Category: {technology}

Technology

Arabesque by John Whitney

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I made the complaint in November last year when writing about James Whitney’s Lapis that few of the classic works of abstract cinema have yet to find their way to YouTube. Happily, things change fast in the online world and you can now see a clip of Lapis here. Another recent addition is the whole of Arabesque by James’s brother, John, a very early (1975) example of using computer graphics to create animations. This is necessarily crude by today’s standards—coloured lines and shapes—but it was made at a time when computers frequently filled entire rooms and recording their visual output meant pointing a camera at a monitor. Arabesque has a suitably Arabian santur soundtrack by Manoochehr Sadeghi.

Update: link changed to a better copy.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The abstract cinema archive

The Reactable

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An amazing tabletop synthesizer with some fantastic demonstration videos here.

Via Boing Boing.

The reactable is a multi-user electro-acoustic music instrument with a tabletop tangible user interface. Several simultaneous performers share complete control over the instrument by moving physical artefacts on the table surface and constructing different audio topologies in a kind of tangible modular synthesizer or graspable flow-controlled programming language.

The reactable hardware is based on a translucent round table. A video camera situated beneath, continuously analyzes the table surface, tracking the nature, position and orientation of the objects that are distributed on its surface, representing the components of a classic modular synthesizer. These objects are passive without any sensors or actuators, users interact by moving them, changing their position, their orientation or their faces (in the case of volumetric objects). These actions directly control the topological structure and parameters of the sound synthesizer. A projector, also from underneath the table, draws dynamic animations on its surface, providing a visual feedback of the state, the activity and the main characteristics of the sounds produced by the audio synthesizer.