I’ll be glad to come back to CrasLab in Paris in order to animate a two-days Processing workshop , the 3rd and 4th of November. The lectures will focus on creative programming through the use of Processing environment, attendees will be taught coding pratices in order to build graphic interactive sketches.

I’ve also been invited by Etienne Cliquet to give a talk about Processing(Mobile) & Arduino at L’école des Beaux-arts in Toulouse.

Text and Interview: Martin Wisniowski, August 2007

Cory Arcangel describes himself as a “29 year old computer nerd from Buffalo / New York”. He works as artist in between media, game and concept art. But most of all he has a very fresh view on things that does speak from his minimal, modified works.

For a long time he is now into hacking things, especially vintage gaming hardware in favor of the Nintendo Entertainment System. He started out doing things with Beige, a “programming ensemble”, that meanwhile also turned into a record label. (You will best check out the incredible old-school Beige website to to get an basic understanding what they are about.)

The works of Cory are artifacts, some kind of derivates or moddings, that play with context of the original work. His way of dealing things plays and re-contextualize with the stuff to bring out things in new and unwanted ways to see. Who is Cory Arcangel? Is he a hacker? Is he an artist? Is he an actionist? Or just a nerd that likes to play? Let’s roll with the interview.

Cory Archangel performing Born To Run Glockenspiel Addendum live

Hello Cory, what is your basic concept to hooking on things?

This is hard to pin down. I really have no general interest: each project tends to be different, cause I like to tinker with stuff. Take it apart, put it back together again, etc, etc. The art part of it in many ways is a separate interest. They collide, cause basically I want these things I make to in some way to affect people. Therefore I can’t just tinker, I have to tinker with something people care about.

What does the hackers attitude mean to your life apart from building works and artefacts?

Hacking to me means having fun, playing around, practical jokes, being clever, maybe even being a bit of a wise ass.

Continue reading “Cory Arcangel on Tinkering and doing Stuff”

This is awesome. Some oscilloscope connected to a PC soundcard to create a demo. Meanwhile there are not so many platforms anymore that haven’t been demoed yet. Finding new platforms is indeed a work that should be performed by demomakers. Think of plotters, robots and/or media facades, because now we have oscilloscopes:

“The oscilloscope is connected to PC soundcard and is in X/Y-mode, with right channel connected to X and left to Y input. Z (brightness) input is not used.”

You can download and listen to the audiofile in flac format
or wav to manipulate. Check the according Website on pouet.

Maybe quite cooler in style is this one. It also has the original sound and is not dubbed like the example above. And it sounds like… Right! FM-Synthesis.

In an intense Herculean effort, Processing versions 127 - 133 were released from the 14th to the 26th of October. Download here.

Short post just to mention that I’ll be speaking tomorrow, Friday the 26th, 09h30, at the École nationale supérieure d’arts Paris-Cergy, thanks to an invitation by Bojena Jake. Also, Jeff Guess has just taken on a new position there, which is great for me, but even better news for the students of Cergy. Also, Jeff and I have finally come up with some concrete plans on how to further coordinate our two ateliers, so we’ll be moving in that direction over the coming months. More on that later, but it’s a continuation of what we started discussing last winter in Mulhouse.

You can see some of what Jeff does with his students on his blog (Atelier Pratique Algorithmiques). As for his personal work, you can explore some of it here (Projects), and if you’re in Paris he’ll be giving a performance of his Ekphrastic Objects at the Pompidou Center on November 21st.

CreateDigitalMedia is where we tell you about the ideas we come up with and lessons we’ve learnt running the wildly successful (and sexy) CreateDigitalMusic and CreateDigitalMotion. We’re building these sites around Wordpress, and beginning to incorporate some bbPress and WordpressMU in to the mix.

Creating a quick interactive piece for this weekend. Particles fall away from people’s motion and pool on the floor (the projection will be angled so the bottom half runs across the floor). This is me eating breakfast in front of my computer, since I only have one table in my apartment.

Cast: David Wicks

I had an inspiring session with the guys around soup.io, that is a fabulous tumblelog project from Vienna. I began experimenting with it a lot and soon wrote my own tumblelog to continue the experiments. This now grew old. Useless to say, I used Ruby in Rails to get stuff done. =)

Digital Tools now presents a new section: the Digital Tools Microcontent. It’s fast paced side of the this site, where I post at least 3-5 short, but interesting entries during the day. It is a valuable source for all your tools heads out there and will serve as a daily source of creative input and inspiration. A collection of random thoughts and things I find fitting in the creative coding universe.

