I brought the laser project to King King in Hollywood for the Create Digital Music Lounge celebrating the 5th birthday of the blog. The event was a sort of after party for a two-day Ableton Live workshop sponsored by Dubspot out of NYC.

The event also featured a few performances by live-looping-beat-boxer Kid Beyond, including an in-depth look at how he uses foot pedals, MIDI and automation to control every aspect of his Ableton Live setup.

Aaron McLeran was there to demonstrate his Enso generative audiovisual system, now with iPhone OSC control!

Meason Wiley demonstrated his gestural music controller that uses lasers and photodiodes to sense the position of you hand and give you continuous control of your sound:

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I was invited to show some projects at the LA County Museum of Art for their Muse Costume Ball, in conjunction with Mindshare Labs. We had an entire gallery in the Arts of America Building for the night and showed upwards of 15 interactive explorations.

I brought the Contours Laser Obelisk but also debuted a work-in-progress safecracking game called “Scrooge”.

“Scrooge” is a cabinet I built designed to look like a cartoony safe. It has a large dollar sign on top which serves as both a scoreboard for the game and an exagerrated symbol of the concept of a secure moneybox (a la Scrooge McDuck). The safe has both a front and back door that serves as the playing surface. Each player (red and blue) tries to open the safe by turning the dial to find the three unknown numbers in the combination. three LEDs on the door flash at varying speeds to indicate how close they are to the unknown number. The dollar sign on top shows lights for both players so everyone can see how close each player is to winning.

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I once again showed the interactive laser project at Mindshare LA at Lot613 in Downtown Los Angeles.

This time it was contained inside the 6 foot tall Obelisk I constructed for DANCEiSM, with a new twist.

I added LED’s in the tip of the metal pyramid that houses the laser so that the obelisk is visible even if no one is interacting with it. The lights are white if no one is around but once but the camera finds someone the lights turn red instead. I cut up a broken piece of plastic from a ceiling light fixture to act as a light diffuser.

The LED’s are controlled by an Arduino receiving messages over serial from the camera program running on my laptop.

Here are more photos of the event:

The organizers of DANCEiSM invited me to bring the interactive laser project to their show on Friday September 4th. It was held at Lot 613, a warehouse / event complex in downtown Los Angeles.

They requested that I enclose the laser in an ‘abstract geometric shape’ to fit with their aesthetic direction. This was also a good way to ensure the laser and computer were protected from the crowd.

I chose to build a pyramid / obelisk that would get the camera and laser high enough off the ground but still be stable and not liable to fall over. The obelisk was made mostly of wood but the top is made of aluminum flashing and rivets.

I also added Infrared (IR) LEDs which allows the camera to ’see in the dark’. This way I do not need to rely on bright lighting for the camera to get a good picture. I also had to get a special camera lens that does not have an IR-blocking coating for maximum IR sensitivity. IR light is not visible to human eyes but shows up purple on digital cameras.

The event went well and over 900 attendees had fun dancing at two DJ stages and playing with the interactive laser and body paint.

See below for pictures of the build process and the event!