Artist in residence March - September 2004

From March till September 2004 the south Italian artist Jaromil developed a real-time video manipulation and streaming device. The Rasta Coder, as he calls himself, has been working on various free and open source projects in the recent years, including dyne:bolic (a live GNU/Linux operating system especially targeted to artists), the MuSE streaming software for online radios, the FreeJ software for real time video manipulation and the popular HasciiCam software for streaming of ASCII formatted video.



For the Artist in Residence program Jaromil created a low cost streaming device. The device is not more than a cheap Intel based computer with tv-out. It will have capabilities like MpegII encoding / decoding, real time video manipulation and high quality video projection. For this purpose a special GNU/Linux distribution is being created to fit the capabilities of the special hardware employed.
With the video box it will be easy to encode a video source or DVD into multiple streaming formats which in turn can be used on the Internet and for projections.

Because the video box is actually a computer, a wide variety of programs can run on it. One of those programs is FreeJ. FreeJ comes close to a VJ program but is better described as a real time video manipulator, being able to capture and mix multiple video sources from the network or files and live input. Effects can be applied, as well as texts and pictures, while all manipulations are scriptable with JavaScript. During this period FreeJ will be extended to run on the video box. Also an art work will be created using the technology.

http://montevideo.dyne.org
http://dyne.org
http://dynebolic.org
http://freej.org
http://rastasoft.org