one number short of a meme

Back in February I met Pablo and Anna. They own the studio Hamill Industries. They were teaching a workshop I was enrolled in.

We hit it off pretty quickly. I was (and am) obsessed with the work they do combining analog and digital stuff to make very cool art, often combined with music. You can see their stuff here: https://hamillindustries.com/

They invited me to come visit their studio which I did almost immediately. They label the spaces North and South Korea. One half is a workshop with a metal lathe, tools, welding equipment, electronics lab, etc. The other half is a cozy space for developing concepts and doing the computer-based stuff. They're very scrappy creatives and a lot of fun to talk to.

I ended up getting approval to skip a week of classes to go "intern" with them and work on a small project together. While I was there, Pablo showed me the work he was doing with an old Vectrex video game system. They had tapped into the system to control the light beam using sound. They then developed a way to send sound signals to the Vectrex in a way that would draw specific shapes. They then hook this thing up in a live setting with a video camera on the screen to use for visuals during live electronic shows. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...

While I was there interning, Pablo was working on how to get it to render text. He had just started experimenting and got it to render "Hamill". It was really cool.

A couple of weeks ago I went to go see them perform the closing show for the OFFF festival in Barcelona. It was incredible. Three giant screens of live video feeds fixed on analog visuals influenced by sound. Liquid on a speaker, injectors that spit out three colors of paint based on bass, treble and mids, and the Vectrex. Pablo set up a countdown clock to the start of the show. I was giddy. It was so, so cool to see that work appear live on stage.

They set up two Vectrex machines at a show; one for the video feed and one pointing at the audience. They often lean into revealing how they do things. I caught a video of the audience-facing machine: https://vimeo.com/11882345...

I'll post a few more shots of their setup to show the scale.

Photo nerd stats: Minolta XD-11, this shot was probably with the 135mm Rokkor-X, Ilford Delta 3200 pushed to 6400.