Hey, Alex!
> Pubcode2 coming up on the 5th August, line-up to appear here soonish:
> http://toplap.org/uk/event/pubcode2/
>
I'd like to join the chants of the less geographically fortunate in begging
for recordings and descriptions.
>
> slub have a short interview in the 'September' issue of Wired UK,
> which I believe hits the news stands early August
>
Excellent. I'll get it. It's been a while since I was looking forward to a
magazine interview with a band I'm a fan of.
>
> I got a live coding paper accepted to the CHArt conference, synopsis
> here: http://www.chart.ac.uk/chart2009/index.html
>
I read your summary on FaceBook and was just about to reply to that.
Hopefully responding here will lead to more debate. I also hope that
addressing your FB post here won't be seen as a a faux pas. Maybe you should
x-post your summary to here but I'll leave that up to you, it being your
work.
While I agree with the position you are coming from and the conclusion you
draw I have a bit of a problem with the way you get there. I don't think
novels are a especially strong analogy for livecoding, despite both being
(mostly, most of the time) text-based. I should note here that I do consider
comics to be literature and do feel graphical systems can be used
successfully for livecoding. In your summary you write;
Where a written novel exists to describe human activity, written software
> exists to simulate it. Therefore the live coder can take the role of an
> artist, constructing simulators in order to generate patterns of movement,
> either as music, video animation or both.
>
I have a bit of a problem getting the use of the word "therefore" in this
case, I don't think your conclusion is a given. This is not because I want
to nit-pick at your stance but because I think it relates to a analogy I
don't find very convincing (so far, I am of course hoping you'll make that
case here). To me Livecoding may have more to do with conceptual art in that
we aim to convey concepts (or at least thought and reasoning) and attempt to
turn their expression into performance. Perhaps Livecoding relates to
traditional conceptual art like improvised theatre relates to movies. This
may seem far-fetched but I also feel that musical genres like Baroque and
Math-Rock have a component of conceptual art in that they are attempting to
conevey a concept in a aesthetically pleasing way. It seems to me like we
are using language to convey our ideas to the audience while also -in the
same gesture- demonstrating their outcome. This becomes a performance as we
refine our concepts, being confronted with how our concepts may be hard to
formally express. This may be a analogy for how what we litterally say in
natural language frequently isn't taken to mean what we intended.
I find that a stronger link between livecoding and language than novels
(being deemed art as well) are to me. We may disagree here, hopefully we can
have a debate on this matter. I'm also not ruling out the chance that -given
present conditions- you wrote your summary in more haste than the actual
paper. Likely I am misunderstanding your position.
>
>
> There doesn't seem to be much livecoding chatter around here these
> days, what's everyone up to? Any more news knocking about?
>
I've been experimenting with resetting ChucK's random seed at a rapid yet
steady pace, thus modulating all UGens that use random numbers and turing
them into a sort of static wavetable players. This led to unexpectedly
interesting results in the UGens and confronted me in that I was then unable
to also get (perceived) random values for random melodies for the UGens to
play. I'm enjoying the noise and enjoying this side-stepping of what is
traditionally considered "scope". This is likely to be a possible technique
in other systems as well and side-stepping scope makes affecting running
code so much more convenient.
Hoping everyone is well,
Kas.
Received on Sun Jul 19 2009 - 21:35:26 BST