Benjamin Van Citters

I had the great opportunity to get to work on a completely new visual set for Decibel Festival in 2015. I have worked with Decibel Festival now for three years running but this was the first time I had the privilege to work not only on the visual set but also the poster. Gosh I really love art!

I built the entirety of this set with Processing and performed it live during the show with a LPD8 Korg MIDI controller.

The original idea for the piece was to create an application that would trace over an image with lines and bend them according to properties of the image, ie color, or whether the image was changing from light to dark. There are some aspects of this remaining in the version I used in the show but as is often the case I find that responsive live controls help you make a performance more magical and so in the live version I erred on the side of live customization rather than complex procedural image walking.

I would love to share more details of this project with anyone will to look inside. Please reach out if you think you might find it interesting!

For Cairo Gallery‘s Vibrations Fest ’14 I built a video synthesizer app for Raspberry Pi with openFrameworks.  Christian Petersen, Nick Bartoletti and I set up a video projection area off in an open area of the forest near the main stage in Volunteer Park Seattle.

My contribution to last year’s visual arts opening night gala. Titled ‘Vase’, it can be seen on the table near the camera in this panorama. It is a generative digital sculpture. The surface of the Chilhuly-inspired work reflects the changing world outside and in front of the screen.