Lo-fi Arduino Guitar Pedal from Kyle McDonald on Vimeo. CDM regular Kyle McDonald keeps cranking out wonderful projects. Following up on a tangible music sequencer powered by Skittles (taste the rainbow of fruity beats), and last week’s cheap-but-effective DIY 3D interface, he’s now put the popular DIY electronics platform Arduino to work as a lo-fi […]

Are we approaching a visualist technology singularity? This video from live visualist virtuoso Eboman might make you a believer. With live camera, live video drums, live camera as instrument, a sensorsuit body performance instrument, and custom software, this set has no shortage of live gimmicks. The beauty of it, though, is that there are so […]

Bigger. Brighter. More ridiculously huge. You know what you want, projectionists. And Quebec is the kind of place that will pull it off. Big budget for an absurdly-large but still very arty project? They’ll make it happen. So, when it came time for the 400th anniversary of Quebec, Quebec City did indeed think big, projecting […]

A hacked DS, as photographed by BAMCAT. Homebrewed game music has an uneasy relationship with the mainstream game industry. Running or developing DIY music software isn’t possible on the Nintendo DS without special hardware – hardware that’s also favored by pirates. Nintendo is now suing the makers and sellers of that hardware, because they (correctly) […]

With all the discussion of Processing, I think it’s time to do a proper survey of who out there is actually using this tool to code custom live performance. Robert Hodgin aka flight404 famously VJ’ed with a lovely Processing rig back in 2005, controlled by four glowing Griffin PowerMate knobs. But with Processing a general-purpose […]

I actually hadn’t had time to watch my tech RSS feeds yesterday when I said I “lost half an hour dreaming of my new lounge-style studio where I adjust envelope breakpoints from a giant aluminum sphere like the one in Sleeper.” But, anyway – wish granted! *Disclaimer: The following video, while demonstrating some insanely cool […]

Getting fed up with all this Lilliputian nonsense of mobile devices and ever-smaller portable music gadgets? Well, here’s a massive leap in the opposite direction: DIY sound electronics maker and David Crowder*Band drummer Bwack created the biggest, most oversized sampler he could design. From emprise34’s xanga blog, details of Bwack’s Herculean creation: he was commissioned […]

“Where the future is being made … today!” You already know Processing can create wonderful visual stuff. It can output movie files, so it can be a companion to your live visual tool of choice. It also happens to be a great way to experiment with OpenGL, so you can work with shader code and […]

The faux-Pan Am logo. The sleek, mod, curved white casing. The elegant controls. Yes, this is indeed a synth that would look at home in the space station in Kubrick’s 2001. Technically not the future so much as the 1960’s version of the future – but surely we’re getting around to reshaping our future to […]

I’ll be in Melbourne from tomorrow, presenting CDMo at the “DIY TV: Video, UGC, Mobile and IP TV” edition of the globetrotting think-tank X|Media|Lab. I’ll be talking to some smart people about where visualists fit in the future of TV, and while my head’s full of my ideas of what’s happening next, I’d love to […]