I made a possible candidate for the TOPLAP dvd project – I took some time to get the audio visual sync working properly, which makes it (possibly) a little clearer what’s going on.
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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.
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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.
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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:
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More work on Betablocker DS. Note playback cues work (after spending some time scratching my head over the affine transformations on the nds). I find these essential for visual feedback when livecoding. I also appear to be maxing out the graphics chip, which fails pleasingly gracefully – stopping rendering rather than framing out – some parts of sprites disappear in hectic areas of the screen keeping the framerate constant (wish OpenGL would do that).
A lot of the code needs cleaning up (quite a bit of lazy floating point stuff to be removed) but it’s starting to feel a bit on the finished side. Just need to learn how to play it now: code & rom.
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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.
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Some schemebricks hacking in preparation for a workshop I’m doing with Alex McLean at Piksel in a few weeks. This is just a case of making it work a little bit more like you’d expect – messing with empty parentheses:
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I’ve been preparing an Al Jazari installation (split screen, 4 player livecoding action) for the funware exhibition at MU – part of the STRP festival. Due to various difficulties with my nordic location, we’ve decided to try getting it running on a bootable USB stick, which I can send via post, and can be run on any computer with no setup required (other than plugging in the gamepads). We will see how this turns out.
Using pure:dyne it was much easier to set up than I’d anticipated. Using this operating system as a base, which helpfully includes fluxus and fluxa already – I could add the script, textures and samples for the installation to the user data partition of the usb stick.
Then I added a .xprofile script to the home directory of the default user (lintian) containing:
cd /live/image/al-jazari-inst
./start
Where “start” is another bash script which does most of the startup work:
./stop # kills all the processes involved to make sure we don't clash
xrandr --output VGA1 --mode 1024x768 # force a maximum resolution
xset dpms 0 0 0 # turn off the hardware screen blanking
xset s 0 # turn of software screen blanking
sleep 2 # I'm a bit overzealous with these pauses perhaps
jackd -R -t 4999 -dalsa -r44100 -p4096 -n3 -P -s -o2 -S & # start jack
sleep 2
fluxa & # start fluxus's audio server/synth
sleep 2
./bin/oscjoy 127.0.0.1:4444 & # run the joypad to osc program
sleep 2
# run fluxus with hidden mouse, full screen and execute script on startup
fluxus -hm -fs -x aljazari-mp.scm
Notice that fluxus blocks (no & at the end of the line). This prevents the window manager starting up, which means fluxus is running directly on X. Puredyne runs a very minimal wm by default (xfwm4) so the reason isn’t really performance, but rather that there are no window positioning algorithms to mess up when fluxus goes full screen, or decorations or borders either.
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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):
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