NOTbirds was created for doing live visuals along with experimental music. Inspired by Jan van Ijken‘s videos, “The art of flying” , I arrived to the idea of manually controlling and following a virtual bird’s flock, and creating visual pieces that mix organic movements with digital aesthetics. Those pieces are always different, by means of a flock algorithm (and live manipulations), and tries to emulate the natural beautifulness of the patterns generated by the birds.
The same way as it happens when we observe this fenomenon in nature, in live sessions I only move the point of view of the camera, giving the impression of having found this bueautiful dance in a remote place, where only us can enjoy this beautiful coreography, that will never repeat again the same way.
NOTbirds it’s a program I created in Unity 3D, with th intention of manipulating it live along with diferent experimental musicians.
Its features are:
– Manual control of the camera parameters (Depth of field, Lens, movement,etc)
– Manual control of the bird’s flock parameters (speed, relation between birds, etc)
– Control of the wind and metereologic conditions (speed, direction, frequency, fog,etc)
– Control over sun’s light
– Live color grading
All this parameters are controlled manually via several Midi Controllers, an Xbox controller, keyboard and Mouse, but all of them can switch also to audioreactive.
Birds flock algorithm based in Shinao’s aproach.
github.com/Shinao/Unity-GPU-Boids
NOTbirds has been shown in various festivals, such as Teorema, ESC or Algorave, with artists as Tuffo Noise, Yago Raymond, Linalab and QBRNTHSS, and also in Apolo club, Barcelona for dj’s as Aphrodite, Benny Page, Karlixx or Plan B.
