I’m sure that after all of our gentle prompting, people are keeping a watchful RSS reader over Flight404.

For those who haven’t been paying attention: The latest iteration in Robert’s wonderfully evolving Magnetosphere series was designed for the AniBoom Radiohead video contest:

Weird Fishes: Arpeggi from flight404 on Vimeo.

More information.

Solar, with lyrics. from flight404 on Vimeo.

People can argue and theorize about digital art as a medium all they want. The answer is as simple as a simple word:

Iterate.

Do it over and over and over again in little bits developing techniques. Start small, add small, but keep adding over and over and over again. Iterate.

flight404 does that about as well as anyone in the Processing community, and it shows. His latest visualization of a Goldfrapp tune, now with lyrics, is stunning. And the addition of lyrics shows that these kind of techniques aren’t just eye candy — they can convey information, and do it elegantly and expressively.

Robert’s techniques are typically far from real-time, so part of why I enjoy them so much is they’re a challenge to those of us on the performance end to figure out how to do more interesting things live.

The other interesting thing here is the beat detection. Eventually, he wound up adding the beats manually, as detailed in the post linked here. That in itself is telling to me — as a composer, having worked on scoring and how things line up creatively, I’ve always found indirect relationships compelling. So this speaks to me of the importance of creating some imperfect algorithms, algorithms that don’t always line up so they challenge our ear and eye to make the connection.

Oh, and I love the fact that “Frankenstein” appears in the end, like a cameo by Alfred Hitchcock.

Solar, with lyrics [ Flight 404 ]

(It’s a long weekend in the US, so I figured we could handle double the inspiration.)

It’s been almost 6 months since we posted about Shiffman’s Most Pixels Ever processing library, but that doesn’t mean there’s been no progress.

Recently he’s left the lab and ensconced himself in front of the IAC Video Wall, bringing Most Pixels Ever to the screen with the most pixels to give.

Run Lola Run Lola Run Lola Run Lola Run from shiffman and Vimeo.

A little technical detail, with an announcement:

Each cell of video is 60×45 pixels. The entire system is run by 3 Mac Pros each pumping out 2720×768 (totaling 8160×768 for the entire wall.) I’m going to be releasing the Processing library/framework this week! Stay tuned!

Releasing the library? You mean this library?

The site is still a little lean, but early adopters can download the Alpha version and read a little about running it with processing.

Bouncy bouncy!

Adrien Mondot has posted a preview of his latest creation for OS X - eMotion. eMotion is an physically modeled, OpenGL powered particle engine enabled app that is Quartz Composer friendly, has an incredible text engine, and has Wii remote, wacom tablet, OSC and sudden motion sensor inputs to drive parameters. Watch the video to see for yourself, the text effects are quite amazing.

Unfortunately no public beta is currently available. You can check out Adriens other Quartz Composer and OpenGL related projects (with downloads and source) on his blog. Be sure to check out the “Simple Time Remap” application, it seems like the smoothest video scratching tool Ive come across.

eMotion looks to be an incredibly powerful and smooth addition to any VJ setup, especially with its Quartz Composer integration and text-savvy nature. This is one to keep an eye on. We’ll try and get you more details on eMotion, but for now you can lust after its mysterious ways and watch that video.

I was about to post about Daniel Shiffman’s new MPE (Most Pixels Ever) Library, when what should appear in my Processing Blogs subscription, but an extended video showing more of the ITP lab, and The Shiff (first ever rockstar processing nickname? I hope so) himself talking about the project.

Preface: If you love Processing - as we do here at CDMo - then you should already be subscribed to ProcessingBlogs, and have probably already seen this. However it’s too cool not to add to our Processing.org tag page. Hence this post.

“Most Pixels Ever” (not to be confused with “Best Pixels Ever”) is an open source Java framework for spanning real-time graphics applets/applications across multiple screens. The above video is a quick demonstration of the first prototype. Three client applications on three Mac Pros connect to six 32 inch LCD displays (each Mac has a dual video card, but this could just have easily work with 6 client machines). One of the Macs is also running a server application. The server tells each client about the master pixel dimensions of all the screens combined (here 8160×768). The client keeps track of its own location dimensions (say 2720×768) as well as its location with in master dimensions (say 5040,0). The server keeps everyone in line, making sure that frames are rendered in sync.

We’ve had a couple of people in the CDM Forums asking about multi-screen projections and video installations. It’s a logical progression for advanced projects - there aren’t many things which won’t look considerably more awesome if spread over multiple screens - but hasn’t really been an option thus far in Processing, unless you were to go the hardware multiple-monitor route.

To the video: Tech Trek: Inside ITP (episode 2) (3 minutes).
Via ProcessingBlogs.

If you ever want to stimulate the visual centers of your brain as you work with your graphics tools of choice, there’s endless inspiration from the visualist blogosphere.

In case you missed it in comments, our friend vade has done some terrific work using Max/MSP/Jitter and “glitchy” texture mapping. I just now noticed he was using audio input to do it, which can be a terrific way of modulating visuals for organic results. (Without knowing he had done that, I tried some similar experiments this weekend using the audio peak input in Quartz Composer.) The effect is simple but incredibly effective: play with texture coordinates so that the textures come alive. Don’t miss the first video.

This would be equally applicable to Processing, Quartz Composer, or anything else that does even basic texture mapping and audio input.

Texture Coordinate Munging [vade blog]
… and more good texture/3D Jittery loveliness

Meanwhile, in Processing Land, generative virtuoso Flight 404 (Robert Hodgin) has done amazing things with a particle system, magnets, and circles:

Magnetism + Spheres = Fun!! [Flight 404 blog]

See also this (earlier?) magnetosphere video (thanks, Jaymis, who was impressed enough he said something PG-13 about its awesomeness.)

Utterly stunning, and better yet, he’s included Processing code and walked through the whole process of building it. Check comments for more insight. But Robert didn’t stop there. He’s gone and bought himself a multi-touch Lemur controller, with still more cool videos:

Pretty lights! [Flight 404 blog]

I’ve been critical of some aspects of the Lemur in the past (see my Keyboard Magazine review), but it has been improving, in terms of the flexibility of the interface and how it assigns MIDI and OSC messages. One key advantage for visuals that can be less of an issue with music is stutter-free control of on-screen elements (which requires a higher resolution), and generally having an interface that lends itself to controlling 2D and 3D visual elements.

And, of course, in Robert’s hands it does some wonderful things.

Why am I putting these in the same post, other than sheer laziness? What strikes me about the effectiveness of each of these examples is that the quality of motion animates them in a way that is organic and alive. In each, the core technique and visual elements themselves are relatively simple, but the rhythm of the gesture of the visuals motion makes them more engaging. That, and just focusing on these two ideas, there are countless possibilities in whatever environment you prefer (Jitter, Processing, or something else).