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.

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

If you’re interested in getting involved in our tangible interface hackday but had trouble filling out the form, here are the corrected links. Somehow I copied the wrong form keys yesterday.

RSVP in New York: New Work City Hackday / Party

RSVP anywhere you’re working in the world (no commitment, just so we can keep track of who’s interested, help you promote group events, and keep you informed)

International update: So far, Berlin, Canberra, Vienna, and India are interested in participating – and that was with the forms pointed in the wrong place! I think we can expect more. I’ll get in touch with you soon.

http://hackday.noisepages.com

Trackmate :: 5 ways to get started from adam kumpf on Vimeo.

The mouse is not all that interesting as an invention. When people first saw mice, in fact, they typically weren’t terribly impressed, and often simply went back to their preferred non-keyboard input, the joystick. But destroy the novelty of the mouse, give it to half the population of the world and wait a couple of decades, and fantastic things start to happen.

See also: the knob, which is basically a simple hack for changing resistance in a circuit.

So, what could happen if we take novel interfaces now and try to accelerate what you do with them? That’s what’s starting to take place with tangible, multi-touch, and augmented interfaces, with the help of shared code tools (OpenFrameworks, Processing, ActionScript), shared libraries and trackers (ReacTIVision, the TUIO protocol, and LusidOSC/Trackmate), and communities like the fantastic NUI Group.

But enough about reading about this stuff and/or working alone. We’re going to try a new experiment in which we get lots of folks building this stuff – experienced users, relatively inexperienced users, your friends – and getting as quickly as possible into the business of actually trying apps, especially for the visual and musical performance stuff that we love.

Now, you may not have folks near you who are comfortable with code or have any idea what the heck we’re talking about. But readers of CDM and fellow hackers will join up on the Internet leading up to and around June 6. We’ve got a nice, fast Internet connection in New York, and we’re setting up some tools to help us share video streams, code we create, and to allow informal text chat.

Here’s how to get involved and join us.

Head to http://hackday.noisepages.com/ for all the details. (If you’re interested in experimenting with in-development noisepages blogs and networking features as you make stuff, you may – ahem – find that registration is open.)

"MGFest (Motion Graphics Festival) continues its tour of the US, opening tonight in Austin, Texas. The conference is still $7 total for all the live events and the conference itself. For the workshops, you add $240 a day (bulk discounts available) – but that means that, if you’re low on change, you Texans can absolutely go hit this.

A number of highlights:

• Conference events, including iPhone/Wii game development, code alongside design, and music topics (yes, even Ableton Live) alongside the visual stuff
• Prototyping with Microsoft’s Expression Blend workshop, even before it’s available (you sign an NDA)
• Installations and performances
• Something really cool-looking called the “Open Collaboration Summit,” which I hope will be the start of more music + motion + code-focused events in other places (read on if you’re interested in that, even if you’re not in Texas, as we may bring it to you)

Some interesting-looking live audiovisual stuff, via our friend Troy: