Microsoft appears to be taking the step some of its rivals – the likes of Sony and Nintendo – failed to do, and that’s to acknowledge that something it made has been re-imagined beyond its original purpose. The above video pretty much says it all.
Remember, it might not have been this way. Aside from direct control of the Kinect hardware, the shield of aggressive intellectual property laws in countries like the United States covering reverse engineering, to say nothing of a bucket of patents, Microsoft could easily go after hackers, open source libraries, and creative misuse of their designs. Or, they could simply ignore it.
Instead, Microsoft reps showed up at the Art && Code 3D event held recently at Carnegie Mellon. I understand they want to see more creative use in game titles, too – which could in turn lead to DIYers publishing on the Xbox 360. And then, they release a video that demonstrates that they see value in applications from which they may not directly benefit. (Indeed, while the cameras in the picture are all Microsoft hardware, the not-for-profit OpenNI initiative has already led to non-Xbox hardware used for similar applications.)
I’m still trying to unravel exactly where Microsoft is in all of this, but the video seems, at least, the right message. And the kind of amazing thing here is that the scenarios presented – the same ones that look fairly silly when they’re limited only to R&D – are real. This isn’t marketing’s idea of what people might do, conceived in some imaginary science fiction world. This is what we’re seeing every day on YouTube. And that alone is worth mention.
If you do want to find deeper meaning, though, I suggest you turn to the lyrics of The Pixies’ “Where is My Mind.” You don’t hear those words in the more chillaxed-out a cappella version playing in the background, so here you go — it’s very “gestural” and “naturally interactive”:
With your feet in the air and your head on the ground
Try this trick and spin it, yeah
Your head will collapse
If there’s nothing in it
And you’ll ask yourself
Where is my mind
Whoa.
Tip of the hat to Elliot Woods of friend-of-the-site Kimchi and Chips.
Update: In fairness, what the heck is up with diffusing a bomb? Seriously, if you need that, please don’t ask us, ‘kay?
In case you haven’t yet seen it make the rounds, the upcoming indie game Parallax deserves special aesthetic mention. A kind of monochromatic take on Portal, its slick, cool, understated world opens windows through space, producing inverse chromatic values that give cues to the overlaid spatial dimensions. It’s a glimpse of the kinds of visual worlds possible with digital rendering, and in a teaser trailer, at least, appears to be a minimal aesthetic triumph.
These spatial visual languages have suggestions for the world of live visuals, too — all the more so as projection mapping produces spatial illusions and 3D tends in new directions.
Toasty Games’ Parallax has been submitted to the 2012 IGF (Independent Games Festival).
Platforms (via Facebook): “We are planning a PC and Mac release initially, and are considering other devices (iOS, Android, consoles) shortly after that.”
How can visualists and venues begin to forge a closer relationship? For one look at how the two can converge, we look at New York’s Brooklyn Bowl.
Now, sometimes, I simply get things wrong. When CDM contributor Annapurna Kumar wrote about Brooklyn Bowl’s Eye Candy for Strangers open call, and its lack of compensation, I expressed concerns that such programs failed to adequately promote professional visual work. I think I’ve become jaded by the poor relationship of pro visuals to event spaces. Brooklyn Bowl took issue with my brief and unelaborated comments, and I think fairly so: I was glib and I failed to do justice to the larger context of their program. (While it’s rare for us to do this, I took the post down, only because we didn’t provide significant information in order to leave it up.)
It is in fact true that this program lacks monetary compensation, but Brooklyn Bowl has more than satisfied me that this is a good promotional opportunity. I’d still like to see additional incentives in these sorts of programs in general, but the work on live shows at Brooklyn Bowl and the call are a good foundation on which to build engagement. (Furthermore, this sort of video sharing on Vimeo and the like – and sites like this – is free by design. The important thing in my mind is to get those compensated events and connections that allow artists to continue their work.)
So, I did get this wrong, but let’s actually do it right, and learn more about how Brooklyn Bowl is working with visuals. The contributions to the Vimeo group — some of my favorites I’ve collected here — may well be work you’ve seen before. It’s some of the live presentation that I think is particularly compelling.
Justin Bolognino, Founder/Creative Director, Learned Evolution + The Meta Agency runs the program at Brooklyn Bowl, and shares more details of how the space is set up for visuals:
Clearly this program has great meaning to me, and I’m always keen to ensure it is being represented accordingly.
Brooklyn Bowl has 12 HD video screen, 8 of them are 10′ x 7′, 1 is 12 x 9, and the remainder are 50+” LED screens. So, attendees are surrounded by the work of the artists. The system is fully HD, so we request as high res as possible for the submissions.
Regarding compensation, it is correct that there is none for the artists. If this is at all a problem for an artist, the answer is very simple: don’t submit your work. As an artist myself, and as someone who represents artists as a profession, I simply don’t see the issue with not monetarily compensating artists for submitting work they’ve already created to be showcased for thousands of people weekly. We’re not asking anyone to compose new works, rather to show off portfolio pieces, with as much credit as they see fit. Again, if there is an issue with the compensation, the power is in the hands of the artists to simply not join the program. I’ve spent much of my career producing digital film and arts festivals, and have seen countless artists who have submitted work with no rewards beyond exposure do exceptionally well from entering unpaid calls for submissions.
