Hurrah, stop motion fans — it’s time for the Stop Motion Eye Candy of the Day!

This time, it’s artist PES, translating classic arcade scenes into stop motion, real world objects. It’s utterly brilliant — and a reminder that, stripped of more advanced code and graphics, early arcade games were reduced to strangely iconic designs. That’s food for thought when thinking about digital motion in general.

There’s more of this stuff, too — here’s a complete round-up from “counter-culture” mag Hi-Fructose:

Video: Clown Head Explosions: The Art of Pes

Found via Laughing Squid and Scott Beale’s Twitter stream

Now, digerati: perhaps these real-world sprites inspire some virtual ones for use in your next live visual tool?

The nicely-growing Digital Tools blog has an excellent interview with visualist Paris Treantafeles, who works with lo-fi 8-bit-style visuals using tools he’s built for GBA and the Linux-powered Gamepark.

Interestingly, while a lot of people will dismiss the 8-bit movement as “nostalgic” — implying it’s just 20-somethings pining for their Mario-playing childhoods — Paris’ inspiration was originally vintage analog synthesizers. And synthesizing graphics is his main interest:

I concentrate on creating graphics from scratch. That’s pretty much all I do. Other people like using movie clips and manipulating them, but from my point of view it’s a good exercise to see what you can do when you have to create everything from scratch. It gives you an appreciation to form and color.

Hally // Blip Festival 2007: The Videos from 2 Player Productions on Vimeo.

The synthesis/sampling argument I think is very much related to the way electronic music is produced. I find that focusing on either one can be a good exercise — see our friend Troels sampling Coke bottles, for instance.

It’s nice stuff, but I do hope, particularly here in the US where the VJ/visualist scene has had trouble gaining broader recognition, that we start to see other styles on genres forming more coherent “scenes” in the way 8-bit has. Of course, what has happened for people like Paris is he’s found strong advocates in the musicians, which seems to be a key element (and has helped strengthen the visual work done outside chiptune music, as well).

As good will spreads through the season, people are getting expressive with more than just paper. Toxi, aka Karsten Schmidt, sends along this Processing-based interactive 3d card: simple but elegant and definitely something different to find in your mailbox.

Postspectacular Xmas

You may need to “trust” the applet for 3D-in-browser, sadly (usually only the first time you run a Java app - but no worries, no actual security risk here). Still, it’s not hard to imagine a day soon where we pop little interactive greetings to each other’s mobiles. Well, not hard for me to imagine, anyway; maybe it’s the glow of this new Blackberry. But thanks to Karsten for all the skill and inspiration he’s offered over this year.

That’s actually not the only interactive card I got. Bubblyfish aka Haeyoung Kim sent an 8-bit holiday card out on her site. Next: a home-built card with homebrew, custom-programmed sound chip and LED array.

Hope everyone’s having lovely holidays. You have just under one week to build your own ball drop.

Pikilipita is a wonder: the developer has created a VJ app that runs on Windows XP and GP2X (Pikix), and even Game Boy Advance cartridges (Pikilipita Advanced). The apps have been getting feature enhancements and other good news lately. Let’s start out with the GBA stuff — which you can now get pre-loaded on a real GBA cart for use on your Game Boy or GameCube with player:

I’ll do my best to release Pikilipita Advance on real cartridges before summer 2007 if at least 100 people are interested in this product.

Its price shouldn’t be higher than £25, 35€ or US$ 50. If you think you’ll buy one, please get in touch with me using the contact form below.

Update: cartridges should be ready at the end of June!

(If you want to order the carts … presuming there’s still time/availability … check out contact info on the site.)

Pikix, the software for XP (yawn) and GP2X Linux-based game console (yay!), has also been getting new features, each dubbed with zany names that put Ubuntu to shame: Fat Dolphin, Delicious Marmot, and most recently, Cheesy Caribou, which adds features like this:

1. New version of the Kouky2x codec: better compression rate: files are 20% to 50% smaller than with previous codec version
2. USB keyboard compatibility (via cradle)
3. Special effects: extreme contras, negative colors, zoom, hue colorization
4. Video in and out points

Nothing earthshaking for your fancy-schmancy computer-based VJ app, it’s true … but can you fit your VJ rig into a space this small?

Pikilipita VJ Software

Following VJZoo’s awesome Glitch Pack on Archive.org, Analog Recycling have followed up with another mega-pack of 79 free VJ loops.

