Friday, June 16, 2006

Toronto Tech Art

I had a great time in Toronto, and much of it centered around the Interaccess electronic media center. I attended an opening of work associated with the Subtle Technologies conference. One of the sculptural works by Philip Beesley and Will Elsworthy looked like thousands of feathers tied together along with piano-wire tentacles. The tentacles were attached to touch sensors, and touching them pulled up the tentacles using memory wire.

Another night I attended Dorkbot Toronto which included David McCallum's "Warbike" for sonification of wireless access points, a discussion VJ tools and techniques by VJ Nokami, and Cameron Browning's 3D network visualization glove.

Finally, I attended an I/O Media synthesizer jam, which was far more entertaining than I thought it might be. Lots of combinations of analog and digital synthesizer systems.

I found out about a lot of cool things, like FreeFrame video effect plug-ins for VJs, and Pure Data, a real-time dataflow language for audio and video processing, and the Plogue Bidule and Live5 audio systems.

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