

In 2011, under NORTD labs he was a fellow at Culture Lab UK. In 2006, Hechenberger founded with Addie Wagenknecht, the New York City and Vienna based research and development collaborative, NORTD labs, which developed the open source system called CUBIT (multi-touch) in 2007 and the more recent iteration TouchKit in 2008.įrom 2007 to 2008, Hechenberger was an honorary fellow at Eyebeam. Hechenberger has worked with Zach Lieberman in creating the OpenCV library for openFrameworks, an open source C++ library for creative coding and graphics. His works include interactive software, computer vision projects and open source hardware. They believe that people should think globally and build locally.Stefan Hechenberger is an Austrian artist and programmer. Over the last half decade, Nortd's open source hardware has been built and used by hundreds of people, labs, hacker-spaces and universities worldwide. It is a studio-based incubator of creative thought engaging the overlap between science and design. Nortd aka Addie and Stefan is a research and development studio based in New York generating work in the field of art, architecture and system design. They were dedicated to making the project a community effort, bringing in as many creators as possible, hosting workshops, lectures and discussions. We believe a culture that allows more engagement and collaboration is a better one.”ĭuring their residency Nortd spent their time prototyping hardware, writing software, and collaborating in a community of like minded people. We understand the appeal of watching a dream team fly to the moon but ultimately think it's more worthwhile to emphasize community and allow wide-spread participation. They are indicators of a society in which authorship is democratized versus monopolized, or quite simply a prosperous versus an idling culture.

For us these are indicators of a read/write versus a read-only culture. “Building things is fun and we prefer custom-built bikes, cars, houses, surf boards over industrially mass-produced ones any time. Their approach was simple: slashing the costs by a factor of 10, open-sourcing the hardware and software, building a developer community and making the technology accessible to as many artist and developers as possible. Having previously carried out a Fellowship at Eyebeam they created the CUBIT and Touchkit projects, which were at the forefront of demystifying multi-touch computer interfaces and bringing them to the masses in an open source fashion. Time to whip the magic out!”ĭemocratizing this process in similar ways as print, audio, and video will have a rippling effect through the entire culture of creating.
#Eyebeam multitouch software#
Not only does this make software a way of comprehending, but it also has the ability to shift ideas beyond the realm of theoretical wizardry. It's like any natural language that evolves - just magnitudes faster. These layers of interfaces are created on the fly, manifested by code.
#Eyebeam multitouch code#
The language of code has metalinguistic abstractions. It is as if your entire childhood nobody told you there was software behind the curtain. At its core, it is a language for describing actions much like the spells in fairytales. The outcome is highly effective but the association with other areas of expertise is enigmatic. Seemingly contradictory it makes sense when seeing software as a form of wizardry. “We create objects, interfaces and installations the same way we write software: engineer like architects and write like poets. They work to simplify the creation and sharing of tangible objects, helping to make open source hardware mainstream. Their goal was to provide a cheap, safe, and highly-capable machine that will increase the proliferation of laser cutters and make a significant contribution to the personal fabrication movement. Their work has been covered internationally by outlets such as the Economist, CNN, Popular Mechanics and Make Magazine. During their residency at Culture Lab and D6, Nortd worked on developing the Lasersaur, an open source laser cutter. Nortd was founded as an international open source collaborative, outputting artistic research and scientific development for humanity.