There’s some attractive stuff here, and the Archive.org video player thing is a great addition, but 368×288? Obviously nobody’s going to look this gift horse in the mouth and pronounce it a little on the small side, but if you’re going to release your content for others to use, you might as well release it in a format which is going to look great on screen.

via Resolume Forums.

Philip Stearns is recycling a yard sale computer as glitchy art. While we’ve been covering the rebirth of the Commodore 64 as a musical instrument over on Create Digital Music, this project turns vintage Texas Instruments TI-99 series computers into a live visual performance tool:

“Gently Modified” TI-99s Project Page with eBay sales info, photos, and video

Unlike the C64 projects, which lovingly restore the intended synthesis capabilities of the hardware, this is a true circuit bending project: the creator has “gently” added additional circuitry and short-circuited existing circuitry to deconstruct the graphics output. The clever part is the addition of optical sensors, the objects in front of the screen shown here. These feed input back into the machine in a loop.

The results are compelling, but I wonder if it’s long before people start using vintage computers to output results as they were intended, just as musicians have returned to 8-bit sound. Anyone for a VJ set with an early release of Macromind Director and QuickTime 1.0?

Via the master of retro and odd video projects, Video Thing, via Data as Nature

An incredible amount of stuff coming up here in NYC:

VJ Book: Paul Spinrad’s new The VJ Book is packed with interviews and how-to information and ships with a DVD full of VJ samples, mixable content, and demo software. (Paul and I got to work together on an upcoming issue of Make Magazine, which you’ll be hearing more about soon.)

VJ party Wednesday: It’s a book launch party edition of Eyewash, the live video series. I’ll be VJing with Korg hardware and Quartz Composer-generated visuals, along with the book’s DVD creator Melissa “Miixxy” Ulto (previously on CDM). Jay Smith from Livid Instruments will be demoing the new Tactic M2 wood-paneled VJ control surface (see previous story). I’ll be trying to steal it from him. Watch your drinks, Jay.

VJ: The Movie Video Out documents the history of VJing and live video art from the 1960s to today. It’s premiering in the East Village November 11, but if you clamour hard enough, it may come to your town, too.

Music Player Live: Les Paul is keynote speaker for this weekend full of of music stars, gear, and instruction. The crew from Keyboard, EQ, GuitarPlayer, BassPlayer, and Frets will all be there. Catch my live video and VJing for musicians seminar Sunday, if you can, but there’s plenty of other good stuff happening.

Game Boy Music Saturday: There’s a major lineup Saturday night of Game Boy and chiptune musicians at Manhattan’s The Tank (which is still looking for a permanent home). Performers: DAVID SUGAR (UK), RECEPTORS (US), HEY KID NICE ROBOT (US), M-.-n (BE), GLOMAG (US), BUBBLYFISH (US), OMAC (US), NULLSLEEP (US) and BIT SHIFTER (US).

Now, attention rest of the world: aside from Paul’s VJ book and the movie, we want to make sure you get to enjoy some of this, too. So, New Yorkers, aside from my own feeble attempts to photograph and document these events, if you’re going and want to help, please drop me a line. And certainly say hello; I’ll buy you a drink or steal you some video hardware.

How many people’s resumes include both a gig with the Phillip Glass Ensemble and posing nude for Marie Claire? An evening with new music virtuoso Kathleen Supové is not what most people expect from a solo piano recital. Her show this week finds her flanked by laptops, plus three projectors running childhood slides, live digital video, and the manic pianist from the Lawrence Welk Show, as she crawls in wearing a pink leopard-skin bodysuit narrating on a wireless.

If anyone can turn the grand piano into a digital instrument, it’s Supové. She was so enthralled by the capabilities of Yamaha’s MIDI-enabled player piano, the DC7, that she’s commissioning a body of work for the instrument. Collaborations with electronic composers, often involving microphones in the piano, blend the acoustic sound into an unpredictable, thunderous wonderland of colliding sounds. “Multimedia experience,” though, isn’t just about technology — rather than the usual parade of pieces, her concerts tend to absorb performance art rants into the mic and other “theatricals.” Her obsessive-compulsive commisioning of composers has brought pieces for her by everyone from Xenakis to Zorn to Bubblyfish (best known as a Game Boy player) and, well, me.

I’ve got one more evening with Kathleen at The Flea; I’ll certainly miss it. She certainly suggest a broad range of possibilities of what playing can be about — I hope emerging, younger players take note.