As it has been for pixel-heads the world over, an obligatory mention needs to be made here for Jeff Han’s ‘Multi-touch Interaction Research’ device @ New York University. Watch the video, and drool at the ways two hands on a large screen are fluidly controlling a whole range of visualised data, spinning discs, 3d maps and more. The discussion comments about it are also pretty fascinating for anyone interested in where interfaces might be going. This is still in development though, and as many have noted, the Lemur by Jazz Mutant, is an already existing interface on the shelves now. Rather than try to make ever more complex controllers to work with ever more complex software, Jazz Mutant have made a very sexy touch screen midi and osc controller which allows the user to design as many different controls on the screen as they like, and map those to data parameters. And for the next performance ( or song or clip ) the controller can be entirely different. Lush.

Ms.Pinky is another sexy controller worth having a look at, or more precisely – is a customised vinyl record you can purchase which will allow you to use your manipulation of an existing standard turntable to control audio and video data on a computer – for a fraction of the cost of a Final Scratch system. More explanations and demonstrations of it in action at the Ms.Pinky site.

Those wishing to sync their audio and video together better would be well advised to check out the related threads at the excellent and vibrant vjforums.com, which includes the following Ableton Live tip via Richie Hawtin:

“Create a file “Options.txt” in Library/Preferences/Ableton/Live4
write the line:
-MIDINoteFeedback
in it. If a session clip has been MIDI learned it will put out a note event when triggered, and a note event with velocity 1 per loop count and the note off on stop.”

There’s a whole lotta video-love out there, when you have everyone’s video bookmarks to browse through.

http://del.icio.us* is the most popular of several online or ‘social’ bookmarking services currently gaining traction. Essentially it allocates you a homepage, and allows you to easily bookmark any webpage you are viewing, which will then show up under your homepage. You can attach descriptions and as many keywords or ‘tags’ as you like to each site you bookmark. Because these bookmarks are located on a homepage, you can find them from anywhere you can access that homepage – and you can easily find specific bookmarks under a tag you might have given it – eg ‘video’ or ‘vj’ or ‘scuba-diver’ etc.

This alone makes it quite an excellent bookmarking service, but you can also view the collective bookmarks of everybody who has also tagged a bookmark ‘video’ or ‘vj’ etc, and you can subscribe to these via RSS / feeds, which means you can keep aware of all the various topic-related bookmarks people are making all over the globe right now. It’s a great way for staying abreast of topics, and in fact – the next 3 posts pretty much represent a harvest of the feed so far this year from: http://del.icio.us/tag/vj. ( Try replacing vj in that URL, with any word of your choice to get an idea of how many bookmarks are funnelled through this ) Beyond bookmarked webpages, http://del.icio.us/tag/system:media:video – will find any videoclips bookmarked, and http://del.icio.us/tag/system:media:audio will find any music or audio clips bookmarked.

• Try this tutorial introduction to the del.icio.us service, read about this list of add-ons, or add the del.icio.us firefox extension to your browser for even easier access.