We have the tools. We have the techniques. Now, what happens when you put technology for tracking physical objects into the hands of artists around the world?

On June 6, members of the CDM community joined in our first “global hackday,” assembling tangible interfaces on tracking tables. Martin Kaltenbrunner of reacTIVision and the reacTable joined us from Vienna, Austria, while Adam Kumpf of the OpenFrameworks-powered Trackmate and MIT Tangible Media Group chatted from Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Much of the day was about saying “hello, world,” and helping each other through getting cameras working, troubleshooting, and the like. But there was an extraordinary variety of ideas even in one day. I can only imagine where things might go from here. I can also see the tools people were developing as being expressive for live visuals and visual performance - and via a really cheap interface, too.

Some of the accomplishments of our first day:

• Endless ideas: Drawing interfaces using objects, a floor tom as a housing, a musical instrument with soda bottles as the interface, a game with blocks featuring the Tokyo skyline, and others.
• Troubleshooting data: Both the Trackmate and reacTIVision projects got lots of feedback about how people were using the tools, where tracking was and wasn’t working, and where people got stuck up. We also compiled lots of information on cameras, drivers, builds, and operating systems. I’m working with Adam and Martin to dig through a lot of this information so we can compile a really practical guide to make it easier for people to create their own projects.
• Special guests: Marco had his augmented magic show and we had the beginnings of an interactive glove. Check out the video highlights to see what the NYC event was like.
• noisepages for networking, and other tools: Livestream video was a bit of a mixed bag; I’m still looking for easier ways of doing that (both on the video shooting side and the streaming side.) Text chat was an easy win, though IRC can still be cumbersome; I’m looking into integrating standardized XMPP chat instead, and providing access via any client or a webpage. But the other big success story was that noisepages worked nicely for documentation; see the fritzcrate and i3games sites for great examples!

Building Communities Around the World

A real highlight to me was getting to hear from Valeria (jalea.tv) and Jose (Estado Lateral Media Lab), visiting New York from Argentina. They talked about what the scene is like in Buenos Aires, and touched on issues of community, learning, open source, and the multilingual world of coding. And they do some really beautiful and hip visual work, both commercial and experimental. We also wound up with a significant amount of the online chat being in Spanish. That to me is a healthy sign - “global” really doesn’t necessarily translate to “English.”

Hackday Results, and the Future

For more documentation, head to our noisepages site:

Tangible Interface Hackday: The Projects (So Far)
http://hackday.noisepages.com/

http://trackmate.sourceforge.net/
http://reactivision.sourceforge.net/

And, yes, this is only the beginning. My suspicion is that a single weekend would be enough to get workable tracking projects going - especially as we iron out some technical wrinkles. But we’d certainly love to do more of this, whether it’s another “official” hackday or simple an open lab with chat and sharing.

To continue this moving forward, you can join the Tangible / Multi-touch Interfaces group on noisepages.com:
Tangible + Multi-Touch noisepages Group

And I’d like to brainstorm how we might proceed, whether it’s a formal event or a sort of online open lab. You can join that conversation on the group:
Let’s make every day a Global Hackday - the event continues

noisepages is still in alpha state, but we’re working aggressively to move forward to beta, and content placed there is safe and future-proof. (Most importantly, I’ve fixed the jpeg library on the server so that avatars work!)

We look forward to hearing from you.

Offf 2009 Oeiras : Ambient Reel from Designflux : Devoted to Motion on Vimeo.

Design Flux and Mark Webster send along this lovely documentary film they’ve done of the Offf festival last month in Oeiras, Portugal. It’s fun to go back to that aesthetic world. It’s difficult to describe the Offf experience: there were sometimes hard-to-hear talks in the cavernous concrete steel mill, crowds of young, able-bodied designer boys and girls from Portugal, Spain, and around Europe packing into lines as if for a rock concert, and an even slightly chaotic sense. At the same time, there was an infectious energy of creativity and enthusiasm - one that clearly should and will be felt more strongly in more events around the world.

The music is spot-on: Byetone’s Death of a Typographer. (Byetone’s label, the uber-hip “designer” music of Raster-Noton, was the musical anchor of Offf, and has since done showcases in Montreal for MUTEK and now SONAR in Barcelona.)

I think we can all agree that there’s really no reason we should be sitting in classrooms and cold corporate conference centers listening to vendor sales pitches thinly disguised as a talk. Culture and technology (and technology as culture) should be, well, a party. It’s doubly comforting now as certain trade show-style institutions are under economic pressure to think that we could all invest in something better.

Now, I’m going to shut up and go edit this huge stack of interview videos and audios I’ve got, which is stuff you wouldn’t have seen even had you been at these events.

CTRL ALT SHIFT - from V.I. Artists on Vimeo.

