Sound reactive generative music video for HDU album track, developed using Processing. Also featured as part of live visuals to accompany ‘Metamathics’ tour performances, New Zealand 2008.

Cast: Karen Curley

15 minute co-located telematic performance between Belfast (Roots Ensemble), New York (RPI), and California (SoundWire at Stanford) including 15 musicians for ICMC 2008. Composed by Curtis Bahn, realized with the vibrobyte haptic actuators (developed by myself and Dane Kouttron) which are used for visual queuing. The three locations perform over Internet2, while the “conductor” application runs at RPI.

This excerpt includes Curtis Bahn, Pauline Oliveros, Jonas Braasch, Dan Valente, and Holland Hopson at RPI, and Cynthia Payne, Chris Chafe, Juan-pablo Caceres on screen at Stanford. On screen, out of this excerpt, is the Roots ensemble.

All performers are responding to LEDs, except for Pauline Oliveros who is wearing three pancake motors.

ICMC schedule icmc2008.net/programme/schedule
Vibrobyte info bluwiki.com/go/Hapticsandtelepresence

Cast: Kyle McDonald

Intento de proyecto final.
LCO.
e[ad].
Hecho en Processing.
Diego Cortés C.

Cast: Diego Cortes

Intento de Proyecto final.
LCO.
e[ad].
Hecho en Processing.
Diego Cortés C:

Cast: Diego Cortes

SiSaSaft.mp4

Author: moritzlaass
Keywords: glitch violent volnce glitchy noise circuit bending circuitbending clown pattern warrior clownpatternwarriors animation processing processing.org purple pink collage videocollage
Added: August 28, 2008

minimal animation illustrating the development of form out of formlesness.
I used Processing and AfterEffects

Author: moritzlaass
Keywords: form black white b&w development grow growth roots fractal animation blacknwhite minimal processing processing.org life plant
Added: August 28, 2008

aircord.co.jp
feat. rhizomatics

Cast: aircord

See the following link for details on the export process:
binarymillenium.blogspot.com/2008/08/exporting-point-clouds-from-photosynth.html

I’ve since learned that I was forgetting to conver the 2 color bytes from network order and that each color is 5-bits not 4, but I still couldn’t get the colors right for this scene ( photosynth.net/view.aspx?cid=5a6288c3-bf08-462c-8f21-8540202e304d )

Music is George Elinas - Beginnings and Endings.

Cast: binarymillenium

Something’s happening in software. Generative techniques have been around about as long as computers, but from Spore’s game design, soundtrack and creature editors to new music software like Nodal and Noatikl, in 2008 we’re seeing those techniques more accessible than ever. Good news for fans of the demoscene (an underground movement melding coding and art): it’s back with a vengeance, now interconnected with the larger Web and friendlier software-making tools.

It’s only a public alpha, but Toolbox, bargain-priced at 20 Euros (EUR50 when released), suggests what graphics apps might look like with an entirely different metaphor, built on generative lines. The creator describes the tool as a “node-based editor for making digital art,” or a “visual programming language” — the latter something we usually associate exclusively with patching tools like Max/MSP/Jitter and Quartz Composer. The difference here is, whereas those are open-ended software sketchpads, Toolbox is a single-window editor and integrated environment for making visuals, more along the lines of a Photoshop or Illustrator. I’m not suggesting you’ll toss your Creative Suite 3 license out the window, but what this does mean is you could generate an asset from start to finish in this tool — and, perhaps, take it out to another program.

Toolbox App Product Page, Download
Video Album on Vimeo
Flickr Set

The whole project is the work of one developer, Simon Strandgaard. (Remember, too, Quartz Composer began as the project of one Pierre Oliver-Latour.)

What does all this mean? It means you can make UI elements quickly, or destroy existing graphics, and play with vectors in a fluid, magically generative way. The alpha state can make it slow and unpredictable to work with, but it’s already capable of some fun stuff. Here’s a look at vector filtering:

Random vector filter experiments from Simon Strandgaard on Vimeo.

I also enjoy these “supershapes” when combined with vector filters. (and this challenges me to work on some of my Processing code a bit more!)

Supershapes and vector filters from Simon Strandgaard on Vimeo.

