We’ve seen lots of fancy projection maps, sculptural creations, and elaborate architectural facades.

But sometimes, you just want to get rid of those awful seams when using a couple of projectors. And that can make all the difference.

Enter Blendy. This friendly, simple Mac tool sits between two visual applications and gets rid of those seams. It simply blends two textures together, combining them using the inter-app visual texture tool called Syphon (the one we’ve been raving about so much lately).

Using multiple projectors (two is just the beginning), ideally the same model for matched brightness, you can line up multiple images. These days, you can easily run out of a dual- or triple-head setup off even a single laptop. Set up a source – like Modul8 or ArKaos – and an output, like MadMapper. Blendy does the blending to the texture so the projection image looks continuous.

Blendy is under development, so your mileage may vary, but it’s exquisitely-well documented and, thanks to Syphon, works with loads of Mac visual apps. (DIY tools like Processing and OpenFrameworks now work these days, too, not just VJ apps.)

We’ll be watching. Try it out, let us know how you do, and by all means, document your kick-ass visualist setup with video and photos so you can show it off to the planet.

Superior Brazilian engineering:

http://blendy.studioavante.com/

Cost, for now, is €33 – with a special Brazilian discount.

With a nod to the forms and shapes of analog-generated imagery, but fully digital, here’s another digital type project. Buchstabengewitter (perhaps translated “Letterstorm”), by Ingo Italic, uses generative patching to imagine type that emerges from three-dimensional clouds of geometry. It comes to us from the research laboratory at Letters are my Friend, the Berlin type hub mentioned earlier today. Description:

Each letter is animated and morphed in vvvv. I tried to push the limits of a readable animated glyph. Each letter can be morphed into any glyph of the alphabet. That makes it easy to blend also several words into each other. Also 3 Posters where painted for the presentation at Letters Are My Friends in Berlin.

More letter experiments at:
lettersaremyfriends.com

2012
Ingo Italic
Letters Are My Friends
Berlin

True to their roots in metal, stone, and wood, typography is generally imagined to be fixed in place. It’s hardly the sort of thing you’d imagine transforming in time, the way you would a musical utterance. Yet the Meek FM Typographic Synthesizer defies that convention.

The 2007 project, designed by Rob Meek and Frank Müller, was recently exhibited at Berlin’s Letters Are My Friends. That makes it a perfect time to revisit the project, and its notion of typography as something fluid, malleable, and temporal in the way synthesized music would be.

From the description by Letters Are My Friends:

The combination of a custom built hardware controller and software generates new shapes and sounds out of pre-installed typeface vectors.

Like a real musical synthesizer, the Meek FM can shape and modify forms (+ sounds) with several parameters. This device shows that there are still a lot of untouched possibilies in realtime graphical instruments.

Music by Flying Lotus: Breathe Something, Stellar Star

meekfm.org/
lettersaremyfriends.com/

Letters Are My Friends is a story in itself. Located in Berlin’s Kreuzberg neighborhood, it’s a typographical gallery and laboratory. It comes a long way from dry type description pages on the Web. One feature is “a cosy showroom where letter relationships can be experienced in a physical space and progressive way.” There’s also a research lab and production label run by Ingo Italic and Bärbel Bold: “We share an interdisciplinary and experimental approach to services and products related to typography, motion- and interaction design.”

Expect a visit soon.

“Wayne Gretzky and Spiderman are at the door, and they brought cake!”

Speaking to the Eyeo visualization festival in Minneapolis, digital artist and designer Jer Thorp (aka blprnt) shows what’s possible with visualization and data as a medium. As the Data Artist in Residence at The New York Times and teacher at NYU’s ITP, he knows his stuff, and here he shares work from a person at the top of his game.

In this long-form video, you can sit back and take in the whole presentation, which covers:
https://openpaths.cc/: A unique visualization and data management tool that works with your location data – while keeping the tool open and secure

Second, an algorithm for resolving where to put the names on the 9/11 memorial, a contentious and sensitive task

Eyeo itself is a great story, and we’ll have some other videos from them. Looks like they have even more in store for 2012, but it’s A-grade visualism there – everything from data visualization to physical computing to creative coding with 3D and live visuals, all using the tools we love.

More on Jer’s blog

Now, tripping out to visuals while you listen to music doesn’t require a separate app. You can do it right in the browser. And this pretty proof of concept not only creates dancing 3D visuals: it also demonstrates just how much is possible with 3D browser capabilities, and how they could interact with music, suggesting much more to come.

Los Angeles-based developer Felix Turner of Airtight Interactive shares The Loop Waveform Visualizer. Tested for use in Google’s Chrome, it’s powered by two cross-platform, cross-browser, HTML5-associated technologies, WebGL and the Web Audio API. Give it any MP3 (you can even drag and drop right into the browser), and it’ll give you dancing, geometric visuals.

http://airtightinteractive.com/demos/js/reactive/

Felix writes to explain the project, how it was built, and why this set of enabling tools can be so powerful: Continue reading »

CUSP-a remembrance of the forgotten from michael matos on Vimeo.

It’s extraordinary sometimes how much a single visual source can do, transformed into other iterations.

Here’s Michael Matos, who writes:

We met before at the last handmade music gathering … since then, I’ve been building a tasty 18u of euro and most recently a
small lzx visionary system. Thought you might enjoy my latest piece processed through the lzx and euro into an oscilloscope.

More description (and some narrative):

A short film of a worm like creature, who emerges from the earth, experiences joy and loss, only to return from whence he came. Created with the help of some lzx visionary modules, my dearest eurorack pals, and my lovely oscilloscope.

Beautiful work, Michael; thanks!

GraffitiMarkupLanguage.com (Trailer) from Evan Roth on Vimeo.

Imagine data that stores digital, virtual graffiti tags as easily as you store text. Imagine, then, the power to record and playback tags at different scales, using everything from projection mapping to robotics. Graffiti Markup Language is in ongoing development, but it’s already accomplishing those aims.

More:

Graffiti Markup Language (.gml) is a universal, XML based, open file format designed to store graffiti motion data (x and y coordinates and time). The format is designed to maximize readability and ease of implementation, even for hobbyist programmers, artists and graffiti writers. Popular applications currently implementing GML include Graffiti Analysis and EyeWriter. Beyond storing data, a main goal of GML is to spark interest surrounding the importance (and fun) of open data and introduce open source collaborations to new communities. GML is intended to be a simple bridge between ink and code, promoting collaborations between graffiti writers and hackers. GML is today’s new digital standard for tomorrow’s vandals.

EyeWriter is a particularly compelling example of what this is all about, and why it’s more than just “because-we-can” technological gimmickry. That project allows a tag artist to continue to work even when he is only able to have physical use of his eyes as physical interaction. And that’s really what all of this is about: representing art in newly open, portable ways allows us to more easily exchange ideas, and extend making beyond the boundaries of our physical beings and limitations.

I’ve been meaning to talk about GML for some time – and, indeed, there’s plenty more to say – but it’s timely introducing it now, as some of its creators are working on extending the idea from visual tags to audio scratch performance. We cover that today on our sister site, Music:
Proposal: A Markup Language for Turntable Scratch Performance; Open Call