Hacking Toys, Bending Circuits
Circuit bending is “the creative short-circuiting of devices such as low voltage, battery-powered guitar effects, children’s toys and small synthesizers to create new musical instruments and sound generators.” (Wikipedia). Here’s a little video of some audio glitching that happened during the beginning stages of a project with DKIT’s Creative Multimedia 2nd years, where we modified children’s toys into tangible multimedia interfaces.
Circuit Bending (2008) from Kieran Nolan on Vimeo.
Sinister 7 – Interactive Munny
This article from Sparkfun.com details a really interesting piece of work made with some of their equipment, an electronic version of the Magic 8-Ball game that detects motion through a gyroscope and displays its information on a mobile-phone screen embedded into a custom painted Munny. The DIY aspect of this project is great, as is the end result, an interactive twist to designer toy customisation.
History of Zelda Documentary
‘Zelda No Video’ is a documentary about Nintendo’s ‘Legend of Zelda‘ series by Enterbrain in Japan. It was made in 2003 but was never officially translated into English. However earlier this year Zentendo released a fansub of the documentary, which took over a dozen volunteers nearly four years to complete. The documentary takes us from the series’ roots on the 8bit Famicom / Nes console up to the ‘The Wind Waker‘ on the Gamecube. A really interesting piece of videogame history and a great insight into Zelda as a cultural phenomenon in Japan and worldwide.
Benetton Flipbook Deluxe
Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been using this great flipbook creator from benettonplay.com with a beginners animation class. It was developed by Fabrica, Bennetton’s R&D center. A clever feature of this little web app is that in addition to publishing your flipbook as part of an online gallery, you can also export it as a PDF, allowing you to print and out and get busy with your scissors and glue to construct a real, on-paper flipbook. Here’s one of the animations from the students, the whole ‘stickman meets a grizzly end’ theme was fairly popular!
Synth Candy
The Synth Eastwood photoshop I submitted for the event of the same name is in the latest issue of Candy, it’s part of a montage… but it’s there! Candy is an Irish produced design magazine, featuring local and international content. It’s distributed free in PDF form and is well worth checking out.
8bit Chiptune Workshop @ LABoral
A couple of weeks ago I attended an 8bit chiptune workshop at LABoral in Gijón in the Asturias region Spain. The workshop was part of series of such running alongside LABoral’s Gameworld exhibition (a Second Life workshop had taken place earlier that week).
The teachers were Glomag and BubblyFish from New York and ‘Yes, Robot‘ and Rabato from Barcelona. These guys are big names in the chiptune scene and over the course of two days provided great hands on training making tracks on the oldschool Nintendo Gameboy using Little Sound DJ and Nanoloop.
LSDJ uses a text based tracker interface, you adjust the sound parameters by changing binary values. Nanoloop is more visual and you create sounds and sequences through by selecting icons and applying them to a 4 x 4 grid of squares. Both have their pros and cons but ultimately do the same job, directly controlling the Gameboy’s unique 4 channel sound sound chip.
The 8bit maestros also performed live on stage at LABoral backed up by Barcelona VJ duo Entter, who complemented all the music by syncing up pixel graphic visuals through their own custom built flash applications. A news reporter from Madrid described the show as “Beautiful” and I’ve got to agree. I’ve been into 8bit video game sounds and graphics since I was a child, but hearing this style of music blasting through a concert PA while watching huge pixel graphic projections was on another level of greatness altogether.
Both the workshop and live show were filmed for an upcoming documentary by Lionel Brouet, who made 8 Bit Generation, so that’s going to be very interesting to see. Anyway’s I’m back home now and starting to mess with the special cartridges, the Gameboy is plugged into my Micro Cube amp and I’m beginning to make some simple loops, will post whatever happens on my myspace page. Bleep!
Björk’s reacTABLE
Here’s a great video from Björk‘s recent performance at Glastonbury showing the
reacTABLE, tangible multi-touch interface as an integral part of her live instrumentation… Björk always pushing the boundaries and embracing new music technology…
Mobile TV, Toon Boom & Machinima @ Darklight
I caught a few of the presentations at Friday’s session of the Darklight 2007 symposium. First up was a talk from reps of 02, Eircom, Babelgum and RTÉ about the future of television and how mobile-tv and tv-on-demand rewrite the rules of the normal linear broadcast model. For example the primetime slots for mobile tv are commuting hours and work breaktimes.
