches by 16 inches to 24 inches by 24 inches.”
“There’s a lot more pieces defying gravity, too,” adds Shaw. “It has a disintegrating look.”
Only two Barco projectors were used for v1.0, but with 2-Bit’s grand reappearance, three Barcos — two Barco FLM HD20s and one Barco RLM R12+ (with three backups) need to be employed. The total beamage onto the structure is 50,000-plus lumens, and the Tobin production team is looking into expanding the projector count to four.
The distance to the stage might change from venue to venue, but all projectors are placed FOH. There are no major edge-blending issues, says Virkhaus, because of 2-Bit’s hard-line cubic structure. Still, calibration of the three primary projectors (and their three backups) for the official unveiling of V1.5 was a painstaking process.
“Peter [Sistrom] did all of the calibration for Coachella alone,” says Virkhaus. “It took an hour for Peter to adjust all of the calibrations when the stage rolled forward [during set change]. Ordinarily, [Peter] would have an afternoon to get it right. But since it was a festival with lots of changeovers, he only had an hour to calibrate. In addition, the stage was farther away [from the projector] than it would have been at another venue, so he needed to use a sniper’s scope to calibrate the show. It was a pretty intense process.”
Intense only begins to describe what’s happening onstage — and off — in service to the show. Although the creative team admits that it fell short of its artistic goals for the Coachella unveiling (hence the Version 1.5 tag), Lazarus explains that the ISAM tour is very much a project in flux. “We’re constantly working on developing new ideas,” says Lazarus. “It never gets boring. It’s always challenging and things are in constant evolution.”
