Daily Inspiration: Oscilloscope Video by Ambient Pioneer Mat Jarvis (Gas / High Skies)

So much of the visual inspiration for digital generative visuals — even those that never leave the computer — come directly from analog electronics. There’s something organic about the motion visuals this gear creates. Case in point: the latest, short video from Mat Jarvis, the pioneering ambient artist, via his label Microscopics. Good stuff, and we’re glad to bring it to you first.

Speaking of pioneering vintage visuals, Mat Jarvis / Microscopics have also set music to the brilliant film “A Film Dealing with the Relative Size of Things in the Universe and the Effect of Adding Another Zero.” The film is the work of Charles and Ray Eames (yes, of chair/design fame), who probably deserve a CDMotion story all their own. It’s stunning to see this 1977 film predicting the worldview of technologies like Google Earth. In case you missed this on CDMusic:

Ambient music fans, here are details on the release of the album itself:

Microscopics Play with Scale on Gas0095, Give You Tiny Moog Model [Create Digital Music]

Microscopics Blog

Got some favorite oscilloscope films to share? Let us know.

Psychedelic Fluids at Glastonbury: Musical, Motion-Activated Installation from Memo

By Jaymis

CDMo reader Memo writes:

I’m just rushing out the door off to Glastonbury to set things up.. I thought you might be interested in this little (!) project…


Glastonbury 2008 PI Teaser (Webcam Piano + Psychedelic Fluids) from Memo Akten on Vimeo.

Everything is entirely camera driven and realtime. Originally started this app in processing, but realized I needed as much power as possible so switched to C++ / OpenFrameworks. Not using the GPU as much as I’d liked due to time restraints, v2 will be fully GPU hopefully ;)

Anyone going to Glastonbury? Drop in and play Memo’s piano for us. Working on your own (little!) project? Contact form’s to the right.

KinderCrasher: Epic, Reactive Visuals and Music in 4K of C Code

By Jaymis

Peter sums up this piece much better than I can:

this person is
better than us :D
when the revolution comes
and the whole world goes mad max
we’ll be dead
and this person will be hacking the computers to fight the robot army


kindercrasher from Inigo Quilez on Vimeo.

From Inigo:

This is my contribution to the realtime 4 kilobytes visuals (usually known as “4k intro”) competition for Inspire 2008 (held in Spain). It is a set of spheres with radious controlled by the Fourier Transform (without the “fast”) of the music. it contains some realtime ambient occlusion and depth of field. It’s done in C, using shaders (GLSL). Once again, it all fits in a 4 kilobytes executable (music, animation, rendering engine and effects).

Amazing stuff. Check out more information on various deep code and 3D issues at Inigo’s Website, and the rest of his videos on Vimeo. Surprisingly, this won the 4K section of Inspire 2008.

One Week of 3L: History and Interface Videos, Live Q+A Today

By Jaymis

3L has been in the wild for 2 weeks now, so I’m expecting to see some work from new users appearing online soon.

Since launch the artificialeyes crew have kept themselves busy. ExiledSurfer has been posting plenty of new content, example clips and screencast tutorials. I particularly enjoy the talking head screencast recorded from within 3L, using the Apple webcam to drop a little talking head into the preview window.


3LU Sophomore: Capture an Object + Feedback from professor thrill on Vimeo.

These videos have been collected into a Thrill University section of the site. This is being supplemented with live tutorials, the first of which happens 12 hours from now (GMT1300, Thursday) on the 3LU page (which will even remind you via email when the session is about to start). I’m going to be there to increase my 3L knowledge, it would be great to see some other CDMers as well.

There’s also a 3L channel on CDMo’s favorite online video service, Vimeo. CDM makes a little appearance in the 3L channel, as I was able to finally edit the bulk of the “3L Sessions” videos we shot with Michael in Perth last year. There’s over an hour of video in the 3L Sessions album, covering the history of 3L, and an extensive tour through the interface and capabilities of the software. Through the magic of Vimeo, these are all downloadable, so you can use them to guide your first steps with Thrill.

read more

Weekend Inspiration: Psychedelic Processing Fluids from Memo

By Jaymis

CDMo reader and 3L winner Memo has posted this rather lovely video.

Interactive Processing version here. Memo says:

This demo was done in Processing 0135 BETA (using Java) but I think I’m going to redo it in C++ with OpenFrameworks for performance reasons. While processing is brilliant for knocking up quick demos and getting off the ground quite quickly, for this project I need as much performance as possible. I.e. the app needs to run across 4 projectors (3000-4000 pixels wide) with loads more features!

So in short I’m halting the development of the Processing / Java version now and thought I’d post where I got to with it…

New vvvv Beta Lets You Make Your Own Visual Plug-in Objects

image The free (for non-commercial use), Windows-only, insanely-powerful visual/multimedia patching environment vvvv just got a killer feature: the ability to make your own "nodes" (what are called objects in some other modular tools).

