Went to a Boston Cyberarts event over at Orange tonight. I was overwhelmed with the talent and effort I encountered. Lots of people working on lots of great stuff. Art is now play. Fun. Here's the summary:

"The Boston Cyberarts Festival is an international biennial festival of art and technology in all media. The next Festival will take place April 22 through May 8, 2005. It will include visual and performing arts and explore how artists throughout the world are using computers to advance traditional artistic disciplines and create new interactive worlds.

The 2005 Festival will also feature two conferences during the opening weekend: eMerging Arts and Technologies, for artists and high-tech company professionals; and Ideas in Motion, focused on innovations in dance, movement, and technology."

Bill Seaman's "work explores text, image, sound and interface relationships through technological installation, virtual reality, linear video, and other computer-based media and/or computer mediated media, photography and studio based audio compositions." He showed me some video of his 1999 work, Recombinant Poetics Dissertation (link to PDF file). I'm not sure how to best explain it, but it combined tactile spinning chambers of multimedia that could be spun and manipulated to change and shape in real-time a wall full of realism and design.

Teri Rueb's been working with location, sound, and GPS since 1997. "Rueb's large-scale responsive spaces and location-aware installations explore issues of architecture and urbanism, landscape and the body, and sonic and acoustic space. She is currently working on an interactive sound installation that explores the urban landscape and psychosocial geography of Baltimore, Maryland."

Eric Gunther, John Rothenberg, and Justin Manor were tearing up sound and picture with their custom C++ OpenGL VJ rig and Ableton Live (which has my vote for most fun software ever). Eric turned me onto Proce55ing, built by his friend Ben Fry.

Processing is a programming language and environment built for the electronic arts and visual design communities. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook. It is used by students, artists, designers, architects, and researchers for learning, prototyping, and production. Here's something fantastic being shown in much more detail on the proce55ing site:

Timescape is the image representation of sequently stacked 1pixel-width video lines that are extracted each from the camera input. Timescape represents the apparition of the time-flow of the space, whereas photography is the visual presentation of the moment of space and movies express the space changed by time. 2005. e.j. gone, Byun Ji-hoon