N.I.P. - New Interfaces for Performance - N.I.P. is an interdisciplinary touring presentation, network and workshop series, developed by Teresa Dillon of the Bristol based media arts and research collective Polar Produce. As an artists lead initiative, N.I.P. currently exists as a three-year project and involves twelve artists drawn from across the UK, The Netherlands and Portugal. The current focus of the project is on gesture and movement based interfaces within live performance and interactive, mixed media installation.

N.I.P. artists at Pixelache 2008 Helsinki are: Teresa Dillon (UK), Kathy Hinde (UK), Torsten Lauschmann (UK), Ivan Franco (PT), Rudolfo Quintas (PT), André Gonçalves (PT) and Tom Verbruggen (NL). Continue reading

Bioluster is a collaboration of the Accelerator Group. Participants in this project include artists Jite Agbro & Meghan Trainor, programmer Stephen Koch and carpenter Patrick Kerr.

Bioluster is a large-scale tactile interface that offers simple, yet not immediately obvious, methods of triggering different series of sound samples. This unique interface, created with RFID & Flash technology, is paired with materials and shapes that leave the audience with a tugging sense of unwarranted nostalgia for a system that has never existed. This project has grown out of Trainor’s long use and exploration of RFID as an artistic medium to examine our changing physical relationship to computing. Continue reading

NIME @ Exit Art - in collaboration with R. Luke DuBois’ ‘Algorithmic Composition’ class, NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) :: December 13, 2007; 7 - 11 pm :: EXIT ART, 475 Tenth Avenue (at 36th Street), New York, NY.

NIME: New Interfaces for Musical Expression - NIME: a graduate course at ITP :: In the sixth annual NIME, students will perform on a series of newly designed electronic instruments that aim to keep the “live” in live performance of digital music. Presented by ITP instructors Jamie Allen and Gideon D’Arcangelo.

Computer music is usually played with a keyboard and mouse. Laptop musicians often sit at a desk and give performances that are little more than watching someone engage in “office gestures.” Continue reading

Frotzophone by Adam Parrish [at the ITP Winter Show and NIME @ Exit Art on December 13, 2007] - Maps, games, music: what do they have in common? Interactive fiction has its roots in maps: Will Crowther’s original Adventure was a faithful simulation of an actual cave in the Colossal Cave system. Some say that the entire genre consists of “interactive maps,” and mapping as a process often serves as the foundation for both designing and playing interactive fiction.

The Frotzophone hijacks a Z-Machine interpreter (a virtual machine originally designed in the 1980s for running interactive fiction on many platforms, and still used today) and extracts information relating to the map that the game is simulating. Continue reading

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Echologue, by Orkan Telhan, is a public interface for sensing and displaying socio-cultural characteristics of a place based on its sonic features. The goal is to build a medium that can reflect its surroundings like a smart mirror, highlight the salient details and patterns in the environment and contribute to our understanding of the perception of social places. The interface senses ambient sound, records deliberate user input and displays a visualization of the activity in that space as its output.

The design explores the utility of sound for envisioning new social, cultural and entertainment uses of public places and help us shape our relationships with each other with new social interfaces embedded in urban settings. Continue reading

Flocking Orchestra (aka DT1) by Tatsuo Unemi and Daniel Bisig: DT1 is an interactive installation that employs flocking algorithms to produce music and visuals. The user’s motions are captured by a video camera and influence the flock’s behaviour. Each agent moving in a virtual 3D space controls a MIDI instrument whose playing style depends on the agent’s state. In this system, the user acts as a conductor influencing the flock’s musical activity. In addition to gestural interaction, the acoustic properties of the system can be modified on the fly by using an intuitive GUI. The acoustical and visual output of the system results from the combination of the flock’s and user’s behaviour. It therefore creates on the behavioural level a mixing of natural and artificial reality. The system has been designed to run an a variety of different computational configuration ranging from small laptops to exhibition scale installations.

A few years in the making, Yamaha’s TENORI-ON is finally commercially available. This digital music instrument (or “visible music interface”) consists of a unique touch-sensitive 16 x 16 color LED button matrix that provides a compelling visual experience in-sync with its musical performance.

See also, networked_music_review

Audiem is a non-visual web experience. It is inspired by online usability studies and the fact that our culture is so dependent on sight. It is designed primarily for people who are not visually impaired, to let them experience a linear audio interface without the distraction of visual content. It also provides podcasts of life without sight. Listen to them and focus on the background noises you would normally tune out. They are what the visually-impaired rely on to experience the world, sounds that most of us discard. We ignore nearly everything we hear and, apart from music, there are few sounds that we consciously focus on. [blogged by Luca on Ecopolis]