Video

I have just finished an intensive stretch of work on the Musical Gestures Toolbox for Python (MGT-python). Or, to be more precise, various AI agents have done most of the work for me, although heavily supervised by me. It started as “let me fix a few things” and turned into a near-complete modernisation. Here I describe how the toolbox went from v1.3.3 to v1.6.9 within a couple of weeks, including a pile of bug fixing, lots of optimisation, and a pile of new features. ...

Earlier today, I wrote about AI and photography based on an interesting panel conversation at Fotografiens Hus in Oslo. During the Q&A session, a musician in the audience said that he felt that the AI systems he had tried behaved so properly and asked if an AI can be “drunk” and whether we could “pour some alcohol into the machine” to make it a little freer and less “stiff” in its creative output. That is a very interesting question, hence this little reflection. ...

Today, I took part in an interesting panel conversation at Fotografiens Hus in Oslo in connection with the exhibition What We Call Real by Camila Urrego. This was the first time they had invited a photographer to exhibit works explicitly made “with AI,” and I was invited to contribute thoughts on the potential of AI for creative practice (in this case, photography). As MishMash picks up speed, I receive many requests for talks and panels on AI and creativity, and I try to say yes when I can make it. I have found this to be an excellent way to think about various AI use cases outside my core focus areas and to meet interesting people. Here are some thoughts based on my preparatory notes and reflections after the event. ...

I am at the Movement Computing Conference (MOCO) in Montpellier and have been discussing motion capture and analysis all day. Someone asked about my work on video visualisation, and this reminded me about a long wish for creating a browser-based visualiser. I have been developing video visualisation tools for more than two decades. In the beginning, I did it with Max/MSP/Jitter, then moved on to Matlab, and later Python. Until recently, web technologies were not advanced enough, and hardware was not powerful enough to do anything in the browser in real time. And, I didn’t have the programming skills to make it work. Now, with the help of CoPilot, I have finally made it happen: VideoViz is here! ...

Yesterday, I wrote about some reflections I had during Olgerta Asko’s PhD defence. Today, while chopping up the video recording to put on the RITMO web page, I thought that it might help to use a videogram to assist with segmentation. Videograms A videogram is similar to a motiongram, the main difference being that the videogram uses the regular video image as input to the “compression” instead of a motion video. Both give an impression of what is in a video file over time. We have functions for creating both videograms and motiongrams in the Musical Gestures Toolbox, but they are optimised for using other functions in the toolbox. ...

Yesterday, I wrote about how I cleaned up a lot of old mess here on this blog. This made me realize that I have not paid attention to creating alt text for all my images, that is, descriptive text that describes the content of the image. That is an enormous job when you have several thousand images on a blog like this. So I decided to ask CoPilot for help. Getting AI help CoPilot first suggested creating alt text based on the image file names. That could have been a good idea if the filenames had been descriptive. However, they are not (in general), hence I asked for a solution that would actually analyse the content of the images. After a series of iterations, we (CoPilot and I) ended up with a Python script that does the job. ...

I have previously written about the differences between sound and audio and sound/light vs audio/video. In this short blog post, I problematize the concept “audiovisual”. Dictionary definitions The term “audiovisual” is ubiquitous. Unfortunately, for those of us working both on technology and psychology, it causes a lot of confusion. For example, consider the definition by Wikipedia: Audiovisual (AV) is electronic media possessing both a sound and a visual component, such as slide-tape presentations, films, television programs, corporate conferencing, church services, and live theater productions. ...

While writing the blog post on AI-realistic photos, I wanted to include one of my 360-degree photos. In the past, I have done this by embedding code snippets from commercial services. However, those tend to disappear or move, so I wanted to check (again) if I can do it natively on my own server instead. And, lo and behold, now, in 2025, it is finally possible to do this easily with regular web tools! ...

This summer, I am working on completing my Still Standing book. One of the concepts I use is kinesphere. As far as I know, this term was coined by dancer–choreographer–researcher Rudolf Laban, and refers to the personal space surrounding an individual. It is an imaginary sphere that extends as far as a person can reach with their limbs, encompassing the area they can move in while remaining stationary. The kinesphere is central to Laban Movement Analysis, where it helps dancers understand spatial possibilities, boundaries, and the relationship between the body and its environment. Also, for stillstanders, the kinesphere is relevant because it defines the personal space around one’s body. ...

In this post I write about how it is possible rename all the photos in a folder based on the date and time information stored in the file. I mainly take photos with my mobile phone these days (a Samsung Galaxy Ultra S23) but occasionnaly also use “regular” cameras. As opposed to my phone, which saves the files with a filename that includes date and time (YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS.jpg), these cameras typically just use some random name (e.g. P43435.jpg). This is impractical when combining photos from several cameras, so I prefer renaming the files with the same filename schema. ...