Space exploration has had a deep impact on the way a lot of us see the world and think about our art. So I can’t wait for this Saturday’s Yuri’s Night Bay Area, which will bring a convergence of bleeding-edge music, art, technology, science, and visualism to a 12 hour-long party on NASA’s airfield outside San Francisco. We’ll be bringing some of the best of this event to you all around the world. Read or subscribe to RSS for our special minisite to make sure you don’t miss a thing, wherever you are on the planet; updates will continue live through the event and in the couple of weeks afterward:

yuricdm.com: Yuri + CDM + music + motion
yuricdm.com RSS feed

If you’re near the Bay Area, let us know if you’re coming to the event. We’d love help with photos, video, and coverage. And if you’re involved in a Yuri’s Night somewhere else in the world, let us know about that, too.

Here’s just a sample of the visualist angle at Yuri’s Bay Area:

I had the pleasure of participating in this year’s Motion Graphics Festival, and just being there provided enough inspiration for a year’s worth of projects.

I’ve tried to track down and compile some of the highlights that really struck me as being innovative and interesting. The actual environments were so saturated with visual media that it was tough to take it all in, so I’ve also enlisted the help of a few participants/attendees to sort it all out.

Regine at We Make Money Not Art has a fantastic overview (summarizing a recent workshop) of presenting data and numbers visually:

Visualizing: tracing an aesthetics of data

It’s a great read; well worth working through the whole thing.

The art of presenting data more expressively is exploding fast. It was a big part of the impetus behind the creation of Processing, the artistic coding tool. (In fact, a lot of those post reminds me of some of the ideas Ben Fry explored at a workshop I attended in Aspen, Colorado. While Processing is often used by artists for other purposes, it was born as a means of making data visual.)

Ben describes data visualization as “thinking with the eyes” — provocative stuff. But coming from a music background, I’m always interested in the senses going beyond thought. Could data become a live performance tool? With Processing (and other tools) in the hands of VJs/visualists, there’s nothing preventing artists from taking that next step.

If you’re going to South by Southwest Interactive (March in Austin), I’ll be presenting a panel (and possibly one or two events) on data as art, both in visuals and music, and will speak specifically to this question of performance tool. Already confirmed for the panel session is pioneering interaction designer S. Joy Mountford, who led Appple’s International Interface Design Project and is now on Yahoo’s Design Innovation Team. More details on that event soon.

What happens when data artists and interaction designers collide with VJs and digital musicians? I’m excited to find out.

Here in Los Angeles the weather is currently sunny and warm - great for going to the park, but not so much for creating that Xmas/New Year’s Wintry feeling. Here’s a patch you can use to fill the room with snowy interactive goodness. Fire up your Projector, Big Screen TV, or Wrist-worn LCD Display and let it snow!

Here’s a clip of the patch in action:

Interactive Snowflake Maker from momo_the_monster on Vimeo.

You can download the Quartz Composer patch here:
Momo the Monster: Interactive Snowflake Generator (Direct Download)

Open it up in Quartz Composer, and drag your mouse pointer over the output window to make beautiful silvery patterns. If you want to go full-screen with it, I recommend you set the monitor to 640×480 to keep a good framerate.

I’ve got a version controlled by a joystick that I put together for my Company’s holiday party - let me know if you make anything new out of it! Enjoy, and Happy Everything.

Cheer, indeed. We know how badly many of you want to get out from behind your laptop and out into a venue once in a while. Here’s a solution: wear your display. And it helps if that display has the insane interactive capabilities that this one does. Marco Tempest of newmagic.com writes CDMo:

A little X-Mas greeting for all of you! Showing of my Photonic T-Shirt. Wearable visuals. Haha…

I’m still working out whether that “haha” is an evil scientist “I’ll take over the world with this” laugh, a laugh at the rest of us that don’t have one of these t-shirts, or a jolly laugh of holiday delight. I’m betting some combination of the three. (Or, as suggested in comments, simply “hahaha, this isn’t actually real.” I take it then as inspiration to make something that does this but actually, you know, works, without needing sly magicians and fakery. I’ll leave it to you to determine what’s going on.) Just watch:

Ever miss 1995? In 1995, this passed for online entertainment: static web pages, some 20-somethings hanging out in casual- and swim-wear, and the ability to talk back to the “cast.”

