Joshue Ott/superDraw +Ezekiel Honig live at monkeytown from superdraw on Vimeo.

I’m very excited about the music lineup we have planned for this Friday in New York at the CDM-curated evening of live audio and visuals – but the visual lineup should be a big draw, too. If you’re in New York, come say hi (and if not, hope to have more details on these projects for the rest of the planet soon):

• Joshue Ott creates live visuals with his homemade superDraw generative illustration tool
• Paris (Voltage Controlled) and Don Miller (No Carrier) create glitchy, lo-fi visuals from custom-created 8-bit visual software on Nintendo and Commodore systems
• vade and Mary Ann Benedetto will visualize and reinterpret geeky things (possibly the Linux kernel, data packets, or both) using custom code and Quartz Composer stuff — we should even see a free release of some of those tools in time for the gig, so stay tuned to CDM
• Bill Jones creates live cinematic worlds inspired by sci-fi noir

Where: The Hotel Pennsylvania, New York City (map); head to the main door, on your left is the entrance to Penn Pavilion and you should see a table there.

When: Friday, July 18 2008 – performances run 11pm – 2am

Cost: US$10 at the door. First come, first served. (free if you have a conference badge)

We Are Hacks: Music and Visual Performance at HOPE, NYC – Preview

http://www.thelasthope.org/

Facebook event page (RSVP if you’re coming! Also on Going.com)

Above: one of my favorite videos from superDraw (Processing-based) by Joshue Ott above, though it’s even better to see it in person with the live drawing capabilities. Below: all-custom 8-bit-style software generates visuals, via Paris.

Function Field System - PureData/GEM from Paris/VoltageControlled on Vimeo.

Cranford Rose Garden Time-lapse at Brooklyn Botanic Garden from Brooklyn Botanic Garden on Vimeo.

Whether at the scale of a frame, a tiny sample, or a period of days, digital is all about the manipulation of time. So it’s fitting that our friend Chris Jordan focuses in his work on the expressive potential of timelapse, and that he runs New York’s T-Minus, a festival devoted to timelapse. You’ve got some time to get in your submissions for this year’s T-Minus – the call for works follows – but I wanted to press Chris a bit on why manipulations of time are important to him, and what works he finds inspiring.

Among his picks, above from just over the river at the wonderful Brooklyn Botanic Garden (and yes, there are idyllic places like this within the five boroughs):

This time-lapse shows three days in the life of the Cranford Rose Garden at Brooklyn Botanic Garden as thousands of roses bloom in early June.
To create the unique perspective, each still frame of the video was treated with a tilt-shift lens effect in Photoshop.
For more information on the Cranford Rose Garden, visit bbg.org/roses
The music is by Jon Solo. His website is myspace.com/jonsolomusic.

Chris explains how he became a video Time Lord – and how even raindrops can take on new meaning when time is compressed. I got him thinking out loud in email:

It’s a jumble of things that draw me to time manipulated work, some personal, some societal, all technological.

One theme that inspires T-Minus is how boring the majority of documentation video is, yet the market sells more and more video cameras, and the entire industry around video is thriving. For what? Think how many times you’ve sat and watched a documented event.  I think of the massive amount of energy and resources that go into consumer video. Wedding videos are a great example. Sure there may be something compelling to you if you’re the one at the alter. But we’re recording too much, saving it, calling it precious, and never actually seeing it again. Instead, if people captured timelapse, they would have the best of both worlds, and save petabytes of data.

The primary creative theme in time-based artwork that inspires me is the idea of the unexplored relationships surrounding us, just waiting to be unearthed. Video editors and VJ’s know some of the excitement around these relationships. But there’s generally in those contexts the studio mindset that comes into play, instilling classic ideas of composition, color, line, movement. I use the analogy of baking a cake to the capturing of time. You put the ingredients together,  put it in the oven, and see what you get. The result always brings out a pattern you wouldn’t have seen or thought existed. I put a camera six feet out off my fire escape on East Broadway once, pointing up the street. When I compiled the footage, I was perplexed to see the frame shift significantly, yet very slowly, over the course of 12 hours. What I realized was when it rained during the recording, the water accumulation and then drying caused the board to warp and twist, shifting the camera’s view. Or how city lights appear through drying raindrops in front of the lens. Or how the shadow of a church slides across the buildings during certain times of the year out my studio window. All these things are incredibly intriguing to me.

CDMotion contributor vade sends word of some experiments he’s been doing with inter-application video sharing. The basic idea: start with live imagery in one place (like a Processing sketch, for instance), and feed those visuals into another app for adding effects, mixing, and output (like VDMX). Naturally, you’d want to do this without a performance tax.

vade’s solution – Mac-only – uses live visual capture to send the output of one tool to another, all on the GPU. Performance looks great, but the big problem is that the window has to stay in the front. Still, I can already imagine uses for this.

