Bit Shifter & Flight404 • “Feedback” / “Flight Risk” from Bit Shifter on Vimeo.

It’s not just sound going chip, lo-fi, retro. Live visuals are, too. With Jaymis at Brisbane’s Game On fest and New York’s chip blowout the Blip Festival coming up next week, it seems a perfect time to look at some inspired 8-bit visuals – call them, instead of chiptune, chipviz? Both are set to the wonderful sounds of Bit Shifter, a star of the 8-bit scene if ever there were one.

flight404 aka Robert Hodgin is known for lush, digital videos, the very opposite of lo-fi. I know I’ve heard more than one live visualist getting into Processing who was disappointed to discover the effects are often rendered, not live, because even high-end computers can’t do all of the eye candy in real-time. Now, it is very possible to scale back just a bit and get some sophisticated-looking 3D eye candy out of Processing, his open-source, coding-for-artists tool of choice. But on this week’s occasion of the 1.0 release of Processing, it’s just as nice to note that Processing will take you the other way – toward minimalist, elemental graphics. Coding in this way is the perfect tool for that sort of thing, and it works wonders for live performance because of the amount of control you can have with the music.

Robert muses on the significance of this work. I guess it’s not at all fair to call it 8-bit, but let’s say 8-bit-inspired:

From the vault [flight404 blog]

If it’s genuine lo-fi visuals you want, look no further than the wonders of noteNdo, aka Jeff Donaldson. Working with modded consoles, digital sources, and the ravages of tape (VHS, MiniDV) as an effect, he comes up with fantastically-organic, glitchy results. If you ever spent parts of the 80s staring into the worst of your VHS collection because you liked what it did when it got destroyed, you’re one of us. Props to Jeff for making it into real art.

See y’all at the Blip Festival. But my (deserving) adoration for your work aside, don’t be surprised if CDM holds an underground 32-bit party, just to be spiteful and defend our fetish for more Fi (Hi-Fi, that is).

Bit Shifter & noteNdo • “Tea With Galactus” from Bit Shifter on Vimeo.

How do you put on a great festival for visualists? Ask the crew behind B Seite (that’s B Side, for the native language of us current and former British Empire subjects). Visualist and Quartz Composer guru Shakinda (as seen previously in free tutorials here) was there, and reports back:

Last weekend I was over performing and giving a quartz composer workshop and the most excellent B Seite festvial, Pixelschubser and his team had put a fantastic amount of effort into a very inspiring program…. It was shot on a movie mode of a digital stills camera so excuse the quality and sound!

It looks insanely hot. If this doesn’t make you want to start throwing some eye candy-filled visual parties and workshops, nothing will. I know we can get our geek on just like the Germans (well, I have at least a few drops of German blood, and a German surname).

Viva la visualist revolucion!

B Seite / B Side Vj / Visual Arts Festival Mannheim :: Shakinda podcast from shakinda on Vimeo.

tbeta preview from ~ on Vimeo.

Look out: multi-touch has a new rising star. The tbeta library (short, oddly, for The Beta) is an open-source framework for computer vision and multi-touch, and it’s particularly good at following your fingers. It’s a descendent of touchlib, with some of its ideas, though a completely new code base. tbeta now powers the finger tracking routines in the BricK multi-touch table (below), at which we take a detailed look today on Create Digital Music:

Spaces and Roots: Manipulating Sound with Processing + Touch, Tangible Interfaces

The creative, visual development platform Processing has undergone what may be one of the longest, strangest betas ever – in a good way. What other “beta” has had tomes written about it, tens of thousands of students studying it (in some large programs, as the basis of their work), rockstar music videos made with it, museum exhibitions, major ads, print graphics, motion graphics – all over the course of a number of years.

Processing.org

Download Processing, and you might be forgiven for thinking this “beta” thing would last forever. Insanely frequent updates only reinforce that idea, as though “beta” really meant “ongoing development.” And after all, the software isn’t like other apps. It’s entirely open source and free. First download it, and you’re presented with what seems like a stripped-down text editor. There’s no real manual, as such: instead, you delve into an elegantly-composed reference to commands, and the real “help” is in the form of folders of example code. Yet this environment is capable of visualizing data, crunching 2D and 3D imagery, video, sound, and via external libraries, anything that you can do with Java – opening it to one of the most-extended platforms around.

But believe it: the beta really has ended. As of Monday, Processing the “beta” is now just Processing. The number scheme has changed, too: it’s just 1.0 now (0162, if you’re still counting, though it will no longer officially be called that).

We’re really pleased on this site that Processing has hit 1.0, not just because of what this tool itself means, but because of the bright future we see for expressive visuals, live visual performance and visual interaction, and the DIY creative movement. Over the coming days and weeks, we’ll have everything from learning materials to interviews to celebrate the launch. Someone somewhere ought to really get some champagne (or considering it’s based on Java, maybe some Irish Coffee). And after years of waiting, coding, learning, artmaking, and an epic development effort by co-creators Ben Fry and Casey Reas, the core developer team, and the wider community, I think this deserves more than just a few hours of attention. Given what Processing has done in beta, it’s almost (wonderfully) terrifying to think what it could do after 1.0.

What’s changed, current users?

If you’re a current user, you’ll want to take a real look at the change log, because the last few weeks of coding have brought more rapid change and bug stomping than any time in recent Processing history. Some highlights:

The stroboscope, dating back to 1832, is likely the earliest animation device. This is motion graphics, 19th Century-style: rotating a series of images and sync the speed of the rotation so the observer sees motion. Modern hacker, bender, chiptune musician, and artist Gijs Gieskes has his own spin on the idea: he’s built an electronic stroboscope that can record sequences of motion and sync the animations to the clock of Game Boy musical app LSDJ. It’s a mind-bending combination of vintage animation techniques, 8-bit music, and VJing.

strobovj from Gijs on Vimeo.

Gijs’ description:

• The left knob sets the speed for the rotating plate.
• The strobe frequency, and the bike lamps light are set in sequence, recorded with the knob with the two push buttons below it.
• The cameras pan tilt servos, can be recorded in sequence, with the two knobs and the toggle switch below them.
• The next toggle switch sets the sequencer to 3/4 or 4/4.
• And the next toggle switch sets the sequencer to 32 or 64 or 128 steps if 4/4 is selected. Or 24 or 48 or 96 if 3/4 is selected.

For a little added Game Boy goodness, many of the animations are created in the low-fi Game Boy camera accessory Nintendo made for the device.

He tells CDM:

yes i have used it live, 3 times so far.. but the last time there were some technical problems ): the other concerts went fine (:
there is a small camera on the machine itself, its on the pan tilt servo, so that’s the camera i use. but because of the technical problem at the last concert, i will probably be replacing the camera with a none wireless camera.
i also experimented with putting just materials on it, and that looks quite nice also, just the wooden plate rotating already looks quite good.