Gisle Martens Meyer is a Norwegian media artist and musician who performs as Ugress under his label Uncanny Planet. Gisle commissioned the development of some new Vuo nodes for his live audiovisual performances and has generously allowed us to share them with the community in Vuo 2.4.3.
About Ugress: “Spanning electronica, film, triphop, dub and EDM, their music is featured in award-winning movies, TV series, art and blockbuster videogames. With a playful mix of epic nostalgia, mysterious sci-fi moods and irresistible groovy beats, the artist has won acclaim for their visual live performance, an entertaining combination of live concert, cinema, musicvideo and videogame experience.” Maybe listen to some of their music after you read what Gisle has to say about his recent work with Vuo.
“In this video of Regression 22 that we performed live, the visuals are “retro-fied” with the Vuo effect. Conceptually it is an endless scroll downwards through abandoned datacenters and history of GUIs into social media datacenter hell. Windows from different GUI’s scroll past (and also on individual screens on the stage so the whole stage ‘descends’). The Vuo effect is used to present the background scenes as ‘16bit 90s videogame aesthetics’. We musicians on stage are then inserted into the scrolling GUI windows.”
“I’ve taken out some stills too, but the Vuo effect reeeeeally works best when the video slowly scrolls in realtime (which is what gives it depth and the scroll + the effect is what establishes the aesthetic).”
“It worked really great on the huge LED wall, for the audience it felt like an endless doomed descent down into 16bit datacenter hell!”
Gisle developed the aesthetic first with “Like A Petal But Not Really”, then sought to expand what he could do with it by incorporating Vuo into the process. “Petal was painstakingly created with Photoshop’s legacy gif exports, which is why I contacted the Vuo team for custom built nodes.”
“Then I did Regression with the nodes, which allowed me to create a lot more scenes, since I could now build and review everything in realtime in Apple Motion.”
“I use the effect in pre-production (as a Vuo plugin in Motion), and then export and animate pre-rendered visuals as separate layers live, and then insert the live cameras in these pre-rendered gfx with similar processing on the camera layers.”
“I have been using the effect for several tracks but actually more in pre-production than as a realtime effect in live production. But now for next year, summer/autumn 2024, I will tour extensively (with a new album and tour titled ‘Retrotopia’ 😉) and I want to focus on improving the nodes/effect since it will see heavy use next year.”
“For now I use the effect maybe 90% in pre-production and 10% in live production. This is what I hope to improve, so I could save some steps in pre-production and actually use it on the finished live VDMX composition instead of pre-rendering it.”
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