>
> One thing I have been wondering about this in this context is how
> muscle-memory works both in favour and against us. It's harder to learn
> highly unusual piano pieces and, worse yet, a playful shove towards a
> trained martial artist could conceivably trigger his muscle memory and
> result in a painfull unintended elbow to your face. I wonder how Livecoding
> relates to this side of the "higher level" of instructions.
>
1. Taking off from guitars, the popular cue-based interface called Guitar
Hero is notable. The score is in the memory, but the human
playing the game is being programmed to play it perfectly. In a sense, the
game is trying to teach you a visual language constructed by the
composer/conductor/band leader. All languages are in essence
'body-languages' since we use our body to speak/write in those languages -
computing languages are subsets of the human body language.
2. From "A Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" by Walter
Benjamin: " *Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking
in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the
place where it happens to be. This unique existence of the work of art
determined the history to which it was subject throughout the time of its
existence. This includes the changes which it may have suffered in physical
condition over the years as well as the various changes in its ownership.
The traces of the first can be revealed only by chemical or physical
analyses which it is impossible to perform on a reproduction; changes of
ownership are subject to a tradition which must be traced from the situation
of the original. The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the
concept of authenticity*." (
http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm)
3. Now looking at the current trends in remix culture and sampling, I have
come to the conclusion that the work of art should now be constructed as a
collection of loosely connected concepts, which can be 'played' by the
audience during the 'performance'. So the audience is the performer in this
case, and the actual programmer of the system a sort of god who smiles from
a distance in approval. It is a kind of evolution, where now the artist has
ascended one level of abstraction. From the capitalist relationship of the
stage-audience, we have now moved to the structure of lab-everyware.
4. I like Dave's suggestion if incorporating some kind of AI system into
livecoding. That could be a lot of fun. I'll have to think a little more
about that...
5. For constructing a musical language intended for play, one of the
important design statements I hold dear is of the 'ephemeral language', a
language to be used and then thrown away. So the language itself is
constructed while playing this livecoding game,
and when the performance ends, the language is discarded, or archived.
Because the construction of the language (and not statements) happens in
front of the audience, they feel a semantic intimacy to the process.
------- -.-
1/f ))) --.
------- ...
http://www.algomantra.com
PS: Are any of you gentlemen on Facebook?
Received on Thu Jan 10 2008 - 01:53:18 GMT