Circus of Lost Souls *Sneak Peek from Momo the Monster on Vimeo.

Animation as performance — our friend Momo gives us a little teaser of what has kept him hard at work. If you’re interested in visual work that bridges different tools, there’s some tantalizing stuff here. Have a look, and let him know how you’d like to see him cover this here on the site — specific questions you might have, or techniques you’d like to see. -Ed.

The above video is a snippet from a show I’m developing for American Werewolf. Our first performance will be at FreakNight in Seattle on October 30th.

This project implements a variety of systems and techniques that I’ve been developing over the last two years. I’m going to document these works in progress and share them with you here on CDM.

Some of the topics I’ll cover:

  • Communication between Ableton Live and Flash – I’m doing this using OSC over UDP, which Air can now deal with directly. Which means this same method is applicable for Android-to-computer controls, as well as Ableton Live to Processing.
  • Song control data abstraction in Ableton Live – Definitely a work in progress, this is my logic system for abstracting songs into a modular language. This way, your Live set can speak to Flash, Processing, Unity3D, Jitter, etc.
  • Max4Live as an OSC solution for Ableton Live – I’ve got a series of M4L plugins I’ve made for converting stored and incoming MIDI data into OSC. They’re not quite ready for wide release yet, but they work, and I’d love to get some feedback.
  • Using a touchscreen for narrative visuals – I’m exploring how to best exploit the features of a touchscreen for interactive visuals and overcome its weaknesses.

My current focus is getting the show ready, of course – but I’ll be documenting the process and sharing tidbits as the system develops.