Livid Union user Faisal Anwar is concocting a multimedia mix on which I recently gave a small assist.  As part of Toronto’s 175th anniversary, he has a project called 360extended that invites people to geo-locate their stories of their city. This web-based project will then be part of an installation for the anniversary party on March 6th at Nathan Phillip’s Square, where he mixes these stories with video of the city and realtime stories delivered in an intriguing way.
He emailed me wondering if he could mix web-based flash content with video in Union. Well, in theory, yes, but in this case, no – his particular example wasn’t working, and even had it shown an image, it still would not have been satisfactory. What was so intriguing about this flash movie was that is generated from SMS messages sent during the performance.
This was too good of an idea to let cave to technical reasons. I coded up a Max/MSP Jitter patch to parse the xml file where the SMS messages are compiled, post the most recent 20 or so messages, and animate and mix them with existing video content in Union. Take a look.
Of course, you can have a much better look as he projects ACTUAL text messages on a building during Toronto’s blowout, so if you are near the city, pay a visit to experience a nice piece of temporal civic art.
Oh, and he’s looking to expand this to your city – so keep an eye out for it so you can tell your story.

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news by Peter