I’ll be teaching a new course, based on Mac interactive tech and featuring Apple’s free developer tool Quartz Composer, at the new 3rd Ward space in Brooklyn (East Williamsburg aka Bushwick). 3rd Ward is an enormous “workspace and studio facility for artists & creative professionals”: think the artist equivalent of a gym membership plus enormous studio and fabrication space of a scale we rarely see in New York.

The idea of the course is to offer artists a solid grounding in interactive design and responsive visuals and projection, even for those who have no previous experience. My belief is that artists from traditional media often get denied the opportunity to experiment with new technologies, leaving them instead for the “digital people.” So, I’ve also chosen to teach free tools, which make for an easier investment, and also don’t require you to make a commitment early on to a single tool that might not be best for you. You can also expect lots of hands-on experimentation with visuals, video, projectors, sensors, and sound inputs, because that’s the kinda person I am and 3rd Ward actually has space!

If you or anyone you know in the New York area is thinking of registering, feel free to get in touch. But don’t fret if not: I want to give something back to the awesome Quartz Composer and Mac community, so I’ll be posting examples and class notes here on Create Digital Motion to share with everyone and get feedback.

Elements of Interactive Art: A Creative, Mac-Based Introduction
Instructor: Peter Kirn
Location: Digital Media Lab
Tuesdays and Thursdays - August 24 through September 12
Time: 7p-9p
$390 members/$485 non-members
Register / more information via the Digital Media classes page at 3rd Ward

Updated: In cooperation with 3rd Ward, I’m able to offer a discount: Workshop and Studio Discount in Brooklyn for Create Digital Motion Readers

We’re long past the days when we believed running screen savers would stop phospher burn-in (though there are days when I miss After Dark). Now we can run screen savers that imagine, through genetic algorithms, our computers “dreaming of electric sheep.”

Electric Sheep is software that produces evolving paintings that can be synthesized by distributed networks of computers. It’s available as a free screen saver for Mac and Windows:

Electric Sheep

The animations are pretty abstract, but (apparently using a lot of imagination), users refer to them as “sheep.” Just be careful, because apparently you can become overly attached to those animations, like this person did:

can anyone help me??????, I fell in love with this sheep and now it is dead. I just got electric sheep and I did not know that my computer would delete my sheeps so fast….If anyone still has sheep 8915 or any of it’s relations…PLEASE tell me. I would be so pleased to see this sheep again…

Okay, a little odd. Anyway, here on Create Digital Motion when we’re not running oldskool vector graphics, we’re what you would call Whores for High Resolution. (I’ll explain later how I wound up running a SketchUp rendering for 18 hours earlier this week.) So, naturally, I’m pleased to learn there will be a higher-resolution version of the project at SIGGRAPH in the gallery:

Dreams in High Fidelity, via spot blog, the creator’s site

There are some stunningly-organic looking images; the added resolution on this custom hardware setup really does make a difference. If you make it to Boston, stop by and say hi to the creator, and try to steal secrets at a panel on simulation, evolution, and distributed systems.

Images courtesy the Dreams in High Fidelity site.

As ActionScript has gotten more powerful, some simple animation operations in Flash have gradually required more code, as opposed to the “shorthand” of earlier versions. Meanwhile, the open source Processing project has built a simple, elegant language based on Java that’s powerful, yet surprisingly accessible to non-programmers — and free.

Brevity is sort of “Flash Strikes Back”; see a nice write-up by blog.blprnt.com. It reduces common animation tasks to simple, readable snippets of code, so you can animate more quickly and more easily, and create complex, but highly-efficient animations of elements like particle systems. Interestingly, part of what appears to make this possible is the developments in ActionScript 3.0, on which Brevity is based. (That’s an important note, or you’ll do what I did, and wonder why the samples aren’t working. They require Flash Player 9.) Certainly, as I’ve noted earlier, having integers for loops will make animations of iterative elements like particle systems much more efficient. Brevity compiles code using the AS3 compiler, much as Processing takes advantage of the Java compiler.

But this is a waste of time, because you can just use Processing for free, right? Well, there are several reasons you might want both Processing and Flash. First, there’s the distribution method: there are times when you want SWF files or projectors and don’t want to have to deal with Java. More importantly to me, though, Processing and Flash still excel at different things: Flash is more optimized than Processing for certain kinds of 2D drawing operations, whereas Processing is still better at intensive calculations. That fact is acknowledged by Processing’s creators, but you can easily see some examples of what works better on each platform. I also like that Keith Peters, one of the great Flash animators, is co-creator. And since speed and elegance are the aim, I think this could be very useful for creating animations, some of which are still faster to create and code in Flash than in Processing.

