Joshua Batty and Mitchell Nordine are Melbourne, Australia-based creative artists, musicians (trumpet and violin, respectively), researchers and digital alchemists who, through Mindbuffer Studios, create audiovisual sensory experiences with digital technology.
Some of the duo’s notable work includes “Lattice,” a 5x channel audiovisual laser installation driven by custom generative music software that creates uniquely unfolding patterns that is running at the Scienceworks in Melbourne; “Architectonics,” a custom projection mapping work that was done for White Night Melbourne 2016 at the RMIT University Gallery; and “The Crack Up,” where they designed stereoscopic VJ mixing software for Deakin’s Motion Lab for its show of the same name.
Implications for worship design
Not only does Mindbuffer Studios provide unique installations to museums, stadiums and special event facilities throughout the world, the company offers software development and audiovisual research that can assist many, including worship facilities.
“A lot of things in the industry will have specific laser software or lighting software and all these other things, and it’s really hard to get these things to talk to one another and get things synchronized,” Batty says. “I always felt there was a lack of precision that could happen if everything was controlled from a single piece of software and most of our research looks into how we can have control over most of these media types from a single interface.”
While a lot of their work is utilized in large installations at festivals (like White Night in Melbourne or Burning Man in the U.S.), the ideas can be used on a smaller scale for something like a church. The two partners used to play in church bands growing up, so they understand the needs of a worship space.
The two partners used to play in church bands growing up, so they understand the needs of a worship space.
The software they have designed has improved substantially over the last couple of years.
Multimedia wonderland
“Because we started off as musicians, we wanted to add a visual component to our shows, so we started writing software that would get us through an hour without crashing,” Batty says. “We started getting booked into projection mapping shows that would last 12 hours, and it moved into doing a 5-hour laser beam installation in a museum that had to run every day for 12 months and, more recently, we did three installations for a museum that have to run every day for 15 years.”
What’s unique about Mindbuffer Studios and the men behind it, is that they make agreements with all of their clients that they open source all of the technology that they develop for them, and so all the software they develop for commercial projects are available to the public for free.
“As a result, we’ve built up a collection of ways to work with 100-chanel audio surround-sound systems, multichannel laser systems and lighting and we created a framework called Nannou, this open-source, free service anyone can use and access,” Batty says. “It allows access to controlling large-scale audio, laser, lights, digitals and everything.”
Nannou was launched in Spain earlier this year and the company is working on refining it and making it future-proof and modern, and also abstract some of the complexities of the stuff for people who don’t know how to code with a simple user interface.
“Our goal is to allow developers to get in there and design their own systems. We’re hoping that people give back some cool things that they come up with in the community.” Joshua Batty, Co-Founder, Mindbuffer Studios, Melbourne, Australia
“Our goal is to allow developers to get in there and design their own systems,” Batty says. “We’re hoping that people give back some cool things that they come up with in the community.”
Over the next 12 months, Mindbuffer is also hoping to come up with a high-level, graphical interface so people without developer knowledge, but with experience working on lights and sounds, can download something and create virtual connections between mediums from the same interface.
It’s there, Batty believes, that a church will find their services useful.
Church tech end-users
“The church technicians can just download this and then create a unified experience for the worship community,” he says. “They first need to think about--is the technical layout of how they want to deliver the media in the church space? From there, they need to learn what is the best media to employ.”
For example, for an older church that has a small sound system with a single projector, the easy case is to get a bigger projector with a wider lens, so they can projection map out certain parts of the structure and have it interface more with the architecture of the church.
“Projection mapping on church facades amplifies and makes the space come alive,” he says. “It seems to be the thing that people are enjoying these days.”
For larger worship spaces that have access to moving [lights] and laser beams, and microphones going through some sort of audio desk, Batty notes an easy thing to do would be to take the levels coming out of the mics and audio desk and pipe that into the intensity of the lights, unifying it all. That, he says, will amplify the worship experience even more.
“I have done projection mapping on church facades before and also projecting mapping performance on a huge, 200-year-old pipe organ inside a church, and even synchronized it with the actual playing of the organ." Joshua Batty, Co-Found, Mindbuffer Studios, Melbourne, Australia
“I have done projection mapping on church facades before and also projecting mapping performance on a huge, 200-year-old pipe organ inside a church, and even synchronized it with the actual playing of the organ,” he says. “As someone pressed the keys, it would light up and really integrate everything.”
Batty has also designed a three-channel laser installation inside St. Paul’s Cathedral in Melbourne.
“I really love the architecture of these old church buildings and they lend themselves perfectly for placing lights underneath columns, so they’re hidden but light up certain aspects of it,” he says. “It’s really perfect for this kind of stuff.”
Having achieved a PhD in audio visual granular synthesis, Batty is something of an expert on all of this and has published research that is available for people to read and learn from. He works as a researcher at a university in Australia and continues to publish important findings that people can learn from.
For a look at some of Mindbuffer Studio’s works, visit www.mindbuffer.net.
