Ilias Bergstrom
In collaboration with Sam Walker of the Bartlett school of architecture’s Unit 14, and Beau Lotto, my PhD supervisor and director of Lottolab Studios, I have created an interactive multimedia installation which is currently being exhibited at the Passing Through exhibition at the James Taylor gallery in Hackney, London. Besides our own piece, the exhibition has a great deal more interesting work, and is well worth a visit!
New features for Mother 0.3:
So go ahead and click here to download it from google code!
Note I have only been able to test this release on my development machine as of yet. Should be fine, but if you run into trouble do let me know, as it is not impossible a bug might have slipped through 
Onar3D - Maria Louiza - HD from Onar3D on Vimeo.
This is the HD version of a video I had previously uploaded. The previous upload had terrible quality, a result of my using a scan converter to grab the video from my PC’s VGA output in real-time.
As a consequence I took the time to modify Mother so that it can render video directly to disc in non real-time mode. It took a few days of work and involved the creation of a rudimentary OSC sequencer among other things, but the improvement in visual quality was worth the effort!
The graphics are procedurally rendered in real-time, and are controlled primarily through musical notation data (MIDI).
The software used for the visuals is Mother 0.3, a program I’ve developed for VJ-ing with multiple Processing.org sketches.
The music I have also made myself, using all hardware musical instruments. The synthesizers are mostly programmed, but the drums I played live on an electronic drumkit.
Even with an entirely digital production and HD encoding pipeline however, the video looks quite a bit worse than what the program does when running in real-time, because of the video compression. Colours are washed out, and some pixellation appears around fine details…
So do have a look at the screen grabs on flickr.com/photos/10401337@N05/sets/72157616429723122/, and download the better quality video from the link at the bottom of the vimeo page, to get a better impression of what it really looks like!
Onar3D - Maria Louiza from Onar3D on Vimeo.
Updated!
I have uploaded a much better version, watch this instead: vimeo.com/4164841
Here is my first piece created using the software I’ve been developing. As you may notice, the graphics are controlled primarily through musical notation data (MIDI).
The software used for the visuals is Mother 0.3, see related posts on this page.
The music I have also made myself, using all hardware musical instruments. The synthesizers are mostly programmed, but the drums I played live on an electronic drumkit.
Please excuse the visual quality! Until I get my hands on a high end frame-grabber for recording from my computers VGA output, my simple little scan converter will have to do. Note that the dropped frames are a capture artefact as well, on my PC it runs smoothly…
Have a look at the screen grabs on flickr.com/photos/10401337@N05/sets/72157616429723122/ to get an impression of what it really looks like!
After a while of radio silence I thought I’d post a little about what is in development:
That is all for now; I do not at the moment have a time-frame for a release, since I’m also experimenting with incorporating prototype 2D filter support. In the meantime, let me know if you’d like copy of the source as it is and I can send it to you!
Yesterday’s release of Mother 0.2 had a bug which I’ve just fixed with the new upload 0.201.
Many thanks to Aaron Koblin for not only reporting that it doesn’t work but also pointing out how to solve it!
The bug was such that if you didn’t have a version of processing installed in “C:\Program Files\processing\”, Mother would start to a blank white screen, because it was looking for OpenGL dll’s in a path that does not exist. In the new 0.201 upload, I have included these dll’s and altered the program so that it uses the included ones.
I did test the 0.2 version on three different machines, but it turns out all three had processing installed on the above path. Will need to start testing on a fresh Virtual Machine installation of Windows or I’ll keep bumping in to simple errors like this…
So if Mother 0.2 didn’t work for you, the good news are you didn’t do anything wrong, simply download 0.201 and give it another shot!
I have just finished the new version of Mother, so head over to google code, download it and check it out!
Besides now working with Processing 0156, I have also added an important new feature that allows processing incoming OSC values using spline interpolation, thus allowing for better animation.
Note that these changes mean that you will need to make slight changes to you previous ‘visual synths’ in order for them to work.
This version is still Windows only for now, however I have an untested Mac version that I can email you if you would like to volunteer in testing it out.
And as always, I am really curious to hear of your opinions and experiences with Mother!
Mother: Making the Performance of Real-Time Computer Graphics Accessible to Non-programmers, Ilias Bergstrom and Beau Lotto, 2008 (re)Actor3 Conference Proceedings.
Available for download from the lottolab.org website.
Mother has now been released to the public!