Once, digital image editing was a fringe medium. Now, almost everyone who uses a computer does basic image editing. So, I’m pleased to get to talk today at Macworld Expo about live visuals and reactive/interactive animation. I chose some relatively simple examples since time was short, just to cover the basics. I think some of these might be useful to people at the show and away from it, so I’ll share them here.

Visualism 101

DJs and computer musicians have turned electronic and electrical music into live, improvisatory forms. Likewise, motion graphics, video, and animation are evolving from being exclusively linear, pre-composed works into reactive, interactive, and performative media. This medium is so new that there’s no name for it yet. You’ll hear about video artists, a tradition extending back to innovative visionaries like Nam June Paik. But “video” is only one of a number of media now at the digital artists’ disposal, from lighting to digital animation and 3D graphics. (Nam June Paik certainly didn’t fit so narrow a category, as a composer, artist, and performer.) You’ll hear “interactive designers”, but to most people that means website interfaces. And you’ll hear “VJs”, but that suggests people mixing two to four channels of pre-rendered video, as a DJ would with sound. (And it could mean a host on MTV)

All of these terms are useful in cases. But at Create Digital Motion, we prefer the term “visualist”, for artists whose love of live visual media crosses these arbitrary boundaries.

Visualism Examples

Visualism extends to a broad variety of artists. Here are just a few to whet your appetite:

1. Toshio Iwai: Mixing art and gaming. Tenori-On interactive music controller, ICE Installation, Tokyo. Toshio Iwai understands the way gaming interactions have become a part of our culture, and has become a hero to musicians and visualists on this site for his forward-thinking approach to digital media.
2. Daniel Shiffman, NYU: Transforming video into 3D worlds and back again. Interactive installations translating motion into particle systems. (Dan is also a reader of this site, so, hi, Dan!)
3. Nikolai Cornell: Futuristic installations. Nikolai’s interactive mirror proves how powerful a few simple, inexpensive sensors can be when used artfully.
4. ART+COM: Computational art. Reimagining computation and data itself as beautiful, ART+COM is one of a growing generation of artists whose work is helping digital media to change rapidly.

That’s not even getting into the enormous range of VJs and visual performers. A number of us will be sharing our work Thursday night at Macworld, including renowned VJ Grant Davis.

Links to Tools

I routinely browse through the tags here on CDM just to see what topics have come up regarding a certain app or piece of gear:

Quartz Composer
Flash
Processing
Max/MSP/Jitter

If you want free/open source tools, here are some important resources:

Quartz Composer (I set up a simple blog for a class I was teaching)
(Boot Camp / virtualized Windows users) FlashDevelop (see also their official site)
Processing.org
Arduino sensor interface
Open Source Flash

Pd (Pure Data) (Pure Data is the open source cousin of Max/MSP/Jitter)

And lastly, the primary resources for the two tools with which I spent the most time today:

Adobe Flash Developer Center
Apple Introduction to Quartz Composer Programming Guide

I’m also developing online curricula on some of these subjects; the place to watch will remain this site. Thanks to everyone who came, and feel free to comment here publicly or contact me directly via this site’s contact form.

Forget predictions. It’s hard enough just processing (or is that Processing) the powerful, new visual tools digital artists got in 2006. With that in mind, we, the Create Digital Motion co-editors Peter Kirn and Jaymis Loveday, take a fond look at our favorite tools and art for 2006. And you can bet that this list is as much a look forward at what we’ll be using in 2007 as it is a look backward. (Peter: Also, everything Jaymis says, I second. We really need to find something to disagree on. We’d make a terrible movie review duo.)

Check out our list, and submit your own nominations in comments. Predictions for 2007? I predict CDMo will drool over lots of new gear and DIY Arduino projects, get completely lost in Adobe software, waste a whole bunch of time on RSS and watching YouTube eye candy, and find new and innovative ways of slipping off to the bar for a drink while still controlling our live visual sets. (Wii remote, I’m looking at you!)

Most significant technology of 2006

Jaymis:
Adobe Creative Suite 2: Adobe’s tight integration of After Effects, Premiere, Illustrator, Photoshop, and Flash is the killer app for visualists. This isn’t a new technology, but to me it’s the most exciting development of 2006. While HD format wars, increasing DRM and film studio funded political meddling are all making things more difficult, Adobe’s buyout of Macromedia and tighter integration of their existing products can only spell great things for 2007. [CDM Adobe tag]

Peter:
Code: No, I’m not crazy. Code is back for artists, and rather than choose any one technology, I think it’s easier to look at the collection of technologies that are bringing it back. Processing deserves special recognition, because it really has done a superb job of teaching non-programming artists the beauties of code, and it’s also something we’ll see a lot more of in 2007. But Flash and Flex are the surprise counterpart, and have an even more robust open source community behind them than Processing, despite being based on commercial projects. With the advent of ActionScript 3, these platforms have finally evolved into serious programming tools, and that means more muscle for processing images, animation, and video. Core Image from Apple’s Quartz makes it easier than ever to code custom 3D shaders for processing video and imagery on your graphics card, by taking care of a lot of the nasty guts for you (and CI integrates perfectly not only with Apple’s hard-core developer tools, but also Jitter and Quartz Composer). In 2007, I think we’ll see Microsoft feature prominently in this category, with their new 3D DirectX 10 API in Vista and their friendly game development environment XNA.