Via the Create Digital Noise forums, Japanese electronic artist Cornelius (Keigo Oyamada) has some terrific videos from director Koichiro Tsujikawa. Tsujikawa has not surprisingly racked up some awards for his work over the last few years. Via Getty Images:

A highly regarded and inventive director, Koichiro Tsujikawa is a self-taught filmmaker whose reputation as an artist and designer is what initially led him to film. Most recently, Tsujikawa won best music video of 2003 at RESFEST’s Audience Music Choice Awards for “Drop (Do it Again)” featuring music by Cornelius.

And he’s an After Effects user. Okay, not terribly enlightening. More enlightening: watching the videos.

Getty Images also features his 2003 winner Eyes, plus a making of featurette.

Cornelius is stateside; the music is equally focused and lovely. I hope to catch the act on the NYC stop.

Got other music videos that you’ve enjoyed lately? Let us know.

Jaymis is getting ready to go on tour with a rockstar, and I’m dreaming of geeky OpenGL implementations for 3D eye candy. Don’t worry; we’ll make the two worlds fit together eventually.

Here’s the latest from OpenGL land. First, perhaps the days of Java lagging in OpenGL implementation are done. The updated 1.1.0 JOGL bindings support OpenGL 2.1 and NVIDIA GeForce 8800 extensions, for groovy geometry shaders and other good stuff. Let’s see, that puts Java’s OpenGL bindings well ahead of OpenGL 2.1 implementation on Mac OS X, which isn’t due until the fall. (Just a binding, but still.) And you should be able to experiment with OpenGL 2.1 and the NVIDIA extensions from within Processing.

And Vista? OpenGL runs just fine on Vista, according to the Khronos OpenGL ARB Working Group. (Hey, aren’t they the ones cloning the President’s nose? Sorry, Woody Allen reference.) It’s compatible. It benefits from Vista, somehow. And it’s competitive with XP. Of course, all of this is in theory; in practice, drivers from NVIDIA in particular seem … not so fresh, performance and stability wise, at least in my experience. I expect this situation may improve over coming months.

Enough geekiness. Simple translation: Java for OpenGL rocks! OpenGL will run well on Vista on all drivers someday.

Flex (and thus ActionScript 3 / Flash) are going open source, according to an Adobe announcement today. Ely Greenfield, Flex architect, and David Wadhwani, vice president of Flex Product Line, explained to Robert Scoble what it all means:

It’s difficult to say yet exactly what all the implications are, but something very exciting is happening in the realm of coding digital visuals. Let’s review:

It’s ironic to me that so many users of the superb, Java-based Processing multimedia tool seem to prefer the Mac, because Mac Java support seems downright anemic. Mac users have long complained that, since Apple develops their own Java support for Mac OS X, the platform tends to lag behind Sun’s releases. That to me doesn’t seem like such a problem — early adoption of each new Java to leap out of Sun is generally a bad idea anyway. A more significant issue, though, is that Java performance tends to lag on the Mac in multimedia apps and that Apple has dropped support for two of the most important multimedia APIs.

On the music side, Apple dumped its com.apple.audio.midi java package with 10.4.8. Result: not only do you lose all the features that make the Mac great for MIDI, like the IAC bus for inter-application MIDI routing, but your external devices also spontaneously disappear. Nice.

On the video side, QuickTime for Java has long been vaporware. Following an update for QuickTime 6.4 and Java 1.4, Apple seems to have abandoned the platform altogether. Note that again, the common theme is Mac OS X 10.4.x. Video sometimes works under QuickTime 7, but there are many potential issues. And each time Apple releases some new QT update, apparently in the interest of supporting the iTunes ecosystem rather than actual video production, stuff often breaks.

Maybe I’m missing something, and maybe I’m being overly harsh (there are platform-specific issues on Linux, Windows, and from Sun themselves), but I would like to learn more about how these issues can addressed to make the Mac a more robust Java multimedia development platform.

If you read websites on the interwebs I’m sure you’ve encountered the phenomenon of “High Dynamic Range” photography, or HDR as it’s affectionately known. It’s not a new thing, the HDR Flickr Group contains over 50,000 images. I’ve had “Make with the HDR, then make the HDR timelapse” on my potential projects list for a while now, and was reminded of such when I encountered this video yesterday:

Pretty! So I asked HDRSoft for a review copy of Photomatix Pro, and took a whole lot of differently-exposed pictures of the closest thing I had to hand, my desk:

Mashups. Sampling a President named Bush. Bah. In the early 90s, life was better. Multimedia collective Emergency Broadcast Network was sampling found footage in truly clever ways — using VHS, artifacts and all. And driving around in massive projection assault vehicles with rotating satellite dishes. And building rockets into golf bags. Really. Now that’s my kind of visualist. Robokid hooks us up with this “documercial” explaining their work (contrats on having a Wikipedia page, Josh!):

If you enjoyed the DJ/VJ grand piano, from EBN’s Gardner Post, you’ve only just seen the beginning. EBN were legendary in their time, but since there was no YouTube in 1992, it was tricky getting hold of their videos. Now, no such problem. Here’s one example of their work, which wins extra points for featuring a piano-playing pigeon:

It’s a huge disappointment: the best eye candy on earth causes blindness. And it’s a little hard to see, even as our closest star. Enter NASA, with the solution: the first-ever stereo three-dimensional images of the sun.

STEREO: First 3-D Images of the Sun

NASA’s Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory (STEREO) satellites have provided the first three-dimensional images of the sun. For the first time, scientists will be able to see structures in the sun’s atmosphere in three dimensions. The new view will greatly aid scientists’ ability to understand solar physics and there by improve space weather forecasting.

STEREO, baby!

You’ll need red-and-cyan glasses, which you can buy or make. (See NASA’s great guide to how this works and where to buy / how to make.) The good news: in addition to still images, there’s video, too. I dare you to make an all 3D set. And, clearly, if you do, you’ll need some NASA sun imagery in there. I mean, come on.

Has anyone tried the red-and-cyan approach with tools like Jitter and Processing? I’m working now with a system that doesn’t require the dual image, instead using 3D color mapping, which should be easier to apply to shaders. More soon. For now, enjoy the great hyrogen-helium fusion reactor that is the engine that gives us life.