luxloop

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Luxloop + The Minneapolis Institute of Art

We're very excited and honored to announce that Luxloop has been awarded the 3M Art and Technology Award and the opportunity to produce an original interactive work with the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

The project is a museum-wide interactive experience called Overheard. Read more in the official press release here. Stay tuned here for more details.

If you’re interested in becoming a beta tester for upcoming projects like this one, please sign up here.

#arttech15

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‘People are Becoming Clouds’ will be premiering at Toronto International

Luxloop built the lightning effects into the cloud prop for this short film. We’re so excited the film is now complete and will be screening at TIFF 2015. 

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We’re very happy to be a part of Meta Narrativas - Arte, Diseño y Desarrollo Tecnológico this month in Mexico City.

If the Walls Had Eyes will be on view alongside work by some of our favorite artists, including Rafael Lozano Hemmer and Ivan Abreu.

The whole show is a cross-section of digital expression, storytelling, science, and art spread over three locations. If the Walls Had Eyes will be on view from August 20 to October 1st at:

Galería Andrea Pozzo Universidad Iberoamericana Prolongación Paseo de la Reforma 880, Alvaro Obregón Lomas de Sta Fé, 01219 Ciudad de México, D.F.

Opening reception Thursday, August 20th at 7pm. Open August 20th to October 1st

Please share any photos you take of the show: #metanarrativas #ifthewallshadeyes

[luxloop]

Sometimes you have to send your app over the internets. Or maybe it's an art installation for a show but you won't be there during teardown. Most of the time, you trust people to be decent and not re-use your app or project without your consent. Most of the time, the people you trust actually are decent and would never do that.

Sometimes though, for those rare times you've got a bad vibe, or if you don't really know who you're working with, or if the needs of the project dictate it, it would be great if your app just expired.

We made an OpenFrameworks addon for those rare times:

https://github.com/luxloop/ofxExpire

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Ivaylo made a quick/lightweight 2D Vector implementation in JavaScript for a project over the weekend. It’s based on the P5js vector functions, so usage is pretty familiar. Useful for doing velocity + acceleration type animations with CSS and JS. Feel free to use. Let us know if it’s helpful! 

https://gist.github.com/ivaylopg/6ef1c2b6f886607dc348

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Social Sound is featured this weekend on The Creators Project and Prosthetic Knowledge.

Thanks for spreading the word!

[luxloop]

New Project - “Social Sound”

A Tool for Live Performance of the Social Sphere

Social Sound is a performance tool designed to aggregate the flow of real time social activity into a rush of sound in the real world, providing a unique portrait of the social sphere at a given moment in time.

A choir of people gather in one physical location, using the Social Sound website as their virtual songbook, ensuring that each performer is reading a unique part. Tweets containing the key search term are channelled to the performers, who narrate the thoughts out loud.

The tool defaults to tracking the word "now," although any search term can be used. The tool can be found at socialsound.luxloop.com.

[luxloop]

Stuff We Like - May Edition

Every month or so we want to share a handful of links to projects, articles, and products that inspired us, helped us, or that we just liked a bunch.

Robert Hodgin - Adobe Remix

Robert Hodgin/flight404 is a perennial inspiration to us. We are always amazed not only by his work, but also the way he generously shares his process. Check out this write-up of his contribution to the Adobe Remix project.

Preposterous Universe

Ivaylo recently interviewed cosmologist Sean Carroll for Axion. This is Sean's blog. He talks about everything from philosophy to dark matter in a very accessible way. Check out the "Greatest Hits" section as a good place to start.

The Tech Model Railroad Club

A fascinating look at what may be the first group of people to refer to themselves as "hackers."

[luxloop]

Thanks to everyone who came out to SELECT Fair this weekend to see our installation. It was fun to be on display with such a wide array of amazing art and performances!

[luxloop]

Come play with If the Walls Had Eyes this week at SELECT FAIR, May 13-17!

Hahamag.com thinks it’s one of the SELECT Art Fair Events Not To Miss

Alpha Sixty says its one of 5 Must-Sees at Select Art Fair:

In the back of the third floor is a motion-activated video installation of multiple eyes observing the passersby. It’s a little creepy, but also wondrously impressive.

[luxloop]

Cool Stuff - April Edition

Every month or so we want to share a handful of links to projects, articles, and products that inspired us, helped us, or that we just liked a bunch.

Visualizing Algorithms by Mike Bostock

If you are considering learning to code, or if you want a great read on algorithmic thinking, then take look at this article adapted from Mike Bostock's talk at Eyeo 2014.

Watch The 'Mona Lisa' Morph Into 'American Gothic,' Pixel By Pixel

Speaking of algorithms, here's what happens when a bunch of people come up with esoteric programming challenges - algorithms for finding the best way to make a given image using only the source pixels in another image. The Creator's Project article is a good write-up, but make sure to check out the original forum thread to see some of the other attempts.

We Put a Chip in it!

“It was just a dumb thing. Then we put a chip in it. Now it's a smart thing.”

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We’re very excited to be a part of this group show in Los Angeles next month - they’re taking over an old motel for a night and transforming it into a gallery space and venue for dialogue.

A One-Night Stand for Art & Architecture (One-Night Stand LA) - an event and publication project by a group of emerging architects and artists from Los Angeles exploring different forms of media, but also new possibilities for architectural strategies of subversion.

