It's alive and ringing. Watching local bellringers play the laser-controlled campanile on the opening night was enthralling. Many stone-cold miracles contributed, as did the ladder-bound feats of Leeds City Museum's A/V crew (thanks, Rick!).

Better quality documentation coming soon.

Another small Processing class developed for Peal, ColourFader takes an array of colour values and smoothly interpolates between them through a series of calls to its get() method.

This is intended for the Peal visualization's idle mode, which acts as a kind of screensaver, drifting from side to side and cycling through its internal colour scheme. It's sorely tempting to include some kind of hidden disco-lighting easter egg...

An absence from technology turned out to be less amenable to hacking than hoped; even with the presence of an iPhone, concocting half-baked hacks to twitpic from a Dorset field was less appealing in practice than in theory. Apologies, therefore, for the break in hackpact programming. Service hereby resumes.

Today's hack is a small Processing sketch to simulate objects moving around on a spring-like arc around a central point. It's a simple implementation of Hooke's law plus trigonometry, but creates pleasantly natural-looking dynamics which are useful, in my case, to spin camera angles around a point with some damping.

This is more rapid work-in-progress for PEAL, appearing at the Sonic Arts Expo in Leeds very shortly.

Continuing the PEAL-related hackpact hacking, today saw the realization of the OSC protocol that the installation will use to communicate with the Processing visualization. As a testbed, this also entailed a Python script (making use of ixi's great simpleosc) to emulate the behaviour of the installation when it's in place - generating events such as clock ticks, bell chimes and aleatoric changes.

Coming from recent work in C++ and perl, it's continually surprising how things in python seem to just work - and moreover, how readable and maintainable the resulting code is. I saw a comment by somebody recently describing Perl as a "read only" language, which can be pretty on the money...

I'm out in the country for the next few days, mostly away from technology, so the next few hackpact entries will be manual hacks, broadcast via iPhone twitpics/twitvids - if signal reception permits.

For this year's Sound And Music Expo, taking place imminently in Leeds, I'm developing the interactive visual elements for Peal, a virtual bell tower realized with lasers, LEDs, surround sound and projection. Lewis and Nick of Monomatic have asked me to transform Malcolm Garrett's vector-based design work into a responsive application that somehow ties together the various elements of bellringing (time, communality, musicality, circularity) into an animated projection, reflecting the current state of the virtual bells as well as providing live scores to established sets of changes.

Lots of concepts to take on board, not least dealing with scalable vector graphics (SVG) in Processing, which is what I've been doing today. The idea is that the application is multi-modal -- switching between contexts based a combination of the time of day and the signalling from the electronics that make up the physical part of the installation -- and so must be able to fade gracefully between different display states.

I might well shoe-horn at least one more Peal-related dev session into the hackpact.