When we select finalists, we send a link to the select works Vimeo album to our 30k mailing list, 17k twitter, and 25k facebook, giving added exposure beyond on-site.
While the Vimeo call doesn’t connect directly to live performance, the Eye Candy series at Brooklyn Bowl has had some really exciting event visuals — in conjunction the rig described above. As Jason notes:
We’ve had Eclectic Method, CTRL, VJ Psyberpixie, Machine Drum, and many, many more live visual artists perform for the Eye Candy series.
Here are the rules. Of course, I’m sure we’d still like to see more incentives for artists, so I hope we find ways to do that. And check out lots more videos after the jump…Continue reading »
Targeting game designers, educators, and students – but also clearly of interest to anyone who loves creative coding – Codify is a lightweight coding environment that allows you to work directly on the iPad. That is, you don’t have to use the full-blown iOS API, and you don’t have to connect a computer or fire up Xcode. You just start the app and begin coding, in a way that ought to be very friendly to users of Processing.
We’ve seen Processing.js running in a browser on a tablet, but this goes further. The environment is visual and interactive – there are even clever gimmicks, seen in the video, that make it easy to pull up a color picker or image asset browser right from the code editor. You’re typing code, but the Lua-based environment, inspired by Processing (among other tools), means a very small number of lines of code can do a lot.
Given a brief look at it, it’s also one of the nicest-looking code environments I think I’ve ever seen – neither overly spartan in its minimalism nor a copy of iTunes (cough, Xcode) nor the usual, overblown, overloaded IDE (cough, Eclipse). Features:
In-line reference documentation
Auto-completion
Touch visual access to color, image, and numeric values
There’s no question independent gaming has found its voice. But it’s increasingly finding something else: a scene.
And that doesn’t just mean people huddled quietly around glowing displays in quiet isolation. Artists, advocates, and aficionados gather to celebrate gaming as an art form, as an event. It’s not just some aesthetic or nostalgic experience of gaming, either, as with the explosion of 8-bit: people are gathering for love of mechanics. And as the game mechanic and art venture in new directions, that is an exciting time for digital visual and interactive culture, generally.
One such hub is A MAZE. Centered in Berlin, the festival is a platform for what’s happening all over Europe, and its connections to the rest of the planet – or, as curator Thorsten Wiedemann calls it, “a melting pot for the European indie game scene.” (Thorsten, for his part, hasn’t trained his eyes exclusively on Europe – the German-based A MAZE is also now starting up in Johannesburg, where it promises to serve as a conduit for work around the fast-growing African continent.)
This week, I’m pleased to be involved in a “prelude” to the A MAZE Festival proper; we’re gathering in Berlin’s Mitte neighborhood for two days of presentations, gaming, workshops, learning, connecting, and the prerequisite drinking, eating, and music. You can read more about Thorsten’s work on the blog of the host, Berlin and Korean collective and art network Platoon:
The MadMapper blog this week looks at a brilliant Space Invader-themed project from this Bogota, Colombia-based artist:
One of my favorite and iconic projects done with MadMapper to date is the Space Invader project directed by the Bogota based A/V Director and VJ, Laura Ramirez Leal l (aka Optika VJ). The simple concept of the classic icon of a Space Invader reproduced on a grand scale screams fun for the eyes.
The technical specifications of the Invader:
- 2 x 20K Christie projectors stacked
- Modul8 and Madmapper
- 20 mts wide – 14 mts high and 6 mts deep in scaffolding covered with material
- Public : 90.000 people
Full interview below; wanted to get this up there, but if you’d like more on Laura’s work and process, let us know your questions and we’ll talk to her soon!
In a spectacular, sculptural work, forms built from paper become organic backdrops for undulating pixels in an audiovisual work by Daniel Schwarz. I like that he describes this as partially “non-mapped.” That is, if projection mapping is the use of software to create calculated virtual geometries on which to project, you can also just point a beamer at something that isn’t flat and see what happens. The appeal of projection mapping is to me really about getting away from flat rectangles – not that there’s anything wrong with them, but because it expands the canvas on which digital projection can work. Sometimes, you want perfectly-tuned mappings, but sometimes you actually want distortion and imperfection. It’d be a shame to lose sight of the latter just because of the novelty (and now ease) of the former.
What makes this work beautiful to me is the transformation of imaginative forms in space. Daniel describes the work:
I used mapped and non-mapped audio-reactive projections on paper sculptures and filmed it with a [Canon] 5d mark II. It’s kind of a journey through a dystopic landscape to the music of Amon Tobin.
Programming was all done in vvvv, editing in Final Cut Pro 7.
I also want so say a big thank you, because i basically made this video thanks to your blog post concerning the Amon Tobin Fan Video
Project.
Hey, thank you! (Curious to see more results of that project.) And here’s another case where you might still want to keep those SLRs around, not just the fancy new iPhone. (I’m also glad I don’t have to deal with mobile carriers to buy cameras.)
Peter Kirn
Jaymis Loveday
Matt Ganucheau
toby
joshue ott
michaeluna
vade
dan-winckler
Momo The Monster
songcarver
dj-rndm
nathanal-lcaud
christian.ryan
craig-dorety
Surya Buchwald
Kyle McDonald
Annapurna Kumar
Sofy Yuditskaya