A Project: SEMICOLONY

Semicolony is a collection of experiments that tries to replicate phenomena found in life, such as mutation, competition, growth, death, etc, and sort of create “artificial life”. This is pretty cool! By abstracting the essential properties of life-like phenomena to create these very organic looking structures that behave like very simplified versions of real life organisms. It sort of suggests that the development of life is not something terribly surprising and that all life up until today can be explained by a collection of rules. Abstracting organic phenomena into digital counterparts can also be pretty useful. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) which can be used to do stuff like learn handwritten digits or recognize objects in images, which was inspired by how neurons interacted with each other in our brains. Can’t really say much about the project and parts of the video itself went by a bit too quickly to really observe in detail the particular phenomenon; I think this is something you really have to see in person. The link above provides a bit more explanation of the project doesn’t really go into anything more than a description of the project.

An Addon: ofxLaunchpad

ofxLaunchpad is a OF library that interfaces with your Novation launchpad through midi, using ofxMidi.

Well I’ve had a Launchpad S for quite some time and I’ve been meaning to play around with it but I really never found a particular library that really ever worked for me so maybe now’s the time. I’ve always liked the launchpad’s interface: you press a button which tells your computer “hey I pressed this button”, and your computer, after some thought, tells you “alright, flip these lights”. I think it would be cool to work with a launchpad as a user interface.