The Kinect camera is built first and foremost to be a three-dimensional sensor, not so much a “camera” in regards to fidelity of the visible image. But what if that data could meet the optics filmmakers want, in a single, calibrated image? The free and open source RGB+D Toolkit answers that need. It’s a combination […]
Music
In Tbilisi, music is on pause because democracy is on the line
Music Stories October 25, 2024
In music video, Lebanese duo Rust captures emotions of “Diaspora”
Music October 11, 2024
If Movies Didn't Play Forward: Toni Dove, R. Luke Dubois Make Gestural Live Cinema
What if film, rather than being projected from start to finish and proceeding in a straight line, could be reconstructed and performed? Every live visual performance involving video has more or less asked that question. But not every performance tries to convey a narrative in the process. Toni Dove’s Spectropia, coming this weekend to the […]
If Movies Didn’t Play Forward: Toni Dove, R. Luke Dubois Make Gestural Live Cinema
What if film, rather than being projected from start to finish and proceeding in a straight line, could be reconstructed and performed? Every live visual performance involving video has more or less asked that question. But not every performance tries to convey a narrative in the process. Toni Dove’s Spectropia, coming this weekend to the […]
Hands-on with Koma’s Analog Filter/Sequencer, Gate/Delay, in a Van, with Champagne
Koma’s stuff is good. Really good. So good, you might even want to watch a hands-on video where I’m juggling a camera in one hand and a glass of champagne in the other. Their stompable, playable analog effects show well even in the back of a van circling Musikmesse. How I came to see this […]
In the 70s, You Bought an Apple II to Code Crazy Graphics Yourself, So Why Not in 2012? [TV Ad]
Here’s a terrific vintage Apple II ad – one that might inspire some readers of this site to go eBay an Apple II for their next VJ gig. (Hey, it has analog video out built in, something a modern Apple … doesn’t.) Of course, what’s telling is that when this ad was made, in 1977, […]
Digital to Physical: From Blender to Paper Object – With a Lot of Elbow Grease
Export to physical object… Now, for many, that means some kind of fancy 3D printing that will soon revolutionize the world, bringing us into the realm of the matter-from-nothing science fiction of Star Trek. Well, or you could just do some work. That’s what artist Mike Greer documents in a lovely timelapse video, in which […]
Sound With a Dose of Mysticism: Upcoming Sufi Plugs Explore Tonality, Call to Prayer, Drones
Could a piece of software make you think differently about sound? Could it reflect ideas, the culture of listening? The developers of the SUFI series of plug-ins seem to think so. In place of screencasts showing which knob to turn which way, they head with a video crew to Morocco. The “instruction” might be about […]
Plink: Play Music with Strangers, In Your Browser; and the Webby Music Goodness Continues
It starts as just another toy to play around with in a few minutes of distraction in your Web browser – as if the Web were short on distraction. But then, something amazing can happen. Like a musical Turing Test, you start to get a feeling for what’s happening on the other side. Someone’s stream […]
Music, to Go: The Mobile Music Computer Revolution, BeagleBoard Workshop and Software
Something like this could be the guts of your next digital musical instrument – and it might even mean leaving your laptop at home for the next gig. Photo (CC-BY) Koen Kooi. Mobile computing has already had an enormous impact on music making. A modern phone or tablet (and yes, most often, these come from […]
Dancing in Point Clouds: unnamed soundsculpture, Making Of, and Human Element [Kinect]
Like an animated equivalent of the Transporter on Star Trek, depth-sensing cameras and custom code can transform the human body into 22,000 points, then back again into something our mind again imagines as flesh and alive, even in abstraction. In “unnamed soundsculpture,” by Cedric Kiefer (onformative) and Daniel Franke (wearechopchop), the body takes on a […]