It’s still a little early to consider Brevity for any serious work; it’s at “proof of concept” stages at this point. Then again, Flash 9 won’t be out until 2007, so we all have time to learn these tools and refine our work in them. (Enjoy life! Take it easy! Go the beach!)

I’m working with Processing and Flash now alongside one another, so expect a report early in fall on each of these, as well as Brevity. (Yeah, I’m slow, but I’m also doing that whole music thing. Send your recommendations for caffeine and other stimulants, preferably legal and safe, c/o the editor.)

There’s nothing quite like the razor-sharp, analog vector graphics in games like Asteroids, Tempest, Battle Zone, and (my personal fave) Star Wars. They’re difficult to emulate using standard computer software. Our friend James Grahame notes that these fantastic graphics have now made their way into the PCI slot of your computer:

ZVG Vector Arcade Interface [Retro Thing]

And, yes, it’s the real thing:

It connects to an ECP-compatible parallel printer port and drives any analog X/Y Monitor including any dual channel oscilloscope that can be set to an X/Y mode.

The interface does both color and black and white vector imagery. It’s fully compatible with the popular MAME emulator, in DOS mode. Your best bet is probably to build a super-cheap PC with standard PCI slots (not PCIe). You can use the other slot for the superb HardSID PCI card, which will give you the sounds of the Commodore 64’s SID synthesizer. (Note that plans to import the HardSID by none other than James ultimately failed, but you can still order it from its European distributor.)

Vector graphics and C64 sound? Yeah, that should be heaven.

Of course, at those rare moments you can tear yourself away from the Star Wars game, you can use this for your own custom graphics. There’s an SDK and documentation at the official site, and source for everything.

(Update: I bought one of these controllers soon after they became available in Australia, and found that it had some compatibility issues with various VJ software. Definitely try before you buy. Jaymis.)

Numark launched their NuVJ VJ product, a combination of a DJ-style MIDI controller with software from Arkaos, back at Musikmesse in April. The hardware is now nearing release, and it’s priced at only US$300.

The gear is aimed at DJs, but it may appeal to anyone who wants a hardware controller well-suited to live electronic music and VJing. With driver support for both Mac and Windows and full MIDI support, it has the compatibility apparently lacking in Behringer’s BCD-2000, as reviewed here on CDM.

Numark NuVJ

The control surface itself looks terrific: two banks of 9 trigger pads each (for a total of 18) for triggering clips, big, solid-looking DJ mixer-style faders, knobs (which appear to be endless encoders) that should be useful for effects, and most importantly, two large wheels for scratching, speed control, or other effects.

The software side is a Numark-branded version of ArKaos VJ, the tried-and-true VJ software for Mac and Windows. No word yet on if or how this might differ from the full release, but there are a number of reasons why ArKaos may be a good choice on Numark’s part. Unlike motion dive .tokyo, the software bundled with Edirol’s competing hardware/software combination, recent versions of ArKaos support graphics card GPU acceleration, which is essentially for getting higher resolutions and framerates. ArKaos isn’t the only software to do this (Livid Union is one example), but it is to me an essential feature. ArKaos has gotten a bad rap among some VJs because it’s been used for a lot of really cheezy effects over the years, but if that were the standard, I don’t think we could talk about any software. With full support for FreeFrame effects (the open source effects standard) and Core Image plug-ins, this could be a strong VJ software choice, and US$300 is a new low in cost for software/hardware bundles. Good news for Intel Mac users: this app is already Universal.

Of course, there’s nothing saying you have to use ArKaos; this is still a competitively-priced controller even if you throw away the software and just use MIDI to control something else.

You might be confused by Numark’s product site; many of the features mentioned (camera input, BPM sync, effects) are in fact features of the ArKaos software, not the hardware itself. The NuVJ hardware is just a MIDI interface; there’s no onboard video processing of any kind. But no complaints here: the price is right, and this hardware could be a fantastic controller for both music and visuals alike.

I hope to test this hardware so we can see if it lives up to its claims; stay tuned.

Updated: Here’s a closer view and a complete list of controls, a number of which you could easily reassign if you don’t want these particular functions or if you use other software: