The Monome, a minimalist, elegant open source hardware controller conceived as an array of light-up buttons, has already made a big splash in the music world. But because it’s fundamentally a controller / LED display, it could be used for anything. And the Monome is now starting to realize that potential in increasingly-cool visual device.

First, here’s the Monome becoming virtually visual, overlaid with generative drawings. (If nothing else, this shows you the kind of love people feel for this open source, community-supported gadget.)

Monome Step : Generative Drawing from formalplay on Vimeo.

This is my first test of having the Monome control some generative drawing along with the audio through this step sequencer I made in Flash similar to the original 64Steps.
I especially like where the step sequencing begins to break down because of how deep the drawing gets.
Its the same drawing engine I used to generate this seasons Thank You cards (although for the Monome version I removed the Type Flakes)
This season’s cards in collab with [M]:
ilikegravity.com/real/archives/2007/01/generative_gratitude_collaboration.php

This lovely work is the product of Detroit area-based formalplay.

The Monome can also be a powerful tool for controlling visuals. Here it is manipulating a set of photos on a computer, also by formalplay. You can imagine the potential for live VJing – and, Microsoft Surface, eat your heart out!

Monome_NL_PhotoGallery.swf from formalplay on Vimeo.

But, wait, there’s more…

Are we approaching a visualist technology singularity? This video from live visualist virtuoso Eboman might make you a believer. With live camera, live video drums, live camera as instrument, a sensorsuit body performance instrument, and custom software, this set has no shortage of live gimmicks. The beauty of it, though, is that there are so many technologies happening at once that it comes down to live performance chops. The pace of technology accelerates to the point that the technology disappears, and the only way to survive is not with a gimmick but mad skills.

You just sort of find yourself living in the future, a future that strangely combines the ancient, surreal art of the one man band with modern software, with hyperkinetic, attention span-warping results.

The cast, as described on YouTube:

This composition was produced for the Stranger Festival by Eboman and performed live in Amsterdam, 3 July 2008.

www.strangerfestival.com
Sensorsuit = played by Eboman
Videodrumkit = played by Guillermo Kardolus
Camera = played by Mascha Rutten
Software = SenS IV by www.smadsteck.nl

SmadS-Sens is an actual product. Then again, tools like Processing and OpenFrameWorks and Max and Pd could all achieve some of the same results, if you think you want to rumble with these Netherlandish mad scientists – just prepare yourself for mind-blowing amounts of practice and work, as with anything. (Good thing we enjoy that sort of thing.) I also expect some of the 3D video manipulations going on here to become more commonplace.

For the single master of live music – complete with visuals – look no further than McRorie, the legendary, kilt-wearing, sensor-driven electronic artist. So, to the SmandS team, I say, consider kilts! They’re not just for Scottish people any more!

Bigger. Brighter. More ridiculously huge. You know what you want, projectionists. And Quebec is the kind of place that will pull it off. Big budget for an absurdly-large but still very arty project? They’ll make it happen.

So, when it came time for the 400th anniversary of Quebec, Quebec City did indeed think big, projecting the work of artist/director Robert Lepage onto nearly 2000 feet of grain silos (that’s 600 meters for those of you in the civilized world). It’s the biggest architectural projection ever created.

But instead of being bombastic, it seems completely at home with its surroundings. It’s not video blown up to the monumental. It seems instead like video that’s proportional to the scale of the landscape, a natural evolution. And instead of overly patriotic cheese, the results are elegant and abstracted – genuine video art. It’s spectacle, for sure – but that’s part of the appeal. Instead of being cold or detached as some public video art has been, it’s personable.

In fact, reading the statement for the project, once you get over the size what this really suggests is the first major breakthrough in locative art:

Its geographic location, urban culture and history make Québec one of the world’s most beautiful and highly photogenic cities. Québec City has been mapped, drawn, engraved, painted, photographed and filmed, and we have invented a mill that transforms, animates, dramatizes and pays tribute to these 400 years of images. The images that the public will see are almost all drawn from archives dating back to the time when Samuel de Champlain drew Québec.

