Imagine access to the power of the modern Web browser – the HTML5 Canvas, hardware-accelerated graphics via WebGL, animation, and more. Now imagine that instead of writing code to access that power, you can connect modules for graphical patching. Windows visualists may recognize the software VVVV. But whereas that tool was restricted to the capabilities […]

Avid released Sibelius 7 yesterday. Highlights in the new version: A new UI. The most apparent change is a new user interface with dockable, tabbed panels. The design borrows heavily from Microsoft’s Office Ribbon, though a more subdued appearance makes it look just as comfortable on the Mac. My guess is that power users may […]

Casey Reas, co-creator (with Ben Fry) of the elegant Processing coding environment so beloved now by artists, talks to our friends at The Creators Project in a recent video. Processing may be best known as only a tool, but it’s also become an open source conduit for ideas in aesthetics and digital art. Casey’s impact […]

sktch is a different kind of art tool for the mobile app age. For starters, it’s the outgrowth of a media outlet: Creative Applications Network, led by London-based architect, technologist, and curator Filip Visnjic, has already become the go-to site for people interested in making apps into art. The application itself embodies some of that […]

Music making with your face? It’s just the latest novel way of manipulating your computer with movement, thanks to a revived interest in camera-based interaction spurred by Microsoft’s Kinect and hackers making it work, and other computer vision libraries. One original work: FaceOSC, which uses custom tracking code and a standard computer webcam (no additional […]

If you aren’t quite ready to delve into the mysteries of granular synthesis and code, a colorful interface guides you through playing in Ableton Live. Granular synthesis… you’ve heard it before. Famously articulated by experimental composer Xenakis, the process of slicing up sound into tiny bits and reassembling it has produced everything from lovely (or […]

He’s built an open-source, retro-tinged 8-bit sampler, “Where’s the Party At?” (I’m been building the second generation now, so expect a review by early August.) He’s had electronic instrument designs on shelves at the retail chain Target and on the walls of the Whitney Art Museum in New York. He just completed a set of […]

From the previous bounds of the proscenium tradition – the flat, rectangular space defined by screens and theaters – audiovisuals increasingly sprawl into surround. One superb example comes to us from Seppo Gruendler of Austria. The project combines multiple “surround” technologies across multiple media. Projection is mapped across screens for wraparound visuals, but sound, too […]

From the previous bounds of the proscenium tradition – the flat, rectangular space defined by screens and theaters – audiovisuals increasingly sprawl into surround. One superb example comes to us from Seppo Gruendler of Austria. The project combines multiple “surround” technologies across multiple media. Projection is mapped across screens for wraparound visuals, but sound, too […]

Hey, Jitter fans: jit.artkmulti is an external for Max/MSP and Jitter that brings the powerful, marker-based augmented reality capabilities of ARToolKit to Max. We’ve seen a lapse in interest in marker-based tracking, I think, with the advent of technologies like Kinect, but it’s still useful for certain applications – and this makes it really easy […]