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 [...]
Attending to presentation slides
by Alex on August 26, 2011
I had some fun with my talk at ICMC earlier this month. I started in the usual way with an outline slide, going through bullet points one by one outlining the structure of my talk. Importantly, I tried to talk continuously while the slide was up. On the next slide was a picture of a [...]
Workshop output
by Alex on February 7, 2011
The Text live coding workshop went really well, surprisingly well considering it was the first time anyone apart from me had used it and (so I found out after) most of the participants didn’t have any programming experience. The six participants took to the various combinators surprisingly quickly, the main stumbling block being getting the [...]
Text update and source
by Alex on January 31, 2011
I’ve updated Text a bit to improve the visual representation of higher order types (you’d probably need to full screen to view): I won’t be touching this until after the workshop on Saturday. I’ve also made the source for the visual interface available here under the GPLv3 free license. To get it actually working as [...]
Text
by Alex on December 13, 2010
Text is a experimental visual language under development. Code and docs will appear here at some point, but all I have for now is this video of a proof of concept. It’s basically Haskell but with syntax based on proximity in 2D space, rather than adjacency. Type compatible things connect automatically, made possible though Haskell’s [...]
Visualisation of Live Code
by Alex on May 29, 2010
I wrote a paper with Dave Griffiths and Nick Collins on the visualisation of live code, exploring ideas around live coding interfaces, accepted for the EVA London 2010 conference in July. A HTML version is below, or see the PDF Preprint. Alex McLean (Goldsmiths), Dave Griffiths (FoAM), Nick Collins (University of Sussex) and Geraint Wiggins [...]
Acid sketching
by Alex on November 8, 2009
I’ve been thinking about visual languages and the morphology of symbols (as opposed to words) for a while. I had the opportunity to start putting some of these ideas into code at a really excellent openframeworks workshop this week, run by Joel Gethin Lewis and Arturo Castro. Here’s what it does: Makes the point nicely [...]
Mary Hallock-Greenewalt
by Alex on March 24, 2009
“Broadly, it is my desire to express emotions by means of timed variations of light and color in a manner analogous to that employed in the art of music. Such expression may either be for its own sake, or … as an accompaniment.” In 1906, about 40 years after the invention of the commercial light [...]
Rhythm space
by Alex on April 18, 2008
I’m working with Jamie Forth on ideas around spaces of rhythm. Here’s a demo (which might not work in feed readers): [kml_flashembed movie="http://doc.gold.ac.uk/~ma503am/software/space/audio.swf" height="300" width="400" bgcolor="#000000" /] The space has two quality dimensions, “intensity” (X) and “disorder” (Y). Drum patterns are arranged along these dimensions, so more intense ones are towards the left and more [...]
Textual patching
by Alex on January 7, 2008
I wrote a perl script that allows you to compose puredata patches in a text editor. You define the patch using ASCII art like this: *————————* | .——–. \ .-x——–. | osc~ 5 | * | osc~ 500 | `-x——’ | `-x——–’ | | | .-x——. | | | *~ 300 | | | `-x——’ | *—* | | | *————* .-x——. | *~ 0.2 | `-x——’ | * |\ | * | | .-x-x–. | dac~ | `——’ Then run the Perl script over it to produce [...]