I had the opportunity to teach several workshops, give a talk and show Gravity during the month of March.

• La Chose Programmée, a workshop held @ BBB in Toulouse (February 23th to 26th), where code together with Bluetooth technologies on mobile phones were explored with Etienne Cliquet and some students of the Ecole des Beaux-arts de Toulouse.
  Read a more detailed article on 2Roqs website.
• Openframeworks workshop, held @ Craslab in Paris (February 28th to March 1st). By the way, version 006 was just released a few days ago and has now support for iPhone development. Check a tutorial on Memo’s website (more to come).
  Slides about Openframeworks (pdf, french)
• Code as a creative tool, a talk followed by a short Processing workshop given for the festival Siana in Evry (March 23rd). Yay, it was very cool to talk about the early Atari & Amiga demoscene in the end of the 80’s.
  Scroll some more text about this on 2Roqs website.
• Gravity was exhibited twice in Bordeaux (March 17th to 20th) . The first installation was shown for “la semaine de la langue française”, and it was set up in an old nunnery that is part of the Drac Aquitaine, a french government organization responsible for promoting cultural events.
  The other one was set up as part of the E.motion electronic festival in Bordeaux. The animation was projected on the Utopia movie theater’s facade. This event was a huge success as the application received more than 1000 sms messages in roughly 3 hours!
  Videos, photos on 2Roqs website.

A quickie application was developed with Vision Factory allowing words to be only projected on bodies surface, with infrared blob detection. Many thanks to our italian dancers M. and A. from the bubbling Pscht Pshit. The whole video was shot @ 2Roqs and assembled by Michaël. Music by Splank Studio.

>>>E.Motion website <<<

From the 27th of February to the 28th of March, french collective Neurosystem will organize concerts, performances, talks and installations across the city of Bordeaux around the electronic and multimedia cultures.

>>>E.Motion website <<<

Among other, Gravity will be shown and projected on the outside wall of the Utopia cinema the 17th of March, while a concert and projections will be held inside. It will also be featured during one week into the DRAC abbey.

We@2Roqs were commissioned to develop an interactive application for the re-opening of Aquarium de La Rochelle at the end of January 2009. The installation uses Vision Factory as the core engine for the rendering.

A more detailed article can be found there, with screenshots of the tool that was used to model the fishes.

All Right. Not sure if I am proud of this one, but anyway here it is : the YouTube Mixer.

This is a little project I worked on a boring Sunday afternoon. This web application (as I dare to call it) lets you mix two different streams from YouTube, with a crossfader controlling the sound volume of each video. Each one can be set by a simple input form, and a search frame can be displayed to that videos can be browsed.
It’s then easy to just copy and paste the embed link and prepare your song to be mixed. The “related” feature of YouTube makes perfect sense there, and comes to rescue if you are in lack of good tracks to put on.

The story behind is that I’ve been involved in several parties where nobody came up with some music to listen to. Opening a browser and start listening music from YouTube videos was our best option.
Each time some serious fun was going on doing this, with just one purpose in mind as you all may know : make the girl(s) dance and get crazy.

>>YouTube Mixer<<

The video shows how to import a true type font and use it within the javascript code through the library object. Images are managed the same way, by drag’n'dropping files on the main window.

One can see a quick glimpse on how to handle mouse events by implementing the mouseMoved(x,y) function on the fly.

Tranformations and drawing syntax, as well as 2D/3D coordinates system, is of course inspired from Processing, though minor differences remain (see window.width and window.height for example). Also, you’ll notice the three main functions that are init, update and render. init() has to be called manually to load objects from the library or declare variables to be used through the whole script.

Hopefully I will release a version for Mac Intel at the beginning of February.

Links

• Click to see the video in HD
• Article on Beart.

*deggv stands for Démonstration d’écriture de graphisme génératif à la volée / Demonstration for generative graphics written on-the-fly.

Douglas and Ricardo of the school of Art of Aix-en-Provence invited me to animate a workshop around live coding last week, using the Vision Factory platform.
*deggv was the final result of the work students did during the week and a kind of cadavre exquis de code was performed during one hour, each student relaying in front of the computer to type graphic commands.

The workshop was the opportunity to push the concept of live coding a bit further, by setting up a collaborative live coding between several computers.

The students took part in a programming session on a local server-clients network architecture. The final rendering was done on a server computer connected to a screen. The number of layers was directly related to the number of possible connected clients. Each layer was then driven by a javascript program typed on the client computer by a student and then sent to the server to be run.
For the sake of readability, the rendering was split in four equal windows but could be alpha-blended in one big layer (think of it as flattened photoshop layers).

Basic graphic OpenGL commands were explored, from drawing simple lines to more complex shapes with the use of push() & pop(). Live coding was really pedagogic there, beacause one could see for example that translate+rotate was different from rotate+translate by simply inverting a single line in the code.

Short video

*deggv @ l’atelier hypermedia, aix-en-provence. from v3ga on Vimeo.

Some more links

• Repository for the workshop (bits of code, screenshots, …)
• Abstract machine announce.
• Some more renderings on Flickr.
• Article on 2roqs website.

Some weeks ago I had the opportunity to project visuals during the set of my friends Tuff Wheelz @Heretic in Bordeaux, France. I developped a serie of black and white abstract patterns, all circle-based and sound reactive (very basic beat detection here)

The animations were run stand-alone during the show, with the benefit of not having to be on stage. Though, I was able to drive the transitions and some parameters thanks to an interface embedded onto my iPhone. Mrmr did a very good job there, and it was quite catchy to tap buttons according to the rythm while being watching the gig as a spectator.
I just let some of my neighbors being “vjs” themselves for some moments, they quite enjoyed it and had some fun…hopefully.

More photos on Flickr

Gravity is a collaborative application using buildings’architecture as a projection surface.
The messages sent through sms are split into words and then dropped from the top of the projection. As they fall, they collide with their environment thus creating a structural and spatial cadavre exquis.