Tag Python

IJAD: In-Finite Space

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This Wednesday we’re performing algorithmic visuals for IJAD Dance‘s showing of In-Finite Space as part of the AHRC Creative Economy showcase. Twitter messages are geometrically formatted in 3D and cast into a retro-aesthetic graphical fly-through sequence to be interpreted by the dancers. Technology: Field, hybrid Python/Clojure mix.

(Edited, 2014-03-15: clearer splash image.)

PEAL Revisited

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We’re about to do some remedial work on PEAL, our laser-controlled virtual English church bell tower. The work has just been listed as a Cycling ’74 Project. The main project page is on the Monomatic site, with videos on Vimeo.

Here are some shots of the piece in situ at Kinetica 2010:

Monome Action at Music Tech Fest

This video from a gig we played back in May at Music Tech Fest has just made its way online. As far as I know, the audio was lifted from the PA which, being d&b audiotechnik, sounded superb.

Instruments: monome running Straker sequencer (Python over Shado), arc running some Clojure over Shado.

Fusion Programming: From Python to Clojure and Back

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Recently we’ve been working on several digital art projects using Field as a development and presentation platform but with Clojure running the core, domain-specific algorithmic code. This choice is, admittedly, partly because Clojure is new and shiny, but we also like the Emacs- and Leiningen-based development environment (complete with continuous integration testing), and Clojure’s clean functional semantics lends itself to realtime, evolutionary artworks. Since Field works at the level of Python-on-Java (via Jython), and Clojure runs in the JVM, the Python and Clojure worlds inevitably collide.

Loadbang Reloaded

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We’ve been putting some effort in recently to shift our major JVM-hosted MaxMSP projects to GitHub. Most of them started out hosted privately in CVS and built using Eclipse, and then migrated to hosting in Mercurial, with a different directory structure and a fair degree of pain in getting the various Ant scripts to work again. Moving everything to GitHub made sense, but that required another rearrangement of source directories and build paths, so it was obviously time to bite the bullet and use Maven to build everything instead. This decision has lowered the maintenance effort considerably.

Coding for the Cathedral: Dreamhub at Vor Frue Kirke

We recently did a bit of coding for Dreamhub: the Lysets Lyd chill-out gig at Vor Frue Kirke required twelve Percussa AudioCubes connected into an Ableton Live set, capable of sending MIDI data to Live (to trigger clips from the sensors) and of responding to MIDI (to transform automation controller messages into colour changes). Percussa’s bundled control software wasn’t up to the task at the time, being limited to four cubes at once and a rather laborious manual setup procedure, so we built a custom Max patcher using an external object by Thomas Grill and our Python machinery to deal with the configuration and state transitions required by the set.