CDM Watch-It Pick: Live Cinema, the Reflexive Documentary

Live Cinema Documentary from toby*spark on Vimeo. Utter brilliance: finally, our friend toby*spark has documented live cinema and visualism with a medium that reflects the concept. Music and video are presented as frames within frames, manipulated and placed interactively. It’s part fiction and illusion, of course, but that won’t stop you from dreaming as you […]

Flying Lotus Cosmogramma Album is Coming 5/4; Clear Your Calendar

I have no doubt that Cosmogramma, the album Flying Lotus describes as a “space opera,” will be one of the albums of 2010. Actually, I don’t even care if anyone agrees, because I know I’ll thoroughly enjoy it. The only bad news is that you’ll have to wait until May to get the release, coming […]

Participate: One Button Game Objects, Handmade Music in NYC, Amsterdam, SF

It’s a call for one-button works. Literally. Sorry. Photo (CC) Jeff Keyzer. What can you do with a button? What circuits can you bend? What software and hardware can you construct? Want to meet up with myself and fellow makers from the DIY music and visualist communities? I’m touring and looking for new works, we […]

Round-up: Your Web-Connected Musical Future, at Music Hackday Stockholm

It’s like Woodstock for Web music tech nerds. Photo (CC-BY) Anton Lindqvist. “Okay,” you say to the Web geeks, “I’ve had enough. I don’t want another little app that looks at my iTunes collection and tells me that if I like Lady Gaga, I probably also like Madonna. I want to listen in new ways […]

Scratching Live Video Input: Ms. Pinky + Max for Live

Scratch Yourself Stupid from digital funfair on Vimeo. Can you do exciting things with video inside Ableton Live using Max for Live? Yes, you can. It’s just a proof of concept/demo, not really a polished performance, but Digital Funfair has revealed with his Max for Live work how you might scratch incoming video and not […]

Get the Lamp Out of the Projector: Upcoming Projectiondesign Hotness

Software, tablets… let’s talk about what we really want: more awesomer projectors. The significant remaining design challenge with projectors has long been the lamp. Lamps are hot, lamps fail and have to be replaced, lamps are loud, and the enclosure necessary to accommodate the lamp bulks up the size of the projector. The solution: take […]

DIY Community: Austin a Hotbed of Inventive Hardware You Can Build and Use

Wherever you live, you can enjoy the DIY and open hardware inventions coming out of Texas. Or, as the famous song goes: “That’s right, you’re not from Texas / Texas wants you anyway.” Austin, Texas may be associated with the strum of guitars. But it’s also populated by some of our favorite electronic music hardware […]

DIY Community: Digitópia Seeks World’s Best Patchers, and More Open Source Competition

What if a competition didn’t just encourage entrants to try to make a better product? What if it encouraged friendly rivalry between makers to produce entries that were also shared across the community? That’s the idea behind Digitópia’s upcoming series of competitions, now entering its third year. Digitópia itself is based in Porto, Portugal, at […]

DIY Community: Handmade Music Toronto, 2/19, and Why Now is a Great Time for Making

From a previous hackday at InterAccess; photo (CC-BY) Rob Cruickshank. Handmade Music is spreading. Toronto’s InterAccess has been a hub of terrific DIY activity in sound and other fields, otherwise known as a General Gravity Well of Awesomeness, and they’re now doing their own Handmade Music, kicking off this month. Full call below, but as […]

Lights and Music: The Harmonic Center of the Universe

The Harmonic Center of the Universe from Jesse Stiles on Vimeo. This beautiful, meditative installation of choreographed lights and sound, by way of Rucyl and Saturn Never Sleeps, is the creation of Chris Harvey, Olivia Robinson, & Jesse Stiles. The Harmonic Center of the Universe evidently narrowly escaped destruction last year during a thunderstorm, but […]