Andrew Benson

Back in March, 2009 I released some GLSL shaders for Jitter that allow you to perform distortions of an image based on Optical Flow. I sort of came up with it on accident while trying to do something else, and getting distracted during my research. At the time I attached them to a forum thread on Cycling74.com and a lot of people downloaded it, and then they were ported to work in Quartz Composer by Anton Marini, and then people got them to work elsewhere. Since then I have extensively altered the algorithms and tuned the feedback processes for my specific work, but I offer the original patches and shaders here in case it helps anyone else to make something cool. If you do, drop me a line.

Download It!

For the show “Disintegrations” at Johansson Projects (a two-person show with Sebastien Lapointe), I created “Until Every Shape Has Found Its City”, a 3-projector site-specific, interactive video installation based on my “slorp” video-processing software instrument.

While I’m a sort of reluctant Arduino user, I often use them for classes and workshops that I teach because they’re pretty easy to get started with and cheap. Lately, I’ve been a bit disillusioned though with the firmware examples available for using the Arduino with MaxMSP, and wanted to remedy that. I found that most of my students just wanted an easy way to connect sensors and switches to an Arduino and have that show up in Max. While the Firmata firmware is very well designed and offers a lot of features, I have been frustrated too many times by not being able to fix bugs in the code myself. Also, the reliance on the “arduino” abstraction has led to all sorts of problems with students who haven’t learned about file dependencies and search paths in Max.
My solution was to write a very simple and relatively efficient firmware called SensorBox that just gets the input from all the pins on the Arduino and sends it over serial to a Max patch. The communication protocol is hardly innovative, but it should give a good example of ways to efficiently transmit data over serial. The goal was to make everything simple and readable, and to avoid any voodoo, so that others can alter and fix the code as they please.
Also, since many real-world projects require more than 6 analog inputs, I wrote an alternate version of the SensorBox firmware called SensorBoxMux that allows you to configure any analog pin(s) for multiplexed input with an inexpensive 4051 8×1 IC. This offers the potential for up to 96 analog inputs on Arduino!

Download SensorBox firmware and Max 5 patches.