I am finally a bit recovered from a wild weekend in Geneva where I was privy to a GarageCUBE/1024 architecture presentation. It started with Frz providing a broad overview of the activities of the MadMapper community since the software launched at the last edition of the Mapping Festival almost exactly a year ago. It was truly inspiring to see all of the creative works that MadMapper has allowed artists to realize. Most of these works have been posted on this blog so I’ll pass on re-mentioning them here and force you to browse through the blog instead when you are done reading this article.

After this overview Frz discussed the importance of light in conjunction with projections and used this as a pretext for providing a sneak preview of the LED Mapper that is being incorporated into MadMapper. The screenshot above is your first taste of what mapping images to LED’s will be like. From a nerd point of view (I have many points of view) I thought it was cool how the resulting selection is converted from pixels into light, so that the data sent from MadMapper via an Artnet interface as low latency data that activates the LED lights.

After Frz finished talking Boris stepped in and demonstrated how easy it is to have Modul8 be a part of this LED lighting magic. Nothing is changed in Modul8 for this to happen. What is exciting and cool about this is that if you can gain access to the stage lighting rig, you don’t have to worry anymore if the lighting operator does not want to coordinate with you on color schemes. Or if you are a lighting designer you can forgo some of the weird DMX desktop software I have seen and use Modul8 and MadMapper instead.

For those of you needing more media about this event so you can triple analyze the movements of the creators in order extract subliminal meanings, this will have to wait until the end of the festival when the documentation crew have a chance to start editing and disseminating.

There is still quite a bit of development that needs to occur before any formal announcements are made about availability however my best educated guess would be that the goal is to get this out by the end of this year.

For now I am off to Athens to conduct a mapping workshop at the Athens Video Art Festival.