I thought it might be useful to offer some brief feedback from my
fiancee, who was sitting in the audience, and has no knowledge of
programming and observed the performance from a musical and conceptual
perspective. I'm also including my thoughts on these points in order to
offer some sort of useful critique. It should also be noted that my
fiancee does not hesitate to let her opinions known, even when critical
- so I'm certain these aren't very biased. :-) However, do remember
these are purely her and my opinions and may not reflect the entire
audience's feelings.
She felt the discussion and exploration of livecoding was fascinating
and worthwhile, and had no problems understanding what was happening
(although not necessarily on a 'this code does that' level). Encouraged
through our remarks that we'd be listening to each other however, she
felt this was clearly not happening during the performance - and with a
bit of hindsight I somewhat grudgingly agree with her. She mentioned
other people in the audience discussed this too. There was tremendous
concentration and some of us were very good at working together, but at
times the music suffered from the tendency of an individual to become
too introverted with their own work, and as such the entire performance
didn't gel together too well. In response, I'd add that given this was
our first performance together, perhaps this isn't a surprise - but the
matter of collaborating on a piece of music is a different matter to
getting a piece of software working nicely, and maybe some of us (me
included) need to work harder on this.
Another major point of concern was that of the visuals. From her
remarks, I get the feeling that anything that might be considered
obfuscatory detracted from the performance. Whilst she appreciated
seeing lots of people's work throughout the performance, and enjoyed
the variety and diversity of techniques, there was a tendency for some
people's visuals to be lost in the chaos of others. This is a very
tricky issue since everybody is using different systems and we knew
this might happen. I don't think she's referring necessarily to the
"white-on-black vs. black-on-white" issue here, but more to the actual
content and animations. Perhaps some separation between specific visual
treatments is needed, in order to highlight specific things happening,
and allowing those with very dynamic visuals to showcase their work.
This segues into the final point, which was of musical separation and
themeing. A large jam like this is naturally chaotic but there should
be individuals who, at times, take the lead and run with a theme that
influences the other players - a bit like a jazz improv-soloist. We
didn't have anything like this and as a result I think our performance
was a little stale given it was approaching two hours long. I had an
idea that we could have a conductor, who allows individuals to run with
a theme alongside the other players for a little bit, can control the
visuals, and generates a narrative that the audience can follow. This
doesn't mean that a large all-hands-on jam can't happen, but that an
audience that concentrates for such a long time requires some diversity
in style and approach that is hard to achieve when most people are
playing at once. Our audience was remarkably patient and from what I
understand, we tested that patience a little.
On the positive side (phew!), the little details seemed to make a bit
difference. Writing instructions to the audience to get them to
participate was a good move and very enjoyable apparently, and
conceptually the ideas explored were surprisingly accessible and well
received. We demonstrated a great cross-section of possibilities and I
think more than justified the practice of livecoding to an uninitiated
audience.
Hope this is constructive in some way. Fun fun!
--
Ade
On 15 Feb 2005, at 10:57 am, Dave Griffiths wrote:
> On Tue, 15 Feb 2005 08:37:59 +0000, Nick Collins wrote
>> I guess we survived then?
>>
>>>> Woo woo, bring it!
>
> so, any reports on the events of transmediale for those of us slackers
> not
> present? :)
>
> were there shouts of joy at the performer's keyboard skillz, or boos of
> disbelief? where is livecoding heading? are we all to be replaced by
> the
> latest artificially generated live C# programmers from microsoft?
>
> laters,
>
> dave
>
Received on Tue Feb 15 2005 - 14:52:18 GMT