Tech Project
Description of the challenges faced by the Tech Project
vvvv’s main goal is to allow users to rapidly experiment with different ideas. By unifying access to different technologies, like computer-vision, machine-learning, 3d-animation, VR, AR,… vvvv makes them available to a wider audience, and more accessible to people without programming backgrounds. vvvv is a visual programming environment that started out as an inhouse coding-framework at http://meso.design to realize largescale interactive media installations. Soon it became apparent that the software we had created would be suitable for many other people in the field of creative-technologies and vvvv became independent in 2006, growing a world-wide community of users around it on https://vvvv.org, which is meeting at the biennial NODE festival in Frankfurt: https://nodeforum.org/activities/node-forum/
Brief description of technology
vvvv is a visual programming environment in continuous development and professional use for over 15 years. Like many programming frameworks and environments it focuses on helping developers to achieve their goals easier and quicker. vvvv's most distinguishing feature though is that it is "visual", meaning users don't write code but instead, they create so-called "patches", ie. visual graphs of nodes, connected by links that describe a program. And while traditional programming with code often consists of an "edit-compile-run" cycle, vvvv knows only one mode: runtime. This allows for a much more interactive and intuitive way of creating software and makes vvvv especially suitable for realtime, interactive, performative applications. vvvv is used in many different areas, like Computer Vision, Data Visualization, Physical Computing, Realtime 2d/3d Animation, Multiscreen Setups, Virtual- and Augmented Reality, Machine Learning... Technologically vvvv is based on .NET and therefore allows direct interaction with all kinds of libraries that are available for .NET. To mention just a few: Xenko (3d-engine), OpenCV (computer vision), Bullet-Physics (3d physics), Box2d (2d physics), OSC, Art-Net, Midi, Arduino/Firmata...
What the project is looking to gain from the collaboration and what kind of artist would be suitable
The commercial applications of vvvv are very broad and mostly obvious from its capabilities. We're turning to this opportunity of embedding an artist into our development process hoping to learn more about alternative use-cases and thus to learn more about our own work. We're hoping for an artist who is familiar with audio/visual performances (and ideally with vvvv already) and is up to exploring the new 3d-engine of vvvv in a playful way. This would allow us to get new insights into creative approaches of working with vvvv and hopefully expand our own understanding of the possible usage scenarios for vvvv.
Resources available to the artist
Our office is situated in Berlin, Kreuzberg, where we can offer the artist a desk and internet access and access to a bigger room for test-setups. All core developers of vvvv are working in that same office which means this will allow for a very close collaboration between artist and developers. Further we can give the artist pre-release access to branches of the development before they'll be publicly available.