The good gentlemen over at New American Public Art have produced an excellent maker tutorial based on our Listener project.

LISTENER – An Outdoor Weather Proof Audio Responsive LED Installation – Maker Tutorial

If a tutorial isn’t your thing, you can also just check out this great video of people screaming.

I recently worked with my friends Dan Sternof Beyer, Kawandeep Virdee, and Bevan Weissman of New American Public Art (NAPA), and Karen Stein Shanley of goodgood on a public art piece called Listener.

Listener is an interactive light installation that responds to the ambient and intentional sounds around it, transforming static space into a dynamic public place. You can see it for the next couple months on the Fort Point Channel Harborwalk between Congress Street and Northern Avenue. It’s outside of the Boston Children’s Museum, right next to the giant milk bottle.

Check out this quick video showing Listener in action:

You can also check out photos of our construction process over on the NAPA blog.

In this interesting TEDx video, Boston Cyberarts’ George Fifield discusses video screens at the Boston Convention Center and the Boston Harbor Islands Pavilion. He links these to a broader trend in art on public screens worldwide and what this all means for the future of public art.

“This is the new public art. Not bronze statues of dead white guys or static plop art, but dynamic media art that reflects the city and the time we live in, and give the energy of the city back to us.”

Excerpt from WGBH’s Greater Boston.

I shot some documentation of my Building Boston video, currently playing on the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center marquee screens as part of the Art on the Marquee series.

These screens are so funky and multi-faceted that it’s interesting trying to capture them on video. If you are in the area, come down and see it in person–it’s definitely an experience.

I was shocked to realize that Apple’s Numbers app doesn’t properly handle it if you try to paste CSV data in. It seems like such a simple oversight.

Luckily, a little searching online turned up an AppleScript script by Koenig Yvan. I made some tweaks and ended up with this:

set delim to ","

set the clipboard to my remplace(the clipboard as text, delim, tab)

on remplace(_t, _delim, _tab)
    local l
    set AppleScript's text item delimiters to _delim
    set l to text items of _t
    set AppleScript's text item delimiters to _tab
    set _t to l as text
    set AppleScript's text item delimiters to ""
    return _t
end remplace

tell application "Numbers"
    activate
    tell application "System Events"
        keystroke "v" using {command down}
    end tell
end tell

As I did with my View Artist on AllMusic script, I use FastScripts to setup a keyboard shortcut like ⌘⇧V in Numbers.

Now we’re living the dream.

Beautiful sculpture here from Charles Sowers. It’s like a diagram from one of my old science text books come to life in a hypnotically dynamic way.

I’m delighted to be a part of second round of Art on the Marquee screening on the incredible marquee screens at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. I’ll have some documentation of the piece soon, but in the meantime there have been several mentions in the media since our opening this past Wednesday:

• The Boston Globe: “10 contemporary works to see now”
• The Boston Globe: “Boston-area to do list”
• BostInno: “Boston’s Largest Public Art Display Premieres Its Spring 2012 Artists”
• Creatives at Work: “Art on the Marquee Unveils Its Second Exhibition”

If you’re in the area you can find a presentation schedule on the Art on the Marquee website.

I spend quite a bit of time listening to music and, being the nerd that I am, I like to know as much as I can about the music I’m enjoying. I find myself looking up bands so often that I decided I needed a shortcut.

tell application "iTunes"
    if player state is not stopped then
        set currentArtist to artist of current track
    end if
end tell

tell application "Safari"
    open location "http://allmusic.com/search/artist/" & currentArtist
end tell

The AppleScript itself is quite straightforward. We’re simply asking for the artist name from the currently playing track. Then we feed that into a search on all-know AllMusic. There we’ll be able to read a bio, see the band’s complete discography, find out whether they are categorized as “psychedelic pop” or just plain old “psychedelic”, all that good stuff.

Finally, Daniel Jalkut’s FastScripts software makes it a breeze to run our script right from iTunes. We’ll name our script something descriptive and good for a menu item like “View Artist on AllMusic.scpt” and place it into ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/iTunes/ (creating any directories that aren’t already there). With iTunes open and in front, our script will appear right in the FastScripts menu. We can also use the FastScripts Preferences pane to define a keyboard shortcut: I chose ⌘⇧A.

Try it out. Being unproductive has never been so efficient.

I’ve been spending the past few months on a public art installation with my friends at goodgood and New American Public Art called “Lighthouse”. The piece will have several components: an internally lit sculpture on a roof, colored light projections from the sculpture down onto the ground, and generative video on a couple very large, very low resolution video screens.

The screens are very interesting. They are approximately 10′ wide by 8′ tall, and are just above the ground on walls that you can walk right up to. But they are only 64×48 pixels, meaning each pixel is a large glowing set of 3 LEDs. They are quite interesting to experience, and a bit of a challenge to create videos for.

Here’s a snapshot of my animation. It’s been processed to mimic the appearance when running on the low resolution screens.

If you’re in the Boston area, Lighthouse will be up for a few months starting on New Year’s Eve.