dave’s blog of art and programming

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The most gloriously aptly named festival for livecoding I’ve ever seen, the Lambda Festival in Antwerp this weekend will see quite a lot of action from Slub. Firstly we are VJing on the Saturday, then the first ever Scheme Bricks workshop on Sunday followed by a performance in the evening.

I’m still trying to work out exactly how to livecode this, but I’ve written a little language for building robots in fluxus:

(Audio: “Dang Spot” by Plaid)

These fellows were premiered at Lazy Sunday yesterday, raving to DJ Conehead’s early 90s hardcore techno lushness.

The idea (inspired by Gabor Papp’s marching maggots) was to make a high level language in fluxus which takes care of all the physics operations – automatically creating active objects and joints in ODE. The code can be found here.

This weekend it’s Lazy Sunday (organised by the The Planet of Leather Moomins) – a distributed streamed festival from Helsinki, London, New York, Paris, Stockholm, Barcelona, Montreal – well you get the idea… I’m going to be doing some visuals livecoding, possibly something very new, which usually means it won’t work properly!

My last update from pixelache is about the urban projection lab Miska Knapek, Ville Hyvönen and I were doing on Saturday night during Earth Hour. Despite not being allowed to turn the streetlights off and some heavy rain, our projector base station/van managed to beam images through the night onto the Finnish national theater building. My contribution was some specially adapted plants from the groworld code base:

Thanks to Ville for the last image. More images of the other projections are here and here.

The Kansallisteatteri is the Finnish National Theatre, and thanks to Miska Knapek and Ville Hyvönen I have the opportunity to try a quick bit of building projection as part of the Pixelache festival. I’m going to try growing plants from bits of the building that seeds would be able to rest on (i.e. any upward facing surfaces):

This is a test animation for the growing – they look quite a lot better now, but I like the style of this movie:

Here’s the first full solo performance I’ve tried with scheme bricks – I missed Alex’s sounds but it’s great footage, thanks go to the goto10 streaming/recording crew. More of my thoughts on the festival in general here.

Back from Groningen, and my mind is full of all sorts of crazy ideas after GOTO10’s mini festival. Although mini in size, the quality of this event was very high.

The day after arriving, Gabor and I did our best to introduce our workshop participants to livecoding and fluxus, from the basics of scheme to some more visually juicy aspects:

The next day the roles were reversed as we took part in workshops lead by some of the previous day’s participants. This was the ’speed geeking’ event, we had 30 minutes to learn about a new project and contribute something towards it before moving on to the next. We looked at games as explorations of the struggle between supermarkets and open markets, by playing and helping to refine the rules of a boardgame prototype designed by Selena Savic. There was also a creative strategy involving recycling digital trash by Loredana Bontempi called ddump. I recycled a presentation using open office into a glorious piece of digital art. Then Emanuele Bonetti showed us a new way of sharing image references called pickpic which promoted online collaboration. This was a good format for fast presentation of ideas – I think the time was short enough to keep it slightly chaotic and therefore giving it a fresh, informal feeling.

The evening ended with ‘Petcha Gnucha’ mixing up presentations of work from the Piet Zwart Institute with Groningen’s Frank Mohr Institute.

On Saturday there were talks themed around ‘Hocus Pocus’. Martin Howse discussed the concepts surrounding his island2 installation which was being shown in the sign gallery. He took us on a journey through ideas of protected or hidden spaces including stenography, kernel security rings and software design tied to themes of vampirism, pornography, plague and classical concepts of concealment. Dmytri Kleiner gave a talk looking at how political ideologies tend to attach to different network topologies, what it could mean to be a venture communist and why the world needs them. Finally Florian Cramer made a passionate call for digital art to return to the critical, comparing the work of Constant Dullaart (superb name for an artist, can’t be real) with Heath Bunting’s Own, Be Owned, or Remain Invisible.

In the evening it was our turn (IOhannes Zmölnig, no copy paste and I) to livecode for the enjoyment of those equipped with headphones at the placard concert.

I have some footage of my performance, but it’ll have to wait for the moment. I should also mention Breakfast club – which was an approach to try and document discussions about the previous day’s events the morning after. The theory being that you can lure people into a situation involving cameras and microphones by the deployment of freshly baked croissants first thing in the morning. This worked well to get discussion going between the different groups, and is something I’d like to see used more at other events.

This week it’s finally time for:

At Sign gallery Groningen, the Netherlands. I’m going to be doing a fluxus workshop with Gabor and a scheme bricks placard performance – the first one I’ve tried solo, I think!

chmod +x art The computer as theatre, as writer of love letters, the computer as world, a place for revolution, art as executable. chmod +x art presents artists that turn our ideas, dreams and fantasies about machines and code up side down and show programming as an infinitely intriguing way of creating. Code is a medium. Whether it is used to formulate instructions for a machine, ideas for people or both. The writing of it influences and shapes the creative process of the artist. For that reason, ghost programmers may be left at home. Besides the importance of writing code yourself, it is essential to show that code. Without source, software art remains a magic trick. Do It Yourself and show us your sh*t!

Live coding dissections by Michele Pasin, Wrongheaded, Thor Magnusson, Slub and Evan + Jag at Kings College Anatomy Museum on the 14th of January, more info here.