Computer Music Journal – Special Issue on Live Coding – Call for Submissions
by Alex on April 24, 2012
I’m guest editing an issue of the Computer Music Journal on live coding together with Julian Rohrhuber and Nick Collins. Really excited about this already, despite the submissions deadline being some eight months away from now.. The call for proposals is below. We are excited to announce a call for papers for a special issue of [...]
Live Notation first performance
by Alex on April 4, 2012
A couple of weekends ago I collaborated on a performance with Hester Reeve at the LoveBytes festival for the Live Notation project. As I was struggling with my new “smoothdirt” live coding language, Hester moved around the cinema carrying out actions including with bells, pebbles in her mouth and a large rock. This aspect seems [...]
smoothdirt
by Alex on March 14, 2012
I’ve got some sounds out of my new live coding system, codenamed “smoothdirt”. Here’s an mp3 for you. The sounds are triggered with some C and structured and scheduled with some Haskell. Plenty more to do, but already really happy hearing embedded juxtoposition of timescales, smooth multichannel panning (2 channels in this test, but I’m playing [...]
PhD Thesis: Artist-Programmers and Programming Languages for the Arts
by Alex on February 22, 2012
With some minor corrections done, my thesis is finally off to the printers. I’ve made a PDF available, and here’s the abstract: We consider the artist-programmer, who creates work through its description as source code. The artist-programmer grandstands computer language, giving unique vantage over human-computer interaction in a creative context. We focus on the human [...]
Motivation
by Alex on February 15, 2012
Now here’s an hour well spent, Bret Victor giving a talk on “Inventing on Principle”: He demos some really nice experiments in live interfaces, including some javascript live coding with a nice implementation of time scrubbing. He uses this great work as an illustration for his main point though, which is about why he has done [...]
Live notation
by Alex on January 30, 2012
I’m really excited to be working with Hester Reeve on a project funded by the AHRC digital transformations call, bringing together live artists and live coders for a dialogue, hopefully leading to new ideas and approaches within both fields. Live artists work with their body as a medium, and live coders work with abstract symbols, and it will [...]
Events and things
by Alex on August 26, 2011
Had a really great time at dorkcamp, and have a couple of more things coming up… Despite now living in three different cities, slub will manage to perform together on 30th September in La Maison Rouge Paris, as part of the Sony CSL 15th anniversary. Really looking forward to this one. Then on 28th October [...]
Pitter patter
by Alex on April 4, 2011
Experimenting with webcam overlay. Video recorded using gstreamer, source for screencaster here (screensave.c). UPDATE, here’s another from a different angle to appease douglas.
Cyclic revision control
by Alex on March 30, 2011
There is something about artist-programmers, the way they’re caught using general purpose languages and tools in specific, unusual circumstances. Many of the basic assumptions underlying the development of these general purpose systems, such as errors are bad, the passing of time need not be structured only minimised, standards and pre-defined plans are good, etc, often [...]