Welcome to the Spot. We’re a bunch of friends sharing a beach house in Santa Monica, California.

Everyday we put up this website and tell the world about our lives through our daily journals.

We can also interact with you - but only if you come in!

The Spot, at the Internet Archive

Well, okay, actually, it didn’t really pass; I remember checking out its launch that year as a novelty but think few people really stuck with it. It returned, undead, in 2004. No one cared (wisely). Well, now The Spot is back again. Except it’s on the Rupert Murdoch-owner MySpace, has video, and has actually widened, not narrowed, the gap with trashy reality TV shows like Laguna Beach. (Ha! See, manufacturing Cheez Whiz isn’t as easy as you thought, is it?)

Roommates (Don’t click that. Really. I could believe Roommates could cause gastrointestinal distress even for a die-hard trash TV fan — maybe especially for them.)

But, somewhere out of this hideousness, is there a lesson for how we think about “new media” (as we called it in 1995)?

Chris O’Shea (also of the blog Pixelsumo) has a brilliant installation that allows people to see through walls. It’s an idea I’ve seen done before, but Chris actually makes the effect convincing, by giving visitors an infrared torch (what we’d call a flashlight here in the States, though torch in this case is an even better word). Software tracks the position of the IR emitter via an overhead security camera, and the whole thing is coded to make the impact realistic.

Software is coded in OpenCV (an open-source computer vision library from Intel, in C++) and OpenFrameworks (a lightweight multimedia C++ framework for artists, on some level trying to do for C++ what Processing has done for Java).

There is a childlike quality about wanting the ability to see through walls with x-ray vision like a superhero character. This memory is something Chris O’Shea wants to capture in the interactive installation Out of Bounds. The work encourages visitors to bore through the walls of the museum and engage in a ‘behind the scenes’ experience with an x-ray torch. This playful interaction encourages childlike curiosity in young and old alike, and opens up a portal into the Museum’s forbidden spaces.

Shine the torch at the wall to reveal the secrets hidden beneath. Pay an anonymous visit to the staff office, collection’s store, workshop, roof hatch or plant room.

Out of Bounds on Pixelsumo
Designers in Residence Program, Design Museum, London
Now showing at DesignTide, Tokyo
Out of Bounds Project Description, Documentation

Seeing the IR Rainbow

The results are so realistic, Chris says he’s gotten emails from people thinking it was real. But the whole effect is purely illusion; IR emitters of this type (near-infrared) aren’t capable of penetrating surfaces. That’s something I had to explain to people when I was using IR-sensitive cameras myself (nothing fancier than a DV cam in night vision mode). Higher up the IR spectrum, it is possible to sense heat through walls, though the effect is nothing like the Superman “X-ray vision” seen here.

But among those fooled by near-IR’s “magical” properties? The US government, evidently. It seems our government, in the latest expression of its infinite wisdom, has placed import/export bans on simple IR flashlights for security reasons. (This sounds really odd, even for us; if anyone knows more about this, I’m curious to know.) I’m not sure what the precise security threat would be; maybe commandeering someone’s TiVO by shining at its remote control receiver? Don’t tell the US government, but there’s all kinds of mobile lighting technology that allows you to see in the dark, too. Like Mag-Lites.

Reimagining Projection

What I most like about this project, separate from how lovely it is as installation art, is that it breaks up the projection itself. The spotlight mechanism is simple, but it suggests the potential for letting viewers control projection, and “virtualizing” the projected image rather than letting it simply be a rectangle. (Not that I don’t love rectangular images — I sure spent a lot of time watching TV episodes in rectangles this weekend. But you get the idea.) I’ll be interested to see how ideas like this show up in clubs and performances.

Sure, you have fun with your one projector. But don’t you sometimes want to add giant water fountains, with water projection? And more video? And fire? And lasers? And some creepy wizard guy? In South Korea, spending money on such things seems strangely commonplace, as at the multimedia/fountain installation at Kangwon Land / High One Resort. Friend of CDM (and Jaymis) Rainer Knobloch had a major role in the project. This definite counts as our Massive Neo-Baroque Multimedia Spectacle of the Day.

