MATERIAL
A desktop instrument for experimental moving image. You build a visual system and play with its rules until the image becomes something you wouldn't have drawn by hand.
A Mac app that turns video, images, audio or a live camera into moving images through techniques like mosaic, slit scan and feedback, driven by the sound, the beat and the motion in the frame.
Built with
Electron · React · three.js · GLSL · FFmpeg · Web MIDI
What it is
MATERIAL is not a filter gallery. You build a system: a source, a technique, a repeated material and the signals that drive them. Then you play with the rules.
Source → technique → material → modulation → output.
Everything runs locally. No accounts, no cloud, no media upload.
How it works
Sources can be images, video, audio, SVG or a live camera, screen or window. Techniques include mosaic, temporal mosaic, echo, step print, slit scan and feedback, plus local shader packs.
Audio is analysed for bass, mids, highs, onsets and tempo, the frame for luminance and edges, and motion comes from optical flow. Any of those signals can drive any parameter, on a beat grid of bars and beats.
It's also meant to be played live: nine Look slots, morphs over seconds, beats or bars, MIDI learn, a performance workspace and takes you record and replay. It exports PNG sequences with alpha, H.264 and ProRes.
- Electron · React · three.js
- GLSL shaders
- FFmpeg · Web MIDI
Development
A show that travels.
Version 0.8: a performance can leave the machine it was made on.
Phases 0 to 4 in one day.
A secure Electron shell, a GPU mosaic renderer, custom materials, video on a timeline and an audio engine with a beat grid.