Source-ry [abstrakt.vade.info]

That’s just one approach, though. Could we eventually even have a full-blown inter-application visual routing solution, one that might work between apps, platforms, or computers? I can imagine a few approaches that might work, though performance is always the challenge.

Quartz Composer gurus have had to face challenges bringing in network data: the problem is, to keep Quartz Compositions secure, Apple has largely crippled networking features. Celso Martinho has been hacking QC to make networking work in Leopard, and has a functional solution. He wrote us to tip us off on a detailed post at his blog.

First, if you’re still on Tiger, good news:

I needed a way to get data from the Network in the form of events that I could reuse in a quartz composition. So our resident mac programmer coded this custom made patch based on sparse non official documentation found on the internet. And it worked great. We have about 5 plasma screens with mac minis over at work running it for months, no problems whatsoever.

But while Leopard finally offered an official means of making your own patches (that’s what the rest of the patching world calls “objects”, Max/MSP, vvvv, and Pd users), Leopard also breaks their custom patch. Solution?

Then I found 2 patches in the new “Network” category: Network Broadcaster and Network Receiver. They are meant to connect several qtz compositions across the network and exchange messages between them. But maybe I can use them for something else…

I wrote a quartz composition to broadcast messages using UDP and multicast and started debugging and I discovered that the packets are really simple non-crippled text messages, four bytes per character iso-latin encoded chunks.

If you’re doing heavy-duty networking, I’d still investigate other alternatives to make sure Quartz Composer is your best choice. Processing and Max/MSP/Jitter both make short work of UDP send/receive, thanks to Java’s natural abilities there, as do objects in vvvv, Pd, and the like. Even Flash has some data features, with a little work. On the other hand, QC has some natural tricks of its own, and for multi-machine setups, the combination of this hack with QC’s new multi-computer features is very sweet indeed.

Full details, plus a PHP script that does the dirty work, here:

Leopard’s Quartz Composer and Network events [Celso Martinho]

iPhone development continues despite a lack of SDK. Masayuki Akamatsu has updated his native iPhone OSC client aka.iphone to 2.1, and includes plethora of screen/input configurations to suit your mobile performance needs. The update should suit typical VJ and Dj applications with its range of GUI sliders, knobs, button grids, etc.

If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, be sure and check out aka.iphone. Very cool stuff. Yes, sorry, another Apple oriented update. Shoot me.

[Ed.: Note you will want Max/MSP/Jitter to work with this app, though I think it should work with Windows, too; I just lack a machine that can test it. Be sure to see also Masayuki's complete Max collection, which now covers everything from Wii remotes to 3D SpaceNavigator controllers, Apple Remotes, and even the motion sensor in the MacBook Pro. Completely brilliant. And needless to say, even if you don't want to hop on AT&T's mobile network, this gives you options with iPod Touch, too, even if you can't play Phase on that. -PK]

Mobile, touch control of visual apps? We’ve seen one way to do it; here’s an even more compatible MIDI approach. I think I’d stick to the iPod Touch, personally, just to conserve battery on a phone. But it’s interesting. -PK

Hot on the heels of Mrmr, ArtificialEyes (the Istanbul-based VJ collective) have released i3L MIDI Bridge for the iPhone, which builds on Masayuki Akamatsu’s aka.remote.app, giving those without Max/MSP skills a simple way to bridge their iPhone and audio/video performance software of choice.

i3L (pronounced “i thrill”) is Freeware, and was developed using Max/MSP from Cycling74 and is a support application for aka.remote by Masayuki Akamatsu i3L receives pre-defined UDP messages from aka.remote.app running on the iPhone, scales the values to MIDI, and allows you to configure the sending MIDI channel and control change message number. While this software was developed to work seamlessly with our Real-time 3D VJ software Thrill, you can use this program with any audio or video software which receives midi messages.

If you give i3L a try, let us know how it works out for you in the comments.

artificialeyes.tv
aka.objects by Masayuki Akamatsu — must-have stuff for Max/MSP/Jitter!

Ed.: Does anyone know if multi-touch gestures would be possible in DIY apps? Maybe in February when Apple shares the official SDK? -PK

Want to wear your video on your sleeve? Wearaware Design hacked the cradle for the Archos line of video devices in ways that make the device both more practical and more … wearable. How? By eliminating the cradle, an always-worthy goal:

The cradle itself is not necessary for accessing any of the A/V i/o ports at all: the signals pass right on through. The cradle is bulky, wasted space; its octopus of fixed cabling is long, messy, and weighs more than the cradle itself. All the cradle really offers is IR and Serial protocols and a power tap for the meager circuitry. Plus, with a serial-USB dongle, and perhaps a microcontroller you can still likely add them without the cradle.

