Hacker extraorindaire Gijs Gieskes has turned your local web browser into an insane, glitched-out audiovisual instrument. He writes:

Here is a new project, it involves using webcrawlers to make live visuals with music.
<http://gieskes.nl/browserjockey/>. works quite o.k.
The music is some of my old recordings on mini disc’s i still had.. mostly 2000 till 2003 i think, its just to show the scripts in action.
Some more description is here <http://gieskes.nl/?archive=browser-jockey>

Flickr? YouTube? Explode?

If you could actually circuit-bend web browser code, the results might look something like this. Think of it as a software short-circuit. (The famous example of that in digital art history is, of course, the Jodi collective — who need some help with their Wikipedia page, if any budding digital art historians want to give them a well-deserved lift!)

Warning: the info page actually changes its own style, automatically. I thought I had lost my mind for a second.

By the way, if you’re going to be in Portugal in May, I’m luck enough to be part of a panel at the incredible OFFF festival of “post-digital creation.” The panel has an odd, odd name, but a nice lineup (think heterodox?):

There’s a new guy in town…The Nerdferences Panel at OFFF 2009!
OFFF 2009 will host for the first time the panel “Nerdferences”, where we’ll focus on D.I.Y. technologies and other hetedorox approaches to the media.

Concepts such as open software and hardware, circuitbending, control surfaces, hacks and cracks will be our guidelines.

For the moment, we can announce that brilliant guys like Eric Wilhelm, Peter Kirn or Gijs Gieskes (www.gieskes.nl) will be there to help us getting our nerdism out. And some more to come…stay tunned! This panel is curated and presented by our collegue Julià Carboneras.

Ed.: Scott Pagano is one of a handful of people you could call visualist superstars. He’s become a headline staple with some key electronica events and artists. But that’s not why I’m excited to see him here - I’m thrilled that he geeks out on some of the same stuff that makes me hot and bothered, like avant-garde contemporary architecture. Inside Scott’s DIY software rig, and inside his visual imagination, here’s CDM contributor and leading visualist himself, Momo the Monster. -PK

»Where do you find inspiration? (things/artists)

Pagano: Photography, architecture, generative systems, cinema, nature, light, music. Artists:

live in mannheim at bseite festival from mr monkeypresso on Vimeo.

[Advisory: some women with pasties in there.]

David, aka Mr. Monkeypresso, was also at Manheim’s B Seite visual fest. He sends along some documentation of his live set, which made use of some visual tools of which we’re already quite fond:

a small demo of my latest live visuals what i did in mannheim, at the great bseite festival. I used here for first time my soft. developed in quartz composer. Thanks for all who helped me in this (Kineme, Vade, Memo and more). And thanks for Benjamin Jantzen for the festival.

For some of those Quartz Composer Mac resources, see our previous story:

VDMX + Quartz Composer, in Free Video Tutorials

And you might want to specifically check out CDMo contributor vade’s own Cocoa/QC projects:

v002

Plus of course the Kineme plug-ins and tutorials:

Kineme Quartz Composer Stuff

And the always-awesome Memo Akten, with lots of eye candy and still more QC resources:

Memo.tv

Korg has just publicly shown this trio of tiny USB controllers in London, and they look very tasty indeed for live visualism – small and thin enough to fit along the lip of a non-pro MacBook or 13” PC laptop, but with advanced assignment features, scene editing, and other features. That keyboard would go nicely with the new GrandVJ’s MIDI assignment features… and that could leave another laptop routed into a mixer with a bigger controller. No word on pricing or availability, but we’ll be watching. Full details on Create Digital Music:

Korg nanoKEY, nanoKONTROL, nanoPAD: Super Tiny MIDI Keyboard, Controller, Pads

Rechenzentrum at Mutek 2008 2 from Create Digital Media on Vimeo.

Far from randomly throwing some VJs in the background with music, there are some cases in which musician and visualist build a real relationship — just the sort of thing we care about here. CDM writers Liz and Peter Dines have been roaming the MUTEK festival in Montreal, and their dispatches and interviews are starting to come in. The word: audiovisualism is thriving.

Check out all the reports as they come in at our new “events” site, which we launched last week and we hope will grow into a kind of global event radar for music and motion:
events.noisepages.com

Peter was particularly taken with A/Visions, which is dedicated to audiovisualism. It’d be great to see this become more widespread at festivals here in North America (I gather it’s more common in Europe/UK). One very good sign: it was extremely difficult to get in.

Highlight so far: Liz has an interview with Rechenzentrum, the German A/V duo. Now, this bit may sound like a challenge to the Create Digital Motion community:

The video is live in the sense that I determine which image gets shown at which second, but obviously I’m not creating the image in real time because I’m not really interested in that. Real-time-created video usually looks pretty “blocky,” and I don’t really like it that much.

Curiously, though, he goes on to say:

It’s a mixture of pre-recorded video coming off a hard disk and live stuff reacting off of Marc’s music. But we’re not connected by any kind of MIDI connections or sound analysis. I just listen to his music and create stuff based on that. It’s a connection between our persons and not between our computers.

…. which sounds reasonably live to me. (I’m assuming he’s reacting badly to VJs unintentionally running lo-fi video not for aesthetic effect but just because they don’t know how to do anything else. And I expect we feel him on that.)

It does make me want to go do a big, blocky live visual set, though.

Full interview, with lots of good commentary about aesthetic issues, making it as A/V artists, and the relationship of sound and visual:
Interview: Rechenzentrum, A/V Duo at Mutek [Create Digital Music]

More from Mutek soon; stay tuned. (Below: more visuals from our friend Joshue, who’s really getting around with SuperDraw, his live generative visual tool built in Processing. Congrats!)