Ilias Bergstrom has created a tool for mixing Processing sketches live in performance. (Thanks, Bart!) The resulting tool lets you cross-fade between sketches and easily host a series of sketches in a gig. The process is pretty straightforward:

1. Use the included Foetus library with your sketch to prepare it for use (your sketch needs to use the OPENGL renderer, but I generally find that to be the best route, anyway)

2. Initialize your set for use in the code, setting it up to respond to input if desire (which is the whole fun of it, of course)

3. Put all your sketches together in a folder

4. Configure a text INI file to set up your OpenSoundController, so you can control your sets live with OSC-ready hardware and/or software

5. Play your sketches as “synths,” complete with cross-fading!

Put it all together, and you’ve got one bad Mother (watch your mouth!) The first release came out a bit earlier this fall. It comes with the library and some examples built in Max for control. Everything’s GPL v3 open-sourced.

Onar | 3D blog

processing-mother @ Google Code

Ilias and Beau Lotto have also written an academic paper on the tool.

Of course, once you start down this road, you could naturally come up with a lot of other potential features – and it’d be really, really nice to have this basic playback capability in a full-blown VJ host, so you could go back to some traditional clip mixing.

I haven’t had much chance to play with this, so anxious to hear feedback.

Do you play live with Processing? How do you do it? We’d love to hear how different people are working.

You can go hear Onar3d’s music on Last.fm. Something else to listen to while you code.

Updated: PC only for now, but a Mac version is in the works. (Could also be nice to test this on Linux…)

Conventional projection hasn’t come very far since the magic lantern days of a century or so ago. Projector + flat, rectangular surface = image. But naturally, with computers, it’s possible to do far more.

The idea is to contextualize a projection in its surroundings, and give the illusion that instead of being simply a rectangular surface (not that there’s anything wrong with that), the image interacts with the reality of a space, objects, and surroundings the way we’d expect. Our own Jaymis Loveday asked last week about the possibilities of mapping — check out the discussion that ensues. I know he’s working away on some projects, but I have to point to the magical, evocative video above of some experiments. ggml writes:

hello. here is a clip with some mapping scenes i have done in recent months using vvvv. they are contextual approaces to improvisation sets, made on the fly, rather than pre-mesured setups. lines are drawn with a 2d drawing-patch, using a mouse pointer, observing the projected image in real space rather than the screen image. other objects are put into proper perspective using the homography node (something like PSP’s distort).

And several of you pointed out that vvvv, the Windows-only, 3D and visualist-savvy generative modular tool (free for non-commercial use) has an edge in this stuff. The reason: the ever-vigilant vvvv community was nice enough to put together an extensive tutorial.

How To Project On Complex Geometry [vvvv wiki]

It’s listed as a work in progress, but like other corners of the rich and wondrous vvvv wiki, there’s quite useful stuff there, made friendly even if you’re new to the topic. Now, the actual topics covered so far are just the basic first steps, but they should get you going. For fancier techniques, I hope this is an area we’ll revisit over the coming months. If you’ve got more resources, send them our way and perhaps we can put together a wiki page of our own.

And yes, I’m now back from my European Road Trip which means you can again look forward to daily posts on the CDMs.

I believe that coding is an essential skill for people making live digital visuals. At the same time, there’s no question that learning to code has been a big obstacle for visually creative people — especially as they have plenty of other things on their mind. You need somewhere to start, and you need to make the learning curve manageable. Processing has been a great tool for doing that, but the point isn’t to learn Processing — it’s to learn how to code.

For that reason, I’m thrilled that Dan Shiffman’s book Learning Processing is now in print and available. I’ve been waiting for this for some time. There are already a couple of great books out there for Processing, but Dan’s book is unique in that it’s entirely focused on teaching you to code visuals step by step, even if you haven’t coded before. Dan teaches coding to creative-minded non-coders at NYU’s ITP program, and the book comes out of that teaching technique.

I know the book very well as I served as a technical editor during its development. We’ll be running an exclusive set of excerpts this week, but here’s a look at what’s included:

• Basics of code structure, pixels, interaction, and fundamentals like how the coordinate system works
• Using arrays to make lots of stuff appear on the screen, including particle systems
• Basics of images, video, data, and networking
• How to use object-oriented programming to make coding easier and more efficient
• Extending Processing with Java and more advanced coding techniques

By the time you’re done, you’ll be processing pixels, drawing generative visuals, and writing well-organized code.

