Howdy y'all!
I don't remember signing up on this list but I
suppose it's providence for two reasons:
1) I'm currently writing a doctoral thesis on
"abstract machines" which is more or less a
shortcut for algorithmic-based artwork, which is
another way of saying that everything Toplap is
doing is very cool and interrests me. I also met
Craig Latta last summer who went through the
whole process for me. And I'm a big fan of slub,
slab, whatever...
2) I've been doing what you call "livecoding" for
a little while now, not as long as most of you,
but for about two years or so. I didn't really
identify any of this practice with that term.
It actually first began as an accident. I was
VJ'ing with prepared algorithms for a DJ-soirée
with a student of mine: we had about six
computers with as many videoprojectors covering
most of the walls. Bascially we were wallpaper,
as is often the case in these sort of settings.
About five minutes into the evening, a virus got
into the network and started fucking with the
machines. So we did as anyone would do, paniced,
ran around with-our-hair-on-fire®, and finally
gave up. So we decided to play with it, and
eventually began rebuilding the programs from
scratch as the night went on. At the time we were
using Director, so we would start with an asFFT
skeleton and program from there. Since we didn't
really care anymore at that point, we just left
the code up on the screen, and people got into
it. That gave us the idea to turn one of the text
actors into a programming console, stick it on
the stage, and with a key combination run it with
the "do" function in Lingo.
My stuents also mentioned last year how some of
my classes are a bit like a performance, so we
went with that idea and did a few semi-public
livecoding sessions at the end of one of our
workshops.
Nowadays, I usually do this as a part of a
presentation, where I begin or end it with a
performance. But come this december I'll be doing
a livecoding workshop in Mulhouse -- again as a
VJ'ing mechanism. Thanks to a recent post on the
Processing forum by Flo, I'll be using
Processing. We haven't figured out yet what to
use for the sound. I don't have the years of
experience coding Processing as I do with other
environments, so it'll probably be a learning
experience for myself as much as for the
participants.
--
/*
// Douglas Edric Stanley
<douglas_at_abstractmachine.net>
// Artiste
http://www.abstractmachine.net
// Professeur d'Arts numeriques, L'école supérieure d'art d'Aix-en-provence
http://www.ecole-art-aix.fr/
// Chercheur, Laboratoire Esthétique de l'interactivité, Université de Paris 8
http://www.ciren.org
*/
Received on Tue Apr 18 2006 - 09:08:07 BST