It's an interesting point, and certainly worth looking into. I think
this touches on the language of performance, a subject which has a
long and interesting history (but which I am definitely not qualified
to discuss at length). For example, I enjoy operas, but have no
idea what people are saying most of the time. Same for French hip
hop, or Russian alt-rock, but that doesn't mean I can't appreciate
it. The language you code in is important, whether its FLOSS or not
is a side point. For example, It'd be interesting to see someone
livecoding in a non-Western language like Mandarin, and possibly not
much different than watching them code in a proprietary programming
language that I had no access to. Personally, I wouldn't mix FLOSS
with livecoding discussions, because they feel like completely
different subjects. Would you discuss with Picasso how much he paid
for his brush? Or Da Vinci? Doubtful, because its besides the point
of their work. From an anthropological or documentary or personal
standpoint, however, I can understand, but I always wind up
livecoding in MaxMSPJitter and it certainly didn't cost me $10K and
it's widely available, so why not?
Alex: the concept of "sourcecode feedback" is fascinating... the
computer commenting in the course code itself, as a conversation with
the user? tantalizing. i can imagine the day when my Processing app
adds itself as the author of a function in the javadoc, and leaves
the comment "you really fucked this up, so i'm taking over; love, the
machine"
On Apr 1, 2008, at 1:58 PM, Kassen wrote:
>
>
> On 01/04/2008, alex <alex_at_lurk.org> wrote:
>
>
> Hi all,
>
> If anyone has time to read this article and send me feedback of all
> kinds, I'd really appreciated it:
>
>
> Good article.
>
> One thing I feel deserves a mention (which I think I talked about
> before) is the link between showing the code and the compiler/
> parser being freely available. If there would be some imaginary
> language that would cost 10K$ to license it would be unavailable to
> most of us (and the audience) and hence harder to gain a
> understanding of. If I write ChucK on stage you could take a
> photograph, go home, install ChucK and copy my code/music, likely
> gaining a deeper understanding of it. FLOSS software is available
> to everybody making it hard to use the tool itself as a layer of
> obscurity (as seen in some electronic performances or even
> guitarists putting tape over the labels on their pedals).
>
> With FLOSS there is (more or less) a guarantee that the language
> being "spoken" is available to the listener. To me this is a part
> of the gesture of communicating by projecting the screen. We know
> that often not all audience-members will understand all code but if
> it's important they can read it I feel it's important that they
> could theoretically run it themselves. To me this makes a
> performance in PD different from one in MAX, at least on a
> conceptual level (which is not to say you can't expressively
> perform live-patching in MAX because I do feel you can!).
>
> I'm not saying there aren't limits to the availability of FLOSS
> because there are. Somebody who only runs Windows would have a hard
> time installing Fluxus, for example, but FLOSS goes to a
> considerably greater length in making the language available to
> everybody and additionally would give a particularly dedicated
> audience-member the chance to review the internal nature of the
> language itself in order to understand what was "said" and how.
> Likely nobody would actually do this after a set but if we want to
> get away from obscurity in performance it can be important that one
> *could*.
>
> From there on one might even argue that it's preferable to use
> tools written in a language that's itself open and using a open
> compiler, even.
>
> Yours,
> Kas.
>
Received on Tue Apr 01 2008 - 17:02:31 BST