Piccolo is like candy for people who like robots and drawing machines. It’s affordable, cute, and downright fun. It’s going to be on your Christmas in July wanted list. How awesome is it? Let us count the ways: It’s under US$70. It’s Arduino-compatible. It works with Processing – ideal for drawing experiments. It’s open source […]

Inside this compact white box lurks a lot of sonic power and technical prowess. Perhaps that explains why the newest version of the open source Shruthi-1 now sports a crazy-badass wolf dog cartoon with glowing eyes. Since its launch, the Shruthi-1 has gradually evolved new features, with a fairly sophisticated combination of hardware and extensive […]

Beeple isn’t just one of our favorite animators. He’s also a creator of open-licensed VJ content that you can use in live sets and other works. In addition to video clips, you get the raw materials on which those animations were based, in the form of Cinema 4D files you can open and manipulate. That […]

Reason’s Rack, a walled garden no more. Hmmm… “reason.” “Logic.” I’m calling my next musical creation “Inanity.” Sound good? Who’s in? Photo (CC-BY) Marco Raaphorst. He’s a fan. Users want more: that much is clear. But for years, Reason has famously (or infamously, depending on your point of view) resisted plug-in formats as a way […]

The original vision of the MeeBlip was to make something affordable, something open and hackable, something anyone could get, something that could tell a story, and something we’d use to make some music. And since those are all goals of Create Digital Music, too, it’s a perfect physical compliment to what we do. For me, […]

With new hybrid performance comes new hybrid tools, as artists can work with an arsenal of evolving, often open, creative visual software. In a new performance for Australian Dance Theater, multiple tools merge to produce an array of visual features to accompany the choreography. Some of the glue is Syphon, the open source framework for […]

The work by Theo Watson and team has been one of those magical technological revelations that makes people say “oh – that’s what that’s for.” Say computer vision or tracking, or show the typical demo of what these can do with interaction, and eyes glaze over. But make them work as puppetry, and somewhere deep […]

Look at a music software interface – particularly a tracker-style interface – and you might easily see something resembling a spreadsheet. So, why not gaze into the cells of a spreadsheet and begin to imagine music? Karlsruhe-based electronic artist and programmer Patrick, cappel:nord, had just such a flight of fancy about office software. He explains:

Diaspora is an attempt to build a social network that contrasts with the locked-garden vision of Facebook, one built on open source software, open exchange of information, and distributed – rather than centralized – communication. I already let slip that we’ll be rebooting our own social endeavor, Create Digital Noise, in the new year. But […]