Wired on Marco Tempest and the stuff we’re making

Wired just published a 2 pages, well written article on Marco Tempest and his approach on magic, technology and everything in between.
Being the super nice person he is, Marco just told me: “i talked a lot about you an they did not even mention your name “, but I admit I like the idea of being mentioned as a “nameless coder”: sounds like cyberpunk hero

Here’s the article: http://www.wired.com/underwire/2013/05/worlds-most-wired-magician-marco-tempest/

Cybercards: time to go beyond marker and markerless

First time on stage for Marco Tempest‘s last augmented reality trick!
The ingredients:

- augmented reality objects that interact with the performer using a combination of markerless and natural features based techniques

- fluid realtime full HD special effects using a bit of GPU voodoo

enjoy

Cyber Cards Live v1.0 from Marco Tempest on Vimeo.

Isosmosi on The Point Magazine

Stefano, my SPECTRE partner in crime, just told me that The Point Magazine featured a picture from our Isosmosi performance.

Isosmosi was a collaboration between Mutant Squad and SPECTRE, created in the beginning of 2012 and staged during the 7th APTPI Annual International Educational Meeting in Milan. The performers on stage were linked with a system of ropes, connected to steel hooks pierced through their skin; constantly monitoring their EEG and using a custom projection mapping software, we were able to visualize their emotional feedback making their body (and the ropes between them) glow in sync with their brainwaves.

More info, backstage pics and a video can be found here.

The secret story of a deck of cards

TED.com just published the video of the last performance I coded for Marco Tempest.
As always the development process was really a stimulating experience: I had the opportunity to remodel an old project by the creative coding rockstar (and dad of OpenFrameworks) Zach Lieberman and teamed up with Kevin Blanc, one of the best art directors a coder could dream of.
The performance itself is a calibrated mixture of experimental augmented reality glasses, 3D special effects and card manipulation dexterity, but, as it often happens in Marco’s work, the narrative component is always central: every shuffle reveals a story hidden inside the deck of cards, following a tradition that dates back to a 19th century story called The Soldier’s Prayer Book. If you’re interested, Marco tells more about this story and about the narrative use of playing cards in an interview published on TEDBlog.

Spectre’s Singularités

After Marco’s last TED talk I dedicated most of my time to finalize a few Spectre installations for the Singularités exposition at H+ gallery in Lyon.
Everything is ready to ship now (it’s been a little rush with some thrilling hardware failures that ruined a couple nights to both Stefano and me…), so stay tuned for the vernissage date
In the meantime you can read the article about Spectre on digitalarti and check Guardami’s page on H+.

On TED’s stage again

Marco Tempest just performed at TEDGlobal 2012 the show we prepared in the last 2 months. It was a revisitation of one of his classics: a mix of card tricks and augmented reality, realized with the help of a set of weareable devices, that we could describe as our own DIY reply to Google Glass.
I’ll post videos and more info soon, but for now you can check TEDblog’s post.

Tesla’s behind the scenes featured on TED.com

TEDblog dedicated a nice post to our Tesla_behind_the_scenes video: go read it here!

Making of “Nikola Tesla in Sound and Light” from Marco Tempest on Vimeo.