If you’re going to be in Los Angeles on May 16th, come check it out!

[luxloop]

Stuff We Like - March Edition

Every month or so we want to share a handful of links to projects, articles, and products that inspired us, helped us, or that we just liked a bunch.

Dear Data- An Analog Data Drawing Project

A modern day pair of pen pals coupled their love of data and hand drawn illustration for this project in which they send brightly colored data visualizations to each other across the pond on a weekly basis. Giorgia Lupi and Sefanie Posavec share creative, beautiful and inspiring hand drawn visualizations of bits of data from their everyday life, from their desires, to their wardrobe, to the number of times they see a mirror in a day. The project is an interesting exploration in how you can get to know a stranger through specific pieces of their particular data. 

Radiolab Presents: The Year That Broke Austin

Unfortunately this one is a little hard to share because it relies on location based data to tell the story of the an 130 year old murder mystery, taking you back into the time of the crime through an auditory and physical journey throughout the city. Other than this special edition, Detour is only available in San Francisco at the moment. For those who are there, be sure to checkout their audio based story journeys. We’re excited to see people experimenting with ways technology can pull stories out into real spaces in the world. 

Spaceprob.es

A beautiful collection of flat design posters featuring all the space probes that are floating out in the galaxy around us. Each entry includes information about each probe’s journey and links to data collected from each mission straight from NASA. The project is drool worthy for any moon obsessed, design aficionado. 

[luxloop]

Stuff We Like - February

Every month or so we want to share a handful of links to projects, articles, and products that inspired us, helped us, or that we just liked a bunch.

A Way To Go

Created by Vincent Morisset, Caroline Robert, Édouard Lanctôt-Benoit and the studio AATOAA, produced by the NFB, A Way to Go is an absolute work of art that we got lost in for hours. It runs entirely on a browser, and the technology is so well executed that it completely melts away.

How to Experience VR for Under $50

Brian Chrils has been blogging as the Digital Technology Fellow at POV since mid 2014 - all of his posts are worth a read if you do any sort of work with video on the web. For the past few posts, he has been talking about uses of VR, and how to get VR experiences into the hands of more people.

Cheap DIY Microscope Sees Individual Atoms

We came across this while poking around on Hack-A-Day: "This apparent wizardry is called a scanning tunneling microscope which takes advantage of quantum tunneling." Anytime a project legitimately takes advantage of some sort of quantum physics effect, we say that's a big success.

Never Trust a Corporation to Do a Library's Job

We've long been fans of the Internet Archive's efforts to preserve the history of the internet, as well as being a resource for public domain media, but we had no idea how extensive their software collection has become.

Jack White - Black Bat Licorice 

A really cool and well-made interactive music video. Using HTML5, it brings interactivity to a wide audience, which is something that always interests us.

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Programming the cloud in Grand Central Station. 

Luxloop designed and programed practical VFX for the film People Are Becoming Clouds, based on the short story by Joe Meno.  The final cloud was able to be cued via a mobile phone, behind the camera. Here, Mandy is making a few last minute edits to the program. 

[luxloop]

Stuff We Like - January Edition

Every month or so we want to share a handful of links to projects, articles, and products that inspired us, helped us, or that we just liked a bunch. Here's a few from this month:

'Plug and Play' - Andrew Frei

This project started as an awesome short animated film, and was recently turned into an interactive app/game. Supposidly it's about how we fall in love, and was animated entirely on a laptop trackpad. A great exploration into how a film can be embeded with interactive elements. Have fun poking, dragging, and plugging you're way through this piece.

Deeplab

Deep Lab is a group of 'cyberfeminist researchers' and artists that are exploring the way we make art in the surveillance age. They've been quite busy, making a documentary, a 270-page book, and a series of lectures on various subjects and an 18 minute documentary about the project. They're working to investigate and bring to light the ways in which the internet and surveillance is breaking our culture. 

How to Make  Mechanical Soldering Tool

Turn an old mechanical pencil into an automatic solder dispenser! Just be careful not to let the pencil get too close to the soldering iron. We're always intrigued by lo-fi fixes and way to repurpose common objects to make our work just a little easier. 

Custom Printable Google Cardboard from Dodo Case

Google Cardboard is one of our favorite projects right now because it is a lo-fi/low-cost way to bring Virtual Reality content to the masses. Now Dodo bird has a custom VR viewer Designer, so you can put whatever you want on the viewer, be it a logo, a custom project design, or a photo of your dog. We all know that VR googles can make you look silly, but Dodocase is making sure you can look much cooler while experiencing a different world.

DIY Haptic Devices

WoodenHaptics has created an open-source haptic kit, meaning that an everyday person can now affordably create their own device to play and tinker with in their own home.

[luxloop]

The Next Dimension from Intel

Vox Creative and The Verge interviewed us for a new Intel campaign. Take a look! You can see some glimpses of If The Walls Had Eyes and Amplified Self when they were showing at Refest, and our Screen Motion prototype from the MIT hackathon.

‘The Next Dimension’, from @IntelRealSense, tells the stories of five creators from the worlds of fashion, animation, filmmaking, gaming, and photography who are using perceptual computing technology to reimagine their respective industries.

UPDATE: Some people have been having problems playing the video on the site, so we’ve linked the video directly here: