It’s a DIY, open source slider. A “pocket dolly.” Motion control hardware, ready for your next DIY special effect or stop motion animation, made free, open, and hackable.
The work of Stefan Kohler, camSlider is in self-described “alpha” phase, but already looking wildly promising for a new generation of animators and creators. Doing an open version not only makes these techniques wildly more accessible to those artists, but also helps them get directly involved in how they’re made – without needing an apprenticeship with a big effects firm. Based in Traunstein, Germany (near Munich), Stefan himself is one of those artists – an animator and director, not only a tinkerer (though he’s clearly adept at that, too). Continue reading »
As projection mapping moves from technique or novelty into genuine medium, one terrific place to look for the progress of state of the art is the Mapping Festival. With backing from a visual developer – Modul8 and MadMapper publisher GarageCUBE – but extending to live visual work in general, Mapping puts live visuals front and center. Visuals headline, rather than serving as a backdrop.
For a glimpse behind one piece in particular, see the video at top of FAIL, a piece that — well, for me, doesn’t. The video goes into the artistic team and their motivations. The reflections do get a bit lofty, but they’re always stimulating. Details:
FAIL “Wood as Bones, Light as Flesh” @ Mapping Festival 2011, Bâtiment d’Art Contemporain, Geneva.
The structure is in essence a narrative organism. This being is telling its story without words or any human form. Its body is its language. This body has its own temporal vitality, a re-interpretation of the human condition. The wood has the value of bones and flesh is no different from the temporality of light.
As the audience moves around the sculpture, they are inevitably part of the story unfolding around them.
FAIL is the collective of electric kettle, SILANT, Lucy Benson and fRED
Image and editing : Jerome Monnot
That’s just one look at what took place earlier this year at Mapping, though; pixels immerse space in a number of other pieces, from VJ Fader’s more reflective dance work to dance party optical explosions. See below:
Lone Star Destroyers, on which the music video is based, could very well destroy whatever is left of your day, once you grab these moshed-up, glitched-out, artefactillicious digital creations in audio and video form:
Look out, flat 4:3 and 16:9 rectangles. Projection mapping – the simple but potentially-expressive technique of using projected light on more complex three-dimensional surfaces – appears to be here to stay. And it’s even reached Mongolia.
Reader Joe Catchpole writes to let us know about his project, combining Ableton Live with VJ app Modul8, Mac tool Quartz Composer, and others, plus the key ingredient — MadMapper, the 3D projection mapping software.
It’s in the grand tradition of communities like the demoscene, but features algorithmic invention that has lots of people excited. Friend-of-the-site and Brooklyn-based artist Kyle McDonald naturally takes up the gauntlet to translate the same ideas into imagery, and what we’re left with is an optical artefact (artifice?) of the same idea. The images are quite gorgeous; see above, and the video that inspired them below:
See also my thoughts from August – for anyone concerned for the future of Apple, I still believe that leaving behind a company that can go on in his absence may be Jobs’ latest accomplishment as a leader. Beyond Cupertino, he leaves behind an impact on many more, people who are even now carrying on that legacy. And while I covered the music side of things, the impact Jobs had on visual technology is of course hard to overstate. President Obama referred to what Jobs “invented,” fairly erroneously. But an even greater way to change the world with technology is to create a space in which others can work:
Graphical interfaces. Pixar. Computer-animated feature films. Academy Awards. QuickTime. Final Cut Pro. Motion. The Mac. The Apple II. Typography — Jobs referred to his own experience with learning calligraphy in college. Pushing forward all the technologies we use, in a world described in pixels, movies, vertices, geometries, shaders.
A whole generation of these inventors is being slowly lost, far more quietly than Mr. Jobs. But Steve Jobs was uncommonly eloquent in describing how death could be a creative force – and how vital it was that people follow their heart. Your heart and instinct may tell you something very different than Steve Jobs, but I certainly wish that for all our readers, all our colleagues, and our many friends and colleagues who this week have lost a friend and a leader.
Wireframe tools are all the rage, but you have to take particular note of the design work done by Adobe Proto – partly because they’re an industry heavyweight, but also because the app itself is generally cool. (Why Adobe then insists on dry presentations of cool apps, I have no idea. Anyone want to do some spec marketing on this for them to show them how it’s done?)
The big draw: export to HTML, CSS and JavaScript. And those languages could increasingly become a lingua franca for creative visual development just as they have for sending things to the Web. I could imagine live visual and music applications based on working with this tool, as well.
Also interesting: Adobe bets on Android. The apps will ship for iOS, but they start on Android. That suggests, at the very least, Adobe isn’t being as bleak about the Android platform as … well, some of us who have even invested in the platform. (For the record, though, I do love my Galaxy Tab 10.1, and intend to run this on there alongside Processing for Android and other goodies. And yes, I own an iPad, too.)
Proto is just one of a number of new apps, but I have to say I think this one may be the most relevant. Fun color tools, drawing, presentation, mood boards, and Photoshop touch make it clear what the big picture is: this allows creative people to show off their work, and refine designs, on the go.
For that, Adobe deserves credit: they get their audience. It’s not about consumption versus creation. Pros will continue to work on the Mac and PC. But ask your creative friends why they’ve bought / are thinking of buying a tablet, and the typical reason is this: you want to show off your work to clients, whether you’re in the art and experimental world or this is a more conventional design day job.
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