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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Taylor Swift may have been invading your TV this year. But did you know she was an indie artist? Photo (CC-BY-ND) Wendy aka freshfruit. The one thing you probably aren’t thinking while watching the Grammys is “wow, look at this amazing showcase for independent music.” (Last night, I expect you were thinking something more along […]

360° “lenses” (which generally aren’t actually lenses, but spherical reflectors) are perfect for simple, single-shot video production. Especially given some inventive viewpoints, staging, or post-production. Recently Merlot’s “Loser” impressed me with its combination of a surround angle shooting and a snorricam setup. LOSER – Merlot from Julien Widmer on Vimeo. I was reminded of this […]

Push the button: Kokoromi’s Gamma game challenge, which we saw earlier this week, challenges game designers to build an entire gameplay mechanic around a single button. What can be done with a single hardware object – a self-contained, one-button invention? We’re looking for creations that answer that question, inspired by games (and encompassing hardware games […]