Mind the Volcano! [2012-2013]

21th-24th november 2013 // Mind the Volcano! @ Piksel13 festival, Bergen, NO

Mind the Volcano is a text-based TV-performance with a typewriter logic. All the visuals consist of text characters, based on words and images from books. The music is arranged and even composed live in a text-based software, shown as a part of the visual story. Words, images and music work closely together.

Many animations are typed manually as a form of keyboard craft. The animation works symbol-by-symbol rather than frame-by-frame. As such, the stories happen between film and typewriter, like a “movie-book”. This limbo is strengthened by the eerie visual style of Raquel Meyers and music from goto80.

Commodore 64 is the primary medium for the performance with open software, but it also uses teletext. Teletext is the data sidekick to the TV-signal, manifested as a transparent layer on top of the video. The graphics are specially made for this performance, using custom open hardware by Peter Kwan.

Technologies used: Commodore 64, Anim64 (open), Letter Noperator (free), BASIC, VBIT Teletext Inserter (open), defMON (free).

31st january 2013 // Mind the Volcano @ Performance Paper / transmediale 2013 BWPWAP, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, DE
Raquel Meyers and Goto80

Mind the Volcano is a text-based TV-performance with a typewriter logic. All the visuals consist of text characters, based on words and images from books. The music is composed live in a text-based software, shown as a part of the visual story. Words, images and music work closely together.

Many animations are typed manually as a form of keyboard craft. The animation works symbol-by-symbol rather than frame-by-frame. As such, the stories happen between film and typewriter, like a “movie-book”. This limbo is strengthened by the eerie visual style of Raquel Meyers.

Commodore 64 is the primary medium for the performance, but it also uses teletext. Teletext is the data sidekick to the TV-signal, manifested as a transparent layer on top of the video. The graphics are specially made for this performance, using custom hardware and software by Peter Kwan.

Mind the Volcano premiered at the literature festival Textival 2012 in Göteborg, Sweden. This is the first time teletext is added, and it is most likely the first live teletext performance.

31th march 2012 / Mind the Volcano! @ Textival Litteraturfestival 2012 – Stora Teatern, Göteborg, SE

Mind the Volcano is a text-based TV-performance that premiered at the literature festival Textival 2012 in Göteborg. It is an improvisation based on books by Lennart Hellsing, Peter Newell, Hans Traxler and Lewis Carroll. The music is made by Goto80, and is played through 40 headphones. His music tool also uses text graphics, which makes it a part of the visual story aswell.

The letters and symbols sometimes form words and sentences, but are primarily used as graphical building blocks. The graphics are typed letter-by-letter, as a form of keyboard craft. That enables a special form of animation which looks similar to a real-time drawing, but using a typewriter instead of a pen. As such, the stories occur inbetween the language of film and the logic of the typewriter.