Ill styled quick first design.

Digital Tools Microcontent is also integrated into this page. Just look at the right side… at the sidebar. Also RSS-Feeds are available! I am also thinking on syndication and / or more community features to add. Feel free to feed back.

PS: The guys from the soup are again on tour.

ITP Big Screens @ IAC from shiffman on Vimeo.

My class went to test their projects on the IAC video wall this week. The works in this video are by Young Cho, Hye Ki Min, and Ji-Sun Lee. The pieces in the photos below are by Daniel Liss and Lucia Jeesun Lee. All 15 projects will be on display in December. More to come!

aAVis is a visualisation creation tool I made for my final university assignment. It’s coded in processing.

Here’s a quick little video displaying a small amount of how aAVis works

More information at :
http://www.tenfiftyfour.com/aAVis/

Cast: a|A

Whoow. There is something huge coming up. A new technique called Trixels to play platform games on 3D-based game engine.

The video shows the gameplay of Fez, a work in progress from the independent game developer Phil Fish. In this game a 3D engine is used to get an original 2D platform game look and feel - but extended in 3 dimensions. Think like a Rubicks cube. Platforming, orientation and puzzle solving will get into very new dimensions and depths. Gaming, level design experience and surprises were not possible in that form before and compared to this, first person perspective games are a failure (at least for platformers).

The technique here was developed/invented by Renaud Bédard (correct me when I am wrong), called Trixels Technology. He writes about it in his blog:

“First, everything is rendered 3D, at all times. The 2D views are just orthographic (a.k.a. isometric) views of the world from a direction or another. Since the Z component disappears, the character considers the whole world as 2D and can go from very far objects to very close objects without distinction.”

“Each visible pixel-art tile that you see while playing the game in 2D view is part of a 3D cube, which we call a trile. Each trile is a 16×16×16 volume which is formed of 4096 potential trixels. Obviously, not all trixels are rendered, else it would be incredibly slow… so only the border trixels are considered. But in the data storage, it’s basically a 3D presence array which tells the renderer if a trixel is present/on, or absent/off.”

I am really wondering how he built the clouds. Fez is still in progress, initially designed by Phil Fish with a very certain taste for colors and cute artworks. He is part of the Kokoromi collective and the gaming experience with the switching perspectives reminds me a little on Zig Zag, but not in isometric but a real 3D view.

Now, I think I am not the only one who waited for such a technique for a long time without knowing. Most of the 1st person 3D games are boring as hell or did not proceed to a good platform gaming experience. Metroid on the 2D: fine, Metroid in 3D: boring. Most of even the fun games (that ones with candy colors and blue skies) really don’t work in the first person perspective. Or until now I did not see any title yet that convinced me. Trixels Technology will be the solution to this.

Fez screenshot with kind permisson from Phil Fish.

[via]

(concept image)

Usman Haque has been commissioned to create Evoke for the Illuminating York festival. You can see the work from on Fri 26 Oct until Sat 3 Nov, from 6-11pm. From the website…

“Evoke is a massive animated 80,000 lumen projection, which will light up the facade of York Minster. The facade is brought to life by members of the public, who use their own voices to “evoke” colourful light patterns that emerge at the building’s foundations and soar up towards the sky, giving the surface a magical feeling as it melts with colour.

The cathedral, built to link conceptually earth to the heavens, has been a site for the conveyance of words, dreams and aspirations for hundreds of years. The facade is designed to orient the gazes of passers-by upwards. As an attempt to continue this tradition, the patterns of Evoke are generated in realtime by the words, sounds, music and noises produced collectively by the public, determined by their particular voice characteristics. The colours will skim the surface of the Minster, pour round its features and crevasses, emerging finally near the top of the facade where they will sparkle high overhead.

People with voices of different frequencies, rhythms or cadences will be able to evoke quite different magical patterns upon the surface of the building - a staccato chirping will result in a completely different set of visual effects to a long howl for example, blending old and new to continue animating the facade of the Minster.”

Created using Processing.

I’ll update this post after the event once photos and video emerge of the final work.

This is from the same Ava Luna show at Monkeytown. I coded and performed the visuals for this song as well. Each glowy white thing in the video is actually a fractal, but the old macbook’s built-in camera couldn’t really pick up on that.

Cast: David Wicks