You know it when you see it: media starting to actually evolve past what you expect, mimicking each other, and pushing at the obvious sense of what they are. One particularly exciting trend is real-world, kinetic sculptures influenced by digital media and taking on new movements and shapes. It’s the kind of thing I hope […]

Here’s a belated US Independence Day celebration, in a style Create Digital Motion readers are sure to appreciate: filled with the sounds of Sigur Ros, and lots of backwards slow motion. Nothing against John Phillip Sousa, of course. “Be kind to your friends in the swamp,” indeed. (What, am I the only person who knows […]

Last month, I was lucky enough to head to a gathering of music and visual artists at the studio of artist Duncan Laurie in Jamestown, Rhode Island, accompanied by performances in Providence and Boston. Among the cast: Richard Devine, Josh Kay (Phoenicia/Schematic), Steve Nalepa, Todd Thille (Synesthete), Vidvox’s David Lublin, Josh Randall (Robotkid/Harmonix), Aerostatic, Brian […]

Ableton Live controllers are suddenly everywhere, in commercial products and DIY creations. But an in-progress prototype being designed by Serbia-based creator Sasa Djuric, found on the CDM Flickr pool, goes the extra distance to integrate more effectively with the software. The hardware looks more like the on-screen UI, for starters – an elusive objective for […]

The middle child of audio technology, neither as hip as vinyl or as modern as the MP3, the cassette lives on in a massive online shrine called the C-90 Project. Odds are, if you’ve ever seen a blank cassette, it’s stored in here or soon will be. We saw its colorful compact novelties back in […]

Building and Using a Reaktor Grain Delay in Kore 2 from Create Digital Media on Vimeo. Let’s cut straight to the reason we use this stuff: we want crazy-sounding delays we can play with. Reaktor guru Peter Dines shows just how you’d build such a thing in Reaktor from the ground up for CDM’s Kore […]

Cranford Rose Garden Time-lapse at Brooklyn Botanic Garden from Brooklyn Botanic Garden on Vimeo. Whether at the scale of a frame, a tiny sample, or a period of days, digital is all about the manipulation of time. So it’s fitting that our friend Chris Jordan focuses in his work on the expressive potential of timelapse, […]

Something very funny has happened in the world of music controllers. It started with the rising popularity of Ableton Live, along with the likes of Reaktor and Max/MSP, as musicians started creating more dynamic, rich live performances with computers. Supposedly, this shift should have created new controller designs. If Live was the killer app, where […]

We’ve been eagerly awaiting the LinnDrum II since it was called the BoomChik. We called the non-functional prototype one of the best products of this January’s NAMM – reasoning being that, based on what we heard from showgoers, a silent LinnDrum still beat more evolutionary blandness from the rest of the industry. But I’d be […]

Machine Project is the wonderful gallery / multimedia educational center and maker of happenings in Los Angeles. They’re on a roll with Big Ideas this month, so I thought I’d pass them along — aside from participating, they may inspire similar stunts in your hometown. (Just make sure you hire professionals if they’re going to […]