To me, one of the real strengths of this book for teaching and learning is its strong emphasis on object-oriented programming, in a way people can actually understand. Explained properly, objects can really help keep your code clean. For some reason, this is often viewed as an “advanced” concept, but on the contrary, I’ve found using objects actually helps keep beginners from getting tripped up. And, to put it in visual terms, understanding objects is a terrific skill for getting lots of glitzy eye candy up on the screen.

Here’s what Dan has to say about the book (emphasis mine):

My goal for “Learning Processing” was to write something for the complete and total programming beginner. If you’ve never written a line of code before in your life, but want to get started creating your own digital media tools then I wrote this book for you. There are several other wonderful Processing books out there and I hope mine will complement them nicely. A special thanks to Casey, Ben, and Ira who kept encouraging and inspiring me as their books were being published.

The book is also geared towards the teacher. It’s not my belief that such a person will necessarily learn any new skills from the book (assuming they have a programming background), however, my hope is that the book will encourage and help facilitate the teaching of programming. It is structured with 10 lessons (complete with examples and exercises) and can act as a ready-made syllabus for a beginner interactive media / programming class. In fact, the book is modeled exactly on ITP’s Introduction to Computational Media course.

The book is available on Amazon.com. It shows out of stock, but those kind of screw-ups are common when a book has just come out (speaking as a published author here).

Stay tuned for those excerpts later this week; I’m editing them now!

See also: Dan Shiffman’s blog, Facebook Page, Official Site, free download of TOC and first chapter

Are we approaching a visualist technology singularity? This video from live visualist virtuoso Eboman might make you a believer. With live camera, live video drums, live camera as instrument, a sensorsuit body performance instrument, and custom software, this set has no shortage of live gimmicks. The beauty of it, though, is that there are so many technologies happening at once that it comes down to live performance chops. The pace of technology accelerates to the point that the technology disappears, and the only way to survive is not with a gimmick but mad skills.

You just sort of find yourself living in the future, a future that strangely combines the ancient, surreal art of the one man band with modern software, with hyperkinetic, attention span-warping results.

The cast, as described on YouTube:

This composition was produced for the Stranger Festival by Eboman and performed live in Amsterdam, 3 July 2008.

www.strangerfestival.com
Sensorsuit = played by Eboman
Videodrumkit = played by Guillermo Kardolus
Camera = played by Mascha Rutten
Software = SenS IV by www.smadsteck.nl

SmadS-Sens is an actual product. Then again, tools like Processing and OpenFrameWorks and Max and Pd could all achieve some of the same results, if you think you want to rumble with these Netherlandish mad scientists – just prepare yourself for mind-blowing amounts of practice and work, as with anything. (Good thing we enjoy that sort of thing.) I also expect some of the 3D video manipulations going on here to become more commonplace.

For the single master of live music – complete with visuals – look no further than McRorie, the legendary, kilt-wearing, sensor-driven electronic artist. So, to the SmandS team, I say, consider kilts! They’re not just for Scottish people any more!

With all the discussion of Processing, I think it’s time to do a proper survey of who out there is actually using this tool to code custom live performance. Robert Hodgin aka flight404 famously VJ’ed with a lovely Processing rig back in 2005, controlled by four glowing Griffin PowerMate knobs. But with Processing a general-purpose tool, pumping out everything from bizarre, animated musical interfaces to data visualizations to interactive installations, it’s often unclear just how many are actually using it live.

If you’ve tried to use Processing live unsuccessfully, I hope to build up some reference materials to make this easier over the coming weeks. But I’m always interested in how people work, from beginners to advanced users. (See our in-progress surveys on Ableton Live and Reaktor on the music side.)

Are you using Processing as a live visual tool? What frustrations have you had? What’s been successful? Got any results you can share, in photos or video?

Do you wish that you could drop Processing sketches into another VJ tool, like Resolume or VDMX? (I know I sure do.)

Some smooth, stretchy After Effects work mixed with spot-on sound design gives us Tales of the Unexpected, by More Soon.

Tales of the Unexpected from More Soon on Vimeo.

Here’s the only clue so far on the techniques used:

Yeah pretty much.. it’s a really long video made in After Effects layered over a series of displacements.

