I heard about vvvv in my first year of studying in this industry. And kyma for sound design.
But I later discovered that the more mainstream ones are puredata and its commercial version max/msp. for sound design I also use: supercollider and csound.
After some years, I felt that I still preferred text-based interaction while I need some even simpler live coding or prototyping tool. so I made https://glicol.org/.
Hydra was how I dipped my toes in. https://gibber.cc/playground/index.html was a little too much for me at first but hydra was small enough for me to wrap my head around.
I also recently learned you can force hydra to spit out the GLSL code, which is a pretty cool feature.
there was a period in computer arts around 2008 or so (edit, björn's comment prompted a reflection, it might've been earlier than that, let's call it "early 2000s"), that went away like many things with pervasive computerization. vvvv including it's naming and otherwise opaqueness is a product of that period. it was represented by groups like TOPLAP and dorkbot, and it was kind of marriage of technologists and artists, back when such a marriage would've still been self-conscious. stylistically it was a lot of algorithmic generation, live coding, and noise, people liked to use puredata, and vvvv, and other such projects to produce sharp jittery zigzaging lines on a projector screen at get togethers in brooklyn. a kind of deliberate, practiced obscurantism was part of aesthetic, you weren't supposed to keep your PD patches organized. there was a particular typographic convention associated with projects of that time, involving a lot of deliberate but arbitrary additions of punctuation marks, -/////lower case letters, repeating letters00xxx. terms like psychogeorgaphy were involved, there was of course an {esoteric}} component to it. downstream the movement took chiptunes mainstream, and produce early minimal house. some of the conventions remain in the digital arts, and video production circles.
so if you think vvvv is not propertly marketed, maybe will benefit from a mission statement, then it's not for you.
This aesthetic is of its time but is really import - I went to the share@open air parties in ~2003 or so, continuing to visit periodically through their run at Santo's Party House. I didn't know anything at the time, and the overwhelming obscurantism was part of the appeal.
I have a lot of feelings about this movement, and I'm happy that I was a part of it. It's driven my feelings about music and art in general, and I've spent a ton of my time since then trying to figure out how to make things that put music first while still containing the cold stochasticity of this time.
oh yeah i should've added share to my list! when i moved to nyc i was so poor i was subleasing a room from a carribean dude in prospect park, and would bike to lafayette with a hand me down ibook g3 :>
i really don't know how to contextualize that experience. i'm glad i was part of it, but like a lot of things immediately pre-pervasive digitalization, i feel like it will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
the dates are vague, while the point remains, because trying to remember things clearer i did livecoding at toplap in brooklyn 2004-2005, and i wasn't a pioneer. but also i'm talking artistic trends, something could've happened prior to it becoming part of bigger whole, but then evolved as part of the whole that it itself has brought about.
but you're one of the meso guys, it would've been interesting to hear your opinions on what i said, outside the quible about dates. in my recollection vvvv leaned heavily into the aesthetic conventions around toplap at the time, and you must recall what i'm talking about judging by dates on your project page.
I started out at meso (~2005) and I worked for them for quite some time but I am not really one of the meso guys. tbh I landed there by chance at the recommendation of a friend while looking for a place to write my diploma thesis. at that time I had no idea whatsoever what they were doing and no relation at all to "digital arts" or "generative design".
I might be misinterpreting the aesthetic you're talking about, but I think it was similar to (and probably directly inspired by) the graphic design that The Designers Republic was doing in the 90's (think the Wipeout videogame). Their aesthetic spread pretty rapidly at the time.
Vvvv is a real, proper windows creative coding toolkit. More arcane than Max or touch designer, imo, but every bit suitable for entertainment industry jobs.
It has been years since I used it, windows 7 actually, but their community had an old school "irc with angry sages" feel.
I remember this crashing alot. TouchDesigner kind of ate its lunch but vvvv is still active - vvvv kind of keeps you locked into writing shit in .NET/C# but if that's your bag go for it
any decent programming environment can crash your system.
Once you have ironed out the bugs, it is super stable I current installations running that have been running since 2014 and 2017.
