Today, I’m in London doing a hands-on workshop on visual metaphors for music, and covering various topics filed under “synesthesia” at Music Tech Fest. It seems appropriate, with the subject matter on the brain, to revisit the topic of visuals and music in a series of posts. When you make hardware, with knobs and faders, […]

Pick up that TV and rock it, baby. While recalling a now-obsolete technology and the work of artists like Nam June Paik, de/Rastra is something of a (delightful) lie. In the form of a television, it appears to be a self-contained, vintage instrument. In reality, it’s a simulation, a CRT with “altered anatomy” that uses […]

The folks at Teenage Engineering have teamed up with another Swedish-bred design house, IKEA, to construct about the simplest digital camera imaginable. I love their cheeky suggestions of features. This being Motion, one has to wonder – what would the simplest possible video camera look like? Jesper Kouthoofd, designer at TE, deserves credit for this […]

This may already be the image you have in your mind of Skrillex’s fan base, but let’s get real: these are actual kids, and they really are getting introduced to electronic dance music through Skrillex for the first time. “What is dubstep?” Darned if I know any more, kid. What have we learned? 1. All […]

Like the modulars themselves, an upcoming documentary on these analog synth beasts has been lurking behind closed doors. But that won’t be the case for long. “I Dream of Wires,” the crowd-funded documentary that probes artists’ fascination with making music by connecting patch cords, will see a public showcase at Montreal’s MUTEK Festival. This and […]

With multi-touch fully exploited and the basics of camera vision largely understood, interaction moves to the realm of free space, “augmenting” your world with gestures that find some physical connection. They surprise by working in some way that seems intuitive and natural, somewhere away from what seems to be the realm of the computer. And […]

These green things, for once, are the stars, in Data Garden Quartet. From the installation version in Philadelphia. All Data Garden photos courtesy the artists. “On lead synthesizer, a philodendron …” (And the crowd goes wild…) Vegetation may not be the first association you have when thinking of electronic music. But two new albums, each […]

A look at a Buchla, up close, from Messe in March. Some of the most innovative modules – and certainly some of the strangest parameter and module labels – have come from this designer. And for lovers of all things Control Voltage, a coming event in New York seems a don’t-miss. You could almost call […]

We remember Adam Yauch today on Create Digital Music, with the help of Network Awesome. It’s doubly appropriate to talk video, as MCA was also the Beastie Boys’ filmmaker. Our friend Benton-C Bainbridge did live visuals with Beastie Boys. He remembers Adam by sharing, at my request, some of his visual work with the band. […]

In moments that would have pleased Belgian surrealist René Magritte, an ordinary paint roller transforms a litany of European landmarks with video “paint.” Roll on, and it’s as though someone has punched a hole to another dimension. This isn’t a post-production effect: it’s all live, via computer vision and projection mapping. The project is the […]