metal heart: generative art & interactive projects by marten silbiger

SUPER LIGHTDREAM concept art

What's happening now? (November 2023)

Working on a project SUPER LIGHTDREAM, a large interactive project with 25,000 LEDs controlled by a MIDI keyboard and knobs. This project will also involve songs sequenced to music, autoplay patterns, audio-reactive effects, and other code and hardware borrowed from LIGHTDREAM. Project page here.

LIGHTDREAM POCKET, a new project to take old LIGHTDREAM code and use that code in wearable LED projects. This is still in the concept phase.

My hobby projects mainly involve LED art and video/projector art. I love interactive art pieces and want to create "video instruments" that evoke feelings of musicianship, but in the visual realm.

Links on the left are mainly project pages for larger projects. The blog posts that follow are generally instructional about small projects or tasks that I've finished. Please reach out if you have any questions or let me know if you're interested in collaboration.

I'm a software engineer by day. Most of my hobby projects involve technologies like Arduino, C++, OpenGL, shaders, Python, and Nodejs; and software such as Resolume, TouchDesigner, AfterEffects, Blender, and Onshape. I try to include documentation and source code with anything interesting I'm doing.

Recent posts

Hosting Your Own Slack Archive

Recently, Slack changed their payment model such that free accounts can only see 90 days or 10,000 messages of history. However, those messages aren't deleted: they still exist and are freely accessible to you, just in a less-than-helpful format. This guide will show you how...

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Tile Scroller - Effects Plugin for Resolume 7

Turn your video clip into tiles. Customize the size, # of rows and # of columns of your tiles. Then start scrolling them! I saw this effect at the 2020 MUTEK.SF virtual festival and wanted to recreate it...

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Filmstrip Scroller - Effects Plugin for Resolume 7

Turn your video clip into a filmstrip!

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Pixelsort XT - Effects Plugin for Resolume 7

Pixelsorting! It looks awesome! Pixelsort your art and turn it into GLITCH ART!

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Radial Mask - Effects Plugin for Resolume 7

Want to show just a wedge of your image? Want to animate your videos with Pac-man reveals? You're literally clicks away from doing it.

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How to Write FFGL Effects Plugins for Resolume Arena 7

To get the most out of this tutorial, you'll want some familiarity with OpenGL and C++. You don't need to be an expert, but you'll want to have some basic familiarity with concepts like vertex shaders, fragment shaders, and texture mapping.

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VJ Loop: Abstract Spinner

Followed this tutorial to something trippy-lookin'. Basically, this is a wireframe with a short cone shape, inside a spherical mirror. The crossing lattices give that nice diamonds-resizing-and-morphing effect...O_O Took some advice on color theory (from watching this video) to maybe tone down the saturation and stop attacking people's eyes so hard. Don't always need to be so intense with bright & clashing colors! Made with Blender and touched up in After Effects.

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[Blender] Tasty Donut

Followed Blender Guru's tutorial to make this nice-lookin' donut!

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[Blender] Modern Bedroom

The bed and rug are completely original. The top sheet is a plane folded on itself, with cloth simulation applied - I set up collision on the mattress below and let the cloth animate to lay flat & fold onto itself. That created the physical wrinkles...

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EZ Radial Cloner - Effects Plugin for Resolume

Need to make some pretty kaleidoscope patterns? Maybe you need to create some weird clones? Maybe there's a specific region of your video that's so awesome, it needs to be multiplied?

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Hexagon Mosaic - Effects Plugin for Resolume

Resolume's got a nice pixelating effect called LoRez. The only problem? It's made of squares, not HEXAGONS.

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HEXASIGNS

Project w/ Greg Robinson. LEDs and plywood. 11 patterns, customizable BPM.

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