You’re looking at a hybrid music/chess system that I’ve created, in preparation for a concert of new and experimental music in late June. The chessboard on the left (a Novag Citrine) is wired to the computer via a serial/USB cable. When people play on the chessboard, the computer monitors their moves, and attempts to figure […]

I found this old video of mine while looking at some old backup CDs. Back in the early 90s, while playing with Gryphon Software’s “Morph” software, I accidentally stumbled upon a technique for making a still photograph or painting look like a hologram. The basic idea is that you make a mirror image of the […]

The other day I found this DIY music box kit over at Think Geek, but they were out of stock. So I found a supplier in the UK, called Grand Illusions. They actually carry two models, including one with a larger number of tines (20 tines covering a 2 1/2 octave diatonic range ). Naturally […]

Oh, I’ve been bitten by this mechanical music bug big time. I’m now working on composing some new music for an orchestrion. This will be no mere weekend-long project (as most of mine tend to be), and hopefully I can share some audio snippets with you as work progresses. I imagine most of you don’t […]

On Twitter, there are a lot of bots that will auto-follow you if you say certain magic words. This is easily accomplished using the Twitter API – I’ve done it for fun (try saying “Beetlejuice” on twitter), and I’m definitely not the first. I’m sure some of you have experienced being mysteriously followed on twitter […]

Interactive version at coverpop.com. This mosaic is constructed from newspaper headlines from around the world, which I collected from the website newseum.org The underlying image is from the famous Shepard Fairey poster.

I’ve been playing with making these puzzle-style animated mosaics this week, for a Topspin-related project. The final image is made by reassembling parts of the original image. Here’s a larger Obama/McCain mosaic. And here’s the first one I made, featuring David Byrne and Brian Eno. UPDATE Here are some more I made on Saturday. Flag/Obama […]

A few days ago, Ian Rogers mentioned that his company, Topspin, is adding “four more rock star engineers in the last two weeks of this month.” At the risk of seeming immodest, I appear to be one of said rock stars. I’m joining Topspin. “Damn. Look out. Look out.”, wrote Ian. Heh… Hope Ian doesn’t […]

This new interactive mosaic, from my Coverpop website, shows the most interesting photos on Flickr, based on Flickr’s mysterious “interestingness” metric, which I assume has something to do with kittens and/or babies… One thing I’ve noticed is that Flickr’s interesting photos tend to look compelling at very small (i.e. thumbnail) sizes, which makes sense, when […]