Three weeks into our artist residency at America's first VR arcade Jump Into The Light, Electric Djinn and I went from learning and creating in VR to setting up a performance (March 10!!) and rehearsing. So we moved our workspace from the downstairs computers to the mezzanine and the green room.
No problem, right? But wait, what's that?!
I moved my complete SoundStage VR projects to another computer, but all my personal sounds were missing. You know, in SoundStage you can import your own samples – like kick drums or bass sounds or anything, really. It's really cool! In the program they visually appear as tapes, and you put them into the tape slots of the instruments (like the drum machine or a sampler). It looks like what you can see on the right side: This is a part of a drum machine for one of my songs in VR. But when I opened my projects on the other computer upstairs, most of the slots were empty, and it looked like this:
DANG! But fortunately, not a big problem for the coders. Sky came up with a quick solution. Thank youuuu! Well, at least this first time … Because after having solved the issue, tapes are still randomly missing. I can tell you: a huge masterclass in patience. The problem is unfortunately still unresolved, but I got better and faster in reimporting and finding my sounds, hahaha. Noone knows what's going on.
But apart from these technical hiccups, everything went great so far. Electric Djinn and I spaced out in the green room, took songs that we created in VR and songs that we created in Logic and Ableton and gelled them into a hybrid set for a fantastic performance! "FreakWhenSee – A Journey Into Virtual Sound Scapes" will happen in three acts:
ACT 1: VIRTUAL REALITY – The audience will see what we will see. While we are performing our songs, they will see everything through our eyes.
ACT 2: MIXED REALITY – The audience will see us (our full bodies) performing and working in our virtual music studios. They will become spectators in the virtual reality.
ACT 3: THIS REALITY – The amazing artist and VJ Holly Danger will project visuals while we shift from VR into this reality. Big finale, dancing with the audience, after show party, fun fun fun!
But that's not even all! Mehow, mastermind and one of the owners of JITL, put us in touch with so many creative brains:
Professor Phillip Baldwin from Stony Brook University provided us with several patches in MAX to create visuals and sounds with movement (!!! How cool is that?!?).
The wonderful dancer Pink is on board and will spice everything up with her beautiful movements!
And the fantastic costume designer Gabriella will pimp our suits with LED lights and other weird stuff!
So many amazing people involved, so many fantastic ideas: We really can't wait to share everything with you!
Our performance "FreakWhenSee" is on March 10 at Jump Into The Light (LES in NYC). Doors open at 7pm.
See you there!