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.

photo by Kally Kahn

Here are some photos of people playing my video game at the art.tech exhibition at the Lab in San Francisco. And below is the Processing code for the game. It’s currently configured to run on a computer with an internal video camera and an external video camera attached via firewire. I have tested it using an iSight camera and a DV camera, both work great. I recommend running it with two mirrored screens set at 640×480. You will also need to add sounds to the Processing data folder named “good.wav” and “bad.wav”–classic video games sounds work well. See this post for instructions on playing. Have fun!

Processing Code

photo by Kally Kahn

photo by Kally Kahn

Expanding on our everydatum project, we created a mobile sensor that broadcasts light levels and accelerometer data to an online database via text message. The visualization below was created by running around for five minutes:

February 6th, 2009
inkjet print on Rives BFK
30″x22″

February 8th, 2009
inkjet print on Rives BFK
30″x22″

February 9th, 2009
inkjet print on Rives BFK
30″x22″

February 15th, 2009
inkjet print on Rives BFK
30″x22″

The above prints were also featured in the Rock Paper Scissors show last month.

Daybreak
gouache and ink on paper
30″x22″

This is a video of two people playing a video game I made using Processing last May. Each player sees a silhouette of themselves on screen whenever they move (their silhouette disappears when they are still). The player also sees a silhouette of the other player. The object of the game is to collect the blue balls while avoiding the red balls to achieve a high score. Balls can only be collected when both players’ silhouettes overlap each other and a ball, so the two players must work together. Each blue ball collected is worth one point while each red ball is worth one negative point.

Grey/Green
The first 35 minutes of Grey Gardens arranged by green.

Grey/Blue
The first 35 minutes of Grey Gardens arranged by blue.