It is not entirely unusual for a Canadian wildlife documentary to open with grainy footage of an animal being carefully approached by park officials, but any similarities between Bear 71 and nostalgic Canadian depictions of wildlife end about 15 seconds into the timeline. This interactive documentary opens with a young bear being sedated, hogtied, tagged with a GPS receiver and set free into the wilds of Banff National Park as narrator Mia Kirshner dryly explains that the tranquilizer used to facilitate the takedown was Telazol, developed “by the same people that make Zoloft and Viagra.” From this moment onwards our protagonist is ‘Bear 71′ and as she bounds back into her native habitat the point of view radically shifts to an abstract topographical map – an interface for exploring data and video collected documenting this subject’s movement and activities between 2001-09

Continue reading.... Bear 71 – Interactive Documentary [Flash, Review]

Created by Ted Martins, Fireplace is a type controlled pixel art fireplace for your mac or pc to stay warm this xmas. Type words to interact with the fireplace or just sit back and enjoy. The log burns down to ashes in about 30 minutes. Some things to type: log, match, paper, marshmallow, smore, hotdog, eat, blow and water (to quit).

tedmartens.com/fireplace/

Merry Christmas everyone!

/via @e_svedang

FOTB is approaching fast and in little over 2 weeks from today you’ll get to see some truly inspiring people on the stage. FOTB already is an annual conference in Brighton bringing together some of the biggest names in creative code, flash and digital media on the whole. This is FOTB’s sixth year! If you are a designer, developer, coder, student, manager, game developer, artist, animator or a code newbie, then this is the conference for you. We will hear about Flash, Flex, AIR, and increasingly more about openFrameworks, Processing, Javascript, Data Visualization, Creative Code and more.

Some names you’ll get to see: hillman CURTIS, seb LEE-DELISLE, gmunk , joel gethin LEWIS, jer THORP, jared FICKLIN, joshua DAVIS and many more.

Regular price ticket sale ends in about 9 hours!!!
Prices vary but student tickets are fantastic value!

Our dear friend John Davey, the name behind FOTB, has sent us a special promocode to get 25% off your ticket purchase. Hurry, this is the last chance before you hit the door price!

SPECIAL CAN CODE TO GET 25% OFF:  CAN25

## Brighton, UK, September 11 – 15th. The Brighton Dome, Church Street, Brighton, BN1 1EE ##

See you there!

flashonthebeach.com

photos by marc.thiele

Some videos from past FOTBs.

Created by Santa Ragione, a micro game-studio based in Milan, Fotonica is a “Pay What You Want” first person game about jumping, sense of speed and discovery. The key is timing, the goal is exploring and traveling flawlessly through the environment. The setting is an abstract – mainly duotone – outlined world, with a look referring to the geometrical abstractions from the 50s a the 3D low-poly gaming era.

Continue reading.... Fotonica [Games]

Created by Anthony Mattox, Pulsus for iPad is a game in which players must solve puzzles by arranging objects in order to move particles from an emitter into goal points. The game is in part about solving puzzles, but also about exploring and understanding a dynamic, engaging, system.

The game has been completely rebuilt from the ground up in native Objective C and C++. The original game we wrote about few months back first appeared as Flash online version created using AS3 (available at pulsusgame.com). It has grown in every way possible, Anthony writes.

It’s found a new home on a wonderful device, has fully redrawn graphics, a new soundtrack, improved physics, a much improved interface, and a suite of new objects and levels on the way. Pulsus for iPad takes the creative game mechanics to a new level of refinement, creating a mesmerizing visual and aural experience.

Visit the new Pulsus page for more information and screenshots. The app is initially only available for the iPad but will be coming to the rest of the iOS family later this summer.

All type set in Apex Sans by Thirstype. Sounds created with Ableton Live and Adobe Soundbooth. Original Flash game uses sounds developed using Pure Dataand Audacity.

Platform: iPad
Version: 1.0
Cost: $3.99
Developer: Anthony Mattox

(video below shows is of the flash version)

NodeBeat is a generative music app for the iPhone and iPad in the style of apps like Bloom. In it, gently drifting nodes interact with pulsing triggers producing minimal soundscapes. It offers several options to tailor the parameters of the music generation. The overall experience is very soothing and meditative; background gradients  swirl through prismatic color changes.

Below is a mini-interview with the authors of the app, Seth Sandler and Justin Windle:

Justin:
I was reading a lot about sync at the time and was interested in experimenting with systems which could be free to form their own patterns, with the possibilities of spontaneous and unexpected ‘syncs’ emerging. Setting up rules to describe quite loosely coupled processes and then observing whether some kind of order emerges from them is something that I find fascinating. Aesthetically, I wanted the system I programmed to feel organic and so chose to work around the analogy of neurons and synapses firing – something talked about a lot in sync theory. These concepts concern themselves a lot with rhythm, repetition and cycles and so using audio seemed like a natural step, which is what gave rise to the idea of a sequencer of sorts. I had recently been introduced the Tonfall AS3 library, written by André Michelle and was keen to experiment with audio synthesis in Flash so I build the initial experiment on top of this as the library had a pretty small learning curve. The user interactions and the ability to tweak parameters at runtime, in order to produce different types of patterns; was something I added to give a layer of feedback to the experiment and push it more in the direction of an instrument that to an extent can be played rather than just observed.

