On Sun, 22 Feb 2004, alex wrote:
a> Hello
a>
a> Amy joined us -- welcome Amy! Her participation is limited by her lack
a> of time, but that's probably true of all of us to some extent. We're
a> not under any time pressure anyway.
a>
howdy all!
yes, i may have to lurk most of the time due to current realities, but i
am excited to join and will try tokeep up as much as i can.
some uber-brief intro to my interest in live coding performance. i spent
most of my growing-up years doing musical performances of various kinds.
eventually i wound up in film, video (real-time and not), computer
animation, unix systems administration, and media art projects made
through programming of various kinds. my first sys-admin performances were
by accident, because i used to get absorbed in what i was doing and type
very fast and suddenly look up to find all the animators in the lab where
i worked grinning at me.
anyway, being a leisure-oriented lazy person, i eventually got interested
in how computers were changing pop culture. i came to the conclusion that
while computers could be used for cool things like music and video, that
they'd brought the business paradigm with them into pop culture. so you
could go to a club and hear some great laptop techno music, but it could
look just like they were doing database programming. quite a shift from
sweaty guitar bands. so cool pop/leisure culture gets more boring; but on
the other hand, geek culture seems to get continually more cool and
mainstreamed. (case modding, slashdot, e.g.)
so anyway, somehow in all this i became a geek vj, trying to make club
culture "cool" by being an extra cool geek (tongue-in-cheek, more or
less.) so one thing i do in shows is try to be very performative about my
typing. (this is more explicit or less in various projects.)
so, i'm very interested in the performative aspects of live-coding.
live-coding can invert the usual electronic music performance assumptions
i think, because it's now coding-as-improv, i.e. live composition, rather
than software-usage as performance. (of course, there places in between
those two extremes, which alex and frederick have already mentioned.)
but anyway, seems like a good way in which a "geek approach" to computers
in pop culture can provide an ultimately less-nerdy alternative to the
traditional ways this integration has taken place.
so... some initial questions from me:
1) is this all about music? (e.g., i work from the visuals side of things.
then again, i'm not specifically live coding, either... )
2) are we interested in the performative aspects of live coding, the
conceptual aspects, or both? in other words, is the audience always made
aware of the live coding process? how? are the performers' displays shown
on screens? do we see their fingers typing?
2a) if we're interested in the audience's experience of the coding
performance - how much of this is about typing vs. coding? i remember from
alex's impromptul 5-minute coding performance at transmediale last year,
the audience was very excited to watch alex's cursor fly around in emacs.
fortunately, alex is not only a whiz at coding, but also moves like a
dancer in emacs. so now that's 3 things - coding well live, typing skill,
and a particularly visual facility with a text editor. do we separate
those issues? for the audience? for ourselves? what about lowly vim users
like me? ;-) ... and, how to address these issues without degenerating
into emacs/vi wars?
3) is live coding inclusive or competitive? i.e., does one need to be the
fastest, most proficient coder to do perform live? if so, it might prove
programming prowess but exclude people with interesting ideas and a feel
for live performance, but who aren't as quick at the programming end of
things. or, can both approaches be accomodated, for example, through
various types of languages?
a> > 'pure' live coding? is a syntax/ascii interface a requirement or is
a> > it more the way of working? what is significant for live coding
a> > then? where do we draw the line? some things to have in mind for the
a> > manifesto...
a>
a> It patching programming?
a>
4) from this question, as well as the issue of cubase sequences, it seems
to me that we've hit on the idea that the distinction between programmer
and user is really more of a continuum than a line in the sand. and after
all, programmers are users anyway, using C++, perl, various libraries,
etc.
a>
a> Limiting ourselves to ASCII (or even UTF8) seems arbitrary. But we
a> don't necessarily want to let people contruct sequences in cubase and
a> call that live programming!
a>
yeah, i'd also vote for keeping things as loose as possible, and then
providing some rationale for whatever admittedly-subjective line we decide
to draw (and that the line can be crossed for particular situations -
what if someone constructs a turing-complete language out of cubase
sequences? ;-) )
a> One idea we had was to have TOPLAP ratified programming languages and
a> programming methods, and a procedure that people would follow to get
a> their particular programming/performance environment ratified.
a>
i'm not sure i follow the rationale for this? it sounds a little like it
could create a feeling of an exclusive club to me like it could discourage
people from working in new directions... but maybe i missed something?
sorry if any/all of this is stuff that's been discussed already! i know it
can be weird when new people join a group and then bring up the same
things that have been gone over before... hoping to catch up soon! :-)
cu,
-_at_
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Received on Tue Feb 24 2004 - 00:28:47 GMT