Idea
In the beginning there was Tim Vets' autocutup-patch.
His patch is based on the literary cut-up technique popularized by William S. Burroughs.
"Autocutup" analyses an audio-file and makes slices - which means it makes several parts out of the audio by detecting attacks. Then the slices will be played back in random order.
Making slices is a common method in music making. You can seperate different parts of a drum-sample to make new rhythmical structures out of it.
I try to work with slices in a combination of audio and video.
Exercise
I started to add video to Tim Vets' original autocutup-patch.
To have more control over the slices i added MIDI to patch, so that the slices can be played with a keyboard for example. I decided to use AbletonLive to send rhythmical strucutres to the patch to make it more musical.
The next step was to work with live-video-material recorded by a webcam. So now I can record myself and the slices will be played back in realtime.
For the presentation i decided to have a prepared track in AbletonLive with beats and harmonics. So there is a kind of rhythmical preset wich triggers the slices. I can trigger the start of a recording-phrase (automatically 4sec of recording time) wich prepares the patch with new material to make new slices.
... but better: watch. :)