Laser beams & projection screens & optic fibers to take you higher! Equipment setup at AVIT, the North American VJ Convention, Chicago, 2003. Check out the "Play-It-Again Sports" trampoline in front of the projection screen for extreme sport leaps through the cartoons, BOING!

Think it's easy to jump around in a bug outfit with synchronized music, projections, and vocal processing? Think again! Here's the technological muscle behind the funky, glam-rock shine.

Two MacBook Pros (left laptop for DJing music, right laptop for video presentation), audio-technica microphone with custom made microphone/remote-control housing for Keyspan presentation remote control, Mackie mixing board, video iPod, LCD projector remote control, and vocal processing rack (at bottom).

The mind plasma! trip-net control panel GUI with hyperlinked cartoon button "tabs" allowing one to enter the hyper-dream. "Tab" buttons are mounted on a neon-blue brain console with shocking white-light "brain-spark" gifs.

The trip-net control panel allows random access to performance pieces to work the crowd. At a bar, music event, or any non-theatrical venue where people have limited attention spans, immediate access to material is critical.

Sound loops are linked to specific key frames of each performance piece. When a key frame is reached, the sound loop automatically changes, eliminating the need to hit exact timing cues of a pre-recorded soundtrack. What a relief! This allows me to spontaneously speed up or slow down my delivery so I can completely focus on connecting with the audience not the soundtrack.

Two views of the microphone remote control.

"How'd he do that?!" I created the microphone remote control so I can control my computer live, triggering music and visuals, while I talk at the same time. The control console was more ergonomic when mounted upside down, so all the programming for the control was done upside-down and backwards, tricky!

Vocal processing rack. Yamaha SPX-90 II, Alesis QuadraVerb, dbx 266 XL compressor/gate, and the Boss VF-1 vocal processor.

MIDI foot pedals and infinite echo trap. Roland FC-200 MIDI foot controller and Boss LS2 Line Selector Pedal.

American DJ FC-8, eight channel foot controller for all my lighting effects. The "STAR" pedal is for swirling in new gene-pools of light.

I have programmed ten custom cartoon voices in my vocal processing rack, but sounding like a space alien is not easy! Creating a distinctive character voice is only the first step. Once a character voice effect has been created, it has to be further tweaked with equalization, compression, etc. for words to be understood over music. Otherwise, vocals are just an indistinguishable cyber-garble. Creating all my vocal effects represents a weekend's worth of programming.

The Roland FC-200 foot controller (pictured above) triggers each voice through MIDI and the vocal processing that goes with it. My crazy custom voices include: a space alien, Satan, bullhorn-distortion, flanger-imagination, underwater vocal-slicer, gooshy-bubble mud pot, five-year-old little girl, robot/insectoid, and the Barry White FM DJ of love.

The setup pictured above includes another innovation, the "infinite echo-trap." This is a "window of sound," usually a word or phrase, which is trapped and echoed over-and-over again to create a chanting, trance-like effect while additional vocals are layered over top using the same microphone.

I use the Alesis QuadraVerb digital delay run wide-open the whole show, and the Boss LS2 foot pedal to punch sound in and out of the delay. This allows me to create an echo of myself, and talk over it, without creating additional echoes. "It's super-duper cool...cool...cool..."

Paradise of light* multimedia installation, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Union Art Gallery, September 17, 2003.

This is only a sound-check test of a primitive multimedia hypercube concept, but all the equipment worked! This installation featured multiple projection screens and surround sound. I used all my equipment, plus projectors and speakers the university kindly lent me for the performance.

The Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, Italy, an early hypercube mind-hole blowout of Renaissance art. Italian Republicans of the 16th century rocked the art world by installing the Palazzo Vecchio art collection. Why can't we have Republicans rocking the art world today?!

Mockup for the multimedia hypercube mind-hole blowout.

One step beyond: the ceiling becomes the stage! Hypercube mind-hole blowout with flying crane. Now that's performance art!

Mockup for the wave-space of imagination with surround sight/sound/smell. Industrial fans transmit the sense of touch ( feel that air blast when UFOs land!) Smell brains create cinematic aromatherapy (for that mellow breeze of cinnamon sea-weed seas).

Early mockup for my original multimedia show. I showed this sketch to a promoter and they said,"I see your future also includes nine people in the audience!" Despite this wise-guy comment...mission accomplished!

>> work in progress <<

Outline

Add picture of trip-net control panel (take screen shot).