Before I forget

Well, one thing I forgot to mention in the previous posts about Make Art is that I put online all the software I coded up for the event. This basically means the tool called “Andiamo”, available as binary packages for Linux, Mac and Windows here (as well as the source).

So perhaps all this code, laboriously thought out and then painstakingly typed in and debugged, will be now destined to oblivion in the darkest corners of sourceforge? Maybe, maybe not… in the worst case some part of it could be reutilized for other projects. For example, a few months ago Jihyun Kim and I were playing out with some ideas to use Android smartphones as input devices for collaborative drawing, as you can see in the video below:

This was done with an older version of Andiamo, together with a client application running on the phone (which is also on the trunk, btw). This work might continue in more refined/enhanced versions, but at this time is to early to say.

On the other hand, the current UI doesn’t look that bad, below you have a few screencaps of Andiamo running on OSX:

Video Layer showing the clip selection interface

Drawing layer with parameters window and animation selector

Audio layer

But I should also note that even if it looks decent, many hard facts from limited performance experience indicate limitations of the current interface. The MIDI input, of course, is of great help but it should be better synchronized with the GUI elements 🙂

So what is next? I would like to use the program as it is now to experiment a little with the combination of digital gestures and analog animation captured with the camera. This was in fact one of the first motivations for the whole MFA project that lead to this code. Time is always the big problem, but without the pressure of public performance events and taking it more as an informal experimentation, things could flow more easily. Maybe.