Brian Kane, designer, Emergency Broadcast Network co-founder, and Vujak co-creator (the first video sampler), has a brain full of wacky ideas. The latest: a study for a sculpture in stone that immortalizes what Apple officially calls the “Spinning Wait Cursor,” and what we call the pinwheel, or “(*&$*(&*(&!” (Well, depending on how zenlike you get.)

Need to calm yourself in the face of your computer grinding to a halt in CS4? Sit and contemplate (Brian plans a bench at some point.) Consider the nature of time, and the wisdom that can come from not doing, but waiting.

And then waiting some more.

And yes, the pinwheel has its own, copious Wikipedia entry.

From Brian’s own blog, slashboing

You know the types - I’d say I had a music video made in MS Paint, and you’d watch it and it’d turn out to be made by some hypergenius insomniac who made some intricate animated film using only the spraycan tool. Happily, that is not the case here. “jono” writes to tell us about his Microsoft Paint music video, which he made while he had the flu. And you may feel a wave of nostalgia for MS Paint or the Bill Atkinson-created MacPaint that Microsoft cloned, because the illustrations look like the illustrations you did while bored in computer class. (I may be projecting here.)

And then there’s a flying copy machine. It’s sublime.

klerical team - by New Zealand’s EFT
Electronic Masters of Tapestry [MySpace]

I am also really feeling the lyrics - seriously. I have so, so much to do … so much follow-up to do. Off to Gmail.

Also, they’re from New Zealand, so expect an HBO show next week.

Fans of vintage games with Macs, take note. Open Emu makes emulation of classic game systems a “first-class citizen” on the Mac. But if it were just a game emulator, well, it wouldn’t be news. What makes it news is that at its core, Open Emu is an open source platform and modular architecture into which your favorite game systems can be added as plug-ins. And thanks to that architecture, you can treat your favorite game systems as though they’re modules in a grand, 8-bit modular visual synth, crunching their textures into geometry, adding real-time effects, and controlling the whole thing with multiple controllers, audio, and MIDI.

In other words, Open Emu is like having a giant visual performance synth made from the tasty innards of classic games.

The platform has been in feverish development for some time, but today a major new release takes it further. Beta 2 of 1.0 extends the modularity of the platform, adds a finished Quartz Composer interface (allowing integration with other apps, live visuals, and graphical, modular patching using Apple’s development tool), and adds more emulation cores.

Supported game systems for emulation: Sega Master System, Game Gear, SG-1000, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, NES/Famicom, SNES/Super Famicom, Sega Genesis, Sega CD, and Sega 32x. (In the immortal words of Strongbad, ain’t got no Turbografx? Sounds like you just need one more plug-in.)

Game emulation is nothing new, but the programming team has build a friendly Mac front-end for a host of mature, popular emulation engines. They also fully support Mac technologies, even third-party niceties like Sparkle for automatic updates.

But, this being Create Digital Motion, we’re interested in the live visualist-friendly features:

• High-quality OpenGL scaling, multithreaded playback, and other optimizations
• Audio or MIDI actually plays the game (and can also be used to make the game line up with music)
• Play multiple ROMs at the same time
• Real-time 3D effects, image processing - and route game controllers to those effects

In other words, you can jack in your favorite MIDI controller and go nuts with your favorite games, turning them into a live performance medium - then mashing up the resulting textures with real-time, 3D/2D effects. The Nestopia engine supports ROM glitching, cheat codes, and game rewinding — essential so that in-game death doesn’t also kill your set, and so you can play with the aesthetic of glitchy cartridges without blowing on a classic game cart.

Squarely in the “because you can” category: YouDisco is a research project at New York’s Eyebeam that simultaneously streams up to eight YouTube videos onto a rotating virtual disco ball. Frame rate is … well, impressive given what it’s doing. The project is the work of Jennifer Jacobs at Eyebeam “with the help of Jeff Crouse.”

http://youdisco.jenniferj.net/?id=51

What is interesting about this is that you do get interesting effects on a computer screen when you leave 4:3 rectangles behind, just as in projection.

Along the same lines, though focused on a mash-up of two videos side by side (sometimes to hilarious effect):

http://www.youtubedoubler.com/ (which is, for me, playing Shatner yelling “Kahn!”)

Lots of interesting graffiti and motion and illustration work on Jennifer’s blog, like this piece:

Nurse from jennifer jacobs on Vimeo.

Hi from Multitouch Barcelona on Vimeo.

For those of you who think that there’s a guy living inside your computer that makes all the magic happen… now there can be.

The gang at Multitouch Barcelona (recently spotted at OFFF) have posted a cheeky project that imagines a real human interface. Microsoft Bob has nothing on this.

I love the way in which this pulls apart the notions behind all these interfaces, and especially the use of the space inside the box. So, could we see practical applications? Will we all be communicating soon by remote multi-touch? (I’ll leave you to imagine the naughty or downright absurd and slapstick implications of that.)

Via preciousforever / Christophe Stoll on Twitter.