mmakers kantine ctm from CDM on Vimeo. The ubiquitous glow of laptop screens hiding mysterious performances, the anonymous DJ looming above a crowd like a priest … if “live” music isn’t doing it for you, we bring glad tidings. There are many, many artists doing it differently. We got a chance to showcase just some […]

Hap as in happy sounds about right. Hap is a family of free and open source video codecs for Mac OS X. The notion is that the computer’s GPU – rather than CPU – does the heavy lifting of decoding frames. Because GPUs are optimized for lots of parallel operations in a way CPUs are […]

Pianos made of apples are becoming, suddenly, commonplace. Photo (CC-BY) Pete Prodoehl. Call it a massive attack of fruits and veg. Simple circuits have long been able to make use of sensors in real-world stuff like apples or JELL-O. But Make Makey deserves special credit for making interfacing those circuits with a computer silly-simple. (The […]

Mastery of technology need not be an end in itself, a showcase for mechanical sophistication. It can mean finding the point at which you push a medium to be its most expressive. And I suppose that’s why so many can admire the ongoing work of musician and media artist Robert Henke. The lasers in ‘Fragile […]

Mastery of technology need not be an end in itself, a showcase for mechanical sophistication. It can mean finding the point at which you push a medium to be its most expressive. And I suppose that’s why so many can admire the ongoing work of musician and media artist Robert Henke. The lasers in ‘Fragile […]

Native Instruments has something new coming, revealed today in a teaser video. And as you’ll see, it’s something new that isn’t a DJ app for iPad. I expect you’ll even see some speculation about it online. I can’t speculate about it, as … I’ve seen it. So you can instead expect full coverage once this […]

As electronic musicians craft songs in digital collage, the distinction between “producer” and “writer” has never really made much sense. Samples, synthetic sounds, and the technology used to bring them together are all an extension of compositional imagination. I’m reminded of this when I regularly explain what I do. (This is really fun in crowded, […]

Performance, and performative arts, are about time. Yet time itself is oddly absent in any useful way from many creative coding environments. Most of the tools for dealing with time and scheduling cover only the basics, and most of the examples tend to adopt an everything-at-once sort of attitude, stymying the efforts of people working […]

Performance, and performative arts, are about time. Yet time itself is oddly absent in any useful way from many creative coding environments. Most of the tools for dealing with time and scheduling cover only the basics, and most of the examples tend to adopt an everything-at-once sort of attitude, stymying the efforts of people working […]

Now with the release of The Marriage of True Minds, the duo’s album based on parapsychological telepathy experiments, it’s worth visiting again with Matmos. The Baltimore-based duo offer dueling interviews. One, with XLR8R, ventures into their basement full of sonic wonders, full of handmade instruments and electronics and oddities, like wooden creations built around contact […]