watershed open
the nip workshops got a great head start with a heads up on each others work. we started off with building bridges, literally with spaghetti, and metaphorically, grouping and coming up with ideas for new instruments in performance, or what new instruments by means of hacking-programming circuit bending may generate new interfaces. it’s very nice to see that machines are winding everyones brains into a twirl in computation, hacking or building interactive devices to operate with.
we were at watershed in bristol, a great space with rooms to work and present, a nicely crowded bar, some cinema rooms, and a lively open wireless network.
the presentations in the afternoon accounted for our group diversity; very interesting presentations by everyone, relating their projects to the themes of research in creating new engaging works that challenge and dazzle the users.
throughout the day there was a nice atmosphere of opening and sharing experiences. and of how to learn to build from there. how to use cameras, circuits, controllers, algorithms, video, sound, weird joysticks and midi connections, there was a nice buzz in the air.
the next few days were all around programming in zach’s openframeworks project, a great simple powerfull raw level of computation with all this nice libraries being wrapped. the whole thing displays direct through opengl and is very very fast, no other layers other than the code and the libraries. it’s all written in c++, directed at mac and windows platforms with linux coming up. here’s a picture of what i was having fun, feedback and array fun (there’s also a broken graphics card here…)
we were on our way to handy computer vision code, started looking at how to make centroids, camera configurations. mostly exploring code from morning to evening, going through the examples, modifying them, learning how they’re built, creating new stuff from simple examples.