Between July and November, 2011, a new version of our project Tentacles was featured as part of the Talk To Me exhibition at the MoMA in New York City.

Tentacles is a multiplayer co-located interactive installation which allows users to download an iPhone or Android app, and use their device like a game controller.  Each user controls a tentacle within the virtual space.  As a tentacle, they can move around the space and collect tenticules to grow, they can also attack other users tentacles in an attempt to knock off some of their tenticules in order to shrink them.  They can also interact with a number of other creatures (image from the app instructions):

It was a great honour to be a part of this show.   Here is a photo from the opening:

The app was released in March 2011, and we’re very proud of it. It provides a mobile outlet for Canadian and Internation art listings.

See it on the iTunes store.

I really do, but sometimes I’m startled that certain things haven’t been done, or aren’t standardized in OSC.  For one, there seems to be no real standard, cross-platform MIDI to OSC and back again converter.  There are a couple platform specific options (e.g. Occam) or some bits for Max, PD, or Supercollider, but nothing really cross platform and stand-alone.

Now I’ve read all about the issues with MIDI clock timing, synchronization, sysex, and innumerable other nuances of MIDI that are problematic to reproduce in OSC. But most of the time I don’t really care about all that.  I just want something that will either throw some notes out on the network, or let me play some notes on a synth by throwing out some packets.

It seems like I’ve written bits of code for translating midi to OSC innumerable times, when really all I wanted was a dead simple gateway, that runs just about anywhere.  I’m sure there’s at least a few others out there with similar experiences.

So I finally decided to do something about it, and present to you Moco (either the Brazilian Rock Cavy, or Molybdenum-Hexacarbonyl depending on if you like chemicals or rodents).  Moco is a dead simple, no-nonsense OSC-MIDI gateway, written in Java.

Primarily it sends and receives note on, note off, and control change messages cause that’s usually all you want.  It also will send and receive raw midi messages with the flick of a switch (if you really want to get into more complex things).

I’m going to be trying something different with Moco too.  I’m distributing it for free, but if you find it useful I’d encourage you to contribute to its development on Flattr.  Also if you’d like to see new features, get quick help with it, take a peek at the source, etc. then I’d encourage you even more contribute, and I’ll see what I can do!

Now, for what you’ve all been waiting for:

Download Moco version 1.0

Contribute to Moco:

Click Above

I know it’s tough keeping up with new trends, thats why the Ephemeral Foundation (Anthea Foyer, Rob King, Siobhan O’Flynn) is happy to provide you with “the new black”.  A free service that scours the internet looking for the next big thing.

Netrooms is a participative network piece that invites performers from around the world to contribute to an extended feedback loop and delay line across the Internet. The work explores the juxtaposition of multiple spaces as the acoustic, the social and the personal environment becomes permanently networked. The performance consists of live manipulation of multiple real-time streams from different locations, which receive a common sound source.  Netrooms celebrates the private acoustic environment as defined by the space between one audio input (microphone) and output (loudspeaker). The performance of the piece consists of live mixing a feedback loop with the signals from each stream.

Netrooms is designed to take advantage of the latency inherent in commonly available audio streaming software.  The typical delay between musical gesture and articulation at a remote site is approximately six seconds.   The visualization for Netrooms takes advantage of this extended delay by sending a secondary data-stream from each site directly to the main performance site containing audio amplitude metadata.  Because of the compact nature of this data, and the direct connection to the performance site (i.e. the stream doesn’t need to go through an external server), the audio metadata arrives well before the actual audio that it refers to.  The temporal difference between the audio data stream and metadata stream allows for the visualization of the audio coming from each site before it actually is heard.  The visualization of each site is laid out in a star-formation with the points of the star representing each remote site, and the centre of the star representing the main performance site.  Amplitude data is visualized as a stream of brush-strokes with larger brush strokes representing louder data.  Each of these sites visualizations is given a distinct visual representation, and synchronised so that the visualized amplitude data reaches the centre of the visualization at the same time as the audio is heard in the performance space.

I frequently perform as part of the Toronto based improvised electronic music and visuals collective I/O Media. This is a collaborative network performance between the musician Zen Lu in China, and I/O Media in Toronto with Additv providing the visuals. I use VVVV to multiply, warp, and twist 3d models into interesting organic shapes to go with the music.

Some more footage from my live visuals:

Apiograph is an art installation that was part of the 2008 Resonating Bodies show at the *new gallery in Toronto. Using a live data feed of the pollination activity from a nest of Bombus Impatiens bees located in the gallery, a virtual garden was grown, visualizing the genetic diversity that bee polination creates.

More info at resonatingbodies.wordpress.com

An interactive controller for the iPhone / iPod and a Processing server that allows on-site visitors to participate in unstructured play (the best kind). Shown here being premiered as an art installation as part of Toronto’s Nuit Blanche. Created by a team led by Rob King (Canadian Film Centre Media Lab), Geoffrey Shea (Mobile Experience Lab, OCAD) and Michael Longford (Mobile Media Lab, York University).

Find more info and future showings at tentacles.ca

As a purely ludic experience, this installation invites the participant to create and play with a linear object that will live in a cube. Using an updated stereoscope viewing booth as the interface this installation recreates the setting of the Victorian-era science fiction story Flatland by Edwin Abbott Abbott and lets participants engage with these geometric elements, as environments, objects and controllers in the installation.

Sphere Line Cube was a ludic art installation by the Autotelic Collective (Rob King, Patricio Davilla, Ken Leung) shown at Toronto’s Pixel Gallery in February 2009.

Using an infrared light pen visitors were able to sketch in a 3D space and see their creations in full 3D using anaglyph (red/blue) glasses.