I enjoyed this thoughtful and insightful essay very much.
perhaps there is a spectacle in seeing livecoders wrestle with time
constraints? Juggling their real-time and compose-time.
The most successful performances I've seen so far seem to have involved
small groups of coders, usually a duo, (10, as in transmediale was probably
too unwieldy without lots of rehearsal discipline) where one artist can
play much more in real-time while the other is in idea-time and then they
can swap. Covering each other's algorithmic backs...
I often cheat outrageously, because I'm too busy in something like klipp av
to allocate any real idea-time. The best I can offer is some variation on
an existing algorithm where the improvisation seems to allow it within the
large-scale time constraints.
But my best live coding has always occurred when there is someone else
there, who can take away the moment to moment demands of the audio (video)
output audience while I fall into algorithm-world and fabricate. Coming
back up from such constructions, I am ready to perform in real-time more
effectively while someone else submerges.
--On Friday, August 12, 2005 4:18 pm +0100 alex <alex_at_slab.org> wrote:
>
> I've been thinking about how difficult the relationship between time and
> programming is. In fact I've been thinking that certain kinds of
> programming might happen outside of time. When programming, it often
> doesn't feel as though I'm working towards a whole, but that I've
> started with a whole in my head and am jumping around it until I've
> visited and described every part of it, at which point it exists in an
> executable state inside the computer. It doesn't feel like a journey,
> more like the simultaneous setting together of different pieces. When a
> program is complete, it's a surprise, a snapping out as I realise there
> is nothing more to do, a snapping back in to linear time as I prepare to
> run the program I've written.
>
> However while I'm programming I'm getting a bit older, and so are the
> people around me. So if during a performance I step out of time to see
> an idea as a whole timeless structure and transfer it into a computer,
> where does that leave co-performers, or indeed the audience?
>
> Somehow part of me still has to be aware of the music that is developing
> while another part of me is in the timeless world of programming.
> Livecoding compounds the problem - the program is executing linearly
> while I am thinking non-linearly.
>
> I think this is why my from-scratch livecoding in a musical
> collaboration and/or in front of an audience hasn't been successful -
> composing from scratch within the constraints of a live performance has
> been too much to deal with - mixing non-linear thought with linear
> thought. It's too hard to have a big idea and then find a way to
> program it that allows a sound to gradually develop - because my thought
> process of programming hasn't been linear. Much easier to start with
> something I've made earlier and make variations on largely pre-meditated
> developments.
>
> On another theme, Nick often talks about the "haptic rate," if I
> understand correctly this is the ratio between our bodies and the speed
> at which we can trigger sounds with them. With the livecoding systems
> I've found so far, it takes many seconds if not minutes to go from
> decision to action - very high latency - but then that action can
> trigger many other actions at speeds at the very limits of our senses.
> So we've exchanged awesome speed for dreadful lag. This is made all the
> more difficult because the lag doesn't exist for the composer, who is
> too concerned with relating their non-linear composition to the computer
> to really sense the time they are using.
>
> Perhaps the problem I keep hitting on here is that the composition isn't
> born only inside the programmer's head but also in the computer. In
> this way of looking at things the programmer starts with a small
> fragment of an idea, and builds it through small actions to and
> reactions from the composition as it grows inside the computer.
>
> How do others feel about time while they are programming?
>
> alex
>
>
Received on Sat Aug 13 2005 - 09:05:37 BST