Last month, with the VJ collective Requiem4Tv, I participated in the creation of a video installation for the VIP space of the Ethias Trophy.
The set-up consisted of a dozen of video surveillance cameras and 4 DVD players, all linked and mixed by a Vixid VJX16-4 video controller. This controller can accept up to 16 video inputs and 3 outputs and be manipulated through MIDI.
Usually, we use the Vixid in live acts but this installation needed to work without us manipulating it. This is where Processing comes in. I used the processing language and especially it’s MidiBus library so I could easily write a script that would activate different functionalities from the video mixer according to some prepared scenarios, without any human interventions.
And because I wanted to make it easy, because I wanted to learn a bit more and because I wanted to add my 2 cents to the Processing and Vixid projects, I decided to write my first processing library that would interface both.
The result is available here for you to try.
It’s still quite basic at the moment, even if everything should work. But if you’d like to interface your Vixid with Processing, it could be something to start with. Anyway, I plan to improve this in the couple months, just for my own projects.
For the fun, I attached here some pictures of the set-up and the VIP space.