Processing

http://processing.org/
Processing is a programming language, development environment, and online community that since 2001 has promoted software literacy within the visual arts. Initially created to serve as a software sketchbook and to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context, Processing quickly developed into a tool for creating finished professional work as well.

Processing is a free, open source alternative to proprietary software tools with expensive licenses, making it accessible to schools and individual students.

120 Feet of Video Art: Final Exams at NYU's Big Screens Class
Dan Shiffman isn't like most professors. Instead of Scantron sheets and bluebooks, Shiffman prefers to give his final exams on a 120-foot video wall that's the equivalent of six 16:9 displays linked end-to-end.
Shiffman, a wizard of the graphical programming language called Processing that many of the students use to fill up the screen (a few others use openFrameworks, another visual language) has taught this class for two years now. Processing has been used in tons of music videos, data visualizations and interactive video art and is popular for its relative simplicity as a way to turn code into amazing visuals.

view more here



Shiffman is the primary author of the "Most Pixels Ever" library for Processing, which allows projects to sync up across multiple displays seamlessly without delays—and not just your dual-head monitor.That hasn’t really been an option thus far in Processing, unless you were to go the hardware multiple-monitor route. Most Pixels Ever is amazing because it can handle the 6 million pixels of IAC's video wall without blinking, and without it, this class would not exist in its current form. All the art-tech nerds thank him as we file out the door.

Read more here

Jennifer Steinkamp

A visual artist who crafts computer-animated projections for site-specific spaces, Jennifer Steinkamp uses her work to explore new means of producing and experiencing art. Employing virtual-reality software like a painter wields a brush, Steinkamp constructs lifelike installations of nature in motion, derived entirely from code.

The artwork is interactive. Steinkamp builds her pieces in relation to their site's architecture, and sets the projectors at a low level so the viewer's shadow disrupts the imagery, provoking a playful point of immersion.
http://jsteinkamp.com/



Loom consisted of two overlapping video projections; one contained a horizontal pattern, while the other vertical. When combined, the two created a weave. Because there were two projections at angles, the viewer created two shadows that disrupted the projection; one shadow revealed the vertical lines while the other was filled with horizontal lines. The image formed a cube that matched the perspective of the space, which was a deep tunnel. The lines warped with a water like pattern.

dance-techLIVE

http://www.dance-tech.net/page/dancetechlive-beta

The OpenEnded Group

http://www.openendedgroup.com/
The OpenEnded Group is three digital artists — Marc Downie, Shelley Eshkar, and Paul Kaiser — who create works for stage, screen, gallery, page, and public space.
Kaiser and Eshkar have collaborated on numerous projects since the mid-1990s. Interested from the start in creating a new kind of 3D space that did not aspire to photorealism, we thought instead about drawing. Soon we formulated the notions of drawing as performance and hand-drawn space, which we then applied to motion-captured performance in a series of collaborations with choreographers. Of these, perhaps the best known are BIPED, with Merce Cunningham, and Ghostcatching, with Bill T. Jones.
Watch videos like 'Verge (Complete)' (Verge uses volumetric light to explore the idea of “blind 3D” in which black zones of the image may be read as voids or as dark solids) and clips 'Movement Principles' of Robert Wilson's instructions on how to move your body on stage

Augmented Reality

Augmented Reality Page
http://www.se.rit.edu/~jrv/research/ar/index.html
This page is a resource for Augmented Reality information. You will find an introduction to augmented reality and links to some augmented reality work on the web.

Levelhead
http://selectparks.net/
http://julianoliver.com/levelhead
http://selectparks.net/~julian/levelhead/install.html
levelHead is known to build on Ubuntu 7.10/7.04 and Debian Etch systems against the following external dependencies. It's adviseable you adhere to these versions if you want to avoid going spontaneously mad:
· cal3d 0.11 https://gna.org/projects/cal3d/
· osgcal 0.1.44 http://download.gna.org/underware/
· openscenegraph 1.2 http://www.openscenegraph.org/projects/osg/wiki/Downloads/PreviousReleases
· gstreamer (any) http://www.gstreamer.net/
· bakefile (any) http://www.bakefile.org/
· ARToolkit 2.72.1 http://www.hitl.washington.edu/artoolkit/download/
· ARToolkitPlus 2.1.1 http://studierstube.icg.tu-graz.ac.at/handheld_ar/artoolkitplus.php Optional:
· linux-uvc revision 228 http://linux-uvc.berlios.de/
· libwebcam revision 22 http://www.quickcamteam.net/software/libwebcam

HIT Lab
The Human Interface Technology Laboratory New Zealand (HIT Lab NZ) is developing and commercializing technology that improves human computer interaction and by doing so unlocks the power of human intelligence.The HIT Lab NZ conducts research with new emerging technologies such as Augmented Reality, Next Generation Video Conferencing, Immersive Visualization and Perceptual User Interfaces. Interaction Design techniques are used to adapt these technologies to the needs of end users and solve real world problems.