Michael Faulkner of D-FUSE says the most interesting thing in this video: it’s when technology becomes redundant that it’s accepted as art. Photography gets invented, and suddenly painting - a business and a craft for centuries - is “high art.” (Don’t ask, incidentally, about what late 19th Century art critics and salon organizers thought was great painting. It was utterly dreadful.)

Ctrl Alt Shift is a 10-minute documentary, pointed out by Resolume developer Bart on their forums, featuring live visualists and audiovisualists. It has a number of things going for it: a terrific artist lineup, asking the tough, obvious questions about why fundamentally we do this stuff, and an editing style that makes projection, live-style edits, and eye candy animation part of the documentary object. It’s a tasty treat to watch if you know the artists, and even if the chatter in this video is the sort of thing you discuss over beers and V4s with your mates, it could be an ideal video to pass along to your friends who don’t yet entirely get what this whole thing is about.

Featured artists:
The Light Surgeons, D-Fuse, Hexstatic, Vj Anyone, Addictive TV, Vector Meldrew, and Fatamorgana

It’s a production by Dean G Moore and Simon Lane.

I know of at least one other documentary project on live visuals evolving. Of course, maybe what we need - given the imperfect and evolving nature of the medium - is more along the lines of a 24-hour visual network. I nominate … all of us.

Fritzcrate Project / RGB Color Mixer from Michael Schieben on Vimeo.

As you can see, people have already begun playing with ideas for tangible interfaces. Oddly enough, two German gentlemen each named Michael (not aware of one another) have gotten a headstart, including the first experiment above in progress. We’ll be experimenting with new interfaces in New York and around the globe. (If that isn’t enough experimentation with new interfaces, the NIME conference – New Interfaces in Musical Expression – is happening now in Pittsburgh, and we expect reports back from that, too!) The event has also been featured on Boing Boing and MAKE.

Follow the action at :

http://hackday.noisepages.com

Or via…

IRC: FreeNode #cdmblogs

Twitter: Hash tag #hackday or cdmblogs or follow the group of hackers at tweetknot.com/hackday

Live Streaming Video (we hope!): livestream

View Global Hackday in a larger map

Philia 01 Support Video from Lia on Vimeo.

Artist Lia has created her first piece of art for the iPhone and iPod touch, something called PhiLia 01. It’s a quirky, gorgeous generative sound and visual app activated by movement, one that encourages users to save their own artwork.

http://www.iphoneart.org/philia01

On the iTunes Store

Composer Morton Subotnik used to talk really eloquently back in the days of multimedia CD-ROMs and The Voyager Company about computers as “chamber music” environments. Instead of seeing the personal scale of technology as an impediment, he viewed it as something intimate and wonderful. So it’s fantastic to see artists engage mobile platforms as a way to have that relationship with a participant.

There’s now also a page up that is beginning to collect some of these particular artworks, focusing on generative-style interactive creations, and featuring work by our friend Memo Akten. Joshua Davis’ kaleidoscopic artmaking tool Reflect, which he showed for the first time at OFFF earlier this month in Lisbon, is enroute.

http://www.iphoneart.org/

Open Source iPhone Art

The way in which these tools are being created is interesting, too. PhiLia is built in OpenFrameworks, the open source C++-based development tool made friendlier for artists with integrated toolsets, a community of friendly creative folk, and simplified, speedy syntax similar to Processing. OpenFrameworks, thanks to its open source nature, has made its way onto the iPhone.

Part of what this demonstrates is that, while the iPhone itself is proprietary, some of the power of open source can still triumph. And, indeed, by basing work on this open source foundation, these same artists aren’t imprisoned by a single platform. PhiLia could be a desktop app, or on other mobile platforms once they support OpenFrameworks.

And, yes, it means I’m aching that much harder to get OpenFrameworks and/or Processing onto Android – it should be possible. (Java on Android is not identical to Java on desktop, so it can’t be a direct port – you can’t just install Processing on Android – but it is possible.) There are also still some wrinkles in the App Store approval process; it really is refreshing on Android (and presumably things like Palm WebOS) not to have those restrictions.

Then again, that’s the whole point: OS and specific platform shouldn’t have to matter, and open source software – and artwork – can be just as brilliant on a proprietary platform as an open one.

Ready to try this yourself?

Developing for iPhone using openFrameworks and ofxiPhone [memo.tv]

Using openFrameworks for iPhone dev [Rober Carlsen]

On the OpenFrameworks Wiki

You can thank Lee Byron, Memo Akten, Damian Stewart, Zach Gage, and the core OF team (Zach, Theo, and Arturo). The “power of open source” is not some sort of magical whirlwind that surrounds code and makes things appear spontaneously – it’s blood, sweat, and tears (unpaid!) by real people. Although, if you get those real people together in a room and do some sort of battle shout or Care Bear Stare (sorry, I’m an 80s kid), it might help psych you up.