A little late, but here they are: the weeknotes for April 2014!

1.

The kick-off went to a really cool netart-exhibition by Florian Kuhlmann in Cologne. Florian installed a local-based website, that is only available at the Ebertplatz in Cologne. Read more about the project at his website. The opening-event was awesome!

2.

Then there was the 4 hour iBeacon-Hackathon, mainly organized by Jan Kus from Railslove. In 8 hours we learned everything about this new technology and also had hands-on technology. We hacked small projects in just 4 hours – a pure experience for every coder, hehe…

3.

Finally we unveiled the big art project, we are working on for a year now. The ORLOVACT is a 4x4x8 meter huge multimedia art object, that we are manufacturing right at the moment in Cologne. The project contains lots of LED-lightboxes and a rear-video-projection. This object will be devlieved and installed at the Pulkovo international airport in St. Petersburg. I keep you updated about this project in this page as well, in the meantime check the Flying Orlov Webseite and join/like the Flying Orlov Facebook-page.

4.

The REVISION 2014 easter demoscene-party was really good. I think I made a new personal best weekly Fitbit-score – not only because of the 5k run. Also some wild-projection with videobeamer in the hall.

5.

Last not least, I gave a PureData-workshop at Dingfabrik with awesome participants. We want to meet regularly with as PureData – User Group now. If you want to participate, feel free to contact me. The dates will be also available at the Dingfabrik-eventcalendar.

Weeknotes March-2014-03

0. Please like the Nodepond-Facebook-Page if you haven’t already!

1. There was some progress on my Ruby-Music-Livecoding-Tool “SuperSonic“.

2. There was some progress on the PureData-based software-synth I am currently working on (still without a name).

3. Lot’s of work on our huge art-project again. We will soon go into the public with that one!

4. At Bames 11 (Beer and Games) we learned about Titanfall (X-BOX) and got a really deep insight into the Ingress-community in Cologne. Thanks!!

5. I attended the vvvv-Meetup #2 at Dingfabrik – the newest User-Group in Cologne. We care about art and technology, that will be glued together with vvvv.

6. Then I attended Robert Babicz Live at Arttheater / Treibstoff-Club. This was a really inspiring night! Showcasing, that playing electronic music live is still something else than just DJing.

7. Next highlight was the release(-party) of the Squirrel and Bär game by Linda Kruse (The Good Evil). Followed by a meetup of the CIGDN (Cologne Independent Game Developers Network). It seems, that the indie-gamedev-movement in Cologne is slowly taking off… Finally! Many small and bigger projects are being made. Awesome!

8. Attended the Arduino Day at Dingfabrik. It was an relaxed Saturday with showcasing of many cool Arduino-projects. The Arduino-plattform went 10 on this day. This day showed, that Arduino is far away from being a dead one!

9. I was part of the Drehkommando at “Mülheimer Nacht“, KunstWerk Köln. This drehkommando was in public with audience and I think this was one of the best live-drehkommandos we ever had! A live-recording will be made available later this month.

10. We made progress at the Dingfabrik-garden. See two of my famous NodepondLOMO-pictures: (one) (two)

The shortest month of the year – with many ongoing projects and small incremental progress. One of the fun things was the Drehkommando, where we made stuff with MIDI and our electronic music devices.

Lots of meetups and lots of Kölsch Karneval. A good month to enjoy – more output to come!

The January 2014 was a blast: a month full of work, creativity and productivity. The month started unter the impression of two insanely great events (where I made some live VJing as well). First The Ultimate Meeting 2013 (Demoscene Party) and the New Years Eve at Digitac e.V..

Right from the start events were rushing in. At the PASSAGEN14 Alexander Speckmann and I made a projection mapping and at the same time we made at Dingfabrik our first exhibition, our first party and lots of workshops again.

For the projection we took a deep step into OpenFrameworks (my new love, nothing can beat C++)! There is a documentation of the projection mapping project pending. I’ll post it when it will be ready.

The Dingfabrik-party was also a blast. My idea was to try out something new and to make a sort of party, where “things” were standing in the center, instead of just music and booze. I think the whole thing was really successful – we had a acapella choir, Stoffel and I made a small “Drehkommando” (live improvisation on electronic music gadgets), a instant photo machine, that was extremely fun! Not to mention, that I made some live VJing later that night…

January was still not over. The Global Game Jam was coming – and this year it was just so full of awesome – hard to describe. All contributions from the 120 participants at the Cologne Game Lab were great. 2+ hours of presentations, really every contribution was unique with much highlights in between. I also made a game and I am very happy with the result: Sea of Rock, Paper and Scissors – the best Rock, Paper, Scissors Textadventure, that can live in any console! Get it on github! And yes, it runs on a Raspberry Pi, too. Feel free to contribute – I also wrote a little game-design-document.

