collaboration with Kyle McKinley
custom hardware and software
presented at the 2011 Maker Faire in San Mateo, May 21-22

The UC State of the Arts just posted a video of our still building installation from the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts’ “Future Tense” conference last fall:

I’ll be hanging out on the street showing sound reactive software which gathers ambient street noise (footsteps, traffic, conversations, etc) and renders them as 3D particle systems in real time. For more info, see the GAFFTA website.

I’ve been playing with sound reactive 3-D particle systems in Processing using OpenGL. Above is one of sketches I’ve been working on (which has way too much information for online video compression formats, hence the fuzziness). Different colored particles react to different frequency bands (audio track not included here) and orbit at different radii around the center.

Kyle and I are bringing building to the Maker Faire at the San Mateo Event Center on May 21st and 22nd. We will be part of a project called “SpaceCamp” which will focus on hacking/making and creating community spaces. The space will include a bunch of groups from around the country doing exciting projects along those lines. Our project is called building: a how to which will include a lot of our previous software projects, hands-on workshops on how we made them, and, of course, some surprises.

My friend Brian just started a project called Occupation-Preoccupation, which looks great:

“The United States has over 700 military bases on foreign soil in sovereign countries, where we have no declaration of war. This project seeks to gather covers by American musicians of songs that are associated by origin with each of these places.”

This spring, I’m going to try to remember how to play music and put something together for this.

Then this summer, in addition to riding my bicycle all over the place, I’ll be teaching a class called “Hacking for Artists” at UC Santa Cruz. We’ll be making digital media art projects by hacking code together from various places. It will be something of a crash course in programming for artists who want to do crazy things with computers but who don’t want to study computer science.