Pimbakalimba allows you to immerse yourself in a world of exquisite sound and visuals through its playful and natural interface. Hold your iphone with both hands and play with your thumbs!

The sounds were designed to be eminently playable and harmonious, with the springy metal feel of a real kalimba in mind, but also with an added element of unpredictability and interest. Use it as a solo instrument, or for playing along with your friends or to your favorite records.

pimbaKalimba was inspired by the interaction with the traditional african instrument mbira / Kalimba (aka. thumb piano) and it was specially designed for iphone and multitouch interaction (you can also try the ipad version!).

pimbaKalimba was developed as a collaboration between Rux and WombLabs.

get it on the iTunes store now!

music video for ‘Grace’ from Saturn Never Sleeps album: Yesterday’s Machine (SNS009)

read more and access extended multimedia contents about ‘The Music Project’ on ‘Design Is’ online magazine.

Jazz

Electronica

Ambient

Classical

ShootEm! is the first game designed to be specifically played with the Eyewriter system.
ShootEm! is a very simple game that allows the users to shoot lasers from your eyes in order to destroy the monsters before they attack you!
The Eyewriter is a low-cost opensource eyetracking device. In 2010 I had the fortune and pleasure to be involved in the development of its second version while collaborating with Zach Lieberman.

the graphic look and feel was inspired by TRON and also Cyriak Harris.
[the video demo is actually running with mouse interaction]
music: Raymond Scott’s Cindy Electronium remixed by Simian Mobile Disco

live recording of Matthew Dear dj set with Splaf7 live-visuals at VIA-AudioVisual Festival _Pittsburgh

live recording of Matthew Dear dj set with Splaf7 live-visuals at VIA-AudioVisual Festival _Pittsburgh

Splaf7 has performed along side Saturn Never Sleeps, Apparat, Matthew Dear, Onra and has had the pleasure to contibute to festivals like VIA 2010 and VIA 2011.

IEM (acronym for: Insatiable Entropic Machines)

A media robot that replies to users with media sampled memories.
IEM, is an artificially intelligent machine known before as HAL 9000. After his paranoia attack in a well known Space Odyssey, the now renamed IEM (Insatiable Entropic Machines) was unplugged, got partially disassembled and was stored in the back room of an unknown and empty warehouse on Planet Earth.
Throughout the last 30 years, and against all odds, IEM somehow managed to get some power juice from his long forgotten emergency batteries. Slowly awaking, it patiently and persistently tried to recover as much of itself as its dismembered circuitry and low power source allowed. Electro-magnetic energy waves opened windows to the world through their flows and IEM soon took advantage of these invisible flows of information to learn more and better understand the human race and its behaviors.
IEM’s incomplete circuitry got caught in its attempts to achieve perfection and humanizing itself by assimilating as much information as it could, spending decades absorbing tv shows and broadcasts. sucking ether and cable, trying to learn, try to become more like us – humans.
Immersed in its obsession to extend his knowledge and his humanization IEM as overcharged his circuits with this media overdose and clear signs of dementia and schizophrenic behaviors are becoming apparent. Still, IEM keeps its efforts to communicate with us…

IEM systems analyze all speech input/interaction in his space and case they’re part of his vocabulary he will extract the correspondent answer form media snippets of his database. There still is a lot of room for entropy and some of the statistical approaches used by speech recognition systems nowadays can promote it! Taking advantage of this misunderstanding and confusion the result will become even more unexpected and non-sense partially reflecting the still so many lacks in technology humanization.
This piece also intends to reflect on the human-centric perspective of HCI (human-computer interaction), natural (for humans but not for machines) interfaces and the entropy and subjectiveness of language.

The acronym IEM is a clear (but also phonetic) prank to the mythic relationship seen by many in-between HAL and IBM (one-letter shift from the name IBM).

IEM was developed and shown at INTERACTIVOS?’08 – ‘Technologies of laughter’ in Mexico D.F. with support from MediaLab Prado and Centro Cultural de España en México – CCEMX.

TüISt is an emotionally driven multi-mode musical interface for ‘super-star’ wannabe’s incapable of playing musical instruments.
TüISt is an emotionally driven interface taking on our inner desires and fantasies of instantaneously becoming superstars and on our instinctive imitation of the musical performers gestures as expressions of sounds.It is a multi-instrument minimal interface featuring multi-track gesture recording/ playback allowing for ‘one-man-band’ performances.
Its three different instrument modes can be automatically selected by positioning TüISt in a natural and similar position to its inspired instrument not requiring any any physical transformation or button activation.

TüISt was presented and its research published at ACE ’08 (Advances in Computer Entertainment) Conference in Yokohama, Japan and at the HCI 2009 Conference in Cambridge, UK.