With less space, it’s possible to wear around your Archos video player around. And since the Archos has video outs, this could quickly become a fabulous VJ/visualist tool. Media artist/designer (or, we’d say, visualist) Ross Bochnek presented his hacks at a Maker workbench over the weekend at Maker Faire:

Archos PMA/AV Series Cradle Connector Cloning (Detailed instructions at at pointlisse.com)
Wearable Computing Hacks (workbench details at makerfaire.com)

Now, I need to see if I can learn from this lesson to eliminate every single unreliable Sony connector I have on my DV cam.

I am currently in the midst of an awesome toys storm! This week has seen the arrival of a Macbook, Crumpler Backpack and I just picked up my M3 DS Simply from the post office. With a Numark AVM02 arriving tomorrow, I’m worried that I’ll become paralysed by the sheer weight of cool techy stuff. Hence: Pocket Review!

Peter put the DS Lite and DS-Xtreme in his Digital Musician Holiday Wish List. I picked up a DS a couple of weeks ago, but thought the DS-Xtreme looked a little pricey and wanted something which would use SD or MicroSD media, as they’re the formats used by my still camera and phone.

Et volia. The Nintendo DS M3 Simply. A choice echoed by a comment made on CDM 3 days ago. AU$61 (US$48) delivered from Bamboo Gaming, it arrived in 9 days, and includes a “thumbdrive” form factor MicroSD reader, driver CD, and a cute little holder to attach to your keyring or mobile phone lanyard or nose ring or whatever it is the cool kids are doing on my lawn.

That’s all interesting, but there are loads of reviews online which could tell you what you’ll get in the box if you buy one of these things. What they don’t really get across is how simple this thing is. Following these instructions it took me less than ten minutes to go from this:

To this! Nitrotracker. DSMidiWifi baybee!

Modding my XBox to run Media Center was complicated enough that I enlisted another geek to do it for me. Getting homebrew running on the DS took less time than copying and resizing the above images.

Nintendo DS M3 Simply: Recommended! [tags]nintendo, DS, homebrew, trackers, gaming, midi, hacks, hardware, mobile, software, wireless[/tags]

Updated: I had to patch NitroTracker with DLDI for R4DS using the instructions here to get NitroTracker accessing the filesystem and saving correctly.

DIY hardware isn’t just for abstract and noise musicians any more: visualists are getting in on the act. While on the subject of glitchy visuals from bent gaming hardware, GetLoFi reports this week on several new DIY projects to delight the eyes.

The EX PMX is a homemade analog video synth that … does … something. Something with lasers. And stepper motors, for sequencing audio and video. Good grief, I think you can actually create whole rhythmic sequences just by mechanically switching video inputs. (And as regular readers know, it’s rare that I’m completely stumped on what something does, meaning this gets extra cool points.)

EX PMX homemade video analog synths [GetLoFi]

For fans of glitchy, distorted visuals, Tokyo, Japan was just host to a whole workshop on creating visual bends from toys, Famicom game systems (the original NES, as shipped in Japan), and more. Details again at GetLoFi:

Visual Bending Workshop in Tokyo, Japan [GetLoFi]

You can watch the event in photos and videos at this Japanese site:

Visual Bending Workshop [Photos, Videos, Japanese-language description]

For those new to this, GetLoFi is definitely the best site to watch for circuit-bending, musical and visual. Now back to programming ActionScript, though it sure would be nice to have some hardware to hack, too — controllers and switchers should keep even those who dislike glitchy aesthetics in their own work plenty busy.

[tags]hardware, hacks, DIY, synthesis, video, circuit-bending, Japan[/tags]

Circuit bender Gijs Gieskes does work that can be seen as beautiful kinetic sculptures as much as instruments and synthesizers. That’s certainly the case with his Sega MegaDrive2: watch as he reroutes patch cords via magnetic connections in a lovely tangle of wires, or listen to the mechanical sounds of the device in operation. (This bend isn’t intended as a musical instrument as some of his previous work has been, but the incidental noise of it running sounds great, anyway.) He’s designed the whole thing to pack into a small, wooden suitcase for on-the-go visuals.

And, while we’ve seen distorted and broken video output from game consoles, here the patches create a rhythm of glitchy images. That, and there’s something strangely satisfying about watching Yogi Bear run through a dystopian snowstorm of analog static.

GIESKES.NL/CIRCUITBENDING/SEGAMEGADRIVE2 [Artist site; photos and description]
Bent Sega MegaDrive2 in action [QT Video]

[tags]circuit-bending, hacks, gaming, glitch, synthesis, oddities[/tags]