Seen other stuff like this you liked? Let us know in comments.

Believe it or not, people making art with webcams don’t rate very highly on the priority list for big computer companies. (Who would have thought?) On the PC, at least, there’s a thriving market for webcams for video chat, since so few PCs have built-in cameras. Meanwhile, on the Mac, Apple has absolutely zero interest in you using any webcams other than those built into their machines, or, if you’re lucky, one of the FireWire iSights Apple made before Apple discontinued them. (Given the high failure rate I’ve seen on the iSights, that assumes you’re lucky enough not only to have found one, but to have it still working.) Ditto, naturally, third-party manufacturers, since there’s unlikely to be any significant market for their wares — and they’re busy navigating the morass of driver development complexity on PCs.

Long story short: the Creative Labs Live! Optia I raved about in the fall is one of the few choices you’ve got that doesn’t require drivers. It’s USB video class-compliant, though unlike other USB classes, it’s not entirely clear that that’s all that meaningful.

But, for several glorious months, through last week, I was able to keep my Live Optia working perfectly with Processing (and thus QuickTime for Java) and QuickTime (via tools like Jitter). Until today, that is. Now I’ve got two of them, five Macs to test, and — nada. On 10.4.10 / QT 7.2 and 10.4.8 / QT 7.1.3 and 7.2, I get either a black screen or (in QuickTime video capture) garbled video. It looks like the sequence grabber isn’t properly setting the resolution, so pixels are being dumped arbitrarily from the camera … I suspect the other errors I’m seeing are also related. USB video class support is relatively new; it only hit iChat in 10.4.9 and may have reached the OS at the same time — I would know for sure, except documentation from Apple is scant.

I suspect some misbehaved QuickTime update, though I find it especially odd that it fails on multiple machines (all Intel — iMac, MacBook, MacBook Pro, and Mac mini) with different versions. I’ve tried reinstalling QT, zapping NVRAM (formerly PRAM), the lot. For once, I can’t blame QuickTime for Java, because everything else is broken, too.

Webcams working some of the time under unpredictable circumstances don’t inspire confidence. Suggestions, anyone? Any idea why this is happening? Anyone got a rock-solid solution for Mac webcams that doesn’t spontaneously cease functioning?

Incidentally, Windows isn’t much better; weird driver bugs there can cause fabulous results like an echo-cancellation driver knocking out USB MIDI devices, driver-related blue screens of death, and other goodies.

Maybe I should just start making my own cameras and writing my own drivers. Yeah, that’s it.

There you are: the party is amazing. Beautiful people everywhere, dancing as though it’s their last night on Earth. Bodies in sweaty, packed mo– [screeching record sound] — erm, okay, actually, you’re stuck behind a computer / VJ gear. Again. We’ve seen attempts to solve this problem before; only Tuesday night, in fact, I saw a DJ/PA set where the musician was wandering the floor with a wireless Xbox 360 controller and headset, manipulating Pd remotely. But here’s one novel solution: pack all your computer VJ tools into a wireless, battery-powered wrist brace:

Belmer Negrillo - On the Body [Project page, videos, technical details]

The basic controls: “pin buttons”, which actually use RFID tags for different commands, plus an accelerometer for controlling visuals with actual motion. Interestingly, the Wrist-Brace controller is designed to be adapted both to the discriminating VJ and the live clubber, so you can simplify the interactions for friends you make out on the dance floor. The project was produced for a class focusing on wearable interfaces called “On the Body” at Italy’s famed Ivrea Interaction Design Institute.

The interface looks great, though it makes me want to build controls into an oven mitt. (Sorry, couldn’t help but make the comparison.)

The title for the product is great: GoDance!

One technical problem not solved by this product: VJs with no rhythm / no coordination. You’ll have to sort out what to do on the dance floor on your own.

Got a preferred solution of your own / seen something similar? Or do you prefer to hide behind banks of hardware, safe from the dangers of the dance floor (maybe that’s why you went into this in the first place)? Let us know.