dave's blog of art and programming

  • Thursday with Tangible Auditory Interfaces

    I spent thursday afternoon in the tangible auditory interfaces studio at the Helsinki Media Lab with Till Bovermann and Erich Berger. Till has a report on our investigations of taking the Betablocker virtual machine into new noisemaking territories. Here is an example of a betablocker program written without the help of the graphical programming interface,…

  • Fluxus on Android

    I recently took a long train journey and had an idea to use my android phone for taking timelapse photos for Miska Knapek. I had no laptop with me, and realised there was no way I could script anything on the phone itself to do this, or anything more complex. This was the kernel of…

  • Betablocker DS premier @ 4for8

    My first attempt at homebrew driven “touch” livecoding at the TAI studio opening event at the Helsinki Media Lab. The DS itself proved to be quite a draw for the audience, and I think the addition of hands and fingers to the projection of a livecoding interface is a (partly unintentional) move in a good…

  • More Betablocker DS

    Betablocker DS is going to get it’s premier outing at 4for8 at Helsinki Medialab this Thursday. This is an all new upside-down video:

  • Cloth simulation with NURBS

    Another fluxus friday adventure… ; a simple realtime cloth simulation model (clear) (texture (load-texture “test2.png”)) (define rez 25) ; resolution of nurbs patch (define dist 0.1) ; the desired spring length (define p ; setup the nurbs primitive (with-state (backfacecull 0) ; we wanna see the back (ambient 0.2) (rotate (vector -90 0 0)) (scale…

  • Diffusion-limited aggregation with particles

    Trying to reinstate “fluxus friday” where I reserve some time for livecoding or fluxus hacking at the end of the week. First up, a new way of making fuzzy blobs in fluxus – particle aggregation. I like the analogue feel to it – reminds me of the voxels from last year. I also found this…

  • Germination X: Draw your own plant spirits

    Part of our groworld bazaar at Pixelache 2011 was the “draw your own plant spirits” workshop/gallery installation in the Augusta gallery on Suomenlinna island. This was the first event to use the Germination X game in a public setting, and the idea was to get people to help us design characters to represent the layers,…

  • Groworld Bazaar @ Pixelache

    After much organisation, shopping for seeds, clay, compost, drawing equipment, aronia berry products, packing, catching ferries, unpacking and then finally tidying up – Pixelache 2011 and FoAM’s groworld bazaar is over! Suomenlinna island was a great venue for the festival, despite the logistical challenges it brought a good vibe with it’s fortified buildings, village atmosphere…

  • Germination X: Relationships

    More documentation for the Germination X game – this diagram attempts to explain the relationships between the plant spirits and the plants, and between each other. Green indicates “love”, red indicates “hate”. Each spirit represents a “layer” in permaculture terminology – a collection of plants, for example the CoverSpirit represents the soil cover species such…

  • Germination X: Secret mechanisms

    I’ve made some graphs to document the underlying processes currently used by Germination X in preparation for the Pixelache workshop. These are not considered required for playing the game of course, but more as a description of how things work now, and hopefully a way to prompt suggestions on improvements and possible new directions. I’ve…