Dear List,
Some notes on my Steim presentation, in the hope that they will benefit
others trying to explain what exactly it is that we do. During my
preparations I found that quality pictures that clearly show how we perform
are oddly rare. The dim light of a club atmosphere combined with bright
projected screens mean the performer often gets lost, focussing on the
performer makes the instrument disappear. Screen-shots or stills from
screen-casts didn't seem nearly as exciting to show as the performative
element will be missing to a lay audience. A talented photographer with the
right equipment should be able to solve this.
I ended up showing some fragments of screen-casts (when you only get 10
minutes there is no chance to show a whole piece). It's hard to pick but I
don't think anyone could disagree too loudly with Andrew Sorenson's "just
for fun" performance, pointing out the link between the audio, the visuals
and the code. That seemed to work well. 10 minutes is too short to also go
into more exotic systems like Dave's experiments, which I regretted. I also
found that the more defensive/critical elements to the livecoding debate
(comparisons to other modes of performance, etc) didn't go over nearly as
well as the idea that it's fun exactly because it's hard and somewhat
far-fetched. In the future I think I'd leave that entire debate to be
introduced by the audience.
I shied away from using a "sheets" style presentation because those tend to
end up looking "structured", "formal" and "corporate" so I thought it would
be more TOPLAP-like to just wing the whole thing with a directory of
pre-selected images at hand. That works, but -for me- it resulted in a frame
of mind that didn't allow for coding immediately after so I instead
performed at the end of the night.
I had a serious fight with the MiniAudicle where for some unknown reason
most of the hotkeys for copy, paste, new-file, etc stop working on Linux can
stop working, forcing me to use the mouse. I also found it harder to think
in ChucK like this after recent months of a lot of Fluxus usage. This made
me keep things quite safe and simple, sticking to 2 of my favourite
techniques. I was a bit surprised that keeping things very simple made them
more musical than most of my previous performances. Using only
3 parallel buffers with simple code made it easier to do transitions by
going back and forth between them as well.
Overall it seemed very well received as a introduction, but then again; this
is STEIM where the unusual is quite normal and welcome. I received some
questions on topics like language, musical scores and the inclusion of
non-keyboard controllers.
Video documentation was made and should surface soon-ish
Yours,
Kas.
Received on Sat Apr 17 2010 - 10:34:24 BST