As a visualist I have an incessant appetite for gear. The inaugural Plug N Play Brisbane on Tuesday reminded me that it doesn’t have to be this way, however. While I rocked up with bags and boxes of computers, cables, cameras, controllers and hardware, others arrived with a single laptop, and of course were able […]

Cesare Marilungo has sent us a draft tutorial in development on using the iPhone / iPod Touch as a controller, via the open-source patching software Pure Data (Pd). He gives examples for both mrmr, the open-source project by Eric Redlinger here in NYC, and akaRemote.app from Masayuki Akamatsu (pictured). One advantage of akaRemote: you can […]

Andrew Turley writes to share his microfiche-to-MIDI music maker, which he shared at the Maker Faire. The idea: take the humble library microfiche, and translate light and dark values into MIDI, fed to a Casio keyboard. Sound like a random idea? Well, it would be — except Andrew happens to be in a band called […]

Apple’s iPhone — and the significantly more affordable, doesn’t-have-to-be-a-phone iPod Touch — are essentially pocket-sized, intelligent multi-touch controllers. Hooking them up to visual software as controllers simply requires some app on the phone to transmit data, and some way of dealing with that data on the computer side. We’ve already seen this a bit on […]

Hurrah, stop motion fans — it’s time for the Stop Motion Eye Candy of the Day! This time, it’s artist PES, translating classic arcade scenes into stop motion, real world objects. It’s utterly brilliant — and a reminder that, stripped of more advanced code and graphics, early arcade games were reduced to strangely iconic designs. […]

The storied iThing. Photo: CC Nathan Makan, via Flickr. Multi-touch controller goodness is now as close as your nearest iPod Touch or iPhone; all that remains is to hook it up to some creative music, visuals, or others. (I would prefer the iPod Touch for this reason; then you don’t have to worry about using […]

There are various ways to bridge the gap between vinyl records and computers, as we saw last week. You can cut records with digital timecode. You can build controller hardware that simulates the resistance of a motor, or mechanically control digital media using the turntable platter. And then there are the brute force methods, like […]

Game Boy musician nitro2k01 has taken on the controversy over Crystal Castles, the band that just joined the long line of artists recently appropriating sounds from the 8-bit musical underground. Get ready, CSIs: nitro2k01 uses spectral graphs to try to demonstrate the Crystal Castles song "Love and Caring" is also ripped off, with beats borrowed […]

High speed video is rapidly getting more accessible. In late 2006 a camera which could do 500FPS would set you back US$8800 (or $350/day rental). Now, the newest addition to the high-speed-cameras-for-normal-people – the Casio EX-F1 is shooting at up to 1200FPS, for $1000. Of course, it’s a still camera as well, and it records […]