Kinetic colour sound
Whitney Music Box – Coverpop (jbum)
It seems as if a revolution of sound-image based synaesthesia is now truly underway. From software based approaches using FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) analysis of music and sound to drive visuals (VVVV & Proce55ing) to the manual synchronisation of the musical beat and the video frame in Vj’ing and experimental film.
Early Pioneers of experimental film and animation where just as interested in the symbiosis of tone and hue. The widely appreciated work of Oskar Fischinger is known particularly for its synchronisation of sound and image. Around 1950 Fischinger devised his ‘colour organ’ named the Lumigraph a machine played both sounds and lights and serving as an instrument for one-man shows.
Another pioneer interested in the relationship between image and sound is John Whitney. In his is classic work, Digital Harmony – On The Complementarity of Music and Visual Art, Whitney explores what he calls ‘harmonic resonance’ in animation, where different parts of an animation are given different fixed parameters (of say speed and/or direction) to produce subtle patterns. He referenced this further to musical harmony and laid down the groundwork for some specific methods for producing what he called ‘visual music’.
Coverpop’s ‘Whitney Music Box’ is a successful attempt at realising Whitney’s ideas. Coloured dots revolve in circles a periodically, and like a music box, when each dot reaches a specific point it’s associated note is sounded resulting in a kaleidoscopic composition composed entirely by numbers.
Tangible Textural Interface
http://vimeo.com/44646607 (video)***********
The technology isn't necessarily as avant-garde as Makey Makey, AnyTouch, or Sketch Synth, but Eunhee Jo's Tangible Textural Interfacesound system is a nice concept in a very nice package.
Jo says, "My proposal was to re-define the role of the surface in future lifestyle, exploring how surfaces can be an integrated as part of a product or environment. As you control the functions [backwards and forwards, volume control and equaliser], the left surface physically responds to the controls. Tactile surface also responds to the beat of the music."
Claiming to be the world's largest kinetic art installation, a new sculpture by German design studio Art + Com has recently been installed in Signapore's Changi International Airport.
Called 'Kinetic Rain', the sculpture consists of 1,216 individual raindrops cast in bronze, connected by fine wires and individually controlled by motors. The raindrops are computer programmed to transform into multiple shapes and switch between undulating gently and accelerating rapidly akin to an almighty rainstorm.
It's the best looking rain we've seen in a while (and in London, we've seen alot). Check out the video above for yourself.
This Gizmo Lets You Draw A UI On Paper, Then Turns It Into A Touch Screen
You know those huge multichannel mixers--the massive boards that audio engineers manage during concerts to control everything from sound to lights? It’s the sort of highly specialized hardware that the average person would never come into contact with, because why would they? But what if you could just draw it?
That’s the idea behind the SketchSynth, by Carnegie Mellon student Billy Keyes. It allows you to draw your own specialized piece of sound hardware--in this case, a MIDI board--on any random piece of paper.
“Ever since I was little, I’ve been fascinated by control panels,” Keyes explains on his blog. “In elementary school, my neighbor and I would spend our bus rides pretending to operate incredible imaginary machines with cardboard controllers we drew, cut, and taped the night before. Even now, I pause when I see desks covered in gauges, switches, knobs, and buttons, wondering what they all do.”
His approach is a compromise between boundless childhood imagination and human factors of practicality: He designed three distinct controls that anyone could draw. So users create buttons by drawing circles, toggles by drawing rectangles, and sliders by drawing an elongated I.
A simple webcam picks up the shapes and sends them to a computer, then, a projector actually lays extra data on top of the drawing, like virtual nubs to control the sliders. This approach allows the user to draw something simple and stagnant, while light can animate additional content wherever it may be needed. The camera is able to track the user’s hands on the controls, not through fancy IR-based 3-D models, but just by sensing the color green in human skin.
A Vertiginous Mirrored Room That Multiplies Inhabitants Infinitely
On the outside, the mirrored walls of this unadorned rectangular box help it blend into the space it occupies--a gallery at KUNSTEN, Museum of Modern Art, in Aalborg, Denmark, where it was installed last year. On the inside--well, that’s a different story.
