I was in Berlin about a week ago for the Create Art & Technology talks and workshops. That happened to coincide with the Shiffihack at the Readmill office so I decided to spend some time there and hang out with my buddies Henrik Berggren and David Kjelkerud. A lot of interesting people showed up for the hack weekend: Eric Wahlfors and Alexander Ljung from Soundcloud, the Amen guys, Tor Rauden Källstigen from Loopcam, a whole crew from Oktavilla and a bunch of other nice people. Spirits were high and the beers and the Club-Mate was flowing.
I decided to contribute with a little hack as well. To honor my hosts I decided to do a project based on the Readmill API. BookClub is a Quartz Composer file for the VJ software VDMX that displays book covers from Readmill users. You have to enter your Readmill AppID and a User Name or User ID to get started. Attach a data source to the trigger in order to walk through the covers.
In my first attempt I was using a third party plugin in Quartz Composer to pull in JSON data but that ended up crashing VDMX so I had to switch to XML which worked fine.
In the video I’ve added some effects to the covers, all done in VDMX. First it’s a smear and then I’ve used a gausian blur and Bangnoise’s Video Delay with some rotation and size changes. It gets a bit abstract but in the end, that was the only way to keep it fun.
Thanks for a great weekend and thanks to Alex Ljung for the name idea.
Click this link to download the Quartz Composer file for VDMX.
Click here to get your Readmill AppID.