Lepage’s background, uniquely, crosses disciplines. He’s the rare artist who has been notable in three fields: as an actor, as a playwright, and as a film director. Perhaps it’s the sense of traditional theater that, paradoxically, allowed him to avoid overt narrative and let the images themselves tell the story.

The technical side of this is no less impressive. Twenty-seven 20,000-lumen projectors are combined with 238 spotlights and 329 speakers, with a radio-broadcast soundtrack by René Lussier. If you’re around Quebec City, you can go see the results for free, through August 24.

Photos above screengrabbed by pkapka, who sends us this tip. (Thanks, pekka!)

Via Ironic Sans: Canada’s 1,968 foot wide movie

The Image Mill documentation

Video

With all the discussion of Processing, I think it’s time to do a proper survey of who out there is actually using this tool to code custom live performance. Robert Hodgin aka flight404 famously VJ’ed with a lovely Processing rig back in 2005, controlled by four glowing Griffin PowerMate knobs. But with Processing a general-purpose tool, pumping out everything from bizarre, animated musical interfaces to data visualizations to interactive installations, it’s often unclear just how many are actually using it live.

If you’ve tried to use Processing live unsuccessfully, I hope to build up some reference materials to make this easier over the coming weeks. But I’m always interested in how people work, from beginners to advanced users. (See our in-progress surveys on Ableton Live and Reaktor on the music side.)

Are you using Processing as a live visual tool? What frustrations have you had? What’s been successful? Got any results you can share, in photos or video?

Do you wish that you could drop Processing sketches into another VJ tool, like Resolume or VDMX? (I know I sure do.)

“Where the future is being made … today!”

You already know Processing can create wonderful visual stuff. It can output movie files, so it can be a companion to your live visual tool of choice. It also happens to be a great way to experiment with OpenGL, so you can work with shader code and other goodies to use elsewhere. But learning its ins and outs requires some skill development.

I’m doing a lot of Processing teaching and coding, so I’m pleased to bring you some of the results of that work live on our companion site, CDM Labs. Labs quietly poked its nose out earlier this spring, but starting this week, it’s the place on which I’ll be “journaling” code examples and teaching materials. You can think of it as an additional output of my sometimes-cluttered but sometimes-useful brain. I’m finding that keeping stuff on the blog also helps organize my thoughts, so I’m really looking forward to the new approach.

Regularly, I’ll also organize some specific CDM Labs projects that are more fully-formed.

For starters, you can check in on the 5-minute presentation I did of Processing (20 slides, each advancing automatically every 15 seconds), as part of Ignite NYC.

Ignite: Visual Code Literacy with Processing, in Five Minutes

Be sure to click through to the actual site so the code formatting and embedded presentation work properly!

I can also say, it is possible to learn Processing even if you’re not a programmer. It’s also possible – though probably not advisable – to cram the fundamentals of programming into 20 slides and five minutes and get the point across in a bar full of loud people drinking beer! (Full presentation with voice explanation coming soon.)

CDM Labs is here:

labs.noisepages.com

And you can add CDM Labs to your RSS feed reader:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/cdmlabs

Wondering what this “noisepages” business is about? We’ll be talking more about that soon. Don’t worry, we’re not spreading ourselves thin with more blogs – on the contrary, Labs and others are about better organizing what we’re doing, keeping you in the loop, and making us more productive. But we will have something else to share soon.

Bonus points to anyone who knows what the first line of this article is about.

I’ll be in Melbourne from tomorrow, presenting CDMo at the “DIY TV: Video, UGC, Mobile and IP TV” edition of the globetrotting think-tank X|Media|Lab.

I’ll be talking to some smart people about where visualists fit in the future of TV, and while my head’s full of my ideas of what’s happening next, I’d love to hear from some CDM readers too. There’s plenty of visualists out there currently working on transitioning their art from hobby to business. We have some ideas on how we can help this process along (more on that next week), but in the meantime: How are you building up your visual business? What opportunities or resources would help you?