It’s actually pretty easy to build, too, and the developers have some templates for you. This is way up the list on my summer projects. You can do matrix transforms, as well, so 3D / GPU-based video processing gets very interesting, along with simpler manipulations of color, string, and number values:

The latest vvvv version offers developers an interface to write their own nodes for vvvv. A plugin is basically a .dll file, that can be drag&dropped into a vvvv patch where it appears as a node. If its stored in vvvv’s plugins directory, its even available in the node list.

vvvv gurus, if you give this a try and make something interesting, let us know:

vvvv40beta16 release with plugin interface [Results in Reverse blog]

Weekend Inspiration: Glowy Nebula of Sound from Richard Lainhart, Built in After Effects


LUX from Richard Lainhart on Vimeo.

Our friend Richard Lainhart sends this lovely "swirly thing" (to use technical terms). His description:

An abstract HD film animated in After Effects. The soundtrack, "The Beautiful Blue Sky", is a realtime electronic synthesizer improvisation for Buchla 200e and Haken Continuum.

My description:

Mmmm…

Oh, sorry. Forgot what I was saying: staring into swirly thing. Hey, it’s the weekend. Enjoy!

Thrill in the Wild: CyberPatrolUnit Gets Realtime Experimental with the Lemur and 3L

By Jaymis

artificialeyes are keeping us updated on the impending release of 3L (current status: Soon), and while I’m still in “getting my studio in order” mode in the lead-up to the “2008 massive VJ geek-out and CDMoFest” and unable to play with new toys, CyberPatrolUnit has posted some great demo videos (and followup), showing us some of the places that 3L may be able to take us.


3L and Lemur at LAX from CyberPatrolUnit on Vimeo.

Exciting? Maybe a little. I still have lots of 3L video to edit from Perth last year, and I’ve promised Michael that I’ll have some videos ready for the official launch. Stay tuned!

Larry Cuba, Star Wars’ Death Star CG, Arabesque, and the Dawn of Computer Animation

How do you make a computer-animated sequence of 3D wireframe visuals of fancy, Empire-built battle stations — in 1977? Very, very slowly. Our friend James at Retro Thing, aside from being a electronic-sonic inventor, is a fan of vintage visuals and was already teaching the history of computer animation in the mid 80s. (Hint: prepping that class didn’t take quite as long then as it would now.)

James explains the origins of the famous Death Star briefing room sequence:

The wizard behind the early Star Wars CG was Larry Cuba, who worked out of the Electronic Visualization Lab (EVL) at the University of Illinois. Legend has it that he was pushing the hardware so hard to create the simple wireframe images that he constantly had to adjust the air conditioning in the computer room to avoid system crashes. Cuba used a vector graphics scripting language called GRASS (GRAphics Symbiosis System), written by Tom DeFanti at Ohio State in 1974. The system he used incorporated a Vector General CRT, DEC PDP-11 minicomputer, along with various cameras and recorders.

Star Wars: Prehistoric Computer Graphics [Retro Thing, via Boing Boing Gadgets]

I have a special place in my heart for the original film Star Wars because — James will appreciate this — I initially experienced it as a kid only on sound Super 8 film, cut down to a svelte 17 minutes. (My understanding of narrative was never quite the same.)

But to me, these graphics don’t look primitive; they look elemental, much in the same way that you don’t get tired of ancient Egyptian art. (And in the timeline of computer graphics, it wouldn’t be a stretch to imagine thousands of years of art history happening in a few decades.)

The real star, though, is the film Cuba used to pitch computer graphics to George Lucas, Arabesque, made with John Whitney. If this 1975 film doesn’t inspire you as a visualist, nothing will. Correction: Evidently it wasn’t Arabesque, but the movie First Fig. Larry Cuba himself writes in comments:

Thank you for the appreciation of “Arabesque.” The film I screened for Lucas was actually my first CG film, “First Fig.”

(And you can connect the historical dots here, too: without Arabesque First Fig, no CG in Star Wars, no ILM CG, no Pixar.)

Well, George Lucas may or may not have seen Arabesque, but you can, below, and it’s still inspiring:

And for another Larry Cuba film, here’s the 1985 Calculated Movements:

For Whitney’s 1960s work, see previously:

Videos from the Dawn of Video: Mechanical Effects and Oscilloscope Games

And for more on Larry Cuba, see:

Larry’s personal site

Larry Cuba on the Star Wars “Wookipedia”

Maybe it’s time to re-write that history of computer animation.

WiiWhorld Released: Generative Visuals with Wiimote and Windows

By Jaymis

Aforementioned visual synthsizer slash exercise tool WiiWhorld has been released for public consumption.

Jeff Mission has tied together GlovePIE (for Bluetooth/Wiimote input (previously on CDMo)), Whorld, and his own secret sauce (a GlovePIE script to control Whorld).

Put them all together with a dash of virtual midi port, and you get this:

Or as Jeff describes it:

Whorld is a free, open-source, live visual synthesizer for sacred geometry. It uses math to create a seamless animation of mesmerizing psychedelic images. You can VJ with it, make unique digital artwork with it, or sit back and watch it like a screensaver. The WiiWhorld project makes it possible to control the Whorld visualizer with the Nintendo Wiimote.

WiiWhorld.