ARToolKit from HIT Lab NZ http://www.hitl.washington.edu/artoolkit/
Development for the ARToolKit library (originally design by Hirokazu Kato and Mark Billinghurst). It's a low-level AR Library for the tracking and the visual integration of real and virtual content. Widely used internationally by the community (GPL Licence), the software is now available commercially from ARToolWorks.

OSGART From HIT Lab NZ http://www.artoolworks.com/community/osgart/index.html
OSGART is a library that simplifies the development of Augmented Reality or Mixed Reality applications by combining the well-known ARToolKit tracking library with OpenSceneGraph. But rather than acting just as a simple nodekit, the library offers 3 main functionalities: high level integration of video input (video object, shaders), spatial registration (marker-based, multiple trackers), and photometric registration (occlusion, shadow).
With OSGART, users gain the benefit of all the features of OpenSceneGraph (high quality renderer, multiple file type loaders, community nodekits like osgAL, etc.) directly in their augmented reality (AR), mixed reality (MR) or mediated reality applications. As with the standard ARToolKit, the user can thus develop and prototype interactive applications that can use tangible interaction (in C++, Python, Lua, Ruby etc.).

AR-media™ Plugin v1.0 for Google SkecthUp™
With ARplug-in, Google Sketch-Up users are allowed to visualize their 3D models directly in the real physical space which sorrounds them. In a very precise sense, through ARplug-in, Sketch-Up 3D models can be visualized out of the digital workspace directly on users' desktop, by connecting a simple webcam and by printing a suitable code. The Plug-in provides users with an advanced visualization functionality which serves two main purposes:
Study and analize scaled virtual prototypes in real environments
Communicate 3D projects immersively and astonishingly
All you need to make ARplug-in work is a personal computer, a webcam and a printed code attached to the software. For optimal functioning, a Dual-core PC with a standard graphic card for 3D videogames are recommended. The price of a one seat License amounts to 99 eur.

Augmented reality on your desktop, thanks to Sketchup



Augmented Reality is a new technology that is starting to spread. Basically, it consists on mixing 3D model with live footage in real time. This concept has been applied to futuristic interfaces, and it can be very helpful for architects as it allows you to take 3D Models a step further, placed on the real world and show it to your clients.
Thanks to the AR-media Plugin for Sketchup, you can start playing with Augmented Reality. This plugin allows you to place the 3D Model over live video from your webcam, and move it around as you can see on the above video. The plugin calculates the planes on the live footage thanks to a sheet you need to print out, which allows the software to calculate the distance and inclination.

Projecting Performance

Interrelationships between performance and technology, dancer and operator

Projecting Performance is a collaboration between performance academics from the School of Performance & Cultural Industries and digital technologists from KMA Creative Technology Ltd. This AHRC-funded project focuses on the choreographic and scenographic exchange between dancers and projected digital images within a theatrical context. It questions processes of performance and perceived boundaries between performers and technologists, and instead it promotes dialogues in an iterative cycle of creative development.....more information
http://www.leeds.ac.uk/paci/projectingperformance/home.html

Video projection tools v2.1

The videoprojection tool was developed during a workshop that Hc Gilje gave for students of scenography, choreography and directing at KHIO in Norway june 2007, and further developed for the workshop he had at the medialab prado in Madrid may 2008 (including some features from the newly released max 5).
The workshops were an introduction to working with video as a tool for creating and transforming spaces: to thinking of video as light, and how you can mask a projection to project on multiple objects and surfaces within the projector´s projection angle and to exploit the depth of field in video projectors.
You can find more here: http://hcgilje.wordpress.com/resources/video-projection-tools/
http://hcgilje.wordpress.com/
http://hcgilje.com

Media-Space Journal Inaugural Issue

http://media-space.org.au/journal/issue1.html
In this inaugural issue of Media-Space Journal, is included ten papers from the 7th International Digital Arts and Culture Conference (perthDAC 2007). Digital Arts and Culture (DAC) is the leading cross-disciplinary research conference series for the analysis of developments in the broad field of digital and new media. In September 2007, DAC was hosted as the key international conference in the public program of the Biennale of Electronic Arts Perth (BEAP) in Perth, Australia. BEAP showcases and critiques artworks that engage with new and novel technologies. The theme of perthDAC 2007 was The Future of Digital Media Culture.

