Our Zygote Interactive Balls at the Olympics from Alex Beim on Vimeo. I’m such a terrible blogger. Here are giant, glowing balls, and I can’t think of a cheeky, snarky, tasteless way to describe them. (Heck, I don’t even know of anything to do with those inflatable beavers at the Olympics.) Happily, the balls themselves […]

You have until Friday to change the way we think about buttons. We live in the age of multi-touch, of sophisticated GPS and accelerometers tracking gestures, of augmented reality and $100 computers. In other words, it’s the perfect time to meditate on the lowly button. And as visualists and designers, you have a unique relationship […]

“Press play” … “button-mashing” … the very criticism of digital music is often directed at the button or switch, even as the cult hit monome spreads arrays of buttons like a virus. Well, we’re still interested in what you can do with a button, so to fully focus you, we’re only giving you one button […]

After the madness of The Edge launch, I can now get back to doing some of the CDMo things I’ve been neglecting. One of which is actually talking to visualists who are touring around the world. Tonight I’ll be getting back to that, speaking to Joakim Faxvaag, who’s currently touring Australia with Phoenix. Joakim comes […]

I’ve been reasonably quiet of late, and for that I apologize. I hope, though, that when you hear the reason, you’ll find it in the cold technological cores of your beings to forgive me. My government has seen fit to create an enormously amazing resource and incubator for technological artists. It’s called The Edge, and […]

Old technology can take on new meaning, once injected with the intelligence of today’s software. And so it is that the plotter – the specialist printing gear invented in a decade past – is being given a new lease on life. With computer vision software, the free and open source OpenCV library, and the free, […]

How to do mpc pad finger drumming from Brandon Murphy on Vimeo. Composer, musician, and drummer Brandon Murphy has put together a how-to video on playing and programming beats with a 4×4 grid. One reason to pay attention: he’s a real drummer, and had been just as skeptical about the value of all this as […]

The monome meme continues to spread virally through your music gear. With some custom code (made freely available) and a little assistance from the free Arduino platform, Philly-based hacker Wil Lindsay has converted the $50 Bliptronic 5000 device from ThinkGeek into a monome. That gives you full compatibility with the community-made patches that support the […]