Pinhole photos date back to the genesis of photography, but artist Pierre-Olivier Boulant is re-imagining them as digital media. Working with custom, hand-built control hardware and software patched in the free visual development environment Pure Data (Pd), he composes live performances from the photos, working with musicians to create a live soundscape. A chemical engineer […]

Vimeo has long been a favored site for visualists sharing their work, but while sites like rival video host Blip.tv and photo sharing site Flickr added an option for Creative Commons licensing, it’s been conspicuously absent on Vimeo — until now. Now, when you upload video files to Vimeo, you’ll see options for all the […]

Watching the bleeding edge of new musical instruments often means having to see new designs in tech demos, in proof-of-concept experiments as artists first try their hands on a new object. If you can use some imagination and see potential, that’s fine, but it’s a bit unfair to the instrument – you don’t get to […]

SWEATSHOPPE-Whip It from SWEATSHOPPE on Vimeo. Visuals and audio frequently cohabitate, but assembling truly integrated audiovisual artistry remains a nascent field. When done right, it’s terribly satisfying. We saw SWEATSHOPPE’s Blake Shaw and Bruno Levy painting “graffiti” with video projection last year. They’ve been doing some other fantastic work since. At top, Whip It is […]

vergence (short version) from Tina Frank on Vimeo. Vienna-based artist Tina Frank is a veteran of audiovisual design, moonlighting as both visualist and designer for media from the Web to music packaging. Beginning work in the 90s, she demonstrated deftly how spanning traditional design work and visualizing music in clubs could establish a designer on […]

Before digital projectors, before even the film projector, there was the world’s simplest projection tech: light source, shadow. From the traditional Indonesian art of Wayang shadow puppetry to modern artists scrounging used overhead projectors as they are retired from schools, the medium is as rich as ever. Electronic musician Mira Calix (Warp) uses cast shadows […]

One phone is … well, one phone. But now that many of us have smartphones, crowd-sourcing technology has far greater potential. A screen of a few inches, multiplied many times, can fill enormous spaces. And because the gadgets contain sensors and connectivity, they can respond more intelligently to proximity. A big hit of DroidCon here […]

Whether iPhone, Android, pico projector, or whatever, we’re living in a world that’s increasingly filled with displays. Much of the focus in the visualist world has been on big — huge buildings, huge grain silos, massive projections screens, and the like. But there’s good stuff to be had in the opposite direction. Now, full disclosure: […]

Photo (CC) Alosh Bennett. With the regularity of clockwork, stories about how digital audio consumption is degrading the quality of music are published and then re-published. Nearly a decade after the introduction of Apple’s iPod, this still apparently qualifies as news. The content of the articles is so identical, you could believe the bylines are […]

NOVAK 3D DISCO™ EVENT SAMPLER from Novak Collective on Vimeo. It appears Novak have hit on a winning formula for making live audiovisuals more complete and more immersive. The 3D glasses are just one part of that; they’re adding dimension to their parties in more ways than one. Toby Harris sends along this reel of […]