dave's blog of art and programming

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Some random pictures from some excellent (and at times very loud) few days in Paris. Thanks to Sony Computer Science Labs and also the Paris contingent of the TPOLM demo crew for coming out to support us.

The gig was extensively recorded, so hopefully more about this soon.

TAI Studio Opening Documentary from LFSaw.de on Vimeo.

More context on the tai studio webpage. Includes my first gameboy ds livecoding performance with webcamera screen/fingers/stylus projection.

My first attempt at homebrew driven "touch" livecoding at the TAI studio opening event at the Helsinki Media Lab. The DS itself proved to be quite a draw for the audience, and I think the addition of hands and fingers to the projection of a livecoding interface is a (partly unintentional) move in a good direction.

Photos by Till Bovermann.

Betablocker DS is going to get it's premier outing at 4for8 at Helsinki Medialab this Thursday. This is an all new upside-down video:

Following on from the Pixelache Urban Projection Lab, we were invited to take part in the Tampere Architecture Week "Night of Lights" to brighten up a dark November Finnish evening. Luckily we didn't have to brave the -12 degree temperatures the whole time, as we had some protection in the form of a temporarily repurposed shop front (complete with christmas tree).

Antti Jadertpolm improvised live paintings (live-photoshop), creating images on the surface of the building - making a dense jungle grow gradually while populating it with animals and characters from warmer places. Miska Knapek visualised energy use taking data from the local energy company and converting it into a particle system, along with wind movement visualisation and some more abstract pieces. I improvised some from-scratch fluxus livecoding, the idea was to try different approaches for using movement to camouflage or distort the surface of the building.

Here is a video we assembled of our exploits:

Piksel 2010 (un)stable was the 8th piksel, and the second time I've been lucky enough to participate. I was there to present Naked on Pluto and general livecoding duties.

I didn't have as much time or energy to get involved with the other things going on as I'd have liked, so this is mainly a report on my activities. I did see a super talk by Audun Eriksen about the visual programming language scratch and it's use for teaching kids to make games - very inspiring stuff.

Scratch was where I started with the idea for scheme bricks, so it was great that the next day Alex and I had the functional livecoding workshop, where people could get their hands dirty with some of our live coding performance ideas.

This was followed in the evening by a slub performance, where we got a little carried away by the responsive audience and the rather nice sound system. It's always good to do performances with stuff you've done a workshop on earlier as the participants can put it in context (and tell other people what's going on!). The image is a link to a video of the performance on giss.tv.

The next day was a switch to Naked on Pluto with Aymeric and a presentation where we discussed clouds, problems with social media, farmville and the intricacies of the facebook graph api.

(pictures thanks to Régine Debatty)

It was great to get questions from people who have tried playing the game before seeing our talk. Hopefully this can be the case as we discuss the project more widely.

AltParty was really impressive. I love how in Finland the demo scene is vibrant and branching out to new areas. This is ESA Mars researcher and Winner of 2009 Move An Asteroid Competition Sini Merikallio describing how a solar sail works:

There were lots of people doing new things with old tech, hardware hacking and other investigations involving robots, rockets, games consoles and 3D printers. I was building programs from shapes that made sounds again (thanks to Till Bovermann for the photo):

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!