Seth:
I’ve always been inspired by the simplicity of iOS applications like Bloom and how something simple can appeal to many and create a variety of musical interactions. When I saw Justin’s sequencer, I thought that it was a great example of something that was simple, yet created an interesting, visual and fun experience. Since, I typically focus on musical applications that aren’t targeted at musicians, I thought NodeBeat was a great fit.

Seth:
In terms of NodeBeat, the iOS implementation, the main goal is really just to provide a fun musical experience. While we had a variety of additional ideas to implement, we really wanted to keep the feature set simple and easy to understand on the first release. The hope is that anyone, musical or not, is able to experiment and create melodies and rhythms without having to learn anything or understand how notes, octaves, or rhythmic subdivisions work.

NodeBeat is developed using openFrameworks and utilizes PureData for audio synthesis. You can download the free desktop version + source code at NodeBeat.com.

Platform: iPhone/iPad
Version: 1.0
Cost: $0.99
Developer: AffinityBlue
(iPhone)
(Pad)

Created by Didier Brun and Sid Lee for Adidas to help them promote the release of their sneaker collection MEGA, the team created a system that would allow dancers to create their own beat or music with their shoes. Although somewhat similar to Nike project by W+K and rhizomatiks, the Sid Lee team have seem to taken the concept a little further making a device like element allowing anyone to pick it up and have a play. The team also built an interactive installation in several Shops in France to allow others to play with the Megalizer.

The system is wireless, placed on each shoe (no cable running on the dancer’s leg, or belt case), efficient at a 6-7 meter range from the speakers. It includes very low latency (max 30ms), handling up to 6 shoes simultaneously. There are two force sensors for each shoe (one for the heel and one for the toe), and a wireless transmitter per shoe to capture the pressure applied on each of the sensors. The first transmitter prototype built was using a BlueTooth chip (class 3). Although the result was satisfactory at half-a-meter distance from the receiver, the latency increased with the distance. At 7 meters, the latency went as much as 1/8th second. Instead a XBee technology was used: with a low power consumption reaching minimum latency at a decent distance.

Each shoe includes A 6-pin dock to connect the sensors and charge the battery, a status LED, switch, 110 mah liPo battery, voltage regulator, XBee chip and a few resistors.

The software includes a server processing the receivers’ inputs (Processing) and an AIR application that interprets the signals, chooses and play the sounds. UI in the flash application is using Keith Petters Minimal Components.

You can read more about the process here including download the Processing server code.

Created by Hi-ReS! and Nanika is a project for the new Hyundai i40, which was revealed at the Geneva Motorshow on the 1 March. Starting on Friday, 25 Feb, users could connect through Facebook (or not) to directly participate in the live light reveal. The web application built in Flash by Theo Tillberg, Mike Tucker and others allows users to animate light over the car and change views. This is of course sent directly to the warehouse where the car is located and video feedback shown back to the users on the site.

In a nutshell, the software written in openFrameworks by Andreas Müller was about finding a way to project a piece of video onto an arbitrary shape of lights. For the earlier project for John Lewis, Andreas hardcoded in 4 rectangles around the model of the house, something similar that was done for Ars Electronica by YesYesNo, but in the new system Andreas represents the surface in 3D space, use that as a view and then get the lights positions within the 2D surface by looking them up in an ortographic projection. Once you have the 2D positions of the lights within the surface, the brightness is calculated based on their 3D position. For fun, Andreas also hooked up OSC control using TouchOSC iPad app allowing him to create swarm like light effect with the setup in real time (see video below).

The official site for the launch was http://www.hyundai-i40.eu
also see hi-res.net and nanikawa.com

Created by Naoki Nishimura, Helvetica Face is a Livetype format font. This new Helvetica family font changes the “typeface” based on the posting of a new “face”. The site allows you to record your face within the font, adjusting the threshold resulting in a new glyph you can download.

While normal fonts which are governed by software rules on how to show the internal form (=data), Helvetica Face doesn’t have this internal information on the form. What is does have is external data given in the shape of a image of your face, and how to show that form is the only rule. For that reason, through the given data, the form continues to change without bounds.

Livetype is a new font format which takes a variety of data and can change the form of it in real time.

livetype.in/face/

NewSpeak is a project created by Immo Blaese for anticensor, the 10th Web Biennial at the Istanbul Contemporary Art Museum. As new words are picked up every minute, NewSpeak will display the opposite meaning (antonym) based on an Orwellian scenario of doublespeak.

The creation of a new over simplified language to limit the expressions and thoughts possible in a dystopian totalitarian regime.

All images and tweets are loaded via public feeds provided by Flickr and Twitter. The full project including screensavers for Mac and Windows can be downloaded here.

Play > newspeak.zonkzone.net