Howdy everyone, the long awaited 1.5 release of the VSERPI is finally complete and available for everyone (NTSC and PAL, old school picapture SD1 and new school capture bundle support). We have several new additions to the cast and have significantly upgraded many of the past crew. all images available here
List of New bbs
Hello Word: very simplistic titler program. add a usb keyboard and type as you would normally to enter text, midi controls change color and geometrical position of text
Convolutional Chaos: an alternate approach to spatio temporal convolutions. each set of knobs and sliders controls the weight and total distance of a convolutional kernel
Generic Geometry Utility: take video input and displace in x,y,z, rotate in x, y, z, apply a shear matrix, spiralize, and kaleidoscope. flip a switch to bypass external video and do internal feedback. is kinda glitchy on the picapture SD1 for some reason so USB only atm
Auto Mesh: Spectral Mesh + audio reactivity
List of updated images, all with midi latching
Waaave Pool: added sharpen filter and video reactivity
Auto Waaave: same as WP
Artificial Life: replaced RGB offset color with a 3 band luma based colorizer, Pulse Width (DC offset/Pedastel) and PWM controls added to all oscillators
Chromatic Aberration: is now an 8 band colorizer/solarizer with 8 individual hue cycling lfos and 8 individual luma cycling lfos
Spectral Mesh & Temporal Vortex: added midi latching and tidied up some stuff that most likely no one else will notice
Super Haeckel Adventures 64 and Phosphorm didn’t get the midi latching yet but have been added to master boot sections.
I’ll be working on updating & creating all the relevant text manuals today (1-25-22) and then creating what will be a fairly vast series of video tutorials going over the new updates to everything that will trickle out to my youtube channel over the next 2 weeks.
The other announcement here is regarding my etsy shop production and general pi availability! Many of yalls have probably noticed that raspberry pis have been becoming scarce since late november 2021. This is because the raspberry pi foundation hasn’t been able to manufacture shit due to companies like Apple and other massive smartphone corporations monopolizing the (comparatively) scare amount of semiconductors available. Scarcity will most likely continue throughout 2022 with small batch productions being released here and there when possible. I still have some sources but they are inconsistent on timing and overpriced so my current plan is to shut down the etsy shop for future sales and try to focus on other means of income for at least this year.
The final pi shortage came at an interesting time tho, as I was already getting a bit frustrated with the whole running a video synth business thing and looking for an excuse to try out something different. My frustrations were simple:
- running the business just ate up too much priority time for me to be able to actually focus and develop anything new
- the act of advertising, hyping, and encouraging people to buy shit is kind of actually directly against how i’d like to live my life
I would like for everyone to think about different methods of engaging with video art tools in the future and try to imagine a world where someone like me develops something new (like say finally getting my video mixer out into the word) and then simply posts all the instructions on building your own out there and everyone just puts together their own instead of relying on me or one of my employees to go through the exceptionally simple, lego-like process of assembly. I’m not saying that I’m going to quit selling premade shit 100 percent in the immediate future, but i’m defintely going to quit selling things some day, maybe a couple years, maybe 10 years, either way i’m not in this for life.
In the meanwhile I’ll be trying out some other experiments in remaining self employed and still focusing heaviily on video art tool development and educational stuff. One thing I have in mind at the moment are my patreon page (https://www.patreon.com/andrei_jay) where i’ll really just be offerring folks the chance to help subsidize maintenance and updates to VSERPI and the Video Waaaves Suite in addition to funding RnD for Gravity Waaaves & whatever form the next gen VSERPIs might take (pi 4, fpga, jetson nano, or all of the above ideally). just subscribe at whatever tier you can afford and everyone, even ppl who can’t afford to subscribe at any tier, will get the rewards of new stuffs. The flipside of course is that if i don’t make anything significant on the patreon then I wont really have any time to keep up with any of the open source tool development so that is more or less that!
The other thing will be offerring some month long online courses in video synthesis tool design in openFrameworks/Shaders (c++ & glsl), and Processing (java). Enrollment for these will be announced in two weeks or so and I’ll offer 1 free slot for each class to someone willing to work as TA. TA requirements will be to know basic stuff on the relevant languages being covered and handling minor bug fixing/grammar errors during the classes so shoot me an email if yr interested in that sides of things.
ok, thats about it for now, thanks for reading and continuing to support this community!