Download the Perfect Summer DJ Mix (175MB)

It finally seems like Sydney's entered Summer. To commemorate the good weather and sunshine vibes, I thought I'd upload an old mix. Perfect Summer is designed for putting on as you drive to the beach or relax on the sand with a cool pina colada.

It's probably one of the last mixes that I did on turntables with all original vinyl, back in 2007. You can even hear the crackle of dust under the needle in the opening refrains of Solar Stone's Seven Cities.

Anyway, download Perfect Summer (or stream it) and get out in the sun while it's still here!

Tracklisting:

1. Solar Stone - Seven Cities (Solaris Heights Mix)
2. Kings Of Tomorrow - Finally (Rulers Of The Deep Mix)
3. Orinoko - Island (Alternative Dub Mix)
4. Graham & Blades - Funky Summa
5. Plan B - #2
6. Nalin & Kane - Beach Ball (DJ Icey's "The Sea" Mix)
7. Nalin & Kane - Beach Ball (South Beach Vacation Mix)
8. Orbital - Frenetic (12"...
   
   
9. Opening Titles for Web Directions South 2011
   

   See the in-browser opening titles

   Another year and another great Web Directions. Of course, for me, Web Directions isn't complete without frantic late-night coding sessions in aid of completing a madly inspired conference-related project.

   Last year I created the Web Directions 2010 opening titles in 3 days from start to finish. This year I gave myself a little more time but made it no less ambitious by expanding the production onto 2 screens; thereby requiring it to run on two laptops simultaneously. (And stay in sync!)

   With the number of things that could fall over -- browsers crashing, projections being out of sync, people hating it -- my nerves were ringing right up until I hit "play". Luckily it came off without a hitch, and you can see the results in the video of the performance below. (Or if your computer's feeling adventurous you can check it out in your browser.)

   
   
   
10. SlashGlobe: A 3D CSS experiment
    

    See the neon-spinny-3D-globe experiment

    The third dimension isn't my strong suit; I'm fine with pixels but not with voxels. To start combatting this I thought I'd have a play around with the 3D CSS transforms that are available in the latest Webkit browsers (Chrome & Safari; sorry Firefox!)

    What I set out to achieve was a neon-spinny-globe thing and I pretty much got there. I even managed to throw some Max Headroom aesthetic into the mix.

    This experiment comes as-is, with all sorts of browser exclusions (and is best viewed in Chrome), so don't bug me if it doesn't work for you. Otherwise, enjoy the neon spinnyness.

    
    
    
11. Desktop Wallpaper: Space Frames
    

    I'm a big fan of a black desktop. It's easy on the eyes and icons are highly visible. But you have to have a dash of colour to add personality, so it's a fine balance between style and stark.

    A few years ago, when I was heavily into Processing I wrote a program that dynamically generated spacey looking spectrum wallpapers, with the aim of offering it to the public so that 6 billion people could each have their own unique desktop wallpaper. Didn't work out. (But I used one of its outputs as my own wallpaper for the last 4 years).

    A bout of recent procrastination made me realise that I hadn't changed my wallpaper in far too long and this time instead of breaking open some code I headed to Illustrator to make some jaunty little geometrics.

    Now, I've got a new wallpaper and you can have one too! I'm calling it Space Frames and you can download it by clicking on the image below. Bon appetit!

    

    
    
    
12. Visualising drawings in 3D with DrawPad
    

    Last February at Ignite Sydney we thought we'd try something a little different to get the crowd involved.

    While most people were downing a few drinks, a bunch of lovely lads and ladesses with iPads were circulating through the audience asking people to draw (with their fingers) what inspires them. On the iPads was a drawing application that recorded the time and position that each stroke of their fingers made and that data was used to create a 3D timelapse visualisation of their drawing on the big screen behind the stage. I've put together a little video of the end result:

    It was actually quite exciting to see what people came up with. And equally exciting was seeing the looks on their faces as they interacted with the iPads and then waited with anticipation to see how their drawings would be interpreted by the foreign shapes appearing on the screen.

