Getting Started

As you may know, Media-Art is not a trivial thing to contribute to. We're trying hard to make it as painless as possible for you.

TheArtCollider (TAC) is designed to not limit its users - which implies complexity - but at the same time provide for easy access to newcomers.

There is a simple interface that hides the gory details and allows for basic interaction. For advanced users there's example code and API interface documentation with basically no limit to your creativity.

The easiest way to contribute is to provide some kind of live video is using a web-browser and camera. In this case, you are providing the interaction instead of reacting on input from TheArtCollider.

Select one of the following options according to the material you want to provide:

For convenience we provide some tools to make it easy to contribute. The screen-capture utility allows to select an area on the Desktop to be sent to the collider. The Flowmixer is a more advanced tool that provides video mixing and effects along with the possibility to read media files from hard-disk.

In order to play back media from the collider, you need a video player that can receive HTTP streams. We recommend to use VLC:

The easiest way to view online footage is to launch VLC. Select File → Open Network from it's Menu and paste the URL of the project you want to see. A list of projects is available from the Yellow Pages (see below).

Apart from the “Click & Go” Flash interface; you need to join in order to participate in TheArtCollider or sign in with your OpenID (your google, yahoo! or flickr account will work).

We encourage you to create a profile page about yourself and submit information about the project(s) you would like to implement:

TheArtCollider Monitoring is handy for multiple purposes: It allows to see who is online and which projects connect to each other. It also provides projects with a way to search and select sources which can be used as an input:

Projects can access sources and receive the information in various formats (RSS-feed, M3U or XSPF playlist, XML). The same interface also allows to search and filter available streams. See API for documentation on the query parameters.

To Play a stream, simply click on the title in the feed. We recommend VLC or mplayer.

For discussion we provide a public email-list where members of TheArtCollider community can discuss ideas and get technical support. Once you've signed up to receive emails, you can also post there: