Independent digital puppets

Recently on the OF forum there has been some interesting discussion about finding skeletons inside meshes.
Since I never really confronted with this kind of topic, I avidly read people’s code, opened my IDE and tried myself.

Here’s my first experiment: a puppet whose strings are controlled by a puppeteer named random. Looks painful…

Another glimpse at my new job as a sorcerer’s apprentice

Guess who’s the “other guy in Switzerland” that keeps uploading kinect stuff…

V for Virtual (face)

I’m still playing with swappable faces and, in particular, I’m setting up a software tool to quickly create and customize synthetic faces that would fit like a glove (or should I say a balaclava?) on your natural one.
I needed to create a test model and, considering the average cultural feedback to this kind of technology, I thought that nobody would be a better candidate than Guy Fawkes:

Swapping faces

Today I tested the awesome face cloning code that Arturo Castro and Kyle McDonald realized mixing Jason Saragih’s Face Tracker and some mean value coordinates magic.
After altering my face with some random noise and swapping it with Stefano’s, I obviously have a somewhat strong desire to start experimenting with this technique in a lot of different ways

Magic.

Well, whenever someone asks my wife what’s my job, she normally keeps it simple and replies “he makes magic”. I always liked this tongue in cheek definition of the stuff I do, so my current project is really giving me some satisfaction; everything is still kind of top secret, but I suppose I could say that there’s something I made inside at the beginning of this video interview with Marco Tempest:

theTube (beta)

This is a quick preview of the first beta of theTube, a visualist friendly tool (somewhat inspired by Jesus Gollonet) that grabs the stuff on your monitor and sends it to Syphon. The idea is that you may want to syphon into MadMapper, OF, Processing, Quartz, something that does not have a syphon-out (i.e. your browser, a videogame, etc…): just move theTube in front of the visuals you want grab, and you’re done.

It’s still very much beta and I’m not sure about what I’m going to do with it, but if you want to try it, you can grab a demo here.

Redubbed performance video

This is just a quick follow-up to last post: we redubbed the segment of our performance so that now it includes the live generative music played by Lukas’ brainwaves.

The body is obsolete

Today the video coverage of the third week-end of the Borderline Biennale went online:

BORDERLINE BIENNALE 2011 |Week-end 03 | Obsolete Body from Borderline Biennale 2011 on Vimeo.

You can find our performance at 12:25.

Democratizing technology

Yesterday I attended the inauguration of the Democratizing Technology exhibit @ Museo della Scienza e della Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci, easily the coolest museum in Italy from a geek’s point of view. The exhibit is sponsored by Ford and aims to show how the new car embedded “intelligent systems” work; I was responsible to create 2 interactive softwares to demonstrate traffic sign recognition and voice recognition.

SOS – Summer Of Spectre

It’s been a busy summer for many reasons, but everything seemed to orbit around one single, exciting thing: the official birth of Spectre.
Everything is still in fieri and I don’t really want to spoil our future projects, but basically Spectre is a mixed media arts collective founded by Stefano Moscardini and me; the collective had his official society debut in Lyon during this year’s Borderline Biennale, where we presented the Fukushima Mon Amour installation (projected light on flag, generative music) and the Dance Neurale performance (biometric data, generative audio/video, industrial equipment) in collaboration with Lukas Zpira.
Soon I’ll post more informations; for now I can tell you that Fukushima Mon Amour is on sale and that, if you missed us in Lyon, you can catch us on the 23rd of September in Maxeville at Souterrain Port VI, where we’ll perform “Danse Neurale” again.