euphoria party invite from 1993. i wonder what that 'e' really means :)

i was recently looking through my archives and came across some of my old design work. this may as well be a chapter in my future best-selling auto-biography. i’ll now completely date myself, but when i graduated in 1989 from parsons school of design, there were only TWO computers in the entire school and computer graphic design classes (then known as desk-top publishing lol) were not even a main part of the curriculum.

a friend of mine and i started doing small visual shows for bands playing in the east village and lower east side and one thing led to another. we started our company, named it xelibrium, and began doing live event projections. we called it real-time optic stimuli.

caffeine invite circa 1994

since our designs were pretty psychedelic, rave promoters started asking us to design rave flyers and then utilize the art in projections during dj sets. we would have multiple slide and video projectors throwing massive visuals around the raves. oh how those candy ravers loved it.

most of our work in the beginning was done with an apple 2ci and then a quadra. at the time photoshop 1 (yes, photoshop v1.0) did not have layers, so design and retouching was not as easy as it is today. it was painter that first came out with layers and they were called ‘floaters’. even simple filters like craquelure (pictured top) took a while to render (and no, craquelure wasn’t that cheesy back then as it is today).

poster for Liquid Visions 2 rave. 1995

it was cool while it lasted and we got to do shows for aphex twin, the orb (rip andy hughes) and moby among the long list of djs and bands. this was way before the term vj was coined and of course visuals in clubs today is big business.

and hey, if anyone out there knows who owns xelibrium.com tell them to contact me. why in the world would anyone want that domain since it was a made up name?

Flash can be used in many great ways. One example is making music online using visuals.

Below are some pretty inspiring examples.

if piano is your thing check out Pianola

if beats are your thing check out this simple beat layering by Project Two

if glitches and cuts is your thing check out Glitchscape

if simple chords and rain dew drops sounds enticing check out this from Lullatone

you can even make music using our planets in the solar system with Solarbeat

and for you visual/aural pleasure check out this form of music making using movies cut/clipped/pasted using instruments like the pioneer dvj-1000. This is by a artist called Pogo (a video disc jockey) made with mixers similar to cd turntables but these are mixed with dvds. The music is not bad but its the way that its put together which is great.

There are a lot of  other sites as well to consider but these are the ones that sparked my interest.

If you know any sites similar to the ones above please feel free to share.