nicolas @ uucidl

Eyeo Festival had a few interesting and entertaining talks, however I’d like to bring attention to one in particular.

Eyeo2012 - Nathalie Miebach from Eyeo Festival on Vimeo.

Knowing nothing about the Festival, besides that Robert “Flight404″ Hodgins had done a very likeable presentation there, I watched in succession the talks from Ben Fry, Amanda Cox and Nathalie Miebach.

The three of them deal with data visualisation, however Nathalie Miebach was the only one who concretely address the “elephant in the room” of visualisation, which is that although engrained in data, it is an editorial exercise.

And she does it brilliantly and with great honesty.

Her sculpture and her scores naturally embed performance, play, interpretation and the objectivity of measurements. Sometimes she even juxtaposes measurements with her own subjective records, to create hybrid narrative (and quite colorful) works.

Her concluding remarks, that we must not forget to interact with data by touch, also brings to light that we must not let the Ipad or other tablets hijack the meaning of touch, the way Facebook hijacked the meaning of friendship. Touching is not just about finger impacts. It’s as much if not more about feedback.

Hello everyone,

Since last post, I have been invited in november 2010 to do visuals for Windy Hill Mill in Paris at the Gare Aux Gorilles. This was a great opportunity for me to update my live visual code to load arbitrary videos. QuickTime made it possible, on a very short schedule, to integrate full motion videos in my normal OpenGL setup. Unfortunately the place was not ideal for projections, and I ended up projecting onto the ceiling!

Later in January 2011, I also played with my friends of Windy Hill Mill in Brooklyn, NY at the Invisible Dog gallery, bringing some parisian flavour to the show. My setup there was a monome 64 and the MLR sample manipulation program. You should check the photos!

Also worth noting, I did the soundtrack for a short movie by Eva Pervolovici called “Danger de Mort.” A short clashing dreamlike photography with a facetious narration.

Coaching programmers and would-be programmers has also been a very rewarding experience. I’ve been teaching some basics about audio/game programming in C, some methodology, and also been working to demystify the harmful abstractions used in the JSF2/J2EE world. Enterprise programmers’ typical schedule is hindering their progress: Integration, configuration, reading documentation may comprise as much as 70% of their time. Combined with harmful abstractions, this leads to cases of impostor syndrome.

Til next time!

Rbrch is a contemplative piece with an aquatic theme.

Downloads

Each is about 1.5MB big and written in C. Both audio and visuals are generated.

• windows version (oct-20: better 3d card compatibility)
• osx version (oct-20: leopard support; better 3d card compatibility)
• linux x86_64 version (oct-20: better 3d card compatibility)

Just contact me if it does not appear to run properly.

Requirements: SSE2, accelerated OpenGL graphics, an audio card.

Video

Although you really should download and run the executable.

Rationale

Rbrch was originally made as a gift for someone’s birthday. A demo meant as a sort of relaxing bubble, away from the urban greyness.

Care was taken in making it work on most basic computers, hence the absence of shaders and an attempt at detecting how fast the machine runs the particle system during the initial blank screen.

Acknowledgements

• Uses the code base I cowrote for LN2’s.
• PortAudio provides the audio interface
• GLUT,GLEW provides the display interface
• stb_image for image loading

Hope you liked it!

L’autre jour je voulait acheter une étagère. Chromée, bien brillante, sur roulettes, longue¹. Je vais a Habitat-Montparnasse, accoste un vendeur qui me dirige vers son bureau, et là on me déclare que je ne peux point l’obtenir.

• n’en avez vous plus en stock?
• si, mais suite aux travaux nous n’avons plus accès a notre entrepot.

Alors moi, pas une pas deux, car j’avais la ferme intention d’avoir mon étagère le jour même (c’était le samedi suivant mes vacances et j’étais dans de bonnes dispositions) je leur dit qu’il n’est pas la peine de la reserver, quitte le magasin et me dirige vers la bouche de métro la plus proche pour aller a Habitat boulevard des Capucines.

Là-bas je trouve l’étagère tant recherchée. La vendeuse m’interpelle lors de mon passage dans le magasin, puis me dirige fatalament vers le bureau approprié. Le vendeur en face me dit oui oui pas de probleme attendez nous allons la monter ici, télephonant a son collègue en sous sol.

Ce collègue lui répond alors, dans un dialogue de sourd qu’il n’en voit aucune en stock, alors que le vendeur, en haut, en voit bien une sur son ordinateur.

Bilan, Ikea, ils sont pas mal quand même :)

¹ A noter que je me suis fait interpeler par un vendeur la première fois que je l’ai repérée, quand j’ai commis le grave crime de sortir mon appareil photo pour la capter pour plus tard.

Frank Bolero and Knos, LSV 7010-04-25

The TPOLM Lazy Sunday Video was an absolute blast, with lots of nice live performances and visual works.

Esem’ music for instance felt satisfying on so many levels. Machinedrum’s was full of vigor. Sense’s and Frank Bolero’s were full of romanticism.

Magic happened amongst the technical difficulties in the visual department. I was particularly curious about Nebogeo’s live coding with his programming language, fluxus. Magic also happened with the video signal manipulation devices that Jdigittl had built for the occasion.

2010-04-26, 2010-05-02: the lazy sunday radio (audio only, so) actually kept playing for a week, each TPOLM DJ handing the station over to the next one in a different time zone. The sunday never really ended.

I participated in the form of visuals for the swedish musician Frank Bolero:

It was an honor and a great pleasure to do visuals on such a moody soundtrack.

You will soon be able to get all of these performances at http://lsr.tpolm.org

During the afterparty, I also did a 2h long live visuals improvisation on a dj set by alkama:

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