I’ve been throwing the occasional GIANT WAREHOUSE PARTY in Philadelphia over the years, more or less every other year since 2005. When it finally came time to leave a couple weeks ago, I had zero time to edit together hours of video, or to build any complicated green-screeny installation stuff in Max/MSP. I figured since I was a Barbarian now, I’d see if Cinder was up to the task. It totally was.

While wandering the streets of Amsterdam a few weeks before it was time to leave, I came up with an idea to have friends tag pictures on Flickr from the past 9 years of any times that were fun, and I’d integrate them all into a big particle field of memories (The Nostalgiatron). Reading through the first few Cinder Tutorials, it became clear pretty quickly that it was going to do just about everything I needed.

I ended up having to cache images locally first, but that was just due to time constraints, I’m sure someone with stronger C++/threading chops could make this just popup an input box where you drop tags in and then build the whole thing on the fly. Anyways, it was awesome, and folks tagged about 1,000 pics that floated down, thumping to the music, reminding us of days past, occasionally opening old wounds.

Projections weren’t the only thing, though. The OSC and Serial modules made quick work of interfacing an iPod Touch w/ TouchOSC for wireless adjustments to the particle generator, and the serial dealie let me hook up to this old firehazard of a lighting grid I built for parties past. From the dance floor, I could adjust how the particles reacted to the music, and turn any of the party lights in the room on and off. And it all came together in a few days. Go Cinder!

You can peruse the source code at GitHub, but please be gentle. It really ain’t code to write home about, but it came together in no time and did the job.

UPDATE: Ashley demanded more photos, so here they are: