Is time for Robert Hodgin to come on Stage. He is going to talk about The Barbarian Group and his own work. Robert shows an installation done in Processing. He has built some grass field movement simulation using Perlin noise.

Magnetic field particles (left) and Robert Hodgin talking about Perlin noise

But the most exciting work from Robert are a set of shiny videos he has done using Processing as well. He shows how he builds these pieces based on magnetic fields and their negative or positive charges. Robert draws the magnetic particles using Hue and Saturation color which gives a spectacular brightness and shiny atmosphere to his work.

Futurefarmers want some feedback from the audience, so we got sorted according to our t-shirt colors into a color rainbow system, and we have to draw some stuff on a piece of paper. I am on blue! I need to draw a shoe and write a word at the other paper’s side. Amy Franceschini and Michael Swaine collect all the audience drawings and start to build one book per each color by sewing all pages together. In the meantime, Amy takes a sit and talks about some of the projects at Futurefarmers.

Amy Franceschini and Michael Swaine – Futurefarmers

Experiments like “The botanical gameboy” – about feeding Nintendo Gameboys out of electrical energy extracted from lemons, or a project about how to produce your own Hydrogen in order to produce your own energy, are some samples of the interesting and necessary work by Futurefarmers.

First day of the festival closes with Zachary Lieberman and Theodor Watson.

Zachary Lieberman (left) and Theo Watson

They show a video experiment called “Liners” which was done with lots of feedback from the on-line community as well. They talk about Open Frameworks, a C++ library for easily developing audiovisual applications. Open Frameworks, 100% cross-platform environment might be a very good alternative to Processing for these who require more performance.

Wow, just one festival’s day behind us and it feels like we have been attending to master classes for a month. It’s so intense! We start the second day with the “ShowPlace”. Exhibition time!

Paint by numbers by Erik Natzke (right) and selected artworks

“Paint by numbers” is an installation by Erik Natzke. Erik is using the logic of code and some imagination to create generative audiovisual pieces which often remember to abstract paintings. Beautiful pictures and even better colors!

“18 Portraits of Atlas” is one of the beautiful audiovisual pieces made by Takagi Masakatsu.

“Anavision” is a very immersing Flickr based application from Mario Kliengemann. We spend some time at “Exposure”, a video installation from Craig Swann that puts together people from different time instances and let them interact with each other. Unfortunately “Audio Space” from Theodor Watson is broken right now 🙁

From left to right: “The Gesture Machines”, “Exposure” and the “Throwie” how-to

One of the most interactive pieces this year is “The Gesture Machines” by Zachary Lieberman. Draw in the screen and let the system transform your drawings!

We walk through the “Dynamic Canvas”, big pictures hanging from the roof. Joshua Davis is there making his compositions live. HP was so kind to provide him with a huge printer and he is giving pictures away for free!

“Dynamic Canvas” and Joshua Davis preparing a print

Finally, the Graffiti Research Lab have some videos showing their work, a “Throwie” workshop and an installation where to test the amazing graffiti tool L.A.S.E.R.