dave’s blog of art and programming

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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!

A script that uses some material from last weeks intensive writing sweatshop. We generated a huge amount of nonsense of varying degrees, most of which didn’t make it into the novel and went into a “waste dump”. This text was exploited for the performances in various ways, my attempt picks words from the text and connects them together with a 3D spring model graph – a sort of parallel to what my mind was doing while taking part. The code is here.

Edit – finally managed to upload a video of this…

I’ve released a new version of the fastbreeder genetic programming synth, mostly just an update by Atte André Jensen to keep it building on newer compilers.

Exquisite_Code.. February 15 – 19th & 20th 2010.. 10-6pm daily.. E:vent Gallery, 96 Teesdale St. London. E2.. 8 Writers pitched 8 hours a day for 5 days against despotic edit-code.. Yield: one book.. Print. Launch. Read. Evaluate.

Forget insulation from the cold nagging existential doubt or refuge in stories comforting the General Intellect; a dark Forest of Things is foregrounded in exquisite_code, a radical constructivist experiment that hothouses a collaborative writing production.

Eight international writers will work eight hours a day for five days generating text-prompts, text and edit-software in unrelenting micro-sessions to create a cadaverous exquisite_code life-novel . Text will be produced in response to prompts conspired by the writers at the end of each session. But only after bespoke edit-software has wormed its way through it, cutting, chewing and spitting gobbets of the text into a dump from which the life-novel will be elaborated. This edit-worm is itself interrogated and re-written in scheduled code writing sprints by the writers. At all times all participants are available for public scrutiny and interaction, and all writing will be on live display whilst continuously extruded as hardcopy from line printers.

The event will culminate in a Saturday night exquisite_code LAUNCH PARTY (7.30 -11.30pm) on 20th February at E:vent Gallery with extracts of the novel presented to the public through human-machine readings, performances and detournements made by participants from the week’s accumulated materials. Publication of all code, prompts and final text will be by way of print-on-demand publication in collaboration with Mute.

Leif Elggren [SWE] writer/artist/performer; Mara Goldwyn [US] writer/performer; Dave Griffiths [UK/FI] artist/coder/performer; Brendan Howell [US/DE] writer/coder/artist; Jonathan Kemp [UK] writer/artist; Laura Oldfield Ford [UK] writer/artist; Eleanora Oreggia [IT/NL] writer/coder/artist/performer; Sabrina Small [US] writer/artist; / with additional performances from Martin Howse [UK/DE]; Preslav Literary School [UK/DE]; and Ryan Jordan [UK]

E:vent Gallery is near Bethnal Green Tube Station. Buses 106, 254, 253, 48 and 55 pass close by. see http://www.eventnetwork.org.uk/contact.

This is an exquisite_code production in collaboration with E:vent Gallery, London, Openmute.org, and supported by Arts Council England.

http://www.eventnetwork.org.uk/events/exquisitecode
http://exquisite-code.com

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.

My first flash/haxe app, which I found really fun to make. Click on the code to change the instructions, and on the cubes to activate or deactivate triggers – there is only one robot and one sample (808 handclap) working for the moment. Here’s more about the al jazari project.

[update - added some more samples]
[update #2 - more robots and more sounds, click on the robots to edit their code]

The source code and textures are here.

Last thursday was shuntcode in the vaults under london bridge station. Alex and I livecoded a pretty satisfying acid inspired set, on the impossibly high stage.

Thanks to mr pixelpusher for the pic. My photos of the other excellent livecoding shenanigans are here.