Hey Matthew
2009/11/26 Matthew Yee-King <matthewyeeking_at_googlemail.com>:
> Righto - cheers. It was an interesting talk. Several people asked the
> question (in various ways) 'given the infinite range of possible
> sounds + musics you can make, why do livecoders often make fairly
> familiar sounding techno?'.
I wonder which livecoders they're talking about. There aren't that
many livecoders so it's a shame if there's already a generalised
stereotype. Worth heading that one off by playing them Sorensen's
study in Keith or stranger stuff like inclusive improv / pbup / no
copy paste etc etc. I've no idea whether slub stuff sounds familiar
to others or not, I guess we tend towards regular beats because we
want people to dance to it although it's rare that they do, ah well.
A lot of these kinds of criticisms (including, I sense, these ones)
come from the "why is your technical demo not achingly beautiful and
complex music that moves me to kiss my neighbour?" direction. Videos
of actual performances help but we don't have a good one of slub yet
(we were close with the recent goldsmiths gig but sadly the camera
didn't get a feed from the desk, so sound is by microphone at the back
of a very large hall).
> It has inspired me to let go of the techno
> cliche safety net....
I've really enjoyed your live coded experiments in wacked out
synthesis mixed with jazz spasms, I think you're already taking the
full spectrum approach and that is the real livecoding hallmark.
> And there was also an interesting discussion of
> the semiotics of the seemingly retrograde return to text as a medium
Yeah, seemingly. This is a blinkered point of view. GUIs are the
retrograde step. We started with paintings, then developed
iconography and ultimately symbolic graphemes, which help us do things
like write down maths and abstract thoughts using text. We didn't
stop doing paintings though, and generally living in our bodies and
moving and thinking in spaces. So when computation was born out of
abstract use of symbols, we eventually got around to implementing
graphical interfaces.
But chalk was a graphical interface first, before it was a symbolic
one. Text is built upon graphics, it's just the retrograde step to
graphics in computation that make us think graphics is based upon
text.
> and of whether interacting with a computer by writing a program is
> more or less 'computer- native' than other forms of interaction, such
> as gestural control.
Writing a program is defining abstract computation through gestures
over a computer keyboard.
Maybe people are dismissive about the humanity of computer
programming, because the history of programming culture has in
generally been dominated by strange men funded by the military
industrial complex and large corporations. In the past I've
identified with 'counter-culture' hackers, like the inhabitants of the
early MIT lab which Steven Levy documents in his book "hackers". But
maybe this is where the problems started, these men were actually
working for the military (as Levy notes), and one of their most
celebrated hacks was about the first computer game, a war similation
called SpaceWar! This passive-aggressive culture has permeated the
languages and tools as well as the culture, making things difficult to
change. Witness the young chest beaters in the ruby on rails sausage
parties. Maybe it's not too far-fetched to suggest live coding is a
force against all this, although we clearly can't claim to be anything
like a representative cross section of society, maybe we can promote
languages and programming culture which a broader range of people can
identify with.
> I guess I should post this to the list... but
> I'll probably not have time to respond so don't want to appear rude!
Hope you don't mind me doing that for you, critical responses are hard
to come by and are very useful for discussion I think.
alex
--
http://yaxu.org/
Received on Thu Nov 26 2009 - 12:24:44 GMT