Motek - Do You Us Too?

Sometime in early 2006 I was contacted by the Belgian band Motek. They wondered if I would be interested in working on an audio-visual experience that would walk the line between a rock concert and an art performance. I swiftly replied, "Please, tell me more."

The idea was that in between the musicians and the audience, there would be 3 semi-transparent screens onto which a combination of pre-edited and live footage would be displayed, while simultaneously using lighting to reveal or hide the artists to the audience. In doing so they would play with the contrast between seeing and being seen, building a space of tension around the desires of both the audience and musicians.

Even though I didn't yet have a clear picture of how all of these moving parts would come together, I agreed to help them with a try-out they had coming up. This would serve as a proof of concept, and at the same time could help them secure a residence in an art house to further develop the show. We put the try-out setup together with a bunch of hardware: video mixers, beamers, cameras, and a lot of cabling.

an audio-visual experience that would walk the line between a rock concert and an art performance

The try-out went well, and a little while later we found ourselves in residence at Vooruit in Ghent. During the time leading up to that point, I had done some research and had come to the realisation there was no software that would fit all of the needs of the project off the shelf. That's where my adventure with Max/Msp began. It turned out to lend itself perfectly to exploring and implementing ideas as we went.

The final technical setup was as follows:

I would receive analog SMPTE timecode originating from the sampler that was on stage and was also playing the click track that was keeping the musicians in time.

This timecode would be pulled into a custom built PC through an external MOTU audio interface and tell my software where we were in the show so it would know what pre-edited video to play. Back in those days, I had to set up 3 hard drives in RAID1 configuration in order to provide enough bandwidth to play all of that video without any hiccups.

Next to that I would also be pulling in 2 live video feeds from the camera men that I was directing during the show, and then mixing these feeds with the pre-edited footage on one or more of the screens.

This 12:3 video feed would then be split through a Matrox TripleHead2Go and sent out over Cat5e cable all the way back to the beamers. I say “all the way back” as I would generally be sitting next to the mixing and lighting table as there were certain parts during the show where I would need to synchronise with the lighting engineer. In other words, if you thought there was a lot of cabling during the try-out, there would've been a silly amount of cables involved in the final production.

the first show was saved by a 9V battery

The premier would take place at the Beursschouwburg in Brussels. A funny little anecdote, in my opinion, is that this first show was saved by a 9V battery. The day of the premiere, after doing a last walkthrough, we noticed that there were frames dropping from the pre-edited footage. It turned out that the battery of the booster sending out the SMPTE code I mentioned earlier was running low. We kept spare batteries handy ever since.

The final production brought together about a dozen people. We ended up touring most of the respectable art houses around Belgium and a few times in Amsterdam. The cherry on the cake was definitely when we were booked by the MoMa in Shanghai in 2008. There are plenty more stories to tell about that trip, but I think this bit is lengthy enough as it is.