Trackmate :: 5 ways to get started from adam kumpf on Vimeo.

The mouse is not all that interesting as an invention. When people first saw mice, in fact, they typically weren’t terribly impressed, and often simply went back to their preferred non-keyboard input, the joystick. But destroy the novelty of the mouse, give it to half the population of the world and wait a couple of decades, and fantastic things start to happen.

See also: the knob, which is basically a simple hack for changing resistance in a circuit.

So, what could happen if we take novel interfaces now and try to accelerate what you do with them? That’s what’s starting to take place with tangible, multi-touch, and augmented interfaces, with the help of shared code tools (OpenFrameworks, Processing, ActionScript), shared libraries and trackers (ReacTIVision, the TUIO protocol, and LusidOSC/Trackmate), and communities like the fantastic NUI Group.

But enough about reading about this stuff and/or working alone. We’re going to try a new experiment in which we get lots of folks building this stuff – experienced users, relatively inexperienced users, your friends – and getting as quickly as possible into the business of actually trying apps, especially for the visual and musical performance stuff that we love.

Now, you may not have folks near you who are comfortable with code or have any idea what the heck we’re talking about. But readers of CDM and fellow hackers will join up on the Internet leading up to and around June 6. We’ve got a nice, fast Internet connection in New York, and we’re setting up some tools to help us share video streams, code we create, and to allow informal text chat.

Here’s how to get involved and join us.

Head to http://hackday.noisepages.com/ for all the details. (If you’re interested in experimenting with in-development noisepages blogs and networking features as you make stuff, you may – ahem – find that registration is open.)

lights on from thesystemis on Vimeo.

Digital visuals are often confined to a screen or a panel of wall. So there’s something magical about projects that get an entire building as a canvas. “Lights” is a live audiovisual performance for the Ars Electronica museum in Linz, Austria. The facade has some 1085 LED windows, controllable in real-time. The performance involved coordinating these windows with broadcast music.

The work was put together, stunningly, in just three days. OpenFrameworks, the artist-focused, C++-based code framework for “creative coding”, became a critical part of the process, assembling all of the real-time visuals. Zach Lieberman, co-developer of OF, also worked on the project and describes its ingredients and team:

this project was made as a collaboration between 4 different folks,
including daito manabe (musician & hacker), damian stewart (artist and
one of the creators of rjdj), joel gethin lewis (formerly with united
visual artists, where he worked on projects like massive attack’s LED
show) and myself (developer of openframeworks).
–> (daito) [daito.ws]
–> (joel) [http://www.joelgethinlewis.com/]
–> (damian) [http://frey.co.nz/]

we did alot of stuff with software that might be interesting for your readers — the tools involved (abelton, max, pd, openframeworks, dmx) and the challenges of a display like that, etc….

Breakdown of the tools:

• OpenSoundControl (OSC) for connecting audio and visual elements (and as Zach and I discussed privately in an email, it’s really the power of being able to relate different media, physical, aural, and visual, that defines the project more than any one tool)
• Max/MSP and Ableton Live for the audio score
• Pd (Pure Data), Max’s open-source cousin, for recording audio and OSC control signals

Zach notes “what I liked about it was how eye opening it was to feel that you can use each tool for what it’s good for.” 

For one of the final Game On performances, Melbourne’s “spiky electro pop” group Flamingo Crash came along and rocked out in front of a bunch of security cameras, and alongside their visual collaborator Simulcast with his Tagtool.

They enjoyed the live footage so much that they commissioned me to edit it as an “offical” music video for their album.

Flamingo Crash - Sister Sister from Jaymis on Vimeo.

I’m seeing this kind of visualist- and web-savvy behavior coming from bands with increasing regularity. Artists (and audiences) are starting to realise that a music video doesn’t need to be blinged out and post-produced into sterility to be entertaining and valid. Outfits such as La Blogotheque’s “Take Away Shows” and $99 music videos are showcasing consistently high quality releases of low-budget, high-speed concepts. As a rule, visualists - those who can perform, produce, hack, and create new concepts and looks quickly - are going to do well in this environment. In the financially exciting world we have right now. Focussing on “fast and effective” also means that you’re able to release more work, which in turn attracts more people to your work, which allows you to release more work… Personally, I’ve more offers so far in 2009 than in all of 2008, so I don’t see this process reversing itself any time soon.

Hi from Multitouch Barcelona on Vimeo.

For those of you who think that there’s a guy living inside your computer that makes all the magic happen… now there can be.

The gang at Multitouch Barcelona (recently spotted at OFFF) have posted a cheeky project that imagines a real human interface. Microsoft Bob has nothing on this.

I love the way in which this pulls apart the notions behind all these interfaces, and especially the use of the space inside the box. So, could we see practical applications? Will we all be communicating soon by remote multi-touch? (I’ll leave you to imagine the naughty or downright absurd and slapstick implications of that.)

Via preciousforever / Christophe Stoll on Twitter.

Share, the thesis project of Yannick Assogba in the MIT Media Lab Sociable Media Group, is an interesting idea in coding: it’s basically a peer-to-peer sketchbook for creative code. All of your sketches are synced to everyone else’s sketches, and Share tracks the connections between users.

http://share.media.mit.edu/about

You get more from Share than you would from simply, say, sharing a Subversion repository. Share not only syncs code and changes, but also tracks each time you copy and paste code from elsewhere, so that code snippets borrowed from others can be traced through the people using the system.

Up to 30 people are now invited for an online competition using the tool.

The Share Experiment is an online competition/design-a-thon/hack-a-thon and exhibition that invites 30 participants form to use Share to make new creative works over the course of ten days. The theme of this competition is "Inspired By Pong". Though the final result need not be games, artists/hackers are invited to reinterpret and remix the concept of pong while at the same time being open to reinterpretations and sampling of their own work as it being created. The Share Experiment will run from June 5th - June 14th and we are inviting applications. There will be some prizes awarded to winners (including iPod Touch[es] and Arduino kits) and we have some interesting ideas about mechanics for awarding prizes!

http://share.media.mit.edu/participate (via toxi on Twitter)

What is the Best Way to Share?

It’s a very cool idea, but this does raise some questions about implementation. It’s too bad that Share can’t run as some sort of plug-in; it loses some of the functionality of the bare-bones Processing editor, let alone the capabilities of an IDE like Eclipse or NetBeans. If it used a standard IDE, too, it’d be easier to be “language-agnostic” as the creator suggests. (OpenFrameworks or Flash or Processing, it wouldn’t really matter.)

But as a concept and an experiment, this looks really fascinating. It should be interesting to see how people use the code. And will users in a “competition” do a lot of copying and pasting, or focus mainly on their own work?

Part of the reason I bring up this is that we’re interested on CDM in doing some shared work. “Share” I think would be too limiting; it’s back to the old-fashioned Subversion approach.

So, for instance, we’re organizing a hackday around tangible interfaces in June, the first of what I hope will be many more. We’ll have people working on it in person in New York, but also folks collaborating around the world online. I’ll post more details, but just to kick off the discussion:

http://hackday.noisepages.com