I recently worked with Jules Espinau on a demo involving the visualization of the marimba lumina, a MIDI-based gestural controller. Because MIDI isn’t the dominant protocol at CNMAT, the goal was to create wrappers around both the MIDI input of the Marimba Lumina and my video patch that needed to accept generic input.
I found it quite easy to be able to create generic input from OSC packets so that all Jules and I had to do was agree on a given name-space and pass it back and forth between computers via wireless peer-to-peer. This method of working proved not only to be time-efficient but allowed for more focus of the details of the creative process. And of course, if one computer goes down, the other is still sitting there ready to transmit the same i/o it previously was.
I would like to develop this piece further in the future; I’ll see what Jules thinks of that.
We were able to create the details of our work in private and finesse the details of how gestures would translate across this name-space in a single session. I think it took us all of a single day to get the OSC-communication up and running in order to work with the setup as a live performance instrument.