Dan Zen Light Shows

Compilation – click to enlarge

Dan Zen has been interested in Light Shows for most of his life.  He grew up watching Hilarious House of Frightenstrein – with Igor dancing in the oil drop psychedelics.  Zen also grew up in the sixties and seventies with hippie parents and a love of patterns and shaping environments.

For his first band, The Chessmen (1989), he created light shows for pretty well every show.  This was pre-digital projector times so were made from old slide projectors with their middles cut out to allow for custom spinning wheels or revolving tracks run by little motors.  Many involved op art or overlapping lines and circles.

Oil Drops were a favourite.  Zen would put several sandwich bags with different color oil and water into the slide area and squish them with a cam lever run by motors.  He also created overlapping circular plates with mixing fins and trays trays for squelching as seen in many of Thee Gnostics shows (1994).  Gorgolon Tape Release is pictured below.

With the dawn of digital projectors all sorts of light shows were possible.  For Zen’s Final Gnostic appearance (aside from reunions) a compilation of old home videos including video feedback were projected.  See if you can get through all of this song – it is worth it – there are some wicked sounds and visuals as the Hari Krishna come on to stage.

Thee Gnostics videos are filled with light shows and they can all be seen on the Flash site http://theegnostics.com.  More videos are planned for the future.  Many of the videos are on YouTube as well.

When Zen left Thee Gnostics (1996), he still did light shows for them as well as light shows for other bands such as the Ride Theory (Young Rival), Christmas and Simply Saucer.

Watch the video – Ride Theory

Some Simply Saucer pics – look at pics to right in photostream to see more patterns used for lightshow – from the Dan Zen tool, Tilator.  These flowed with the beat.

As Zen became able to animate to sound frequency in Flash he created light shows that moved to the beat of the music.  Examples were the Christmas show in Toronto (try it) and The Magic Shadows show in Hamilton (try it).

In particular, the demand for original Christmas vinyl records is extremely high, with one album recently having been sold on Ebay for $2000! For this show Bryden was backed up by Toronto’s Saffron Sect and the performance was enhanced with a wickedly cool light show created by Dan Zen.

For Thee Gnostics Reunion show Zen created a water based light show that moved when people pulled on a series of Cyber Medallions hooked onto the light show – this warbled projections of the inside of keyboards.  This was used as a wall projection as there was a projectionist for the night.  See the making of video.  The cyber medallions were given away to the audience after the show.

The latest light show for the Hawkwind Tribute show at This Ain’t Hollywood in Hamilton used Opartica Tunnel controlled live by Dan Zen – click the link and watch as there are a number of snips from songs in the one video.  There were also lights by General Chaos at the sides.  See Pics.

Did the lights for the Bob Bryden Yorkville Days CD Release:

And Hollow Earth

Here are some videos from the 2014 Simply Saucer show at the Casbah for the Baby Nova Tour – animated factories at controllable speeds and background supernovas.

SAFFRON SECT

All the best and try adding a light show to your event!

-13-

Altura – Pseudo Interactive Storytelling Site Launches

Altura at http://altura.mobi is a Web / Mobile site that lets people partake and write pseudo interactive stories in a fun and free manner.

We will not give away exactly how it works until you try it!  Suffice it to say, it is another interactive storytelling feature from creator Dan Zen – http://danzen.com to add to the long list of interactive fiction environments:

Interactive Storytelling GAMES

	GORGOLON Underwater Multi-user Sci-Fi Game
	SAVE EARTH Save Future Earth With This Online Remote Control!
	MOUSTACHE MYSTERIES Zany Mysteries from the Mind of the Moustache!
	SHRINK RAY Save thousands shrunk in a bottle!
	BLIMP RACE Fly your blimp with all your friends!

Social Interactive Storytelling

	HIP CATS Turn On, Jack In and Hang Out
	CHANGING MAIL Change sent mail after it is read
	SPIROGRAM Spiral Encode Messages To Friends
	DENS Atmospheric Forums
	SPY-MAIL Get Spied On!
	COMMENT RIGHT Encouragement for blog comments

Interactive Storytelling EXPERIENCES

	TOWER OF BABEL Whisper Words That Have Never Been Said
	ZEN MOTTO Philosophical Focus
	A MILLION CLOUDS Fly a Jet Pack Through a Million Clouds!
	GYCOPO The Game You Can Only Play Once!
	PREDICTION TRAIN Ride the Prediction Train Into the Future

Interactive Storytelling APPS

	SNIPISODE Tell stories through Facebook status lines!
	TAPOLL Predict-a-Poll Web 2.0 Site!
	YASEESAY Say What you See Tool!
	ZEN MIX Cool Vlogging Tool
	ZEN PICTURE PAN ZOOM Scrolling Picture Viewer

-2012-

Inventing for the Internet the Early Years

Over on the Inventor Blog, I have just posted on Inventing for the Internet – the Early Years. Below is a brief synopsis but please see the post for the examples.

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Here is a look at inventing for the Internet written in 2005 looking back over the ten year period from 1995 up to 2005. In general, the focus was on making new use of the medium:

1. People can interact to make content not just view content
2. People can communicate with each other
3. A computer mediates to enforce rules of a game or environment
4. Production and distribution of virtual objects are free

Other inventive focus was the relation between story and game play. Sometimes a story would suggest game play but usually a relevant story was created for a given game play.

Here are the comments about inventing features for the Internet in the early years. Many of these ideas would have relevance being redone in today’s social media aware world – because we were socially aware in the past but perhaps did not quite have the platforms and sharing systems worked out.

Inventions for 2005 – 2010 will be the focus of the next posting.

Enjoy – Dan Zen – Full Post