This Saturday I'm performing with a friend who's also called Alex, he's
going to play drums, processed by a weirdo max/msp patch he wrote and
which I don't understand fully. We are syncing (he's going to build up
loops) and communicating via OSC, for example I can send him a message
/change, which makes lights blink on his screen telling him that I'm
getting bored.
But I don't think we'll use that. I like to think of us as people
performing and playing using our different instruments, communicating
with each other through the sound rather than ethernet.
I once took part in a workshop that was based around people writing
software together, networking together their various coding environments
and then making a system based around idea of cocktail recipes. In the
end it didn't go very well, we spent the whole time working on the
technical aspects of networking max to perl to flash etc etc, and no
time doing anything particularly creative. In the end we mostly gave up
and concentrated on the making and drinking of real cocktails.
So beyond time synch I can't think if I've seen a good use of networking
in this kind of performance. Some success stories of this type of thing
would be good to hear though...
By the way, I'm having a lot of success with my decision to remove the
save function from my editor. Last night we did four run-throughs and
each one was completely different. It's great working without having
any structures pre-defined, starting from ideas in my head.
However, at the end of every run-through I'm left with some processes
running which I might really like, and then have to kill them knowing
that I'll never be able to recreate them quite the same again.
alex
Received on Thu Jul 15 2004 - 18:47:11 BST