Imagine what’s now possible with a mobile phone: anyone with a supported device can jam with other artists, walk up to an installation, connect to other creators and other software, all using supported protocols. Leaving behind the days of painstaking manual adjustment of MIDI commands and obscure drivers, and even the act of having to physically connect gear, software - and with it, digital art - can simply talk to each other in standard ways.
That’s why we’re excited about software like Memo Atken’s MSA Remote. It uses the standardization provided by the network-savvy, open protocol OSC, with additional plug-and-play (or, erm, don’t plug, do play) functionality from the TUIO protocol. OSC provides the communication; TUIO makes the messages standardized.
To avoid confusion: You do NOT need a Mac to use OSC. OSCulator is a cool app - and makes bridging to MIDI easier - but it’s just one tool among many. You can use this app with Windows and Linux, too, and visual apps like VDMX, Resolume Avenue, Pd/GEM, Processing… the list goes on. In fact, almost every visual app today worth using uses OSC, even as the music world is painfully slow to catch on.
Here’s a really elegantly-designed multi-touch table. It uses two really key pieces of open source technology: the Community Core Vision (“CCV”) tracker, formerly known as tbeta, and a lovely framework for coding visuals called PyMT.
PyMT, as the name implies, is a Python-based framework. I’ve gotten to know Nathanaël Lécaudé, a talented artist and coder who was nice enough to put me up a couple of nights while I was in Montreal; he’s one of several core coders. They’re doing a lot to really encapsulate functionality in widgets in a nice way. Features of PyMT include an event framework, specialized widgets for gesture, touch, and layout, and connections to OpenGL, OpenGL shaders, and sound. You can even work with the enduring, evergreen synthesis language Csound using its Python bridge, the oddly-named but powerful Ounk.
Of course, that’s all plumbing. It’s nice to see this applied to something powerful and educational. From the Vimeo description:
"Puddle of Life" is an educational multi-touch installation that was designed for Coimbra’s Science Museum (Darwin exhibit), demonstrating the theory of natural selection, as part of Darwin’s 200th anniversary.
The installation is composed of a round multi-touch table whose surface represents a virtual environment where 4 species of creatures live in. Each of these little creatures have different physical characteristics visually expressed by it’s quantity and/or size: Vision, Locomotion and Fur.
The player interacts with the game by touching the surface. He has to maintain full awareness of his creatures emotions (visually represented by a cartoon like ballon) and using this information to properly choose the mating partners on the control console. This console also allows the user to select the most appropriate descendent from 4 possible mutations, resulting from the reproduction.
The player’s objective is to help the species he controls achieve the highest number of creatures of its kind. Since this world suffers from climate change the player must assure that his creatures are well adapted to this ever-changing environment by choosing the best balance between mating partners and descendants.
The species move in a swarm, but they split when the predator is near. When a creature sees food it warns the nearby siblings and they all run towards it. Of course only the ones who have best locomotion reach it. The vision gives them the ability to see the predator sooner and the ability to see the food further ahead too. The fur is useful to them when the temperature is low but harmful when it’s hot, leading the creature to a shorter lifespan.
The player wins when they reach about 18 living creatures and loses when all of it’s creatures die from cold/hot, predation, famine or old age.
The project is the work of Tiago Serra and his collaborators, who have also been PyMT contributors (see comments). Great work, gang. We’ll be watching for more.
Calling Nam Jun Paik a video art pioneer would be too narrow to describe his impact. In exploding the idea of what television and television processing could be in his art, he helped create a conceptual revolution that cleared the path for today’s ubiquitous and always-dynamic screens. But to really understand that work, you might want to delve into the theory of cybernetics, for the same reasons that can help understand early, radical electronic music and the path we’re on today.
Rhizome has a lovely essay by Carolyn Kane, framed by a new gallery show in New York. That show should be a pilgrimage for ardent Paikists. With animal-machine hybrids and screens everywhere, this is the cybernetic thought process made manifest, just at a time when we’re finding new insight into our relationship with technology as it becomes mobile.
As a Buddha gazes into a screen, visualists can contemplate being the screens on which they project. As Kane writes:
Paik is well known for transforming the architectural function of the television set from a mere box to an element distributed in space. However, these interventions must also be contextualized with his ongoing interest in cybernetics, a theory of animals and machines in their environment. In 1971 Paik asserted that today, the “nature of [the] environment is much more on TV than on film or painting. In fact, TV (its random movement of tiny electrons) is the environment.”
Maybe it’s time for some new visualist manifestos.
Aside from cool aesthetic effects, projection mapping (mapping projection precisely onto real-world objects) and augmented reality (what you get when you add digital projections to your reality) can be useful.
So, while we’ve already seen plenty of projections on walls and floors, this is a projection on a climbing wall. It might seem silly, but climbers use other means of keeping track of which way to go. This provides multiple paths on the same wall without extraneous information. It’s a wall that can actually help teach you to climb, without someone at the bottom shouting at you. From the description:
iOO Climb turns every ordinary climbing wall into an augmented and interactive climbing experience. Thousands of boulders and routes can now be saved on a single wall, and browsed and played using a single remote control. Climbers can thus focus on their climbing experience, forgetting numbered stickers and colored stripes. Climbing routes are displayed only where and when it is needed.
Via Hacked Gadgets, and sent our way by Drew Atienza. (Thanks!)
I’m bad enough at climbing that I could probably use some projections giving me digital encouragement. Create Digital Exercise, anyone?
Keith, maker of a wearable wristwatch Theremin, sends his Ars Electronica-winning project Moving Mario. Yes, this is just the sort of thing you might think of, but not actually do. He did it:
It’s a gimmick, of course, but I really like the questions it raises. By making Mario’s virtual space physical, you really have to think about the universe the game creates. And as a person interested in the architecture of virtual spaces, it also makes me wonder what else might be possible. (I’m personally still waiting for Mirror’s Edge to hit the PC, though I’ve heard more motion sickness as the transcendent experience than some sort of new sense of virtual motion.)
Remember, too, the gaming-themed art event Game On (with a call for your visualist works and loops) launches on November 22, Australian time. That gives you a few more days (until about the 19th) to get your work in to curator and CDMotion co-editor Jaymis.
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