Peter posted last week about Flight of the Conchords’ new video. For additional CDMo flavour, Toolfarm have an interview with the visual effects gurus for this clip, talking about the shoot, with lots of motion tracking and colour correction thrown in: Michele: The job involved tracking the stunt double’s heads with the singer’s heads. I […]

We’re seeing more and more unique ideas for reimagining DJing and the two-turntable setup. Here are two examples from opposite ends of the spectrum: one employs a non-traditional interface to do traditional DJing in a new way, while the other uses the traditional interface to produce new DJ techniques. To me, the latter is more […]

From the STEIM Concert Blog, which gives some sense of who has been playing STEIM. Takuro Maizuta Lippit, aka dj sniff, writes in thanks for the international outpouring of support for the STEIM music and art research center in Amsterdam, which faces potentially losing government funding. Some readers raised some questions about why STEIM is […]

Matthew Applegate sends this our way — it’s like two computers having a conversation, across epochs of computer history. The MacBook Pro is running a computer vision algorithm and "singing" notes based on colors it sees on the Spectrum’s screen. Maybe this will get your brain thinking of something new — file this under "really […]

A vvvv-based Wii music patch, (CC) by illogico. Check out the thesis project. Visual patchers love the fact that they can create sophisticated stuff just using on-screen patch cords. But when you want to go beyond the capabilities of the default set of objects — and for solving certain problems more elegantly — code is […]

The successor to ArKaos VJ, a staple in early VJ application history, is nearly here. GrandVJ just hit public beta. GrandVJ is a complete, from-scratch rewrite of the app, with some new features — but still a nod to the simple, one-screen interface that made the original popular. You can now download a working demo, […]

eMotion – Basic particles tool example from Adrien Mondot on Vimeo. We saw eMotion last year — it’s a Mac OS-based 3D tool for particles and visual effects, with physics modeling, Wacom tablet control, input from sensors and OpenSoundControl, a text engine, and integrated Quartz Composer support. In other words: it’s a friendly tool for […]

The free (for non-commercial use), Windows-only, insanely-powerful visual/multimedia patching environment vvvv just got a killer feature: the ability to make your own "nodes" (what are called objects in some other modular tools). It’s actually pretty easy to build, too, and the developers have some templates for you. This is way up the list on my […]

Making new instruments from scrap at a junkyard challenge. Now it’s time to save STEIM from becoming scrap. Photo (CC) by termie. Just a "niche", eh? I can’t think of a time in recent history during which creative technology research was as profoundly relevant to mainstream design as it is now. Tangible interfaces, sensor-rich environments […]