Now you’re thinking in spheres. We’ve been covering Syphon since its introduction – see a recent interview with co-creator Anton Marini. The idea is to give visual apps on the Mac the ability to pipe textures from one app to another, as simply as you’d connect sound signal on a computer or in a studio. […]

Ed.: He’s worked to translate classic hardware like the landmark Rutt-Etra to digital media – in that case, working with its original co-creator. He’s been a virtuoso of Mac visual development, building his own tools and working out an innovative way of piping live textures between applications in ways never before possible. And he’s been […]

Since the days of Paint, computers have routinely taken some gesture of our hand and made it into a graphic. Now that coding is faster and friendlier, it’s possible to make a new tool, learn that tool, and then learn to perform with that tool. We’ve seen it in Joshue Ott’s superDraw (made in Processing/Java), […]

Syphon VDMX 5 Beta 8 integration Demo from vade on Vimeo. Once upon a time, we imagined a future in which computer applications shared content, media, and data effortlessly, where different tools all coexisted. The reality we got was, in almost every category, far more monolithic. By exploiting a little-known feature of the Mac’s graphics […]

To start our Monday morning right, here’s some nice, rhythmic glitch in the Mac tool Quartz Composer, using a combination of custom and off-the-shelf plug-ins — bless you, modularity. It’s a lovely demonstration of how having an ample set of pluggable tools can help you to produce the results you want. PXN_richterizz from pixel noizz […]

The Arduino isn’t quite an deal choice for a live generative visual computer – but it can do some gorgeous things with signals. Sebastian Tomczak has a gorgeous hack (as seen via Limor Fried) that manipulates RGB data lines with the Arduino. You connect horizontal and vertical sync signals, then go to town. The Arduino […]

GPU HSFlow port to Quartz Composer from vade on Vimeo. The Live Optical Flow Processing continues. Anton Marini, aka vade, is working on his own Quartz Composer patch, which will in turn be integrated with the visualist software he’s assembling, v002. More details once we get them, but you can see how nice parameterizing this […]

live in mannheim at bseite festival from mr monkeypresso on Vimeo. [Advisory: some women with pasties in there.] David, aka Mr. Monkeypresso, was also at Manheim’s B Seite visual fest. He sends along some documentation of his live set, which made use of some visual tools of which we’re already quite fond: a small demo […]

CoGe 0.85b – Quick Start Guide from luma beamerz on Vimeo. Apple’s visual goodies and modular patching tool Quartz Composer provide some building blocks for live visuals. But to actually connect these into something you can use live requires some work. Quartonian by Roger Bolton was an early effort to do just that, but while […]

Ed. It’s one of the most important live visual inventions of all time — a visual creation on the level of something like the Minimoog for audio synthesis. And it’s now in software form. But just as importantly, there’s a chance to help its inventor complete his vision. -PK Anton Marini, a.k.a. vade, has released […]