When visitors enter the nearly hundred-square-foot room--an installation dubbed "The Phoenix Is Closer Than It Appears," by Berlin-based artistThilo Frank--the mirrored walls have the opposite effect. Where on the outside, they diverted your visual attention, on the inside, they direct it--very, very intensely. The occupier of Frank’s room sees himself multiplied infinitely on the walls, floor, and ceiling--like a carnival hall of mirrors with a more rigorous geometry. The piece recalls earlier works that experimented with immersive, mirrored experiences, like Lucas Samaras’s Room No. 2, from 1966. But what makes Frank’s slightly different is the unexpected form of seating it offers inside.
Instead of a chair or a bench, visitors are encouraged to park themselves on a simple plank swing, suspended from the room’s ceiling, which introduces a dizzying element of motion to their battery of illusory selves. The text accompanying the installation probably isn’t overstating the experience: "Once [the visitor] begins to swing," it reads, "the disorientation is at full effect: walls, ceiling and floor disappear in a spatial centrifugal motion, which seems to suck the body in and out of the infinite space."
The Density of Light sees super-chromatic artist Gabriel Dawe make rainbows real
Gabriel Dawe’s latest Plexus site-specific installation sees the artist accumulate thousands of strands of sewing threads, solidifying space in a vibrant, tangible spectrum of colour. The absolute precision of its making allows the viewer to perceive it from all manner of angles with the effect being somewhere between “material and the immaterial.”
Through the materials he uses, the artist returns to his childhood frustration at his Mexican heritage, the threads, and more specifically embroidery, symbolising the purported machismo mentality, the cultural roles of the genders, and a “complicated network between ideas and people.” The overall effect is both sculpturally architectural and very, very beautiful.
Chandelier by Troika. Large fresnel lenses shape light from LEDs suspended below into overlapping geometric patterns on the ceiling of the Royal Society of Arts‘ headquarters in London.
Piccolo
When we imagine robots we still have an image of a quasi C3PO bot clunking around space stations in an alarmingly human manner. Unfortunately we’re not quite there yet, but we do seem to be on the right path.
Say hello to Piccolo, a pocket-sized drawing CNC bot which can not only sketch, doodle and graffiti its way around a piece of paper, but also has a depth engine that means it can draw just as succinctly on 3D objects. For just $70, the Piccolo, designed by tech studio Diatom, arrives in an easy-to-assemble kit and, while it can only create very small images (it is a very smallbot after all), it uses sensory data to aid it with its drawings. It’s even capable of fabricating tiny forests based on light levels. It's also an open-source project, meaning it will gradually improve as more people tinker away with it.
While the product may only initially be picked up by bot enthusiasts, hobbyists and the programmers, the technology could have greater capabilities once people play around with the open-source platform. And with its sensory capabilities, who knows what the Piccolo will be drawing in the future!
creative applications site while researching into new arduino based workshops and ideas, so simple but genius.
The Product, a Berlin-based design studio with a focus on objects, space and interaction, was commissioned by Volkswagen to develop a set of visuals for an interactive musical performance for the premiere of the New Beetle at the 2011 IAA motor show (September 15-25, 2011, Frankfurt am Main). What the client got instead was Soundmachines – a custom-built instrument for performing electronic music by DJing visual patterns on record-sized discs. Honk for ingenuity!
The development of the visual turntable trio was nothing short of a process, says Jens Wunderling ofThe Product in an email. “The initial commission called for a set of visuals for a performance entitledConnectivity, that was supposed to allow both the performer and the audience to contribute to the music. To achieve that the client proposed a camera tracking system analyzing motion in the audience. We realized pretty quickly though that the spatial and lighting conditions at the IAA Volkswagen area weren’t suitable for what they wanted us to do.” A different idea for engaging the audience was needed. Something playful and intuitive that young and old could easily interact with. “We had some vague conceptual ideas for visual turntables earlier. We really liked the elegance of the interface and at some point simply proposed to build them.” So they did.
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