Interface 27 from CyberPatrolUnit on Vimeo.

There has been a long tradition in live visuals and motion graphics, inherited from many other media, of maintaining a “secret sauce,” or the guarded formula of eleven herbs and spices. Ironically, for all you hear today “DIY” and “open source” in the same sentence, a lot of the motivation for doing something yourself has historically been doing something no one else can. Keep your secrets, and raise your value.

As our friend Bryant Place / CyberPatrolUnit sends over this latest set of live clips from a recent gig, and I browse through the comments, and reflect on the conversations I had last week at OFFF and during and following my own talk there, though, I’m struck.

The world has changed. First off, the Internet isn’t really about secrets. Your value is almost in direct proportion to how much you can share. Connections are forged through links of mutual exchange and good will. It’s not just about sharing your output or getting fans (the MySpace model), but sharing with a network of enthusiasts, and fellow artists. Those are the people from whom you often get real support (artistic, technical, and personal), gigs – and inspiration. (Even if you hate 8-bit music, that community is a really amazing model: their work to support each other and advocate for the whole subgenre has been I think the single biggest ingredient in their viral success.)

The visualist community increasingly itches not only to improve the quality of their own individual work, but everyone around them. A lot of us are in a battle for the future of this whole medium. Some parts of the world are devoid of live visuals, while others have mass-produced club visuals filling the nightlife.

Before I get carried away, the video itself is just the latest from the ongoing Interface 27 series. It employs a touch interface to control abstract visual pictures formed from streams of particles.

The reason I’m pulling back into the larger question is that these visuals are enabled by a library for Processing, a library we’ve seen here previously, developed by Memo Atken:

MSAFluid for processing (and Java)

If you’d rather use openFrameworks, there’s that version, too, as pictured below running blazingly fast:

ofxMSAFluid for openFrameworks

There’s even an ActionScript 3 port, in case you want to code Flash on the beach.

ofxMSAFluid for openFrameworks from Memo Akten on Vimeo.

Superfluid vs Particle from jimi hertz on Vimeo.

Speaking of insanely-cool multi-touch magic and the wonderful resource that is the NUI Group, CDMo Fave Memo is working with Jim Hertz to do ridiculous things with water screens (water as in H2O) and particles (the virtual kind).

I could explain, but watching says it all. Or, as their marketing puts it:

Ever heard about MSA Fluids ?
Ever had particles on your water screen ?
Mad scientist Memo Akten wields the immeasurable Power Processing Particles (PPP) and is one of the most powerful entities within the Multitouch Universe; he has created the MSAFluid , a tools that gives to any multitouch user access to limitless fluid & particles energies .
That’s insane ! Please Stop Memo ! Call Superfluid !

Until actual superpowers start to evolve out of genetic mutations like in the movies, this seems the next best thing.

Joshue Ott, creator of the gorgeous abstract performance tool superDraw (built in Java and Processing) has a seasonal toy for your playing enjoyment, built in Flash. SnowDraw is a fun little falling snowflake toy which can create messages like the one I spoiled above. It’s naturally far more fun in motion, so go give it a play:

http://snowdraw.intervalstudios.com/#/cdm

You can create your own drawings and share them, too.

A Processing port should be possible; I know Josh is thinking about it.

Lots of good people get mentioned in the credits:

programming/design/concept by Joshue Ott
php/serverside code by Sean Smith
special thanks to Morgan Packard, Daniel Hai and always Sabina Hahn

Now, I’m in Chicago at the moment, so virtual snow isn’t strictly necessary, but I know we have plenty of readers in Australia where it’s not actually winter.

By the way, if you want to keep Onyx VJ creator Daniel Hai above and Joshue Ott from getting work done, you can come play them, me, and Jaymis in the CDM Steam group. Mmmm…. killing zombies. I’d love to hear people exchanging OpenGL tips while shooting away at the zombie horde. Then, I’ll know we’ve ascended to a new level of geekdom.

eMotion+Wiimote in IR mode from Adrien Mondot on Vimeo.

eMotion, an all-Cocoa Mac app, is now available as alpha donationware, and it’s capable of some stunning, particle-based visuals. Wave around a Wiimote, and get satisfying swirls of particles – even if they send a chill down my spine as I sit here in snowy Chicagoland.

Creator Adrien Mondot of Grenoble, France practices juggling and dance as well as programming, and it shows. He has some nice ideas about the software that I think could inspire other, similar directions. As he describes it:

eMotion is a tool for creating interactive motions of objects for live visual performances.

Electronic motion seems often artificial, synthetic… well… in fact it does not convey any emotions. By defining new rules to create movements, eMotion is a new kind of software made for visual live animations.

As it is based on real world physics law, all motions seems natural, full of emphasis.

It allows to manipulate different kind of objects like still image, videos, text, drawing.

Targeted mainly for theatre/dance performances, it can be used in broader situations.

In fact, talking about just the tool seems to miss the point of thinking about jugglers, dancers, and dancing pixels. But to summarize quickly, eMotion provides physics-based animation rules, multiple particle systems, and layered, scriptable behaviors. Add Wii, Wacom, MIDI, audio, and OSC inputs to control it with whatever you like.

With eMotion and Animata and Processing and vvvv, we’re seeing a real renaissance in live, performed visuals.

Thanks, Anton!

eMotion Project Page [description, documentation, downloads]

Interstellar Sugar - Suryummy from Suryummy on Vimeo.

Friend of CDMo Suryummy shares this audiovisual motion sequence, imagining what the world would be like if you cooked … in … outer space.

Good stuff. And no, The Frugal Gourmet hasn’t been dropping acid. (Suryummy does suggest that this could be Bowie with a cooking show, which I like.) But Suryummy does share his tools:

• Maya
• Adobe CS3
• Particular
• Ableton Live
• Native Instruments Reaktor
• Native Instruments Absynth

Tasty. Keep those videos from vimeo (and elsewhere) coming.

At some point we need to go over what a workflow would be like doing this kind of thing in a live tool like Processing. It’s tricky, and of course necessitates some sacrifices in the visual category to allow for real-time performance – but it can be rewarding. (And there’s no saying you can’t do both.)