CO2 Cube from Obscura Digital on Vimeo. It’s an older project, but no less timely: speaking of Obscura Digital’s work, they’ve also employed projection as a way to illustrate in tangible terms a serious issue. You’ll hear climate scientists speak in terms of metric tons of emissions. But because we can’t see those emissions, and […]

Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque Projections from Obscura Digital on Vimeo. Illuminating the facades of United Arab Emirates mosque and historical architecture with extraordinary imagery, Obscura Digital transformed these structures with visuals both decorative and cultural. It’s a visually-rich celebration of Arabic and Emirati culture, and one of the developers – absurdly-prolific artist and geek virtuoso […]

In code and 3D models, in live visual performance and augmented architecture and dance, in VJ sets and futuristic 3D demos, shows and games, visualism extended to new ways of transforming perception. For just one slice of what happened this year, entirely by the numbers, here are the stories that scored the most page views […]

2011 has seen sweeping changes in technology and music, alongside the loss of titans Max Mathews and Tsutomu Katoh, two pioneers of our world. Some of these stories passed quietly; some with great fanfare. Here, we reveal those stories that attracted the greatest number of Internet eyeballs, a metric not necessarily of importance but certainly […]

Keys open doors to creative music making in a community-led process. Photo (CC-BY) Cassie / Angelandspot. What an extraordinary thing an interface can be, a map to making music. A new community-generated album from users of the now-legendary monome grid instrument yields a variety of musical outcomes. The results are instrumental and lovely, breaking off […]

In a stunning, surreal set of tests, our friends at Bologna, Italy-based Apparati Effimeri are using stereoscopy and projection mapping to muck with the fabric of what you perceive in a garden or architecture. The results would make Dali go buy a six pack of beamers. There’s little to say other than to have a […]

In action, a Eurorack module by superb builder MakeNoise, with whom we caught up in March in a get-together in Austin, Texas. Photo (CC-BY-SA) Andreas Wetterberg. Modular music making is a throwback to the early days of electronic music, in which a spaghetti of patch cords is the price of open-ended sound creation. Fairly or […]

I’m not sure how everyone who owns an iPad uses it for music, but I find myself strangely drawn, more than anything else, to analog step sequencers. With MIDI connections – via a special interface or a standard USB MIDI interface connected via adapter to the tablet – you can even drive hardware. For me, […]

Then: flat, rectangular displays. Now: projection mapping flat images to 3D objects. Next: volumetric displays. From New York’s Chelsea neighborhood come two very inventive visual projects, opening in January. Matt Parker, veteran of New York University’s ITP brain-building program (don’t ask what it stands for), leads research at NYC’s Eyebeam in some seriously-cool volumetric display […]

Then: flat, rectangular displays. Now: projection mapping flat images to 3D objects. Next: volumetric displays. From New York’s Chelsea neighborhood come two very inventive visual projects, opening in January. Matt Parker, veteran of New York University’s ITP brain-building program (don’t ask what it stands for), leads research at NYC’s Eyebeam in some seriously-cool volumetric display […]