As promised during my presentation at FlashForward Austin, here is a tasty little .ZIP file (11.9Mb) for you to have a look at. It contains my presentation, my lecture notes, and full source for my Smart Rockets and Darwinstruments projects. The source for Variance isn't in there yet, but I have put up a pre-alpha version of the project here, so that you can play around with it to your hearts' content.

Thank-you to everyone who attended and particularly to those who came up and talked to me after, or sent me an e-mail. It is always good to hear from people; indeed, it's proabably the best part of the whole deal.

I'll be posting about some of the great presentations that I saw during the conference as I get my head back together, so stay tuned! 

My favourite session from last week's FlashForward conference in Austin was by Mario Klingmann, of Quasimondo fame. Mario's session covered some of the techiques he uses to create 'mash-ups' - projects that incorporate media from various sources like Flickr, YouTube, and de.licio.us.  

As well as showing the workings behind some of his older projects like Tagnautica and Flickeur, Mario also showed us a few new projects. The Stake lets you burn images from anywhere on the web. Burn books! Burn photos! Burn websites. It's a teenage pyromaniac's dream come true. Picturedisko lets you put photos on a turntable and liten to what the sound like when the pixels are converted to music. Both are fun to play with and are, as is always the case with Mario's work, flawlessly executed.

After a short but wonderful sidetrip to New Mexico I’ve finally returned home from what was a really exciting Flashforward. I’ve seen some awesome sessions like Brendan’s or Craig’s and unfortunately missed some others like those by Jeremy, Branden, Chafic or Grant.

A big thank you to everybody who attended my session despite the top-class lineup in the parallel tracks and a special one to everyone who spoke to me afterwards and made me feel good - wow, I think that I’ve never before received such an amount of positive feedback after a talk. Since many people asked: all the illustrations for my screens, the t-shirts and buttons where drawn by the wonderful Jasmine T. (unfortunately her site is down for maintenance at the moment).

Since I will hold my “Mashup Baby!” session again soon on FITC Hollywood I will not upload my session notes yet, but if you are desperately interested in them you can send me an email and I will send them to you. You will find my email address in the printed session notes.

Here are the links to the main items I showed:
Clockr
Tagnautica / Tagnautica Del.icio.us Edition
Anavision (This is the stage frontend of the engine running a demo playlist)
Picturedisko (as I hopefully mentioned on Macs you will unfortunately hear no sound, due to the missing MIDI support of Processing/Mac and it will also show an ugly backward-compatibility bug with Flash Player 9 in Firefox. So either use Internet Explorer with Flash 9 oder Firefox with Flash
The Stake (this qualifies probably for “Web 2.0″ which means: permanently BETA)

Für meinen letzten Post hab ich mir das iG:Syntax Hiliter plugInn für Wordpress installiert. Das ganze setzt auf der GeSHi-Modul auf, dass eine Reihe von Sprachen unterstützt (JAVA, Actionscript, …). Da Processing nicht dabei war, hab ich kurzer Hand das JAVA Modul so erweiter, dass es nun auch den Processing Code richtig highlightet und verlinkt. Einfach diese Datei in java.php umbennen und in den Ordner ig_syntax_hilite->geshi packen.

Im Netz gibts eine Reihe von Seiten mit Farbpaletten, Farbkombinationen, Verläufe etc. (COLOURlover, Color Scheme, ColorBlender, ColorMatch Redux). Da ich nun keine Lust hatte in einer copypaste Orgie die Farben nach processing rüberzuholen, hab ich kleine Klasse geschrieben mit der man die Paletten in Processing einladen kann. Das gute ist nämlich, dass einige der Seiten die Möglichkeit anbieten die Paletten im .act bzw .cs Format zu exportieren. Einfach die Datei in data Ordner ziehen und mit der Klasse importiern. Das Ergebniss ist ein Array der alle Farben der geladenen Palette enthält.

The video shows a prototype application of RhNav - Rhizome Navigation in action: A graphical navigation interface incorporating realtime website traffic and user behavior analysis.

