ABOUT

A very commonly used quote from Albert Einstein goes like this: « If I can't picture it, I can't understand it. ». A very commonly used quote from Henri Bergson goes like this: « The eyes see only what the mind is prepared to comprehend. » Following that thought, we'll eventually enter the realm of visual thinking, or better yet, the imagination realm, where complex ideas can be communicated in a simple way, or just the opposite.

Mosaic is a visual thinking toolkit made by artists, for artists.

Mosaic is a live-coding programming/patching environment for creating real-time audio-visual compositions. It's principally designed for live needs, as can be teaching in class, live performing in an algorave, or running a generative audio-visual installation in a museum. It aims to empower artists, creative coders, scenographers and other creative technologists in their creative workflow. It's a FLOSS, Free/Libre and Open Source Software with multi-platform support, and it's written in C++, offering high performance.

Mosaic is shipped with an internal code editor, non-blocking system dialogs, a programmable non-linear interactive timeline, lua/scheme/glsl/bash live-coding and pure data live-patching capability, a good selection of audio synthesis modules, multiple fullscreen output windows capabilities ( as many as your system can have ) with an independent warping for each window, a map-map style integrated mapping module, and an easy to use osc sending/receiving objects/nodes for network communication.

The idea behind Mosaic is to facilitate human-machine communication, to amplify imagination and to speed up the creative workflow, without sacrificing the spectrum of possibilities. To achieve this, it bundles together various creative-coding tools, acting as an interactive bridge between them. It includes a collection of audio-visual objects that can be easily connected together using a nodal-based graphical interface, defining a custom dataflow.

Mosaic is mainly based on two frameworks : OpenFrameworks and ImGui. OpenFrameworks is an open source C++ toolkit for creative coding. Dear ImGui is a bloat-free graphical user interface for C++ with minimal dependencies. Together with the latter ones, Mosaic bundles comes with other 3rd party libraries such as libpd and numerous ofxAddons. It also embeds various programming languages for live-coding purposes : Lua with OF-bindings, Scheme with a minimal set OF bindings live-coding, live compiling of GLSL shaders and editing/execute Bash scripts (macOS & linux) capabilities.

Mosaic is extendable : you can easily add custom objects. While this involves writing and compiling code, requiring some C++ knowledge, we aim to make this process as easy as possible. Thus, Mosaic is flexible and devoted to grow over time. For example, any Openframeworks project can be easily ported to Mosaic Objects, exposing them to the live-patching environment. This way, working with OF becomes way more modular, and you can make run-time adjustments. Possibilities are endless. Once created, plugins can either be statically compiled into Mosaic, or if you wish, there's also support for dynamically loading them, making it easy to share and distribute your objects with others.

Mosaic development team is composed by Emanuele Mazza, Daan de Lange and Maria José Martínez de Pisón

Mosaic was partially funded by the Agencia Estatal De Investigación (Spain) through the project: Desarrollos de Sistemas Interactivos para la Generación y Proyección de Imagen- Luz y Sonido: Revisión de su Incidencia en Arte Público. Referencia: HAR2017-87535-P-AR. Laboratorio de Luz, Universitat Politécnica de Valéncia