Immersive Sight Within the Third Space: Augmentation and Spatial Interface in exhibition space

by Jeremy Hight
Our field of vision is a continual, multi-tiered number crunching. Bicameral sight is always being processed , interpreted, reacted to, adjusted for focus, comparisons made. It simply is always running as an immersive, multi layered interaction of information and movement in a space.
http://neme.org/main/645/immersive-sight
http://neme.org/main/880/immersive-event-time
http://www.xcp.bfn.org/hight.html

Digital Performance Archive

http://ahds.ac.uk/ahdscollections/docroot/dpa/authorssearch.jsp

amber '08

http://08.a-m-b-e-r.net/
special performance section: http://08.a-m-b-e-r.net/index.php?m=works&sm=1&id=3
and New Media in performance: http://08.a-m-b-e-r.net/index.php?m=works&sm=4&id=39

PERFORMING PRESENCE: FROM THE LIVE TO THE SIMULATED

http://presence.stanford.edu/
http://spa.exeter.ac.uk/drama/research/intermedia/conference_announce.shtml
http://spa.exeter.ac.uk/drama/research/intermedia/welcome.shtml
An international conference, Centre for Intermedia, University of Exeter, UK, 26-29 March 2009

CONFIRMED KEYNOTE SPEAKERS*:
• Matt Adams, Blast Theory http://www.blasttheory.co.uk/
• Tim Etchells, Artistic Director, Forced Entertainment http://www.forcedentertainment.com/
• Adrian Heathfield, Professor of Performance ands Visual Culture, Roehampton University http://www.adrianheathfield.com/
• Lynn Hershman-Leeson, media artist http://www.lynnhershman.com/
• Hugo Glendinning, photographer, AHRC Fellow in the Creative and Performing Arts, University of Exeter http://www.hugoglendinning.com/
• Ken Goldberg, artist, Professor, Industrial Engineering and Operations Research (IEOR),, UC Berkeley and Director, Berkeley Centre for New Media http://goldberg.berkeley.edu/index-flash.html
• Mike Pearson, Professor of Performance Studies, University of Wales, Aberystwyth http://www.aber.ac.uk/~psswww/shared/general/pearson.htm and Mike Brookes, artist http://www.mikebrookes.com/
• Paul Sermon, media artist, Professor of Creative Technology, University of Salford http://www.paulsermon.org/
• Michael Shanks, archaeologist, The Omar and Althea Hoskins Professor of Classical Archaeology, Stanford University http://www.stanford.edu/~mshanks/
• Marianne Weems, Artistic Director, The Builders Association http://www.thebuildersassociation.org/
• Krzysztof Wodiczko, Professor of Visual Arts, Massachusetts Institute of Technology http://architecture.mit.edu/people/profiles/prwodicz.html

CALL FOR PAPERS:
The conference will engage with a wide range of disciplines, art and performance practices, technologies of presence, theory and modes and practices of documentation. Key questions may include:
• What are the chief signifiers of presence?
• How is presence achieved through theatrical performance?• What makes a memory come alive and live again?
• How are practices of presence connected with senses of self and identity?• Is presence synonymous with 'being in the moment'?
• What is the nature of the ‘co-presence’ of audience and performer?• Does presence imply distance?
• Where does performance practice end and its documentation begin?
• In what tense does documentation take place?• Can technology produce presence?
• Is presence a form of immersion?
• Is documentation theory or practice?
• What happens when documentation becomes time-based and ephemeral?
• Where does practice end and its documentation begin?
• In what tense does documentation take place?

Compagnie Amoros & Augustin

Watch some video from this amazing theatre company's performances:

on shadow theatre

Sunjata

mixing shadow theatre and film

360° à l'ombre

mixing theatre and film

The Never-Ending Shooting

video and photos of the technique

More videos: http://fr.youtube.com/BrunodeBeaufort
Official site: http://www.amoros-augustin.com/accueil.html

Blog: http://leterneltournage.theatre-contemporain.net/

The Callas Project

CALLAS (the acronym stands for Conveying Affectiveness in Leading-edge Living Adaptive Systems) is a integrated project funded by the European Commission.