Screens and LED's are beginning to fail, but the software is chugging along nicely.
The landing page is as opaque as the name. I _think_ this might be something cool, but I have absolutely no idea what it is based on the landing page and the included video.
Check https://visualprogramming.net instead. There are two versions of vvvv the old one called "beta" and the newer one (complete rewrite) called "gamma". vvvv.org is more focused on the old version.
Looking at the page, it seems like there's nothing other than art installations in the Showcase. https://visualprogramming.net/#Showcase Is there something about the software the predisposes it being used only for art installations? Or just the community it attracts? It "looks" capable.
It seems weird that out of all the showcases, there's not anything like normal industry projects. No games, no movies, no television shows. Lots of museum displays, AI scultures, art walls.
Take Blender instead https://www.blender.org/features/ and its almost entirely "industry production pipeline" and "award winning shorts and films". Or Maya, which is pretty much nothing other than "used in Hogwarts, used in Avengers, used in Dune." Notably, not very many art walls or digi-scultures.
Usually its a chicken and egg thing, like nobody uses it, because nobody famous has used it yet, except vvvv looks like it has plenty of users.
The way it works seems to appeal to "artists" / "creatives".
It's pretty simple to get a visual output fast and the always running (hot-reload) aspect makes it easy to iterate on things, tweak some parameter (size, speed, color) and directly see the outcome.
> normal industry projects
It's used quite a lot in the context of trade fairs, not only for touchscreen exhibits but also stage shows. Nice example: https://nsynk.de/work/mercedes-iaa15
There are also totally different kinds of projects/uses, they are just not that well documented. For example I know of a guy that programmed a feeding robot for a fish farm using vvvv.
Thanks for the answers, explanation, and invite. It looks like interesting software, and live update does seem like a nice feature. I guess I'm just surprised that does not appeal to the WebGl, javascript, and online community all that much, since that's one of the main perks of those is quick feedback without compiling. Tweak, load the page.
Had not heard of Anadol (not much involvement in the pro art community), yet working with the sphere in Vegas probably means at least fairly well known.
Had a lot of fun just messing around with it during the slow pandemic year. Takuma Nakata made many interesting tutorials for it [1], although I think most of them are for beta, not gamma.
When the latter was released it was still missing a lot of the functionality and libraries beta has, not sure how it is these days.
It's a node-based visual framework, I guess. Around 2006 I worked on a project using VVVV to create sound reactive, generative visuals that tracked a pop singer as he moved on an LED stage. The visuals were displayed on the stage.
We had it hooked up to MIDI, time code, video, motion tracking and DMX lighting. Pretty impressive for the time, now I think about it.
It's a visual programming environment for .net (the current stable version is based on .net6 while newer previews use .net8). Visual in the sense that
programs are represented as node graphs.[1]
You can basically do what ever you could with C#. Using the VL.Fuse[2] library you can also visually program on the GPU. If stuff is missing you can reference just about any nuget package or add functionality using C# (CPU) [3] or HLSL (GPU)[4].
I didn't explain it well but I think that's the point, one could do all kinds of visual or audio things, it's one of many multitools for audo-visual media creation. Often these projects need to combine multiple technologies to reach their goals. Often deadlines and expectations are ludicrous. Being able to sketch, prototype visually and build the finished project in the same tool is useful. Forget Figma it takes too long.
If you have a project that needs lights, video, lasers, sound, motion, cameras, exotic sensors etc and speed of creation is maybe more important than long-term stability, something like this might allow you to sketch your way to a solution significantly faster. The real code is always underneath, but it's kind of like having some kind of flow diagram, sketch tool, visual debugger and IDE.
The creative coding 'scene' (at least when I felt part of it) is loosely divided between patcher tools and traditional code-based tooling. vvvv is a patcher, like Max/MSP, PureData and Touchdesigner. You connect function blocks together to do stuff, you can see the data flow between and see the visuals they create. Like creating shaders at a high level of abstraction, I guess.
I have complex feelings about visual programming that I haven't yet quite worked through.
