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DOCTOR FRIENDLY AND HIS AMAZING VISUAL THEREMIN

By Mad Dog

Photo by Carla King

Doctor Friendly sways, his hands moving through the air in waves. His shaved head and silver clothes shimmer in the dim light as the brightly colored patterns on a large projection screen metamorphose like a kaleidoscopic light show. He presses a key on a keyboard with his foot and a new pattern emerges, his body moving, slightly robotic, hands flowing through air, controlling the constantly changing pattern and keeping the crowd mesmerized. Amazing what you can do with a thousand dollar pair of gloves, a computer, and a custom-written program. Doctor Friendly, a.k.a. Aaron Wolf Baum, developed the Visual Theremin. It starts with those expensive gloves you can buy off the rack. Assuming, of course, that you know where to find that rack. There are fiber optics that run along the fingers and wrists which translate each movement into one of 256 numbers. Then the computer program he wrote does the rest, using one of sixteen settings—instruments if you will—to create a new piece of visual choreography. It’s like a slightly controllable acid trip. Not that I’d know what that could be like. And it’s legal. Cool.

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