The first UK focus group/game testing session for Germination X will take place at the “Loading” gaming cafe in Falmouth, Cornwall on the 28th March at 18.00!

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I spent thursday afternoon in the tangible auditory interfaces studio at the Helsinki Media Lab with Till Bovermann and Erich Berger. Till has a report on our investigations of taking the Betablocker virtual machine into new noisemaking territories.

Here is an example of a betablocker program written without the help of the graphical programming interface, by poking heap memory directly to create a simple sawtooth oscillator:

// begin LFSaw
    u32 threadID = m.add_thread(23);

    m.poke(23, ORG);
    m.poke(24, PIP);
    m.poke(25, 6);
    m.poke(26, JMP);
    m.poke(27, 1);
// end

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How I imagine Matisse’s cutouts to feel like (Drag mouse over)

Code

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I spent last weekend in Berlin, on Saturday we has a fluxus workshop at pickled feet where I introduced livecoding and fluxus, and then had a quick play with the groworld game prototypes.

On Sunday I tried some audience participation livecoding. I think it went quite well, people were playing al jazari quite happily from the moment I got it set up, so I never really got the chance to explain anything – but it didn’t seem to matter too much. I just joined in with them, first doing some classic fluxus livecoding using the sounds they generated, then accompanying them with scheme bricks and finally al jazari myself, where I messed around with the bpm a bit too much and broke everything (slightly on purpose…)

I’d like to explore this form of audience inclusive performance more, I think it could work better if I was more in an audience role myself and not a separate entity – there is a bit of a performer/audience barrier to overcome.

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I’ve been a bit slack on the blogging front lately, but my excuse is that I’ve been doing a lot!

Firstly slub had a gig at the Slade Technology Faire where we were joined by Jamie Forth on supercollider percussion duties.

Then I went to Futuresonic09 to present groworld as part of their Environment 2.0 theme. They also had a exhibition in Manchester’s Cube gallery, where I took some pictures.

My favourite thing at futuresonic was Rob Bailey’s paper insects – there were 5000 of them swarming in the gallery, and every visitor was given one in their welcome pack as a free artwork. Following on from the environment theme, each one was cut out of last year’s futuresonic paper brochures.

Today is the TakeAway Festival at the DANA centre in South Kensington – and slub is performing to end the live events tonight. The gallery installations, which include Pitch control by Marcus Lyall and Evan Raskob continue for another week.

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My new art blog.

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