If you’re in Austin for South by Southwest Interactive, you’ll want to duck out of the parade of open bars Web companies are offering and check out some of the live music and visualism happening. Saturday night, I’m judging a laptop battle as CDMotion contributor Dan Winckler is the evening’s VJ. Monday, as proem, Lila’s Medicine, and I play music, we’ll have a live visual lineup courtesy Jay Smith of Livid Instruments.

AMODA Showcase + Laptop Battle [AMODA] = $4-7, or free with SxSWi badge

CDM Music + Motion Party [Upcoming.org; also on Facebook] = Free, no badge needed

SxSW @ CDM [Create Digital Music]

I unfortunately have to fly back to New York before SxSW Music begins, meaning I’m missing a pretty great lineup. Addictive TV is on the opening party Tuesday, right before Moby. (aka the closing party for Film) Anyone know of other good VJ lineups for the Music fest? If you’re going, would love show reports.

Not in Austin? View Some Viditar!

Speaking of Jay Smith and Livid, here’s Jay showing off the Viditar video instrument on some vintage TV — the now-dead Screensavers program. After all, it’s only fair to have something for the 99.5% of you not in Austin. Think of it as a vintage virtual Viditar vignette:

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