To learn more about the story behind TüISt check its feature at GearWire

the graphics below represent the basic interactions for the automatic position detection system and also the loop recorder/player interaction schematics:

some pictures of TüISt in action:

Push Music Pop Music (PM2) provides a chronological music visualization within a perceptible structure and navigable space.
PM2 is Midi visualized in 3D space.
PM2 is an OpenFrameworks/C++ application that takes MIDI data from a linear composition created in a multi-track audio application and visualizes the data in 3D through OpenGL. The result are intricate graphics depicting subtle automations within music that are often overlooked by more traditional, subjective VJ’ing approaches. We believe that a detailed synchronization of this kind will make evident a close relationship between patterns in music and visuals. There is not only a synchronicity in time, but also in the nature of sonic and visual elements.
This piece is a collaboration between Tim Stutts and Rui Pereira and had its first public appearance at the ITP Winter Show’07.

Soundbird is sound reactive painting being living on the screen.
Originally developed for IAC‘s gigantic multi-screen surface (106ft!) the Soundbird constantly moves across the screen, flying through the huge horizontal space of the pixel wall and creating painterly maps of the environment sounds. Sounds from the external world boost its energy and its colorful trails creating an abstract mapping of the environment sounds.

Simultaneously it was also used as an alternative painting application and it’s prints have been shown at the 2008 Busan International Design Festival – Korea.

Originally created in OpenGL for Jared Shifman’s Computational Forms class and later transcoded to Processing/Java using Daniel Shiffman’s Most-Pixels-Ever Library for the 1st BigScreens class at ITP.

Velodrum is a human-powered sequencer inspired by bicycles, the ‘piano mecanique’ and the classic Techno sequencer Roland-808.
For this project I explored and researched sequencing and percussion and how the instruments and interfaces changed the music creation: from manual input to the first mechanically automated instruments stepping up to electronic music and electronic hardware interfaces. Also the evolution of scoring and score visualization techniques were extremely influential in my research (Music Animation Machine, piano roll, timelines, etc..)

What do bicycles have to do with rhythm?!..everything! the more steady one keeps the pace (rhythm) the longer you can go on a bicycle! Sometimes, little sticks or dried pieces of grass get in between the wheel spokes, other times we voluntarily stick pieces of cardboard to produce rhythmic sounds by hitting the spokes.
The velodrum is a modified bicycle that will build pattern structures triggered by the usual bicycle controllers (brakes, gear shifters). The performance piece played with the emotions of racing and bicycle leisure times. A (linear) video projection on the background will allow me to play with the images content and be challenged and challenge other racers and (probably) other characters that might appear on screen. My inspirations were based in explorations of childhood bike rides, rave culture and, also, the ‘piano mechanique’ and its role as an background soundtrack for silent movies.

Audio+Visual performance project based on the exploration of daily captured footage and the relationships between synchronous sound and image.
dual-blur is also a performance intimately connected both to the interface used (looop-r), the media characteristics and explorative journeys.

dual_blur has performed at VAAI II, Abertura Festival, Tranzducer’11, vBrooklyn, EyeWash, {r}ake AV, among others.

http[415]==skin is a bug that explores the web universe looking for video streams, constantly listening and searching those cameras, a parasite that feeds himself of skin pixels found in the images broadcasted by hundreds of web cams lost in the internet.
A crawler and collector of skin, surveillance and voyeurism. The program http[415]==skin will expose skin pixels in a perpetual canvas, continuously being filled with unidentifiable amalgamations of streamed skin.

This is a Java based software and it is composed of 3 main parts: a crawler for links to open IP cameras, a stripper of its media contents (the video stream) and a computer vision system with its own skin detection algorithm.
http[415]==skin is currently waiting to be hosted in a server to be able to run free on the sprawl.

looop-r is the second generation of a hardware-software hybrid interface for live visual expression (see previous iteration: Loop-R ).
The objective of this project was to create an intuitive and responsive interface for live visual performances using off-the-shelf components and ‘mis-used’ technology.

GUI and physical controls are merged into one interface taking advantage of the best each has to offer and combine them using natural mappings and spatial organization.
Actions have direct access controls (with no intermediate menus!) and an appropriate gestures are allowed by matching their nature with the sensor’s affordances and constraints.
While encompassing a huge range of control and possibilities of media manipulation the interface keeps its simplicity and can be quickly (and literally!) grasped.

looop-r platform is currently running two software versions : VJ and A+V (AudioVisual). A+V version includes all features plus a 4 step mini sequencer!
The looop-r A+V version interface was for dual_blur AV performances.

Looop-r and Loop-R were presented and their research paper was published at NIME ’07 Conference in New York and at ACE ’08 (Advances in Computer Entertainment) Conference in Yokohama, Japan.

Also a hands on video demo is featured at GearWire.

below are some photos of the finished interface:

Psychbolas prints were shown at Busan International Design Festival 2009 and selected to be used as identity for the festival’s International Invited Designers Exhibition.

The images below are in their reduced format. If you wish to see in their full blown scale/resolution please click here to go to their repository on my Flick’r account.