I’ll try to get some more secrets out of the creator, but in the meantime: Any CDM readers like to step up on how this might have been created?

This is my favorite part of video production, the “figuring out someone else’s Kung Fu” process, but I don’t know enough about displacement maps to even get started on this one.

Yes, speaking of the visual power of flipbooks, Ivan points out that Kraak and Smaak have just made a big splash with an ingenious new music video making surrealist plays with space. It uses copious, cleverly-placed flipbooks throughout. Now you have two challenges: one, to go out and make and film flipbooks, and two, to make it somehow not this but cool in some other way. (Hmmm… perhaps live flipbook VJing?)

It’s all real and real-time and, minus some subtle animation overlaid obviously at one point, it’s all flipbooks. The work is the creation of superelectricvideo, a director, motion graphic designer, video artist, illustrator, and general maker of cool things to look at based in the Netherlands. It’s worth reading his whole, oddly poetic bio, which matches some of the dry whimsy of his films:

Lots of motion in the non-digital world can inspire digital visuals. (Hey, that pretty much sums up all digital photography and videography, eh?) Keeping with this theme, I’m really taken by the flipbook work featured by my friend Bre Pettis at Etsy.com’s online magazine:

The Flipbooks of Etsy: Motion Picture Objects [The Storque]

Bre has interviews with the various makers, some of the talent on online marketplace Etsy.com, and even a dose of the philosophy and technique of creating them.

Properly shot, the flipbook effect looks really lovely on video. (I’ve also done a piece that involved scanning index card notebooks, but shooting them directly is much nicer.) If you’re interested in making some of your own, Bre also includes this tutorial:

Cranford Rose Garden Time-lapse at Brooklyn Botanic Garden from Brooklyn Botanic Garden on Vimeo.

Whether at the scale of a frame, a tiny sample, or a period of days, digital is all about the manipulation of time. So it’s fitting that our friend Chris Jordan focuses in his work on the expressive potential of timelapse, and that he runs New York’s T-Minus, a festival devoted to timelapse. You’ve got some time to get in your submissions for this year’s T-Minus – the call for works follows – but I wanted to press Chris a bit on why manipulations of time are important to him, and what works he finds inspiring.

Among his picks, above from just over the river at the wonderful Brooklyn Botanic Garden (and yes, there are idyllic places like this within the five boroughs):

This time-lapse shows three days in the life of the Cranford Rose Garden at Brooklyn Botanic Garden as thousands of roses bloom in early June.
To create the unique perspective, each still frame of the video was treated with a tilt-shift lens effect in Photoshop.
For more information on the Cranford Rose Garden, visit bbg.org/roses
The music is by Jon Solo. His website is myspace.com/jonsolomusic.

Chris explains how he became a video Time Lord – and how even raindrops can take on new meaning when time is compressed. I got him thinking out loud in email:

It’s a jumble of things that draw me to time manipulated work, some personal, some societal, all technological.

One theme that inspires T-Minus is how boring the majority of documentation video is, yet the market sells more and more video cameras, and the entire industry around video is thriving. For what? Think how many times you’ve sat and watched a documented event.  I think of the massive amount of energy and resources that go into consumer video. Wedding videos are a great example. Sure there may be something compelling to you if you’re the one at the alter. But we’re recording too much, saving it, calling it precious, and never actually seeing it again. Instead, if people captured timelapse, they would have the best of both worlds, and save petabytes of data.

The primary creative theme in time-based artwork that inspires me is the idea of the unexplored relationships surrounding us, just waiting to be unearthed. Video editors and VJ’s know some of the excitement around these relationships. But there’s generally in those contexts the studio mindset that comes into play, instilling classic ideas of composition, color, line, movement. I use the analogy of baking a cake to the capturing of time. You put the ingredients together,  put it in the oven, and see what you get. The result always brings out a pattern you wouldn’t have seen or thought existed. I put a camera six feet out off my fire escape on East Broadway once, pointing up the street. When I compiled the footage, I was perplexed to see the frame shift significantly, yet very slowly, over the course of 12 hours. What I realized was when it rained during the recording, the water accumulation and then drying caused the board to warp and twist, shifting the camera’s view. Or how city lights appear through drying raindrops in front of the lens. Or how the shadow of a church slides across the buildings during certain times of the year out my studio window. All these things are incredibly intriguing to me.