Photo (CC-BY-ND Dave/riptheskull. Happy Thanksgiving to our American readers. I was thinking about technologies for which I’m particularly thankful, some non-obvious, some perhaps so obvious they might be easily be taken for granted. Each I hope represents some opportunities for others. At the risk of starting a Thanksgiving roast, in no particular order, here are […]

Interactive Puppet Prototype with Xbox Kinect from Theo Watson on Vimeo. When Microsoft gobbled up vision technology and announced they were channeling their own research into a product for their game console, artists, researchers, and hackers lamented. It seemed the tech might be destined only for a handful of mainstream game titles. Hours after the […]

The Lemur, seen here onstage with The Glitch Mob, rides off into the sunset. It’s not so often that I write obituaries for hardware, but this time, it seems appropriate. JazzMutant has announced that its Lemur, the multi-touch hardware controller, is officially at the end of its life. Their announcement:

Checkerboard Step Sequencer V2 from Josh Silverman on Vimeo. Shall we play a game? Have your checkers chops ready, because Josh Silverman’s Checkerboard Step Sequencer, a tangible interface for music, will test both your game mettle and your grooves. Built with the open source coding tool OpenFrameworks and Ableton Live as sound source, the checkerboard […]

Syphon VDMX 5 Beta 8 integration Demo from vade on Vimeo. Once upon a time, we imagined a future in which computer applications shared content, media, and data effortlessly, where different tools all coexisted. The reality we got was, in almost every category, far more monolithic. By exploiting a little-known feature of the Mac’s graphics […]

What if you could make any device or any software a re-programmable musical instrument, effect, or soundmaker? Your phone could be a touch-controlled effect, your tablet a sketchpad for interactive drum sequencers. Patches assembled on your desk on a computer could be taken with you in your pocket. And what if you could do all […]

Flying Lotus – Kill Your Co-Workers from beeple on Vimeo. Beeple + Flying Lotus Team Up in Dazzling Animated Music Video Flying Lotus sends over his new music video, in collaboration with one of our favorite visual artists, the multi-talented motion artist Beeple. It seems a perfectly-calibrated aesthetic marriage between 3D models and hand-sketched rough […]

StepPolyArp for iPad controlling an Oberheim FVS from Logan Mannstrane on Vimeo. Logan Mannstrane sends in this lovely video combining an iPad MIDI step sequencer — with an Oberheim FVS. It’s a striking intersection of analog and digital technology. But I wanted to ask Logan to explain why he’d use the iPad in this case […]

The Canadian Broadcasting Centre, viewed from above. Photo (CC-BY-SA) Benson Kua. To me, a license is a tool: it’s a means to an end. But that means that the tool ought to be doing the job you chose for it. After news broke that the Canadian public broadcaster CBC was moving away from Creative Commons, […]

It’s a little mind-boggling to me, but artist Sebastian Pirch has managed to use free, graphical patching environment Pure Data (Pd), with its graphical extensions Gem, to build a graphics engine. The Salzburg-based artist explains on the Pd forum (to incredulous Pd patchers): hehe…not kidding…honestly only pd-extended + gem modelling and texturing and particleFX in […]