A majority of people at Piksel - even more than last year - now base much of their work on the use of PureData (PD). The international PD user and developer base has grown considerably in a relatively short time. PD is highly flexible and was written to be multi-platform and therefore is quite portable; versions exist for Win32, IRIX, GNU/Linux, BSD, and MacOS X running on anything from a PocketPC to an old Mac to a brand new PC. It is possible to write externals and patches that work with Max/MSP and Pd using flext and cyclone. And - just a month ago - the first ever international PD-convention was held in Graz. Present there was users, developers, artists and even 16 dedicated PD-theorists! And of course Miller Puckette, the almost legendary original developer of Max programming languages and now the unofficial (or official?) "godfather" of PD. The Piksel gang was represented by Tom, Yves, Lluis, Rama and James (or maybe I should put it the other way round; Five outstanding members of the 1st international PD convention are represented at Piksel!)

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, Tom started todays dedicated workshop schedule with news from the front of PD developers, and (I only guess here) his own PDP library of extensions especially aimed at providing video and media manipulation features. Later the conference room was taken over by Jaromil, Silvano and Eleonora from the dyne.org crew. They presented the latest developments of FreeJ (0.7), the now classic video manipulation tool - a very strong contender for VJs and live artists all over the world. A slip of the tongue by the end of the presentation soon evolved into a first of many discussions around the architecture of Livido (Linux Video objects). The design is based upon extensive research that has already gone into applications such as PD/PDP , FreeJ, EffecTV , Veejay and other video software applications. Livido has been featured and discussed heartily in a plathora of emails on the [piksel] and [piksel-dev] mailing lists, and a Livido "public release" 1.0 has been scheduled for the end of the week, but lets wait and see - by the time of writing there are still many unresolved issues. I will hopefully provide an update by the end of this week.

THE EVENING PROGRAMME started with a presentaition of MAlib by Jun Iio from Tokyo. MAlib is an open source library for media and motion analysis, and Jun showed us both some C code and examples of e.g. face edge detection without bluescreen, and movement tracking. I was especially impressed by his proposal for "parking lot management" by the use of MAlib - not what you normally connect with Free Software video art, but we should of course not forget that video can be (and is) used for many purposes in everyday life. Next out was On Ni Wan from China, currently living in Gothenburg, a.k.a. Slimboyfatboyslim. Her project GeoLeds was the result from a trip to Iceland, where she made an installation utilizing GPS data to provide input data to a 11x11 LEDs dot matrix display. I have to be honest, I didn't catch the connection between the data (provided by who?) and what was being shown on the LEDs (mainly arrows pointing in different directions), but was nevertheless taken by On Ni's overwhelming enthusiasm for the Icelandic nature! Last out monday was Antti Silvast and a presentation of his Pseudotoad collective who have been involved since the early days of the Demo Scene (which was last year presented at a big retrospective exhibition in Kiasma, Helsinki). They are currently doing OpenGL 3D VJ stuff, and Antti was convincingly showing us some effective swirly roboty things and talking about the philosophy and technical attitude behind it. Btw: Pseudotoad is a word play on "pseudocode", no more, no less. Like Antti stated promptly in his dark finnish manner: "The toad is a nice animaal".