On 01/04/2008, alex <alex_at_lurk.org> wrote:
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>
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> 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 - 12:59:09 BST