In the project vision, ambitious challenges are pursued: partners from different countries are working together in pursuit a common goal that will contribute to reduce the cost and the complexity of development of multimodal interfaces in the Digital Entertainment and Information context.

• to produce a set of components (known as Shelf components) which can be used to generate emotionally-aware user interfaces (or Affective Multimodal Interfaces).
• to handle interoperability between the components through the open source CALLAS Framework
• to provide APIs to 3rd party developers through which the shelf components and emotional model might be accessed.

Finally, the capabilities of the CALLAS Framework will be demonstrated through the development of CALLAS Showcases, significant test-beds in the context of New Media, embryonic samples of applications of the future.

CALLAS aims to design and develop a Framework based on a plug-in multimodal architecture, invariant to configuration of Multimodal Components, to interpret and process emotional aspects in real-time for easy and fast development of applications for Art and Entertainment, paying attention to the value of users, who are no longer passive spectators of artistic performances, but stimulating sources of human communication. The project is developing selected scenarios for Art and Entertainment, to showcase CALLAS technology in different typologies of space: theatres, home, squares, festivals, etc., as the "space" is one of the most interesting factors where human emotional interaction takes place. A strong attention is given to all interface and interaction aspects, to minimize the complexity for multimodal handling, to make creative industries and artists free to develop truly interactive art, keeping the technology burden hidden and preserving the naturalness of user interaction, not altering the spontaneity of their experience.

http://www.callas-newmedia.eu/

NIP (New Interfaces for Performance)

NIP (New Interfaces for Performance) is a practical, artists led, workshop and touring event, which examines techniques for creating mixed media and interactive work for live, interactive contexts - for the most this refers to live performance (music, theatre, dance, sound) and interactive, real-time installation.
http://newinterfaces.net/nip/

"The Passion Project" by Reid Farrington

Read from: http://broadwayworld.com/viewcolumn.cfm?colid=31262

The Passion Project is a vibrant archival film experiment spun from the reels of the last great silent film, Carl Th. Dreyer's 1928 immortal masterpiece, "The Passion of Joan of Arc." Exploring the intersection of live performance, film, and installation, The Passion Project includes every frame of Dreyer's film - his outtakes and the reels that were eerily lost to fire - and explodes the film into three dimensions, placing the audience inside the action and surrounding them with the relentless rhythm of 30mm projections. The Passion Project features a mesmerizing and meticulous performance by Shelley Kay, who bears an uncanny resemblance to the Melle. Falconetti, the actress in the film.

Directed by Reid Farrington and performed by Shelley Kay, production includes costumes by Sara Jeanne Asselin, set by Janet D. Clancy and dramaturgy/technical assistance by Stephen O'Connell and Austin Guest. The piece had its initial workshop production at the PS/K2 Festival, last November in Copenhagen, Denmark and continued workshop showings at the 3LD Art and Technology Center in June and July.

For the past seven years Reid Farrington has been a technical artist and collaborator with the Wooster Group. He has designed video and created hardware and software systems for the playback of video and sound for To You the Birdie!, Brace Up!, Poor Theater, House/Lights, WHO'S YOUR DADA, and Hamlet. He has toured productions to Moscow, Paris, Berlin, Istanbul, Amsterdam, Melbourne, Brussels, and Athens. He has edited has authored interactive DVDs of The Wooster Group's performances, Brace Up! and House/Lights. In addition to being a video artist, he is a director, set, light, and costume designer for various theater and dance companies in NYC.

For more information, visit http://www.reidfarrington.com.

Watch video extract from Wooster Group's "Hamlet" and "The Passion Project"

The Salt Satyagraha by Joseph Delappe

Over the course of 26 days, using a treadmill customized for cyberspace, Joseph Delappe reenacted Mahatma Gandhi's famous 1930 Salt March. The original 240-mile walk was made in protest of the British salt tax; the update of this seminal protest march took place at Eyebeam and in Second Life, the Internet-based virtual world. For this performance, Joseph Delappe walked the entire 240 miles of the original march on a converted treadmill at Eyebeam in New York City and online in Second Life. My steps on the treadmill controlled the forward movement of my avatar, MGandhi Chakrabarti, enabling the live and virtual reenactment of the march.

