This online procedural drawing interface (click + drag in the big white space beneath the bar) simultaneously inspires awe and unease in its instant transformation of scribbles into intricate drawings.

It's made possible by the new HTML version 5 and its <canvas> tag, which allows for images to be dynamically created and modified within a web browser -- here using the JavaScript port of Processing. Exciting (and occasionally unnerving) times ahead.

This Thursday at the ICA, I'll be DJing to a night of live drawing by Mimi and Tom, as part the regular Heavy Pencil series. The idea is that I'll be creating live remixes of their own sound work, interspersed with tracks selected by them, for a kind of sensory cross-pollination: drawing in response to music in response to drawing, ad infinitum. It'll be great fun having such a wild and weird sonic (and visual) palette to work from.

In another of those episodes that makes you wonder when exactly the Future chose to creep up on you unannounced, Oakland-based startup Livescribe last year launched a device called the Smartpen. It's essentially a ball-point pen, turbocharged with an IR camera in the tip and a microphone, together capable of recording penstrokes and audio -- which can then be collectively transferred to computer via a USB cradle. Entire pages of drawings and text are then accessible onscreen, searchable via OCR and with replayable audio linked to the time of writing. Insane.

Something they don't make such a song and dance over is the fact that its accompanying "3D headset" is equipped with binaural microphones; I imagine it only records in sufficient quality for oral note-taking, but it's still an appealing prospect to have such a compact multifunctional binaural recorder...