Hi Marcel,
My recollection of this concert is generally in line with Ross' comments. It seemed to me that the friendly adversarial style did engage the audience. I think your premise that competition generates interest, see reality TV idol shows, is reasonable but from my experience it is not typical nor optimal as a live coding format. I think that your description of the audience at the 2005 off-ICMC concert as disapproving of Collin's activities and enthusiastic about Ge is not exactly what I recall. Rather, I think that the audience responded mostly to either witty text comments or ChucK's 3D graphic tricks. There was little "readable" code for even knowledgeable audience members to follow, either because Ge displayed minimal code - especially during recompiling :) - and Nick used code blocks that would have taken a while to "read." However, it was clear to the audience that both performers were controlling the machines with code which was a novelty for them.
These are my impression in any case, so I expect any version of the concert you end up with can triangulate these various views.
Cheers,
Andrew
On 23/2/08 6:26 PM, "Ross Bencina" <rossb-lists_at_audiomulch.com> wrote:
Hi Marcel
Although I can't corroborate Nick's testimony regarding the Babylonian
microtonal project (more lack of sleep at the time than the "free" beer
sadly), from where I was standing at least I don't believe your first
paragraphs fairly or accurately represent the nature of the performance nor
the audience's response to the performance practices of each performer. This
is unfortunate because it has left me disinterested with reading the
remainder of your potentially interesting paper.
I understand that everyone sees an event differently, and it is certainly a
risky proposition to try to use your own perspective on a public event as
the starting point for a paper.. but you could at least temper your comments
with an explicit qualification of their subjectivity.
Best wishes
Ross
----- Original Message -----
From: "Nick Collins" <nc272_at_cam.ac.uk>
To: <livecode_at_toplap.org>
Sent: Saturday, February 23, 2008 3:18 AM
Subject: Re: [livecode] code taunts
Hi Marcel,
your work is very interesting and I wish I could attend one of your public
battles! Thanks for sharing the paper. Just to clarify, this isn't my
recollection of the Barcelona contest:
their disapproval of Collins' loading of
pre-programmed code fragments with boos and hisses
I spent the first ten minutes just coding a complex microtonal system based
on the Babylonian square root algorithm. I then explored this with sound
from around 10-15 minutes in; but all was from scratch.
after 15 mins, when Ge had dropped out to recompile ChucK, I had to switch
to working with some other stuff just to cover (in retrospect I should have
worked further on the Babylonian material, but panicked); but I did so
within my live coding environment, and was live coding throughout, though
less from scratch and more by modification.
It was Ge who ran preprogrammed presets in the first half of the
competition. However, neither of us had anticipated the public competition
aspect would be so dominant, and our preparations were very different to
what turned out to be required. I make my full confession in the 2007 NIME
paper. I typed what I should have typed had I prepared for battle, in my
movie posted the other day.
I was the most disappointed by that gig of any I've been involved with, but
a great learning experience under real-time constraints! I had been
practising for weeks before, but not the right material, and had to adapt
to the setting in a way that I wasn't prepared for. Note that I make no
defence of the quality of that 2005 concert.
best
Nick
Received on Mon Feb 25 2008 - 05:14:27 GMT