MixEmergency is a new attempt to expand the DJ techniques into the visual realm in a single, integrated environment. And once again, Serato is the backdrop.

We saw Serato’s own Scratch-Live, which provides digital vinyl control in Serato, when dj rndm gave us a detailed hands-on earlier this year. The VIDEO-SL focused on vinyl control of video and integration with the TTM-57SL Rane mixer required for the product. MixEmergency is a bit different: here, visualizations and MIDI are the centerpiece in place of video and scratching. (They’re there, but they’re not the main draw, according to the developers.)

Features:

• QuickTime video mixing and scratching


• Quartz Composer visual compositions, taking advantage of QC’s 3D and image-processing / generative capabilities
• Visuals react to play position and velocity of media, and audio and video signals
• Custom layer and transition effects, frame bending, image and text layers
• Drag and drop preview and playback, drag and drop of folders
• Assignable MIDI control (including MIDI in QC compositions), and support for Scratch LIVE control

MixEmergency Product Page

The software is currently in public beta, Mac-only. The full version will cost US$179 (the demo is watermarked and doesn’t support fullscreen output). As with a number of recent Mac apps, you need a MacBook Pro or other Mac hardware with dedicated graphics. Happily, 10.4.10 works — 10.5 isn’t required.

So who is this for? A lot of the push has been for giving DJs visuals easily — with the danger being potentially eliminating VJs or dumbing down visuals, which isn’t really good for anyone. (See Jaymis’ rant about that direction.) But I don’t get that sense here. In fact, the ability to create custom visualizations means DJs could commission visuals from a VJ and tour with them. The developers actually tout collaborative performance controls and VJs working to design and perform with reactive visuals alongside the DJ. Integrating the two could encourage that kind of collaboration, as dj rndm and Robotkid discovered in our VIDEO-SL review. On the other hand, many VJs will remain happy in their existing environment. But it’s nice to have more choices.

If you try the demo, let us know what you think. I expect we’ll see this are continue to grow and mature.

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

As code literacy improves and coding tools like Processing and Flash make it easier to produce stunning visual results, the line between the coder/hacker and digital artist, and more conventional artists, is blurring fast. The next trend: networks and blogs on which people share not just their work, but the code behind it. The idea is old, but there’s no question the breadth of content and number of participants is expanding - and beginners are welcome, too.

The Flash Virtuoso, and Galleries vs. Code Repositories

Keith Peters, aka BIT-101, has been instrumental in the Flash community in advocating digital art and animation. His books are clearly written and intuitive to non-programmers — despite their Flash basis, I’ve found them useful for my Processing experiments, too. And Keith has been busy of late. He’s got a second installment coming for his wonderful Making Things Move book, inspiring his isometric experiments pictured here, and he’s also launched a new site called “Art from Code.” (Various permutations of this theme come up regularly.)

I owe a huge debt to Keith, as I got into generative coding entirely through his books, before later going on to discover Processing.

Interestingly, the relationship between code and art is an imperfect one. Just open sourcing the code isn’t always practical. In a way, though, that makes the code even more beautiful — and sometimes sharing visual results can be just as interesting as sharing code. (It forces us to go back and try to reproduce the results, then get it all wrong, and wind up producing something original, often as a result of mistakes!)

Keith writes on his blog:

When the creative team behind Radiohead’s new video for House of Cards released 3D imaging data of Tom Yorke’s head, I’m sure they looked forward to finding out what people would do with it. I’m guessing one thing they didn’t expect was for someone to go manually through the data and painstakingly reproduce it in actual, physical Legos, one … brick … at … a … time, then make it into motion again with time lapse photography (okay, with a fair bit of fakery and digital legos added, though quite nicely).

Be sure to go watch the high-quality version on YouTube for the full effect. (Check the direct YouTube link and look for the option directly below the player.)

I think I’m going to go just watch TV for the rest of the day or something.

Who would have imagined seeing a music video on Google Code? Welcome to the new age of data visualization.

Radiohead’s new video uses 3D images capture from two scanners – one a close-proximity 3D scanner from Geometric Informatics, another a multiple-laser array for the “exterior scenes” rotating in a 360-degree pattern. That yields just data, not anything you can look at, so the artists created the video itself using the open-source tool we love so much, Processing (site | CDM tag).

Cool so far. But the interesting part is that the tools and data are open-sourced and/or freely available:

View the data visualization in 3D and navigate with the mouse

Download the data in CSV form and do stuff with it using Processing source code and instructions

There’s a remix-friendly license in there, and a YouTube group to follow the results.

All the relevant links, plus the video itself:

RA DIOHEA_D / HOU SE OF_C ARDS [ Google Code ]

It’s also striking to notice that, despite the new-fangled technologies, the face stuff is remarkably similar in actual visual effect to the Rutt-Etra video synth (see also stories on Rutt-Etra restoration, Bill Etra restrospective). The process is entirely different: the Rutt-Etra processed the image directly via raster manipulations, whereas the Radiohead video is really a visualization of 3D data. But in some ways, I find the 1972 effect more appealing, and the visual relationship I believe is intentional.

Then again, part of the power of data visualization is that you can make it look like whatever you want. So it’ll be interesting to see how these techniques evolve.

Director: James Frost (Zoo Films)

Director of Photography: Von Thomas (Zoo Films)

Director of Technology: Aaron Koblin (whose work we’ve admired at the MOMA Design and the Elastic Mind show, via the now-defunct Yahoo Design Innovation Team, and elsewhere)