I oscillate between "it's a dreadful local minima that people get trapped in because real programming is so genuinely intimidating and hard to crack" and something more like "of wet could figure out how to take the good bits from visual and textual coding and avoid the worst bits of each, then we will reach the promised land".
The reason people use tools like vvvv, max, pd, reaktor, etc is not because they’re avoiding textual programming, but rather because those tools are better suited to specific tasks than regular textual programming.
This also applies to things like excel or databases.
Surely, one could implement a reaktor patch or a spreadsheet in their favorite language, but that doesn’t mean much.
I've done a fair amount of both and there's an element of truth in your statement - but it's far from the whole picture. Spreadsheets solve data entry in terms of providing a nice UI - but when you add too many formula, the advantages quickly disappear and code starts to become a much saner way to handle the logic.
As for other systems (audio and video tools) kinda yeah but no. There's some nice aspects to visualizing the data flow but that's something that can be implemented as a feature to text-based programming. Actual editing is more laborious and many tasks that are simple with text are complex in all the visual tools I've tried.
I'm not saying visual tools have no advantages over text - I just feel that the cost is very high indeed and we should really be looking for a synthesis that gives us the best of both worlds.
Traditional programming also has a but: it can do anything a spreadsheet can, but it is often overkill. Spreadsheets etc are waaaaaaay faster and safer for 90% or more of the work.
> I just feel that the cost is very high indeed and we should really be looking for a synthesis that gives us the best of both worlds
But normal people is happy with the specific solutions in the meantime.
Maybe there will be a proper visual language paradigm that will end all textual languages the future, sure, but in the meantime, comparing visual languages with this impossible utopic silver bullet is unfair and limiting.
> But normal people is happy with the specific solutions in the meantime.
I'm not discussing whether they are "happy". I'm arguing that Visual Programming comes with some massive drawbacks. Whether people are aware of them or not is irrelevant. There's such a thing as being contentedly stuck in a local minima.
I believe that there are objective drawbacks (to both approaches actually). Whether you currently enjoy using them or not doesn't have much bearing on the point that things could be much better.
> I'm arguing that Visual Programming comes with some massive drawbacks
And textual programming comes with even bigger drawbacks.
I don't want to care about programming things like memory, time complexity, nulls, or code style when I'm programming a synth patch in Max or Reaktor, or when writing a spreadsheet. If needed, I can just use a compiler.
> many tasks that are simple with text are complex in all the visual tools I've tried.
And many tasks that are simple with visual programming are incredibly complex with textual programming.
There is a reason people use it, and part of it about embracing the paradigm, rather than trying to emulate what you already know in it.
None of these are specific to text vs visual. Except maybe "code style" and that has a direct analogue in visual programming (and arguably one that's harder to manage).
> If needed, I can just use a compiler.
Unless I'm misunderstanding you, this is another orthogonal concern.
> And many tasks that are simple with visual programming are incredibly complex with textual programming.
I never said otherwise.
> There is a reason people use it, and part of it about embracing the paradigm, rather than trying to emulate what you already know in it.
There most certainly are very good reasons to use visual programming. But that doesn't make the pain points disappear.
I'm not sure how to put this any clearer but what I'm trying to say "They both suck. I think we can do better..."
Back in the early 2000s there was such poor support from non-Windows for high powered graphics cards, it's no wonder vvvv never moved to other platforms. I worked at a Mac/Linux art studio in that time and we had to keep buying Windows boxes just to run the video artworks we produced.
VVVVVV (6 V's) is a fun game (I've played it before, and it has "overwhelmingly positive" reviews on steam). VVVVV (5 V's) appears to also be a game on Steam with mixed reviews, maybe looking for customers confusing it with the other game?
But I later discovered that the more mainstream ones are puredata and its commercial version max/msp. for sound design I also use: supercollider and csound.
After some years, I felt that I still preferred text-based interaction while I need some even simpler live coding or prototyping tool. so I made https://glicol.org/.
for visuals, I would recommend:
https://hydra.ojack.xyz/
and
https://nannou.cc/
Note that these are not replaceable for each other, you can look at them all