One curious note about the first-ever recording I mentioned today: you’re among the first to hear it, because at the time, the inventor had worked out how to record, but not how to play anything back. (No speakers — no sound.) It did make awfully nice pictures of sound, though, which in turn suggests an […]

I had the pleasure of participating in this year’s Motion Graphics Festival, and just being there provided enough inspiration for a year’s worth of projects. I’ve tried to track down and compile some of the highlights that really struck me as being innovative and interesting. The actual environments were so saturated with visual media that […]

Instructables have just announced the winner of their $15000 Laser Cutter contest. GRL put together a project showing how to create a "bullet time" (also known as "time slice" or the "matrix effect") rig for relatively cheap. I’ve had this idea in my "someday, when you have a couple of grand free" list for quite […]

Squarely in the “things Ableton Live was not necessarily built to do”: animating visuals, one frame at a time. Cousin Throckmorton whipped up a retro visual feast of Space Invaders, Pong, and other games classics, using MIDI to step through frames individually. You can MIDI sequence Live’s locators to jump between frames, thereby giving the […]

Ed.: It made some headlines on the blogs a couple of years ago, but as we revisit wacky ideas for VJ rigs, well worth revisiting — especially as we’ve been flying a lot. Hello, TSA! Like destroying beats? Looking slick while you do it? Getting strip-searched at the airport? Then you, my friend, need to […]

All Kaoss, All the Time: In a world of endless choices, what happens to the creative power of limitations? Back in November, we saw Norman Fairbanks make an album entirely on Tenori-On, Yamaha’s interactive blinking-lights button pad. “Ah,” you said. “But that sounds suspiciously like the music of Toshio Iwai, the Tenori-On’s composer-inventor. And it […]

Sure, you have fun with your one projector. But don’t you sometimes want to add giant water fountains, with water projection? And more video? And fire? And lasers? And some creepy wizard guy? In South Korea, spending money on such things seems strangely commonplace, as at the multimedia/fountain installation at Kangwon Land / High One […]

The sounds are lush and silky smooth, like a cello making love to an angel. The new, enhanced graphics are … breathtaking, in their spectacular range of colors and pixels. Yes, folks, it’s time for another multimedia extravaganza, as released on NES cartridge. This stuff is what we like to call “high fidelity.” It’s the […]