For more info please take a look at:
http://www.rafelsberger.at/node/rhnav

Author: walterra

Keywords: Information Visualization Attentation Data and User Behavior Analysis Interactive Navigation Interfaces processing.org

Added: September 17, 2006

Oldskool: Sketches 1994-1998)

I just posted a sequence of old sketches to Flickr, ranging from 1994 to 1998 and showing some of my earliest computational work. Actually, since I never drew or worked visually in any other non-computational way after age 12, it is also some of my earliest visual work of any kind.

While some of the images are deeply mired in the techno aesthetic I was so taken with at that time (after all, I had just turned 20 and these were the 1990's), others point to the beginning of a generative approach. Some of the basic ideas about form and structure expressed in these pieces are still with me today (see Kugelstudie or Illuminations for proof).

These are some of my favorites:

• Boxgrid
• objsphere
• Particle
• postscript.red.lines
• punch.codes
• grid0-5.deformation

You can still see these pieces on my Evolutionzone web site as part of the historical section, but that design was done in 1996 and is painful to look at now. Seeing the images on their own in the pristine Flickr interface makes me look at them in a different way. It still feels a bit vulnerable to expose them to public viewing like this, but I figure it's not a bad thing.

The 3D images were rendered in POV-Ray, my first ever visual tool.

This is awesome. Via node3000 I came upon this here:



Ferrofluids are fluids, that have magnetic properties. You can manipulate them with magnetic fields and get real interetings shapes. What should I say? It really looks like processing… or 3D-renderings. But this is real world.







[via]

Well, this is my last week in Kaiserslautern and a big, big pleasure to announce that I am invited to a talk with a topic that I was massively thinking about in the last 5 or so years. The topic is about “Culture work in the province - a useless struggle?”



The talk will be on 24. September 2006 at Wollmagazin Kaiserslautern. Get all infos at the digitalcouch.

As I have a plotter which only speaks vectors, and Peter has motion tracking on the brain we’ve been thinking about visualisations involving vector graphics a lot recently. Someone else who has visualisation on the brain is Martin Wattenberg. I’ve encountered his work before, but hadn’t connected the projects together.

Most recently The Shape of Song (from 2001) turned up Music Thing.

Using midi as a source removes all of the ambiguity and noise inherent in audio analysis. This is most evident in media player visualisations - a waveform contains too much data moving too quickly to reproduce meaningfully on screen, so they never really seem to produce images which can be seen to correlate to the track playing. However, the Shape of Song Software uses the simplified data available in midi files to produce clean, clear visualisations. As seen below in my aggregation of the midi track from Aphex Twin’s “Beetles”.

These images display a piece of music over its entire length, so they’re not really useful for visual performance. They do illustrate how useful midi data from the music can be for a VJ though. The gig in which I drowned my laptop with beer was supposed to include a debut of some DJ Shadow style a/v drumming as documented by Dave Dri. Even in the comfort of my own home this was incredibly fun, and it looked fantastic. Visualists, find yourself a Digital Musician and get your midi on.

If you don’t have any collaborators nearby, processing has proMIDI, and I’m sure Peter or other learned commentors will point us to some worthwhile Audio to Midi apps soon. analysis, aphex twin, MIDI, music, processing.org, vector, visualisation, VJ

Apologies to the readers and writers of Processing Blogs for the recent downtime.

Our host machine was experiencing unusual load, and both Steve and I were away on holiday last week and didn’t want to risk it going down and affecting all our other sites. I’m experimenting with Wordpress cache plugins and will probably offload the Processing Blogs feed to Feedburner, but normal service should be resumed for the time being.

test with the superShape subClass

Author: eskimoblood

Keywords: supershape processing.org surface 3d music vj

Added: September 13, 2006

ITP is back in session, and another semester of nature of code has begun. Here’s a new example that demonstrates a method for picking a non-uniform distribution of random numbers.

Branden Hall of Automata Studios, who is well-known in the Flash world for his work with Joshua Davis, has been working on a patch-based programming tool for ActionScript. His project, called Flow, allows users to quickly create visual effects using in interface similar to PureData or MaX/MSP. 

This should be a cool resource for artists who are working currently in patch-based environments, but want to leverage some of the features of Flash (and also make their work far more accessable). The speed increases in AS3 and the improvements in bitmap handling mean that Flash can handle large-scale media projects very well.