ThingsAmongMany

Music has never played a large enough role in my life for DJ’ing to have much draw. Technology, however, does play a pretty significant role, and the thought of exploring VJ’ing has indeed crossed my mind (though the equipment prices have kept me from doing much with the thought). Next drool-worthy piece of technology? Check out this new VJ hardware from Cue:

Phenomenal mix of touchscreen, tactile instrumentation, and the sliding function of the single knob puts it over the edge. it’s still in the conceptual phase at the moment, but if I ever comes to light, I’m sure we’ll see more VJ’s cropping up at the clubs around NYC.

Fellow POKEr Charles Gallant, who’s name you may recognize from Robot Designs For Tomorrow, recently took a huge step toward acheiving a long standing project goal. An avid guitarist as well as technology afficianado, Charles took the game we all know and love - Guitar Hero - and turned it on its head.

By connecting a bunch of gizmos and gadgets to his guitar, Charles has created a real-time visualization engine that reacts to the notes he’s playing on the instrument. Still in the early stages of development, the project is sure to continue moving forward, time permitting, of course. Check out the vid of the first test-run:

Guitar Animation Project from Charles Gallant on Vimeo.

You can also read more on his blog here.

Yup, most of us are fans on some level or another of Sofia Coppola’s 2003 hit Lost in Translation. Of course, as much as I enjoyed the movie (which I admittedly haven’t seen in a few years), I’m not sure that I could sit down and explain the plot too easily. I can, however, explain the plot of the new mashup by Charles Gallant (fellow POKEr and co-creator of RD4T) that he recently posted on Vimeo.

To demonstrate the reality of those “lost in translation” moments, Charles took the lyrics of NIN’s Closer and translated them from English to Japanese using Babelfish. He then retranslated the resulting Japanese rendition back into English (also via Babelfish) and set the newly interpreted translation in time to the original song.

The result is a humorous, intriguing look at why we don’t always understand one another, no matter how simply we believe we’re speaking. Give it a watch:

NIN & Babelfish from Charles Gallant on Vimeo.