And for those who are quite happy to do this just for the fun of it, here’s a little DIY TV I put together last week, a continuation of my quick, single shot “Bridge Sessions” video series.

Edward Guglielmino - Landslide (Bridge Sessions) from Jaymis on Vimeo.

We’ve seen terrific iPhone / iPod Touch apps for MIDI and OpenSoundControl, including Mrmr running VJ apps, i3L outputing to MIDI, and free, cross-platform Pd tools. With these, you can run visual, music, and other apps. But the latest addition is a very polished-looking app dedicated entirely to DMX, the protocol of choice for automated lighting and certain motorized projectors we love so much.

Luminar is a DMX lighting control app for iPhone and Touch, running control data for DMX rigs over wifi. There’s a touch-enabled mixer, precise, per-channel control, and color manipulation with a Color Changer channel layout. It’s definitely geared for lights in a way that general-purpose control software is not. I feel slightly icky talking about “lights” on this site. (Hey, aren’t those the things that blow out our projections?) But on the other hand, this kind of control and better software is just the kind of tool that can help give us better control over live rigs – and it’ll certainly work for DMX-controlled visuals, too, or (if you’re lucky enough to be doing this) synced projected visuals and lights, not to mention the kind of lights we very much enjoy (like LED arrays).

Last month we had a little teaser of Psychadelic Fluids, as CDM reader Memo was preparing to install the project (as part of a crew put together by Seeper) at the massive Glastonbury festival in the UK.

Well, the festival is over now, and Memo has followed up with a video documenting the project, and some more technical details on his site:

Glastonbury 2008 - Pi Interactive Installation from evan on Vimeo.

The biggest challenge in creating an application of this scale was to structure and optimize it in a way so it could analyze upto 6 camera feeds, and run at a large enough resolution to cover the entire tent. A multiple computer approach was out of the question due to the complications of synchronising a fluid simulation across multiple PC’s, so the decision was made to go with a multi-threaded app running on an 8-core Mac Pro. The motion estimation was split into 6 threads (one for each camera), the fluid solver ran in its own thread, and the particles (glitter & orb) ran in another thread - all of these threads ran in parallel. Once all threads were finished processing their data for one frame, they exchanged their results ready for processing for the next frame (camera motion fed into fluid solver ready for next frame, fluid currents fed into particles ready for next frame etc.). This approach allowed everything to run in parallel with smooth framerates of 30fps.

Tech aside, the crowd definitely seemed to like it.

More information @ memo.tv. Photos on Flickr.

I really adore Julian Oliver’s work; he’s constantly finding ways of making three-dimensional, virtual spaces more expressive. We’ve seen Quake as a musical instrument, gaming actors as insane digital painters, and 3D interactive game equivalents of Grantz Graf. But this piece is unusually poetic and moving to me. It features a figure inside a virtual space, placed over real-world blocks by augmented reality gaming technology. Your role in the game is to navigate this figure through an M.C. Escher-style, three-dimensional labyrinth. It reminds me of toy theater and puppetry pieces, extended to the digital domain. And that’s just the idea of releasing tools into the open source, that artists could pick up the basic infrastructure of a digital project and build upon it, doing something unexpected – just as with any artistic technique, that the resulting art would be more important than the tool used to make it.

The video is a “spoiler” in that, if you have really good spatial memory, I suppose it could give away the game. I don’t, though, so I look forward to playing this tangible game at some point in the future. Eat your heart out, Portal.

levelHead v1.0, 3 cube speed-run (spoiler!) from Julian Oliver on Vimeo.

Via MAKE:blog; see also (in Spanish) Edgar Gonzalez.

For more Julian Oliverism, see his blog:

/var/log/sysblog

– a detailed keynote where he explores cartography (also of interest in terms of visual language):

Inclusiva-Net Madrid Keynote

– and an extensive interview and bibliography by our friend, VJ and artist Jean Poole (Sean Healy), which pulls together a lot of Julian’s work, in particular his Internet visualization Packet Garden (seen at right):

Julian Oliver : The Art of Gardening