Space exploration has had a deep impact on the way a lot of us see the world and think about our art. So I can’t wait for this Saturday’s Yuri’s Night Bay Area, which will bring a convergence of bleeding-edge music, art, technology, science, and visualism to a 12 hour-long party on NASA’s airfield outside San Francisco. We’ll be bringing some of the best of this event to you all around the world. Read or subscribe to RSS for our special minisite to make sure you don’t miss a thing, wherever you are on the planet; updates will continue live through the event and in the couple of weeks afterward:

yuricdm.com: Yuri + CDM + music + motion
yuricdm.com RSS feed

If you’re near the Bay Area, let us know if you’re coming to the event. We’d love help with photos, video, and coverage. And if you’re involved in a Yuri’s Night somewhere else in the world, let us know about that, too.

Here’s just a sample of the visualist angle at Yuri’s Bay Area:

Whether in three-dimensional videos or paper sculptures, artist Martin Böttger manipulates organic, fluid geometry like a child with blocks. An artist working with Maya, vvvv, and Processing, his work demonstrates that even simple elements can yield a variety of creative products.

“Transformer” is an intentional nod to the robots and movie — with good reason; Martin seems like the type who could design you a robot that changes into a truck:

If you’re in Austin for South by Southwest Interactive, you’ll want to duck out of the parade of open bars Web companies are offering and check out some of the live music and visualism happening. Saturday night, I’m judging a laptop battle as CDMotion contributor Dan Winckler is the evening’s VJ. Monday, as proem, Lila’s Medicine, and I play music, we’ll have a live visual lineup courtesy Jay Smith of Livid Instruments.

AMODA Showcase + Laptop Battle [AMODA] = $4-7, or free with SxSWi badge

CDM Music + Motion Party [Upcoming.org; also on Facebook] = Free, no badge needed

SxSW @ CDM [Create Digital Music]

I unfortunately have to fly back to New York before SxSW Music begins, meaning I’m missing a pretty great lineup. Addictive TV is on the opening party Tuesday, right before Moby. (aka the closing party for Film) Anyone know of other good VJ lineups for the Music fest? If you’re going, would love show reports.

Not in Austin? View Some Viditar!

Speaking of Jay Smith and Livid, here’s Jay showing off the Viditar video instrument on some vintage TV — the now-dead Screensavers program. After all, it’s only fair to have something for the 99.5% of you not in Austin. Think of it as a vintage virtual Viditar vignette:

I couldn’t be more excited than I am now about the future of createdigitalmotion.com. After starting out in the shadow of createdigitalmusic.com, CDMo has some good stuff coming, and we owe that to your enthusiasm, feedback, and the great work you’re doing. To do all that we really want, and to continue to support CDM’s cost in hosting, bandwidth, time, and other resources, we do need your support. I address that in some detail on Create Digital Music, so do read there for a complete picture of where we’re at, and where I’m at, as we look forward on CDM.

We Need Your Help: Support CDM’s Future

Create Digital Motion does face some unique challenges: the live visual community remains in its infancy, which is why, in comparison to countless websites and dozens of print publications for digital music production, there’s almost nothing specific to live VJs and visuals. Reader support is more important than ever.

If I’m going to ask for your support, though, I want to give even more back. We’d love to spend more time on development and content to make Create Digital Motion far more than it is. Support for CDM — even if you can only spare a couple of dollars, which we understand as working visualists — is a vote for that future. We’ll keep you updated on how that’s going and what we’re working on.

If you can give us support, we do appreciate it — and be sure to include in comments that you’re a CDMo reader. But most of all, we appreciate you as readers. Thanks for your help.

This time next week Peter and I will be in Perth, Western Australia, basking in the geekly radiance of ByteMe festival and enjoying the hospitality of the inimitable Kat and Jasper, a.k.a. CDMo favourites VJZoo.

We don’t have any official panels or workshops planned. Instead we’ll be devoting our time to documenting the goings-on and creative outputs of all the other cool people who are attending the festival.

Aside from catching up with the ArtificialEyes crew and Australian Visualist extrordinaire Jean Poole, this festival will be especially exciting for CDM as it’s the first time Peter and I get to meet In Real Life! Will we still get along after our fleshy casings have shared a continent? Will the CDM empire crumble as we discover that we’re not really interested in writing about CreatingDigitalThings? Watch this space to find out.

After the festival concludes on the 9th of December Peter will accompany me back to Brisbane for CDM Summit ‘07, where we’ll discuss the future of CDM, work on CreatingDigitalStuff, and probably play quite a lot of Strikers.

Leisure time aside, we don’t really have anything concrete organized, so if any CDM readers will be in Brisbane between 9-14th December and are interested in an informal get together, or would like to catch up at ByteMe festival, make with the comments.

Ed.: If you happen to be coming to Perth, or know folks who live there (and really, who among us doesn’t have lots of friends in Perth), be sure to sign up for events! Many require an RSVP. And if you can’t make it to Perth, we’ll make the virtual experience as rich as possible! -PK

Byte Me! Festival Events List

We’ve got some big ideas for the future of Create Digital Music and Create Digital Motion, and we need your help. Everything you like here now will stay. We’re just adding some carefully-chosen features around it, overhauling the community side of the site (createdigitalnoise), and making things work better. We’re looking for a web hacker/developer who would like to join the team and help take the site to the next level.

We need someone with strong PHP skills, experience with WordPress, and Apache and Linux server administration. If you’re interested, get in touch (choose “Editor” and talk to me directly).

I’ll be out next week at the Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Aspen, Colorado, where I’m taking a workshop led by Processing co-creator Ben Fry.

In this workshop we will focus on Processing’s video library, learning how to play with pixels from a live camera by analyzing their makeup, altering colors, and experimenting with effects. We will also explore video as an input to control graphic elements on-screen, whether by controlling their movement or generating dynamic, abstract compositions.

I’ve done work with video and Processing before, but naturally not with Ben Fry himself nearby, so I’m quite excited! I’ll be interested to see how he teaches it, since video performance is not a strong suit of Processing (largely the fault of Java, not Processing), though it is an interesting tool for using video for other tasks.

I’ll try to “liveblog” some of it next week, but if that doesn’t work, I promise some code examples of my own and other tidbits when I return.

Jaymis and I are out in Meatspace being visualists, leaving little time to, you know, blog and such. Here’s how to find us:

If you’re in Australia, find a big rockstar with big hair (listen for screaming girls and boys), and Jaymis will surely be nearby.

If you’re in the Bay Area of California, find a convergence of technology gurus, crafters, and DIY counter-cultural geniuses, or small downtown venues cramped with people, and you’ll probably find me. Actually, after thinking I might get away with just doing sound and not image, I’ve managed to find lots of projection possibilities so I’m going to go nuts and do both.

There are some promising-looking visualist goodies here in San Francisco, so I hope to get some images up as soon as I can and will have a full report next week.