Next up was a workshop by Brown Bag where they described their experiences using the animation toolset ‘Toon Boom Studio‘ to create a new children’s tv series ‘Wobbly Land‘. It seems to have a steep learning curve, particularly if you are used to Flash (no tweening!) but they had great technical support from Toon Boom’s creators, including 2 weeks of training. TB also created custom effects plugins for Brown Bag, that helped give the show it’s unique (and very non-generic vector animation) look.
The last workshop I attended was ‘Machinima FilmMaking’ (the art of making movies inside video game engines) by Friedrich Kirschner, the developer of Movie Sandbox, a heavy modification of the game Unreal Tournament 2004 that turns it into a Machinima application. The game world becomes your stage and the characters your actors, who you can direct as you please, either ‘live’ or through pre-defined scripts.
Some cool input methods were shown, one involved controlling your ‘actor’ like a virtual puppet using the strings on a usb golf controller. Another made use of the Xbox 360′s Guitar Hero controller so your machinima actor can jam on some chords.
Also demoed was an innovative supporting technology called Milkscanner, a low budget but highly effective method of scanning 3d objects using a webcam, lego, a bowl and some milk(!). A (small plastic) elephant was gradually submerged in milk, each stage captured by the webcam and then the software assembled each ‘slice’ into a 3d wireframe suitable for import into Movie Sandbox. Great stuff, innovative and nutricious!
Good Copy Bad Copy
This great documentary by ROSFORTH examines sampling culture, digital distribution, how copyright laws are struggling to remain effective and how they must evolve.
“Everyone has been bombarded with media. We’ve almost been forced to use it as an art form. It’s like anything. If people were handing out paint for free on the streets, I’m sure there would be a lot more painters right now.” Gregg Gillis – DJ (Girl Talk)
Check out www.goodcopybadcopy.net for more information and to download it for free (in the true spirit of this film’s file sharing message).
FÍS07 – Dundalk IT Multimedia Exhibition
This week Dundalk IT’s department of Music & Creative media held it’s fifth annual multimedia exhibition. On display were interactive projects from the 3rd and 4th year multimedia degree students. The teams did a great job, their imagination and hard work really paying off with a innovative and varied selection of work. Here’s some info on the projects that were on display:
Anomie
An experimental art piece showing the journey of an amnesiac from a healthy state of mind to a state of uncertainty. Through a route of non-linear interactivity, the user helps guide the character to the reason of his ill health and the incident that caused it.
M.A.M.M.Y.
M.A.M.M.Y. (mass audience multimedia-media yeah) is a social networking site for the creative students of DKIT, where they can communicate, collaborate and display their work. It uses bluetooth to beam recently uploaded content to students mobile phones.
R.E.A.C.H.
The R.E.A.C.H. (Routine Education for Autistic Children at Home) team produced an e-learning CD-ROM for autistic children to show them how to get ready for school in the morning. Their research found that autistic children are visual thinkers so it uses a cartoon based approach to effectively communicate it’s message.
Delirium
Delerium generates a visual representation of the current mood of the user using music and colour. The users temperature is recorded and inputted into the computer, at which point images and a piece of music appears and floats around the walls of the room. Questions appear onscreen that the user answers, after which these answers are compared and contrasted with the temperature reading.
The Land Of Luna
An exploratory game aimed at 8 to 9 year old girls. The game is from a first person perspective. The user plays the character of Lana who is transported to the world inside her snow globe, where she must collect a series of objects in different levels to save her friend Noah. There is no time limit on the game, so as to encourage the user to explore the world and interact with the characters.
Reuben Chinaski
An interactive exploratory autobiography for the digital age. We see the main character, Reuben Chinaski, on his deathbed. He is too weak to write his own biography so instead he tells the user about the ups and downs of his life. The user is free to explore parts of Reuben’s life in a non-linear fashion by selecting various objects in the room and letting Reuben explain what the object means to him through filmed narrated memories.
Seven Deadly Sins
Purge your soul of the seven deadly sins by engaging with this interactive experience. Memorize sound sequences inside the confession box while hit with some far out imagery.
Tactical Control Force
‘Watch tomorrow’s news today”, in TCF you control a live newsfeed by taking place in a series of games. The outcome of these tests shapes the narrative. A real adrenaline rush as you try to avert a national emergency in real time. The installation for this piece is a sort of survival bunker / command post, which helps intensify the atmosphere further.
Zeppelin’s Universe
This game’s target audience is kids in a public waiting room who are feeling restless. The main character, Mikey, goes into a dream state where he meets Zeppelin the Wizard. He has four tasks to accomplish to allow him to return to reality, or else he will be trapped in Zeppelin’s Universe forever.