January still not over! I spent the rest of the month hacking a DMX-control in JavaScript for this still unannounced huge art-project we are working an. And I started a nice little tool together with Thömmes “slogmen” Schrader. The idea is to make a music live coding tool in Ruby, inspired by livecoding in general and by Sonic Pi and Overtone. The development is very early, but there is already a public repository on github: SuperSonic. The name of this project might change.

If productivity will be on that level through 2014, than this will be a good year!

After the success of the spontaneous live-videobeaming of Jake Rathburns live-performance at Dingfabrik, we decided to make another go and try to make up the idea a little bit. So we set up some dedicated visuals about three weeks later in Dingfabrik Cologne again!

It was an extremely nice evening with lots of people nerding around, with recording sound, making the beamers, the set-up, a small, but cheerful crowd and camera guys, catching all this on video. Here is one of the first cuts from that evening. Thanks go especially to Alexander Speckmann and Daniel Bruns for filming and making the cut!

Here is a freshly cut video from the “Passagen 2013” in Cologne – showcasing works from Dingfabrik-members. Two things in the video was made with my involvement: a projection-mapping and some plotter-works with the alpha-version of the self-written Lua-Crumbs-framework.

In January 2014 I am also involved into one project, more details here.

December started with a great event at the KISD (Köln International School of Design), called “Open Factory“. Two days of workshops and panels about Open Design, 3D-Printing, FabLabs and Technology-hacking. The Dingfabrik was having a talk and I participated at two “music and hacking” workshops.

At this workshop I managed to connect an Arduino to PureData. There are some specialities, when it comes to the serial port and reading ASCII, that’s why I share the patch with you: here is the PureData serial-port-reader for getting Arduino to PureData-done quickly.

At Dingfabrik we are still messing around with the renovation of our new rooms, but already make plans for some neat media-art-workshops and/or usergroup-meetings. The first event will be vvvv for beginners at 11. January 2014.

Currently I’m tinkering with Raspberry Pi, openFrameworks and PureData+gem. That Raspberry Pi thing could get really cool…!

Besides.. I work another projection-mapping project for the Passagen 2014 and on a huge media art object, but more on that 2014… 😉

November kicked in slowly, getting prepared for a real “nerd winter” – days are getting darker, nights longer. Happy hacking!

At the 16. November I was invited to make a two-hour VJset at Gewölbe in Köln. It was a nice evening with a 3 videobeamer-setup at the club-location. Here is a small take from the live-set.

Lately I was testing and thinking about the Sentinel projection-mapping tool again. The focus of direction goes into open-sourceing the project by the end of the year (if I meet the time-schedule). I want make Sentinel a best-practice calibration tool for projection-mapping, exporting a self-developed “projection-mapping-information-format”. But more on this later. I also decided to integrate the Sentinel stuff with PureData and Gem. Use PureData, it is just a plain great tool!

At Dingfabrik I started to play with PureData / Gem and multiple screens. Having many screens and panel can be much fun, but more on this later…

And this week I started a new tumblr, featuring lomo-shots taken with my Alcatel Fire One FirefoxOS mobile phone. Check it out at NodepondLOMO.

Alexander Speckmann and I were invited to make an public art installation. The topic was about changing public places for one week. five art-groups were invited to participate. We made an interactive game, where we used video-beamers and Kinect/MIDI-Controller input, project a game onto the Mülheimer bridge.

Inspired by The Good Evil-weeknotes I will try to post some short status-updates every week (or maybe just every two or four weeks, depending of new relevant content in that time). It is just a handy tool, to get the work better out there and connect to the community. I just figured out, that there are always lots of more Nodepond-activity, than reflected here on this blog. So, here we go!

Alexander Speckmann and me were invited as artists at the project “m2020 Köln-Mülheim, Stadtgestaltung von unten” (Facebook-Event) from the 5. – 13. October 2013. Five artists were invited, to modify the public space in Köln-Mülheim for one week with art-installations. We decided to make an interactive game, controllable by Kinect and/or MIDI-controller. The game-screen was the bridge at the “Mülheimer Brücke”, resulting in an “interactive urban screen”. More info here.

Then I had a really good VJing-session at the Kolbhalle at 2. October 2013. Here is a short live video:

Together with Jake Rathburn we made two really good video-recording sessions, where I provides the visuals. Here is a link to the first session, the results of the second session are in preparation and are about to released soon.

Feel free to join the public software-development boards of the software-tools I am currently working on: Public boards of Nodepond.

I made some posts in the CoGe and Resolume-forum, relating to Quartz Composer issues. The CoGe-question was about mapping MIDI-data or keystrokes to a Flash-patch, loaded into CoGe. And yes, it is possible. The Resolume-question was dealing with problems with the iterator-patch and input-values as well. I learned, that it’s always a good practice, to use Input Splitters in Quartz Composers to map values – especially if you want to use the patches in CoGe or Resolume!