Responsive Shapes: Minivegas Digital Sculptures

What Daft Punk have to do with sculpture and the evolution of storytelling.

If you didn’t catch us raving about it on Twitter earlier this week, here’s your chance to catch up on this brilliant piece of work by directing collective Minivegas — a virtual gallery, featuring a visualizer rendering digital sculptures in real time in response to sound and gestures.

The gallery walls are adorned with album artwork of the mp3’s loaded into the visualizer (including the appropriately chosen Daft Punk classic, Technologic), with the music itself driving the shape-shifting mutations of the sculptures. The shapes can also be manipulated with hand-motion using a webcam.

Refreshingly innovative, this work illustrates an exciting intersection of multiple senses and multiple media — a beautiful epitome of the evolution of modern storytelling.

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Labuat: Soy Tu Aire

Paint by notes, threads of voice, or why the future of music is up in the air.

Spanish music outfit Labuat is an innovator of the freshest kind. A collaboration between vocalist Virginia Maestro and composer Risto Mejid, who has also produced music for The Pinker Tones, Labuat explores music across the many planes it inhabits.

Labuat is a project born out of the imagination.

Soy Tu Aire (I’m Your Air) is, simply put, an interactive music video. But it’s oh-so-much more — it’s a way to experience music as it happens, literally letting the voice paint it onto the “air” of the screen with a brush that “listens” to the music and reacts to your manipulation. It’s consuming music by letting music consume you.

“Soy Tu Aire” is a song full of much and little. Of orchestras and threads of voice. Of half-truths and lies, going up and down as we wanted to give you something you could move with the song.

To promote the launch, the team hooked the “brush” to a Wii remote, synched it to a laptop, and took to the city, inviting passers-by to experience the music for themselves.

We love the idea of crafting a space where different forms of creative expression — music, design, animation, interface — can cross-pollinate rather than remaining compartmentalized isolates. It’s a true canvas for creativity, however it may manifest itself.

Go ahead, immerse yourself.

Art direction by HerraizSotto & Co, animation by Jossie Malis.

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