I’ll be teaching a new course, based on Mac interactive tech and featuring Apple’s free developer tool Quartz Composer, at the new 3rd Ward space in Brooklyn (East Williamsburg aka Bushwick). 3rd Ward is an enormous “workspace and studio facility for artists & creative professionals”: think the artist equivalent of a gym membership plus enormous […]

We’re long past the days when we believed running screen savers would stop phospher burn-in (though there are days when I miss After Dark). Now we can run screen savers that imagine, through genetic algorithms, our computers “dreaming of electric sheep.” Electric Sheep is software that produces evolving paintings that can be synthesized by distributed […]

As ActionScript has gotten more powerful, some simple animation operations in Flash have gradually required more code, as opposed to the “shorthand” of earlier versions. Meanwhile, the open source Processing project has built a simple, elegant language based on Java that’s powerful, yet surprisingly accessible to non-programmers — and free. Brevity is sort of “Flash […]

Steve Jarvis sets a new speed record for providing impressions of new software. Here’s how Ableton Live 6 is working for him on his Macbook (pictured): A few impressions from about an hour of playing around with the Live6 beta last night: It’s BETA. Still lots of bugs (mostly small) and missing features (e.g., no […]

There’s nothing quite like the razor-sharp, analog vector graphics in games like Asteroids, Tempest, Battle Zone, and (my personal fave) Star Wars. They’re difficult to emulate using standard computer software. Our friend James Grahame notes that these fantastic graphics have now made their way into the PCI slot of your computer: ZVG Vector Arcade Interface […]

Pierre Pinard points us to new Logitech hardware that could work well with music software (and other multimedia, graphics, and creative software): NuLOOQ Professional [Logitech.com]

Raymond Scott’s Electronium is one of the great, odd sound inventions of all time. Scott developed the machine as an automatic performance and composing machine, a great, mechanical algorithmic music creation device. For an official source of information, be sure to read up at the Raymond Scott site, which has this fantastic music demo: Electronium […]

Manchester’s Futuresonic conference featured some of our favorite people. Fortunately, while none of Team CDM could be there, we do get to live vicariously through others: Toshio Iwai traced his work from childhood to present-day in a talk. Our friend Chris O’Shea has copious notes and images on the talk at Pixelsumo, and Régine Debatty […]

Ableton Live 6 is now out in beta, but now that you’re reading this, you’re too late: the beta rosters are already full. As with previous upgrades to Live, Ableton is rolling out the beta in waves, and the first wave is the smallest. If you missed the boat, though, previous experience suggests you won’t […]

Numark’s new VJ product looks like it could be the missing link DJ controller hardware a lot of us wanted. The Behringer BCD2000 is inexpensive, but availability has been scarce and it doesn’t yet support the Mac, on top of some MIDI implementation oddities. (See shipping and driver complaints, full review on PC.) The US$300 […]