Imagine VJing with a stream of live snapshots from partygoers — or playing live data from the Web on email statistics as though it were a musical/visual instrument. The ability of tools like Processing to make numbers fluid opens up new interfaces to the storehouses of data on the Web — but also makes them friendly to artists and visualists.

I’ll be doing a workshop at South by Southwest Interactive in Austin with S. Joy Mountford, formerly VP Design Innovation, Yahoo and leader of the Yahoo Design Innovation Team aka yHaus. Joy certainly knows her stuff — not only did she lead a ground-breaking team at Yahoo, but she’s also supported student work and research and has a long history in interaction design including working on the original QuickTime interface. We’ll talk about the work being done, where we think these technologies are going, and how you can give it a try yourself.

Data as Art: Musical, Visual Web APIs [Event Page, SxSWi]

5:00 pm - 6:00 pm, Sunday, March 9

You’re an incurable font geek and you love sound. Can’t choose? Combine them. The MeekFM synth is both a visual synthesizer for typography, and a synthesizer — it actually sonifies the letterforms you generate. This is synesthesia on such a high geeky level that my mind is blown wrapping my head around it. But I love the approach — and while I can’t search even my deepest serif fetish to work out how anyone would come up with this, perhaps there’s a parallel for other generative visuals. Think synth.

meekfm.org [Official Project Page]

via: The Meek FM Typographic Synthesizer [Synthtopia]

Previously:

Illuminating Lettering as Digital Process, in Elegant, Open-Source Mac NodeBox

Free, Open Source, Remixable Fonts, and Embedding Fonts in Flash 9 / AS3