four tiny drum machines from ALH84001 on Vimeo. Cybernetics is poised to make a comeback. The theory is, everything from electronic circuits to plants and animals can be understood in terms of feedback loops, as organisms – mechanical or organic – respond to input from their surroundings. The father of modern cybernetics, MIT mathematician Norbert […]

What happens when you mix technical chatter on the Cakewalk forum, Samuel Beckett, and The Matrix? I’d wager you get something like the surreal video above. Prompted by the posting of technical details for a new update to Cakewalk’s SONAR production software for Windows, and empowered by a strange, new tool that generates eerie virtual […]

As digital media matures, you come to the awareness that real artistry and technique, not just newness, is what matters. So, look back just a few years to SIGGRAPH in 1994 for this extraordinary video by Karl Sims. (That’s not, like, a SIGGRAPH stage name, is it?) The work involves simple physics and 3D geometry, […]

I don’t know if it’s “the most revolutionary new musical instrument of the last 60 years,” but let’s be clear on one thing: the Eigenharp Alpha is utterly, beautifully insane. It combines breath and finger input in a bassoon form factor, but with quite a lot more physical control, a computer connection, and no internal […]

CDM contributor and Friend of the Site momo has laid down the gauntlet. Sure, it’s great to talk about Nina Paley’s Creative Commons-licensed animation. But open culture is about making, not just talking. Momo has a venue – a Portland, Oregon gallery, plus The Internet – and challenges all of us to do a visual […]

makingthenoise (mtn); photo by Joshua Schnable. It’s actually paradoxical to talk about music “made” on the monome. The monome, the open controller, is after all, a grid of buttons. It has no sound of its own. But as such, perhaps its design as a blank canvas – without any indication of how a single button […]

wee see – collection one from Rolyn Barthelman on Vimeo. When working with drawing code – or perhaps even computer media in general – starting out with simple shapes can feel oddly uncomfortable. Perhaps as adults, we’re accustomed to dressing up our work and our identities. Using something as basic as a regular triangle can […]

Part of the beauty of the iPhone from its launch date was the notion of a Mac you could fit in the palm of your hand. That makes it ironic that, for so many developers, mobile platforms in general have turned into a way to fragment software, to make it run fewer places instead of […]

The novelty of the iPhone or [your favorite device here] may fade. But part of what matters in mobile design is thinking about how to create interfaces and uses that can scale to the size of your palm. That can mean embracing radical simplicity, and reducing an interactive, digital musical object down to its essential […]

LaDiDa Demo from khush on Vimeo. There’s no question iPhone/iPod touch development – really, just clever mobile development – has gotten a bit overhyped lately. But that’s all the more reason to do a round-up of genuinely interesting stories, real innovation happening on the platform. So, I’m clearing out my inbox with some of the […]