i knew i wasn't going to be able to make it out to pixelj.am 2012 but i at least wanted to contribute an entry to the demo compo.  i asked basementdigital to see if i he'd be up for doing a tune.  we'd been wanting to do a demo together for yeaaaaars so finally made it happen!  with only a few days i thought it'd be fun to try doing a browser demo with javascript and planned to do it friday before the party on the weekend.  it was like wednesday night after basementdigital sent me the track he made that i found out remote entries were actually due the following morning!! yikes!  i loved the tune he did and couldn't let him down so stayed up to quickly put together the code and visuals for our entry.

it's a browser demo so the code is in javascript though i actually wrote it in coffeescript which then compiles to javascript.  i had coded demos like n-0505 and the blockparty invite in python so it was great to find coffeescript and replace a lot of the wackiness of javascript with something cleaner and more familiar feeling.  the 3D is hardware accelerated with webgl (so requires a newer browser like google's chrome to view) and uses the sweet three.js library by mr. doob.

since i only had some hours i kept things very simple and used only colored lines for the whole thing.  the letters and symbols are rendered also as lines and are glyphs from the hershey vector font.  i had fun just typing in wacky equations to get some motion then semi randomly tweaking until i'd get a nice happy accident that looked nice to me.  each of the scenes was done that way.  for sync with the audio i used the time honored technique of hitting a button on the keyboard each time i heard something interesting in the audio and gathering up all those time offsets from the debug console to toss into the code.

i like how it turned out in the end.  very short and simple but pleases my eyes and ears. :)  i hope you like it too!  you can watch it on vimeo or youtube or even better run it directly in your browser!  if you have a pouet.net account be sure to rate and leave a comment!