    To pull off this stunt we used all open web technologies: a webpage running my "DrawPad" Canvas application that...
    
    

13. Anatomy of a Mashup: Definitive Daft Punk visualised
    

    See "Definitive Daft Punk" visualised in realtime »

    I've always believed in the strong connection between sound and vision. Music videos are like little slices of synchronous art, designed to please all of your senses. (Go ahead, lick your TV next time "Poker Face" comes on!)

    Every so often I delve into music making, but aside from the cover art for those releases my music has remained very separate from my visual design work. Now and into the future I plan to rectify this, and first cab off the ranks is a data visualisation I've had in my head for a while.

    The art of the mashup has come to the fore in pop culture of recent years, but beyond Biggie Smalls crooning over Elton's keys I feel that the general public understands little of the nuance that goes into constructing a complex mashup from tiny pieces of songs.

    In order to explain the layering and interplay that goes into something like a Girl Talk album or The 139 Mix Tape I decided to take my own mashup...
    
    

14. Source Code: Not a movie about programming
    

    One of the advantages of having 2 billion people on the Internet is that every so often one of them sends you something for free. In this case, the kind people at Hopscotch sent me a couple of passes to a preview screening of Source Code. (And only briefly mentioned, in a passing, fleeting manner that I might -- if the right mood struck me -- want to blog about it)

    When I sat down in the cinema last week to watch the movie, I was immediately on the back foot when trying to objectively assess it. For the past 6 months I've pretty much compared every movie I've seen to Inception and found them all wanting. It's certainly one of my favourite movies of the last 5 years. The reason it so affected my objectivity in this case is because Source Code has been labelled as "Inception, but better". Now that's pretty much sacrilege in my books, so I naturally wanted it to suck.

    Although the two movies have some similar themes -- alternate realities, immersion in technology, subjective perceptions --...
    
    

15. Realtime visualisation of @replies
    

    See @replies visualised in realtime

    Back on September 15, 2010, it was "R U OK?" Day. This is a national day of action which is designed to raise awareness of suicide by encouraging people to reach out and make contact with others by asking "Are you OK?"

    We were commissioned by the R U OK? organisation to create a visualisation that highlighted the connections people were making throughout the day, and after a number of rounds of brainstorming (and budget cuts) we chose to highlight the connections that were being made over Twitter.

    Because of fears about subject matter we weren't allowed to highlight content contained in any tweets, so to gather our data we performed a search for all tweets in Australia that are directed at someone (@replies), geocoded both ends of the conversation, recorded the timestamp of the message, and map this connection in time and space. For each location we also perform frequency analysis on the tweets and provide a tag cloud of the most used words (available if you hover over a city).

    All of...
    
    

16. Twitter Visualisation for Sydney Festival 2011
    

    It was with 2 days notice that the Sydney Festival informed me that they'd like some way of getting tweets onto six giant screens (each roughly the size of 240 computer monitors) that were going to be viewed by hundreds of thousands of people. So sure, how could I say no?

    With such little time to burn I decided to adapt the code from Visible Tweets into a format that would be suitable for what they had in mind -- live video stream above, tweets scrolling below. In addition to the design changes, there was also the request that all tweets be moderated. I'm not a big fan of moderated tweet streams at an event because inevitably the moderator can't keep up or forgets to add tweets to the stream and you end up with a stale, lifeless display. (Sure, filter out dirty words, but there's plenty of ways to do that)

    Anyway, moderation was required, and with the aforementioned constraints we didn't really have time to create an entire moderation system, so we went quick and dirty -- pull all tweets from...
    
    

17. Abstract Repetition
    

    I'm a huge fan of dvdp's work. The limited colour palette and hypnotic repetition make for a very lost afternoon.

    When I saw his latest post I just couldn't resist remixing it, so here's the result:

    

    Made in Processing.