Paper, wood, and traditional media aren’t tied to one vendor. They don’t require licenses or agreements. They aren’t, generally speaking, incompatible. If digital art is going to provide artists with the same freedom, it stands to reason that artists working with computation will find ways to make any pixel their medium. Processing is a good […]

Tonight, interactive artists are taking over an Internet Cafe and turning it into exhibition space, running artworks that function in regular browsers. Artists: Erik Andersson, Cory Arcangel, Michael Bell-Smith, Charles Broskoski, Jon Cates, Aleksandra Domanovic, Doubble Happiness, Constant Dullaart, JODI, JK Keller, Greg Leuch, Olia Lialina & Dragan Espenschied, Duncan Malashock, Eva & Franco Mattes […]

The Rock Band keytar Rock Band 3 Wireless Keyboard, next to an iPod touch, for scale. What if a gaping product hole for musicians were filled by a game company instead of a musical instruments company? There’s no need to imagine: pick up the new Rock Band 3 keyboard, and you’ll see what I mean. […]

A toy controller – in a good way. The Mustang Pro guitar controller for Rock Band 3 is equipped with a full MIDI implementation and standard 5-pin port to connect to synths and computers. Since the very first Guitar Hero game, musicians have found ways of converting game music controllers into genuine music controllers, through […]

iOS has proven some of the appeal of on-demand interactive artwork and audiovisual toys. But even the iPad is limited to a 10″ screen; these days, the biggest screen in the house that isn’t a TV is often attached to a computer. (In fact, I regularly run across people who use a large computer monitor […]

iOS has proven some of the appeal of on-demand interactive artwork and audiovisual toys. But even the iPad is limited to a 10″ screen; these days, the biggest screen in the house that isn’t a TV is often attached to a computer. (In fact, I regularly run across people who use a large computer monitor […]

Play testing Rock Band’s challenging new play modes. You know, challenging — kind of like music. Alli Thresher, community moderator, and Jessa Brezinski, intern. What Harmonix has achieved with Rock Band, and their original Guitar Hero, is remarkable. At their core, these games are descended from arcade rhythm games, reducing music to simple coordination of […]

Must-read: Chris Adamson, one of the few developers with real experience with Java and multimedia, lays out just how bad the situation is with Java on the Mac: shoes[1].drop(); I think the problems here are not insurmountable – it’s just a matter spending energy on the future of development in Java, not ranting at Steve […]

Life was so much easier for bands in the 20th Century. Now, record sales are slumping, and the music video bar has been raised to near-absurd levels. Of course, against these immense pressures, people make incredible stuff. For Austin, Texas’ David Crowder Band, it meant getting into Lite-Brite — to the tune of 700,000 pegs. […]

Music software development includes some of the most sophisticated, expressive software out there. But it has long faced serious challenges in sales – audio software still appeals, generally, to a small slice of people, made smaller by factors ranging from piracy to the sheer complexity of available audio tools. As computing’s distribution model for software […]