If you were lucky enough to gaze into the northern skies above Earth last week, you might have seen a spectacular light show, as a solar storm bombarded the planet’s atmosphere and lit up the Aurora Borealis. A humble digital reflection of that phenomenon, the Aurora Dress brings sparkling, colored effects in LEDs to something […]

Adorn your iPhone with audio, courtesy 3D printers Shapeways and an unusual use of the SoundCloud API to get at the data. The content we watch on the Internet is, ultimately, just data. We view that data in fairly narrow, conventional ways, but there’s no reason that has to be the limit. In one of […]

Digital artist and imagineer Memo Akten, known for beautiful work like his dazzling, sparkling open source fluid library, has lately turned his attention to intersections of visual motion and musical pattern. In a series of etudes, he applies simple, sinusoidal motion to musical patterning. That is, as abstract waves flow on the screen, they trigger […]

Looking a bit like the love child of a Nintendo DS and a microKORG, the Miselu neiro is a different animal in mobile music. The upcoming device is powered by Android and has a touchscreen – a bit like a tablet – but it’s hardware dedicated to music-making, complete with a compact, piano-layout keyboard. The […]

Photo by Phillip Stearns. The link between dub music and technology is as old as the genre itself – you could even argue that dub is THE purest example of a technology expressed through music. At its best, it’s like magic – when I first saw Scientist run the board for Mikey Dread live, it […]

By the 1990s, the notion that computer software could be a means of delivering interactive digital art more personally was enjoying a Renaissance. This was the age of the Voyager CD-ROM, which catered to new multimedia PCs and Macs with titles from the likes of Laurie Anderson and Morton Subotnick, the decade in which Brian […]

For all the growth of three-dimensional mapping techniques, the surfaces are often (quite literally) dull. In Prismatica, an installation piece, the material is part of what makes the work so beautiful. Color and geometric form drip through the crystals like liquid, in a work that revolves like a modern, digital mandala, a kaleidoscopic meditation. The […]

Visionary 3D scanning, computer vision, and digital media guru Kyle McDonald is back again with more tools that break down the boundary between the computer and the world. Kyle tells us he spent a great part of the fall in residence at the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media (YCAM) in Japan. He worked with […]

What will you do with this blank slate? Photo (CC-BY) Yutaka Tsutano. Apple yesterday described their iPad as “this magical pane of glass that can become anything you want it to be.” So – how about making mobile devices into what you want it to be? With the help of author Peter Brinkmann and publisher […]

Pure Data (Pd) is already a free, convenient tool for making synths, effects, and sequencers and other musical generators. But imagine stripping away all the things that tie it to a platform – UI, specific hardware support – so it will run just about anywhere, on anything, in any context. That’s what libpd, a free, […]