Zio – Demo video

Well we’re almost there, I’ve got most of the features in place for my iPhone app ‘Zio’ – an interactive visualiser based on my generative animation system used in Music Is Math, The Nest That Sailed The Sky etc.

Presently you can change most of the branching and shading and can easily navigate with dragging/pinch zoom and rotate.  You can pause the animation at any time and still interact/move around, and also save pictures to your photo library.

The interface is just a temporary one at the minute for testing, it will be redesigned and probably have twice as much features seen in the demo – including particle motion and trails and the ability to tweak the underlying math and algorithms.

This demo is a screen cap of the iPhone simulator – at times the frame-rate is jerky – but actually runs okay on the real device! (don’t know why that should be).

I’m taking a short break for the minute and off to Austria this week to pick up my award.

Music, not animation.

Thought I’d share my ‘other’ creative half – it’s my back catalogue of TV documentary soundtrack music over the last ten years.  I’ve done stuff for BBC, RTE and Channel 4 (UK/Ireland) for subjects as diverse as D-Day to the Rolling Stones, but mostly historical and political stuff.  All produced by Doubleband films here in Belfast.

You can listen through an mp3 player here - My music.

It’s on shuffle mode, there’s about 50 tracks.

I’ve always been really into electronic music and keyboards since a teenager, and started teaching myself guitar and music theory over the years, and so what you hear is my fascination with audio synthesis techniques to create textures and atmospheres, and some melodic acoustic guitar or piano floating through..

I’ve sort of ‘retired’ from music these days to concentrate on my animation, but that’s okay, there’s already too much music in the world, and not enough interactive generative animation

Computer Arts – The Pros of Processing

Great opening article in this month’s Computer Arts featuring myself and a few other processing-heads.

I’m chuffed about this, it’s very fitting as this month it’ll be a year’s anniversary since I relaunched this website and re-birthed myself as a digital artist in the realm of Processing and generative animation.  I started reading Computer Arts many years ago, so to get this far with my work inside it is a nice symbolic milestone.