In late December I was approached by a member of the Vapor Media group from Ryerson University. They were planning a gallery event called Digitalscapes and had in mind a particular installation art piece they wanted built. The concept was for a jumble of paper lanterns in the window of Thrush Holmes gallery, the lanterns being lit up in patterns that responded to the beat of the music played by the DJs for the event.

I took on the development and building of this project. Ordering piles of BlinkM LED modules and hacking together Processing code and Arduino based electronics to make it reality. I plan to publish a how-to post with more tech details later – as I was standing on the shoulders of generous giants for this project and want to give something back.

Huge thanks to Michael Pereira who helped with the physical installation on the day as well as some inevitable last minute troubleshooting.

The final installation took the form of 5 large paper lanterns hanging in the gallery window. Each was lit by a set of red-green-blue LEDs the exact colour and brightness of each lantern being controlled by the beat-monitoring software I created. It was a fun project, but a lot of work. Physical installations being subject to laws of physics can get complicated fast. Lots of interesting lessons and I’m happy with the final product. Next is to use that gear and knowledge I now have to build something fun and interactive (as opposed to just reactive). Perhaps I’ll hook it all up to the Arduinome controller I built last year.

This comes out of several conversations I’ve had recently about data visualisation. Specifically the way that visualisations can end up more beautiful than useful. I thought it would be fun to try and create a data viz piece that was deliberately skewed towards the aesthetic and away from the useful.

So I threw this together, it illustrates two days of Twitter messages from the people I follow as a flock of pigeons. Next up is a giant, live updated, animated version. Just as soon as I find some time and a few nice plasma screens.

Well, better poetry is a stretch. But more fun poetry for non-poets might be more like it. A quick demo I hacked together of a system where haiku form poetry is created by blasting away unwanted words with a lightgun. My idea is that this could be scaled up to a fun, creative experience to be installed at events.

Update: video of the installation in action now online.

Despite a few maddening moments between a fully functional set-up and the actual start of the Toronto The Good gathering, the debut of our 1834 Roller Rider installation went over quite well with those in attendance. (see NOW) A good constant stream of folks watching from behind and queuing up to mount the cruiser controlled installation (and then dismounting with smiles still on) suggests Version 1 is something worth building on.

What began as a beer & burgers conversation about playing mobile-controlled pacman on the streets of Toronto soon morphed into the ambling experience that could make indoor riding actually fun. Imagine pedaling the streets of 1834’s Toronto while watching synced video of those streets today. Spot those bits of old architecture? How about a faded mural or that spot where Duke and Newgate once met and now form Adelaide?

On the surface the Roller Rider seemed pretty straight-forward — a little bit of hardware and software talking between bike and computer-controlled video — but Patrick and I owe some thanks for the insight of, among others, the dedicated Yvonne Bambrick of the Toronto Cyclists Union and Navid Taslimi of Goldsprints.

And of course Willie (or Willy?) the junior MLTer who brings a state of zen with him and, even when boards are spewing more noise than data, has the ability to maintain his own and our composure. Plus, as a pre-tween, he’s got loads of energy and he kept the wheels spinning; one of the few to do the full figure-8 loop — repeatedly at that.

Photo: 1834 Roller Rider at Toronto the Good via Patrick Dinnen’s Flickr
More pics and some video coming.

Not even a year passed and already we created a video to document the work that we (Patrick Dinnen, David McCallum and Gabe Sawhney) did in creating a sound reactive system for the huge balloon field that KPMB installed for last year’s Luminato Festival.

Media Lab were lucky enough to be invited to the IN09 conference, which took place in Toronto this month, to showcase the Twitter Wall we have developed.

The Twitter Wall was projected onto a large screen in located in the central hall of the event – a great location. For the two days of the conference the wall streamed live tweets relating to the event into the projection (relevance determined by  looking for a hashtag, “#in09″).

People seemed to enjoy the bounce and crash of their messages as they appeared on the screen. We automatically displayed several hundred messages on the screen during the event and were very happy to be involved.

HoHoTO is a much anticipated holiday party here in Toronto. It was put together entirely by volunteers in just two weeks from idea to event.

I’m very pleased to get a chance to display TXTris in a new version. As before the app pulls live content (in this case Twitter messages related to the event) and shows the falling down the projection wall. This version uses a fancy physics engine, desgned for computer games, so the messages bounce, slide and fall in a pleasingly real way.

Check out the real thing at the event, as long as you have a ticket as it sold out a while ago. Or I’ll be posting video here afterwards.

update:  no video yet, but there are some photos up on Flickr.

If you’d wandered into Yonge-Dundas square in the heart of downtown Toronto at 1AM Sunday morning you would have seen a strange sight. A couple of hundred people dancing under a huge canopy of colourfully lit balloons.

The most striking thing though was the silence, with only the shuffle and stamp of feet on the dance floor, a little conversation and the occasional whoop. The reason for the quiet is the rule that no amplified music can be played outside in the city after 11PM. To get around that Luminato provided a set mixed by AC Slater as an MP3 download, which you could drop onto your iPod and bring along to the square. So all the dancers were listening to the night’s soundtrack through their own headphones. This is a silent rave, happy bylaw officers, happy late night dancers.

As part of the work that David, Gabe and I are doing on the lightning control for the balloons we put together the light show for the night and it was a lot of fun.

Raju Mudhar from The Star described it like this:

“With the choreographed lighting from the balloons in the square, it did feel a bit like an outdoor club. But more than that, it was spontaneous and fun. People shared earphones with those that didn’t have. Every festival in town could use more of these types of moments.”

There are tons more pictures of the night over on Flickr.

The installation of 250 big balloons for Luminato is well underway. It was a late night for the Media Lab Toronto crew (along with the riggers, architects, technicians and engineers who were doing the real work of stringing the things up in the sky). Even though I only got to bed a few hours ago as dawn approached I’m really excited to see how this thing turns out in the end.

We didn’t get all the time we were hoping for to test the sound reactive displays we’ve been working on last night, so there’s a lot left to do before the official opening tonight.

You can check out photos of the installation coming together over at Flickr.

Some of the Media Lab Toronto gang are hard at work getting ready for a great project. Gabe Sawhney, David MacCallum and Patrick Dinnen are working on an interactive light show to run on a giant canopy of LED lit balloons to be installed above the Yonge-Dundas square for the Luminato Festival.

The spectacle will be made up of 250 4-6 foot balloons strung above the square from a spider’s web of cables. Each balloon will be lit from inside by an array of red, green and blue LEDs (for infinite colour mixing possibility). The physical installation is the work of KPMB architects. We’re working on designing and creating a series of lighting effects which will be triggered by the sounds picked up from the square below.

The show kicks off this Friday night, June 6, and runs for 5 days. Stay tuned for more info once our collective noses come up off the grindstone for long enough.