The one thing you won’t find, unfortunately for readers of this site, is any kind of live performance mechanism or video output. I’d love to see these two added — even if you could output without the UI to a second monitor, you could “play” with Toolbox live.

Also, the tool does appear to have a sea of palettes and sliders, which is why I actually like developing graphics with code. And some may be disappointed that, for the same reason, they didn’t adopt the lovely floating palettes in Apple’s Motion and Aperture.

But for an alpha version, this looks very promising, and it could be an interesting companion to your VJ app or performance environment of choice.

If you give it a try and have any impressions or tips, do share!

Visualizing a conversation in Processing. Work in progress for an interactive installation based on para-linguistic elements in a conversation.

Cast: Jori de Goede

I saw Marcel Duchamp’s Anemic Cinema (a short silent film) again recently, and realized I could make something similar with Processing ( processing.org ). This is an early result.

I have to add the poetry spirals, of course.

Cast: Matthew Conroy

Scientists from University of Manchester and Dolby Canada in Vancouver have figured out a very simple method to capture textures and assign them with depth-information. You will need this to model rooms, walls or characters with specific height information, in order to set height-maps, depth-maps or albedo-maps. Capturing them was a time consuming task that had to be done by hand or that required special expensive equipment like laser-scanner. Now we got this:

You just take pictures of the desired texture. One with flash, one without. Some post-processing on the colors (that differ by the color of the flashlight and specific shadows) result in the height map, we are ready to use. This technique should not give *that* accurate results, but at least it works perfectly, in relation to the cost. So, happy hacking and modeling! More details on Gizmodo and NewScientist.

If you are running low on inspiration than I have something for you. At O’Reilly there is an interview available with Andy Hertzfeld, one of the leading designers on the early Macintosh-range. This interview is not only written, but you can also listen to it as podcast, so check it out.

From the interview:

James Turner: Reading your book, it seems like the project management style for the Mac was very loose. How would you compare it to conventional project management approaches like Agile or Waterfall?

Andy Hertzfeld: I’m not sure; I don’t even know what Waterfall is. I have a pretty good idea of what Agile programming is and in a way that’s the technique we used by the Mac. But I think you know all conventional processes will make conventional products. The key thing–the key ingredient to me is the passion that developers put into their work–how much of themselves they invest in it, and I think that’s kind of orthogonal to a conventional development process. You can, you know the formal process can be whatever but the key ingredient is the passion and you know and the Mac team had passion in spades.

Yes, sometimes the greatest DIY projects are built not from scratch but from the cannibalized bits of other, less-brilliant controllers. Together, these pieces become greater as a whole, from bland and boring to bizarre and fantastic.

Case in point: Devin aka “mzo” writes us with his Cyrillic-emblazoned custom controller creation for VJ control.

The controller is built from modifying 3 off the shelf controllers (M-Audio Trigger Finger, Belkin Nostromo n52 gamepad and the old Mixman Dm2) into a custom made, laser etched box with a cold-war soviet space station theme (hence the name Def-con, also Definable-controller because of its flexibility in programming). The computer still sees the thing as 3 seperate and unmodified devices and I program them for my vj’ing using the respective software for each (although the dm2 to midi software isn’t from the manufacturer). This also makes the controller suitable for a wide variety of applications including dj’ing.

I currently use this controller with Vjamm, Resolume, Live and Traktor with custom control setups for each.

I was curious about more details of how the controller mappings were used in action, so Devin sent more.

Full-size image download of above

No videos, but he did write up some other impressions:

The dm2 is unfortunately pretty janky so the joystick is a little unreliable and the scratch wheel needs some fine tuning. The n52 is definitely my favorite controller ever, i’ve dj’d tons of parties using just the n52 and vr goggles with no computer in sight to bust out whole sets.

I’ve attached the diagram of my current resolume def-con setup (I actually reference the printout of it when playing still since its pretty newish) so that you and the readers can get an idea of how it’s actually used.

God I can’t wait for resolume 3 so I can use resolume for avj’ing instead of having to switch between vjamm and resolume mappings!

If readers were interested for whatever reason I could also package up my mapping files for the devices and resolume.

So, what do you think? Would those mappings be useful?

(And yeah, we’re excited about Resolume 3, too!)

Def-Con Picture Gallery [Picasa]

If anyone else has gone Dr. Frankenstein on their own controller, we’d love to hear about it.