Enough with virtual reality – virtual hallucinations?
"Free-form mind blowing," is how Raster Master Creon Levit describes the goal of his band's visual music. "We're trying to develop a new performance medium: live computer-graphics ensemble performance.
"Raster Master's improvisations are a cascade of swirling, metamorphosing images: '60s light shows grafted onto '80s music video, real time. "Enough of reality – let's do virtual hallucinations," Levit declares. "We are instrument builders, playing away on the visual equivalent of the first synthesizers."
Give this group one thing: They've got some high-end equipment. No wimpy Video Toasters for this outfit! Try two Onyx RealityEngines2 along with two Indigo2 Extremes. It takes a 12-foot truck to pack up all their beefy machinery; setting up for a performance takes five hours. For these artists, corporate sponsorship resembles traditional patronage of the arts more than it does the run-of-the-mill Miller Beer logo stuck in your face. Two of the Raster Masters work for Silicon Graphics; among their duties is writing the code that creates their visual music – code that a Macintosh could never crunch. SGI, of course, also provides the machines that the Raster Masters use.
Of the group's three highly skilled programmers, two – Levit and David Tristram – worked at the NASA Ames Research Center, in Mountain View, California. Levit still works there. When Tristram left NASA, he went to work at SGI. There he met Ron Fischer, the Raster Masters' third programmer. Fischer compares performance graphics to "puppets, directly reacting to many operator actions at once."
Graphic designer Maggie Hoppe plays the role of mixer-cum-video-switcher. Sound designer Johnathan Nelson spins a dense mix of sounds. Look for the Raster Masters in Amsterdam at the TILE Convention on June 28 and at the Montreux Music Festival in Montreux, Switzerland, in mid-July. Stateside, you can see them at Digital World in Los Angeles on June 9 and at SIGGRAPH in Orlando, Florida, July 24 to 29. E-mail: rm-request@telsa.esd.sgi.com.
