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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.

I have been experimenting a fair bit with different possibilities for non-photorealistic rendering.  This video shows a few of those experiments.

This is from an upcoming project with Pedro Rebello of SARC.

This is a little experiment I did in VVVV, mapping the colours from a southpark episode to a 16×16 voxel grid.

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.

LiveAPI was an exciting project to develop.  Due to my work with PlayLive, I was contacted by Nathan Ramella and James Andrew when they discovered that the midi device scripting for Ableton Live was done in Python.  By decompiling the midi remote scripts we stumbled across an entire Python API within Live!  We ended up writing some new remote scripts for Ableton that let people access these internals through telnet or OSC.

Here’s the CreateDigitalMusic article on the original release.

I’m not terribly involved with this project anymore, but am very proud to see that through the powers of open-source others have taken up the mantle and made this project their own!

The current community seems to be centered around this site.

I discovered that you can use plastic bags/dropsheets and a hair straightening iron to make your own inflatable forms.  This star shape was my first attempt.