I got a couple of kind mentions etc lately: Dazed and Confused May issue – an interview with Stephen Fortune about live coding and algorave, see the photo over there for proof, and I’ll post the full text here once it’s off the shelves. I got a mention in a lovely article “coding the software/art nexus” [...]
Women in computer music
by Alex on March 6, 2013
(An earlier version of this post was directed at some other events in addition to mine, but these references turned out to be factually incorrect and more upsetting for the people involved than I could have imagined, partly because they have been working tirelessly and successfully to address the below concerns. Sincere apologies.) Here’s an [...]
Transient and ephemeral code
by Alex on March 4, 2013
Be sure to read the comments – Sam Aaron makes some important corrective points… The below left as documentation of thinking-in-progress. There is now an exciting resurgence of interest in live programming languages within certain parts of the software engineering and programming language theory community. In general the concerns of liveness from “programming experience design” and [...]
Real programming
by Alex on February 19, 2013
On to another point I tried to make at the Node forum, perhaps not too well.. That perhaps that the usual conception of “real programming” is misconceived. (I have a nagging feeling that I’m going to regret writing this post, but here goes..) Programming is generally conceived in terms of professional programmers, implementing software for [...]
What is embodied programming?
by Alex on February 18, 2013
I had a great time at the Node Forum in Frankfurt this weekend. I got to meet my software art hero Julian Oliver finally, who gave an excellent and provocative talk on the technological ideology of seamlessness from a critical engineering perspective. Kyle McDonald gave an excellent related talk on the boundaries between on-line and off-line life, [...]
We have no idea what we are doing: exclusion in free software culture
by Alex on April 10, 2012
The following is a live post which includes some strong statements which I might temper later. If anyone asks, I do know what I’m doing and understand recursion just fine. There’s an interesting thread on the eightycolumn mailing list on gender and exclusion in free software, which has prompted me to write up some thoughts [...]
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 [...]
Computational thinking
by Alex on January 11, 2012
Some great news today that the UK school ICT programme is going to be replaced/updated with computer science. As far as I can tell a lot of schools have actually been doing this stuff already with Scratch, but this means targeting teacher training for broader roll-out. This has immediately triggered bike shedding about the issue [...]
There must be no generative, procedural or computational art
by Alex on January 1, 2012
This blog entry feels like a work in progress, so feedback is especially encouraged. Lately I’ve been considering a dichotomy running through the history of computer art. On one side of the dichotomy, consider this press statement from SAP, the “world’s leading provider of business software”, on sponsoring a major interactive art group show at [...]