Product Placement from Matti Niinimäki on Vimeo.

It’s like Creature Comforts for the ad industry. But look out, traditional animators – still images can come to live almost magically through the interactive powers of Animata, an open source animation tool.

In a brilliant series of animated interviews, Product Placement populates its scenes with classic ad mascots, from Heinz’s Tom Tomato to anti-polluter PSA character Woodsy Owl. The audio comes from interviews with people connected to the ad industry being surprisingly frank and even cynical about the role of advertising in society. The audio for those interviews is an interesting project in itself – the Anti Advertising Agency had the novel idea of installing DIY motion-activated playback units to insert the conversations in public space, commenting on outdoor advertising.

But add motion, and the interviews take on a different meaning. Woodsy begs advertisers to tweak his mind with their ad techniques, as the Chicken of the Sea Tuna mermaid worries about greenwashing and her body image. (Fret not: you look just fine exactly the way you are, Chicken of the Sea mermaid.)

The work is the product of the gifted mind of Matti Niinimäki, whom we saw recently turning blenders and handheld mixers into DJ controllers. Matti, you’re amazing – can we just make these sites about you? (The Finnish “one-man collective” has his own site, alas, at original hamsters.)

Musician Christopher Willits has an ongoing series for XLR8R Magazine in which he talks his own technical workflow. In the latest episode, he adds live visuals to his Ableton Live set using Max/MSP/Jitter. What’s nice about this is you see how some clever mapping can make visuals integrate neatly with music.

I’m somewhat insane, so my own setup often involves simultaneously running visuals separately with no communication with my music software. That allows me to set up less-direct relationships between visuals and sound.

But, while the techniques could be combined to a variety of setups, this also serves as a nice introduction to how you might use patching in Jitter alongside your music software.

Curious to know what you think of the presentation and content here, as I hope we’ll do more videos like this ourselves.

What You Talkin’ Bout, Willits? Part 10 [XLR8R]

motion distortion 2 from andrew benson on Vimeo.

Datamosh? (The “forbidden” but harmlessly meaningless word?) Video squishification? Mushy data?

Call it what you will, but applying real-time distortion and displacement to video so that video textures become flowing layers of pixels looks absolutely beautiful. Andrew Benson of Cycling ‘74 has only just begun playing with this in Jitter using GLSL shaders, and already the results are really compelling. (For a simpler example that looks more like the compression artifact technique we’ve seen recently, have a look at the second video – though, personally, I like the more sophisticated, layered approach of the video at top. This is going some very cool places.)

This is a Jitter patch, but would be simple enough to port to code for Processing, FreeFrameGL (which implements shader code), or other tools, too, in case you can’t bear being away from your moshness.

Andrew writes:

In which this humble author, with tongue sometimes planted in cheek:
1. Shares a how-to video on datamoshing.
2. Forbids the use of the word datamoshing in future.
3. Challenges obscenely-gifted motion artist David O’Reilly to a rumble.

Here’s the story so far: there’s a compression artefact created when videos are compressed improperly, which causes frames to melt into one another like wax. And so, among others, we recently saw on CDM the music video Evident Utensil, a video that intentionally (ironically?) overused that effect until you started seeing missing p-frames and i-frames in real life and/or threw something at your computer in disgust. The most interesting part of that story wound up being a guy with a few dozen YouTube views who posted videos with this effect like they were home movies, and he seemed to actually speak in a language made up of compression artefacts, and he showed up in comments and said, insightfully I thought:

drul pixel the. teh pix pi pi aph afgh. $$$342agph. fafpht. :D :D :D !!!! teh. teh teh!!!!1 fteh ftehapple.>>>>VLC<<<< wmv &&&scrub vidcodec. mma ek :D S:D sence video. :D ghsg :) VLC VCKL :( wmv wmv ##raghg drool pixels<<<>>>_>baby. :D crazy like a fox. :P :D :D :D !!!! $$# ragha arugh pi pii pi squeez VLC%%%charflit, flarhfit. ckharlift. :( :( bad babyb, bad band. teh teh teh!!!! the

This is, of course, what baby boomlet parents fear will become the lingua franca of their children, as kids text nonsense to one another rather than paying attention to Pre-Algebra class. I think that probably doesn’t matter, because by the time those kids are grown up they’ll be jacked into the Matrix anyway, and to save money, the Matrix will be full of compression artefacts.

You probably think I post everything without remorse. You probably think I’m a hipster, lounging on a bed of PBR cans and spouting nonsense words for occasional blips of Boing Boing fame, that tomorrow I’ll have my own brand of steampunk datamosh. But believe it or not, thoughts do flash through my brain as I’m writing - well, at least some of the time. On those occasions, conflicting sentiments blink like so many p-frames in the frontal lobe of my brain:

Projection mapping has been a running theme here, as visualists are dying to get their projections onto objects other than flat walls. If you’re ready to experiment and develop new material but have been intimidated by figuring out how to properly calibrate your projections, videoprojection tools is for you. This free Mac/Windows tool built in helps align videos with objects. It was built in Max/MSP/Jitter but runs whether or not you own Max thanks to the included runtime. (I’d love to port some of the same techniques to Processing! See also vvvv, as linked below.)

Not only can anyone try their hand at projecting onto objects with videoprojection tools, but a new v3 release brings some powerful new features:

• 8 layer support
• Cornerpin distortion
• Advanced masking features
• 8 individual video sources, 1 live video source, 1 draw source

This is on top of its extensive preset and sequencing system. Ready-to-use on your Mac OS X or Windows (XP/Vista) system, for free.