Over the last month, we’ve kicked off a couple of awesome projects: MzTEK Unplugged pub meets and P2P workshops.  The aim?  To foster discussion and skills exchange in new media art, and explore somewhat idiosyncratic (yet  quality) alternative learning environments.  Students teach students, guest speakers present over candlelight and drinks at the local — a bit different from your average uni course.

At our last P2P, meeting up in Bermondsey, Sophie walked us through Isadora— software that provides an interactive element to audio and visual input/output.  Isadora is a graphical programming environment that lets you easily link together effects, input, output, and other pre-made patches to create powerful interactive audiovisuals.

Here's some visuals of our own, tapping the first known woman programmer (long before computers), with Isadora.

The effects we played with were pretty simple, but we got the idea that this stuff can do some very, very cool things if you tinker with it long enough.  Maybe this is how I can learn to VJ?  The only downside is that Isadora will set you back about £200 (if you want to save your files).  Here’s an example of a cool video effect (sort of like difference) applied to a clip I took at the Kinetica fair :  testing-isadora-movie.

But before we delved into Isadora, Mary — a choreographer from Devon — walked us (or should I say chasséed?) through a breezy series of physical movements and routines with the idea we could then apply these towards a project in Isadora. (Isadora, I should mentioned, is named after the famed American dancer Isadora Duncan, and its original raison d’etre was to provide dancers and choreographers with new means for interactive movement capture.)