On Tue, 2004-02-24 at 14:33, Adrian Ward wrote:
> Hear hear. If I may digress slightly, and bring in another related
> consideration we mustn't lose sight of:
> There is considerable snobbery amongst coders, even amongst friends.
> There are too many misconceptions, and too much rivalry between skill
> sets. There were raised eyebrows in the audience in Hamburg when it was
> revealed that I use REALbasic to make music. Later, over food, there
> was considerable surprise that whilst Alex is the "perl one" and I was
> "REALbasic one", I was the one who wrote the slub sound engine in C.
> Heavens above! I know how to use gcc as well as a mouse. How did that
> happen? Coders are the worse at this. Not even stroppy prima donna
> artists do it.
Is REALbasic really frowned upon that much? I guess it's a Macintosh
culture thing.
I think the same unfounded snobbery can be found upon other artistic
mediums however - for example painting, watercolours and so on (we both
know the disrespect that the various flavours of fine arts student
discord to each other in badly managed academic situations...). I guess
the problem is that a medium becomes embedded in a culture, and gets
dumb stereotypes attached. Then you get the conformists reinforcing the
stereotypes.
> Amy asked if we should be inclusive or competitive. I suggest we need
> to be inclusive (fairly obviously given my experience), but let's be
> careful that we dont endorse or promote any particular practice, since
> it'd be easy for that to be misconstrued in the eyes of a community of
> coders who are conditioned to judge by tools alone. My line is that
> it's not the tools that are of interest, but how you use them.
I agree. How can we define "live coding" in these terms?
We could take the runme.org approach, of challenging what we disagree
with by taking it to ridiculous levels. So having a page for officially
ratified TOPLAP live coding performance systems and having thousands of
languages in there.
Anyway - we are talking about performance, and for me an essential part
of being audience to a musical performance (for example) is seeing the
movements that make the music. It connects me physically with the
music. If I went to see a violinist and he turned his back on me so I
couldn't see his fingers move, I'd wonder why I didn't just buy a CD
instead.
So in relation to live coding, movement needs to be visible. So seeing
a mouse being moved or a keyboard being tapped at does help. But even
better is seeing the processes move. Nick and Fred's joint visual +
audio performances seem like an ideal. But letting your screen be seen,
so that the movements within the interface can be seen exposes more of
the process. The audience might not understand any more of the process
(watching a guitarist perform doesn't help a non-musician learn about
chord structures), but they are nevertheless allowed to witness
movements of musical processes.
The only alternative in my opinion is to have a dance floor, so that the
audience adds the movements themselves. The non-alternative is to
instead sell recordings so that the audience can listen how they like (I
don't believe people really want to sit listening to music in expensive
theatres at some random point within a stereo field sitting next to
sniffing, coughing strangers).
alex
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Received on Tue Feb 24 2004 - 16:15:53 GMT