The awesome CDM blog has been spreading the word with posts about live coding lately (e.g. about our birthday, algorave and tidal 1.0), and the latest is about Hydra, the increasingly popular live coding system for visuals created by Olivia Jack.
Reimagine pixels and color, melt your screen live into glitches and textures, and do it all for free on the Web – as you play with others. We talk to Olivia Jack about her invention, live coding visual environment Hydra.
Inspired by analog video synths and vintage image processors, Hydra is open, free, collaborative, and all runs as code in the browser. It’s the creation of US-born, Colombia-based artist Olivia Jack. Olivia joined our MusicMakers Hacklab at CTM Festival earlier this winter, where she presented her creation and its inspirations, and jumped in as a participant – spreading Hydra along the way.
Olivia’s Hydra performances are explosions of color and texture, where even the code becomes part of the aesthetic. And it’s helped take Olivia’s ideas across borders, both in the Americas and Europe. It’s part of a growing interest in the live coding scene, even as that scene enters its second or third decade (depending on how you count), but Hydra also represents an exploration of what visuals can mean and what it means for them to be shared between participants. Olivia has rooted those concepts in the legacy of cybernetic thought.
Oh, and this isn’t just for nerd gatherings – her work has also lit up one of Bogota’s hotter queer parties. (Not that such things need be thought of as a binary, anyway, but in case you had a particular expectation about that.) And yes, that also means you might catch Olivia at a JavaScript conference; I last saw her back from making Hydra run off solar power in Hawaii.
Read the full article, including an interview with Olivia, over here. Or if you haven’t seen Hydra yet, you should probably run over here immediately, smash the button in the top right to load different examples from the community, and start live coding! Then when you get overloaded, find out more by reading the interview..