I remember when I first saw the designs for the wiimote controller thinking how stupid it was to make something that looks like a TV remote, one of the worst designed interfaces that we know of. I also just thought of it as nothing more than an accelerometer device, something that people make around here all the time. I admit that I was quite wrong and had underestimated a company that had defined my generation’s childhood with their games and ideas.

STEIM has always been a place about practicality for musicians, so when we realized how cheap and accessible these controllers were it didn’t take much time for the software team to implement a wiimote extension into our JunXion software. We also noticed that residence who come to STEIM and people in our community have also been experimenting with this controller. So we decided to host a Wii meeting. We invited composer/performer Tom Tlalim, the Netherlands one and only WiiJ Tim Groeneboom aka DJ Timski, a collaborative working group of Australian artists Ross Bencina, Somaya Langley, Danielle Wilde and our software R&D Frank Balde and Saskia Dedenbach.

To much of our surprise the evening was packed with an enthusiastic group of people. Frank and Saskia opened the evening by demonstrating the new wii extension patch in JunXion and also talked about development issues concerning bluetooth stacks and ppc vs intel mac issues. Tom talked about his wii-suit using 8 wiimotes to read positions of each limb and mapping that to different parameters in his SuperCollider granular synthesis patch. DJ Timski showed his wiimote + Ableton Live + Max/MSP DJ setup and demonstrated how he can use the controller to apply different effects while he dances among the crowd. Ross/Somaya/Danielle talked about how they used the wiimotes as prototype sensor interfaces to explore new gesture-sound mapping techniques. It was a very energetic evening, and I wonder if as many people would have showed up if we announced the night as “applications and discussions on wireless 3 axis accelerometers.”

Saskia and Frank from STEIM

DJ Timski (both pictures taken by Somaya Langley)

text from our mailing list:

wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii

wii is a small revolution.
wiiiiii is a movement about movement.
wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii is leaving the desktop and moving into sonic space.
wiiiii is made for gaming but hacked into a music instrument.
wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii is this rare moment where a mass produced object is recycled into a tool for both experimental and mainstream practice.
wiiiiiiiiiiiiii is supported by STEIM’s junXion and pd, maxmsp, supercollider etc.
STEIM’s wii evening is not sponsored by nintento, but we hope they get it and continue making brothers and sisters of the wii.
wiiiiiiiiii(h)ero’s from all over the globe will present their wiiiiiiiing and perform at STEIM on September 24, Monday.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 16th, 2007 at 4:17 pm and is filed under report, lecture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.