Apple’s Quartz Composer has long enabled beautiful, intricate generative and responsive visuals, often even with simple patches. But assembling its compositions into something with which you can perform is more of a chore. 2 V-P isn’t the first attempt to wrap Quartz’s interactive visualizations into a performance tool. But it might be the most practical. […]

Audego Motion Graphics Medley from jeanpoole on Vimeo. Arrange, arrange … render. Wait. Wait. Given that you can jam along with music live, why not do the same with visuals? Quartz Composer’s real-time workflows still appeal for that reason. Australia’s Sean Healy, aka Jean Poole, writes to share how he worked with QC and a […]

Mapping tools begin to proliferate, but here’s a unique-looking example. It’s a mapping utility built for Quartz Composer, which also boasts a nifty synthesis feature – complete with BPM-synced sequences. It’s just in private use at the moment, but intriguing enough to warrant a sneak peak. mapping composer is a simple tool to make mapping […]

A thousand points of light! Okay, really, just a whole bunch of “Fixtures,” which allow DMX/ArtNET integration of lighting goodness with your MadMapper mapping rig. Image courtesy GarageCUBE. The future of mapping as technique is doing more than just mapping as a technique. And so, having seen how ArKaos targeted LED lighting, here’s the popular […]

Serato’s ability to work with Quartz Composer opens up some unique possibilities for audiovisual DJ sets. I could describe what those are, but here Venus Rollergirl shows them off in Serato Scratch, as it’s easier to see than talk about. (That’s not to be confused with Serato DJ, now a separate product.) In this case, […]

With new hybrid performance comes new hybrid tools, as artists can work with an arsenal of evolving, often open, creative visual software. In a new performance for Australian Dance Theater, multiple tools merge to produce an array of visual features to accompany the choreography. Some of the glue is Syphon, the open source framework for […]

Via the experimentation of the movement+music+visual collective in Ireland, we see another great, free tool built on Apple’s Quartz Composer developer tool. Tryplex is a set of macro patches, all open source, that makes Kinect skeleton tracking easier. There’s even a puppet tool and skeleton recorder. Aesthetically, the video below is all stick-figure stuff (which […]

CoGe is an upstart VJ app on the Mac, built on the foundations of Quartz Composer as a standalone VJ app. It’s been winning over some converts already – as indicated in our recent survey. But here’s the big release: version 1.0, a ground-up rewrite, which in turn debuts the app as a commercial tool. […]

The crew at French-native collective 1024 Architecture are giving us plenty to write about. Working to hone their chops in mapping, generative projection, and audiovisual performance, these artists embody the Renaissance in these fields. First, they point earlier this spring to a brilliant Quartz Composer plug-in that intelligently maps sound to generative visuals, the work […]

Lit entirely by projector, a new music video by Finland-based artist Aku Meriläinen translates pulses of sound into pools of colored light. I love the personal, handcrafted feel of the result — pretty, but not too slick — and for Mac users, there are freely-licensed goodies you can use to either bliss out to music […]