Podcast 078: Jean-Marc Pelletier

Jean-Marc Pelletier popped onto my radar some years ago; I was doing my Masters program, and was (of course) paying attention to the work of a lot of people around me. One thing that I noticed was that everyone was using the Kinect hardware, but were also using it in combination with a variety of blob tracking, color tracking and optical flow tools. And doing them in Max... Digging a little deeper, I found that almost all of these projects were based on a single person's work: the work of Jean-Marc. His library of computer vision objects for Max, called the cv.jit objects, we at the heart of a lot of work. As I started exploring it myself, I found that this library offered an extensive set of functions, but also included help files that were great starting points for my own projects. I was a believer. Over the years, the cv.jit objects were getting a little creaky - mainly due to changes in the Mac OS and Max itself. Luckily for all, a group of us at Cycling '74 chipped in to rework it into current shape, reformat it for the Max packages system, and generally make it usable in Max 7. The new work, along with some focus on the project that use cv.jit - as well as Jean-Marc himself - can be found on maxology.club, the site that we've put up to focus on third-party libraries and technologies. Want to find out more about JMP? You can read his bio, and check out his other work at http://jmpelletier.com. Enjoy this chat with him, where we explore his obsessions, his interest in both music and visuals, and how he sees the future of mixed media art.