Friday 30 October 2009

Crayola My First Electronic Coloring Book

So this is the Crayola My First Electronic Coloring Book 
It outputs composite video and if you can find one
it will only set you back a few dollars 
(I think its only available state side)

good start for video circuit bending

heres a video of Madnoodler's bent Crayola

BATSOCKS TellyMate

Batsocks is a super cool little company making an arduino shield called the TellyMate


the TellyMate puts out black and white PAL or NTSC Composite Video and has an inbuilt character set or can be used for simple graphics 



I was thinking If you took one of these £15 and an arduino £10 you would have an interesting "Video Oscillator" as the basis for a simple video synth for £25 not bad


all you need to do is write an interesting program maybe even make it audio reactive by attaching a sensor to the arduino 


bildheinzer (scroll down his page) has already accomplished some audio reactive arduino action by using the arduino pong code by Alastair Parker found here  whitch I think inspired the idea for generating composite video from arduino found here 


and heres an interesting video by Batsocks

Video Inverter

Inverting a videos colour is an interesting and dramatic effect. Many programs have been able to do this for ages but without a nice midi controller and a laptop you can't play a VJ gig with them or put them in a feed back loop :)

further more you cant hack the effect for audio reactivity 
without using something like Jitter

here is a website that details a project that was adapted from 
July 1995 Electronics Now magazine using an LM359 IC and here is the circuit diagram from another site 

many mixers and video effects units also have this effect and can be hacked so look for them on ebay and at junk shops (more to follow)

Introduction

I hope this blog will promote and encourage discourse amongst artists using hands on video techniques

I hope this blog will cover a wide range of related subjects including video art, video synthesis , audio reactive video, video circuit building, drawn sound, visual music, video feedback, VJing, experimental film, video effects and more.