Prodical’s Blog

It’s been a while since my last blog post – so this is an overdue round-up of what’s been keeping me busy.

It feels like I’ve been focusing on Processing to the exclusion of anything else for sometime… and not just my own creative development… but also all the time and energy I’ve been investing into InProcess:ing – the open forum for sharing creative coding and practice at Madlab.

Don’t get me wrong… I lurve Processing… but I think it’s time to take a bit of a breather and outline ideas and strategies to move forward with new opportunities and other creative ideas that have been bubbling on my back-burner for a while…

Themes include:

1. KiNoSeq – a kinetic nodal sequencer for the iPad
2. Fun with Arduino
3. PEAL ‘Hand Bells’
4. The Augmented Tonoscope
5. shado – monome widgets
6. Dirty Electronics – Skull Etching
7. ‘Analogue is the new Digital’ exhibition

Some of these are relatively brief and included within this post – others are more substantial so I’ve opened up a separate post in their own right.

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I’d been having some issues mixing the PeasyCam and Obsessive Camera Display (OCD) libraries in the same Processing sketch – which I’ve now sort of resolved and learned a thing or two in the process…

I found that switching between a PeasyCam and non-configured OCD viewport camera feed made PeasyCam behave idiosyncratically – loss of mouse control, some offsetting of Z-axis distance (only on the first switch back from an OCD feed – it’s consistent from then on), clipping of the scene – as if the farClip setting in OCD has likwise adjusted it in PeasyCam – though clipping isn’t actually assignable within PeasyCam itself.

Turns out PeasyCam is now at v0.8.1 – I was running an older version – and the documentation now includes a number of methods I hadn’t noticed before.

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on Friday, 13th February I attended the Owl Project m-Log workshop at FACT in Liverpool and spent a thoroughly enjoyable (though quite intense and tiring day) building my own m-Log from the supplied kit.

the m-Log kit

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With my monome 64 due to arrive imminently I’ve been browsing the monome website for sparkly things I particularly like the look of…

Starting with Ableton Live…

1. drumwreck by anton hornquist – website & youtube demo

monome step sequencer in maxmsp/live

Early days for this app… which seems both intuitive and ergonomic… and even works using the ‘monome40_fake’ patch. Latest developments on its monome discussion thread.

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Here’s a first draft outline as PDF - though it’s still waiting for feedback and contributions from Anthony Rowe.

There’s always more to find out there… Deep Vacuuming the Source Files and then looking fairly systematically through BIT-101 Lab has turned up several interesting Flash demos:

a sweet little non-interactive 3d particle system waveform – 041101_lewis.fla

Click on the image to load Flash in a pop up.

and a simple sound activated wave pattern – 050819_lewis.fla

Click on the image to load Flash in a pop up.

It also suggested some new and useful practitioner and reference links – though these have quickly branched out further still…

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I’ve recently proposed this idea to Gini Simpson, Head of Media Arts at SPACE Studios, Hackney, London, E8 3RH. The outline is included in full here but you can also download it as a PDF.

Introduction

Through recent online research for my own creative practice I came across a fascinating, but hitherto unknown to me, USA based project – momone.

There are videos of the monome 40h in action HERE

Essentially the momome is a beautifully designed, hand-crafted, minimalist interactive interface for controlling and monitoring pretty much anything audio, visual and beyond…

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Interesting things I’ve found…

I want one… I really, really want one…
monome 40h – ~$500 second hand
monome.org
Several video’s HERE

the monome 40h is a reconfigurable grid of sixty-four backlit buttons.

buttons can be configured as toggles, radio groupings, sliders, or organized into more sophisticated systems to monitor and trigger sample playback positions, stream 1-bit video, interact with dynamic physical models, and play games. button press and visual indication are decoupled by design: the correlation is established by each application.

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