Realized in several stages, DeLappe's virtual re-creation of The Salt Satyagraha, Mahatma Ghandi's Salt March to Dandi, a journey 240 mileslong, is part installation and part performance art. His historical re-enactment reveals more about how virtual space is navigated from real
space than it explains the politics of Mahatma Ghandi's protest against British salt tax in 1930, utilizing travel in real space, a blog, and images from the journey housed on Flickr.
More of the article:
http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=308

view project
http://saltmarchsecondlife.wordpress.com/

On joining a “real” march in NYC…
May 6, 2008 by delappe
Long delayed in writing about my experience on April 6th, 2008, walking in a march in “real life” sponsored by the NYC based “Satya Graha Forum”. The march was the inaugural event of a month of activities surrounding the production of “The Satyagraha”, the Phillip Glass opera from 1977 that was being revived by The Metropolitan Opera here in New York. The march involved starting at any one of four gathering points, walking a few miles and circling Union Square Park with all four groups converging on the Gandhi statue at the Soutwest corner of the park for a rally and speeches.
Keep in mind this was the day after completing the 240 miles of the reenactment in Second Life and on the treadmill - I was tired! All the same, it was quite an amazing experience to break out of my daily regimen of walking at Eyebeam (indoors), sleeping, getting up the next day and walking again. I made my way to Houston and 2nd avenue to gather with my fellow marchers. I immediately found myself feeling very self-conscious and shy in only the way that gathering with a group of complete strangers can do to me. Oddly, this was the complete opposite of my behavior and demeanor within Second Life during the course of the reenactment where I was completely at ease in approaching others in the online space to chat and invite them to be my “friends” and perhaps join me in walking.

more...

Liberate Your Avatar

http://creativetechnology.salford.ac.uk/paulsermon/liberate/
http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid823425610?bclid=1201016440&bctid=1398215641
An interactive public video art installation incorporating Second Life users in a real life environment. Located on All Saints Gardens, Oxford Road, Manchester, for the Urban Screens Festival, October 12th 2007 from 5pm to 6pm.
The merged realities of ‘All Saints Gardens’ on Oxford Road, and its online three-dimensional counterpart in ‘Second Life’ will, for the first time, allow ‘first life’ visitors and ‘second life’ avatars to coexist and share the same park bench in a live interactive public video installation. Entering into this feedback loop through a portal between these two parallel worlds this event exposes the identity paradox in Second Life. ‘Liberate your Avatar’ examines this new crisis and reflects the history of ‘All Saints Gardens’, relocating Emmeline Pankhurst as an avatar within ‘Second Life’ where she remains locked to the railings of ‘All Saints Gardens’.

Marnix De Nijs

MARNIX DE NIJS IS A ROTTERDAM BASED ARTIST WHO EXPLORES THE DYNAMIC CLASH BETWEEN BODIES, MACHINES AND OTHER MEDIA.
As an artist, De Nijs shows how culture acts upon our senses, and he expresses this in a great variety of ways, making use of continually-changing technology. This allows him to emphasise a new role for the artist that seems to have been established by our developing culture of technology. De Nijs describes himself and his work as recognition of the dynamic collision of bodies, machines and other media.
http://www.marnixdenijs.nl/index.htm

RIXC, Centre for New Media Culture

Recently founded Centre for new media culture in Riga - the RIXC is the joint effort of a number of independent local cultural groups working in the fields of new media, art, film, music, youth culture and the social projects. The founders of RIXC are E-LAB - Electronic Arts and Media Centre (http://re-lab.net), LOCOMOTIVE- film studio (http://www.karosta.org) and BALTIC CENTER - NGO for education and social development; members and partners include: SVAIGS99% (http://svaigs99.lv), Bio.codes, Djs AG & Raitis, VARKA CREW, F5, OPEN, CLAUSTHOME, ORBITA (http://www.orbita.lv), K@2 (http://www.karosta.org), and others.
The aim of the centre is to bridge the traditional gap between 'high' and popular culture and the divisions between various youth, sub- and minority cultures. The RIXC intends to become a meeting place for different types of culture on local and international scale.
The main fields of activities include:- organising of public events (festivals, workshops, performances, club events, etc.)- Media lab - production space, where different artistic disciplines can meet and collaborate (video, film, audio, cd-rom and web design, electronic music,…) - Training programmes - specially geared towards specific target groups (artists, young people, minorities and local ethnical groups, administrators and managers of the media centres, etc.)- Educational and social programmes- Research into the fields of new media and culture, particularly in streaming media (developing of Acoustic space research programme).
RIXC is the member of NICE network (Nordic-Baltic-North-East European network for small scale innovative initiatives in the field of new media culture (http://nice.x-i.net), and takes part in other international and cross disciplinary networks, co-projects and mailing-lists in the field of new media culture in Europe, Canada and other parts of the world.
http://rixc.lv