Manuel Chantre 2 Day Workshop
Manuel Chantre is a music and immersive video installation artist. In this 2 day workshop, which was held in conjunction with the Cork French Film Festival, Manuel gave an overview of his work process and installations (day 1) followed by a practical set of tutorials into the technologies that he employs (day 2).
For me it was the second day which proved to be most beneficial. Manuel spent the first half of the day looking at Max MSP - a flexible multimedia platform that allows you to mix sound, visuals and more to create interactive media.
Max MSP uses a fairly intuitive user interface which is very similar to Pure Data. By forming links between objects, you can create projects as diverse as your imagination (pretty much).
The second half of the day focussed on experimentation with projector's and multi layered platforms for projecting onto. Manuel's own style uses layers of tissue or fabric to project onto. This creates a layered effect and allows for a greater physical depth to the piece. Although my own project did not benefit greatly from this technique (I tried but it addd nothing to my work at this stage), it did look great for others. Clemens using 2 projectors to create a composite projection (see pic below) and there was a lot of projects that worked well with this technique.
Even though the specific techniques that Manuel's uses are not directly applicable to my project I still benefitted greatly from attending his workshop. Getting a good introduction to Max MSP and layered projections was a great experience and certainly worth the time investment.