Rumour has it that I may be something to do with the new ChordPunch label, which is promoting algorithmic music for ears and feet. Be careful not to get emotionally attached to any of the chordpunch output, their music, artist roster and administrative staff have algorithmic components in certain cases.
ChordPunch
September 3rd, 2011Events and things
August 26th, 2011Had 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 I’m honoured to be invited by Aarhus University to give a talk on Artist-Programmers.
On the 15th March 2012 I’m doing some kind of live coding performance at the Life Centre in Newcastle although details aren’t set for that yet.
I’ll also be co-organising another dorkbotsheffield in the next month or so.
That’s it for now..
Attending to presentation slides
August 26th, 2011I 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 boy throwing a stone into the sea, I talked about it for a while, making the point that it was easy to perceive the image while listening to my voice. The audience hopefully found they could attend simultaneously to the visual scene and my linguistic speech.
I then skipped back to the previous slide and pointed out that the outline slide actually had little to do with what I had been saying. Here’s the contents of that first slide:
- A live coding talk towards the end of the conference
- Some strange programming languages were shown
- He made a point about cognition that I didn’t quite get
- The demo didn’t work out too well
- I was a bit tired but he seemed to be trying to say something about syntax
This got some laughs. There were quite a lot of people in the room, and the slide had been up for a while, but as far as I could gather no-one had managed to read any of it. My contention was that they couldn’t read it while listening to my voice, it’s too difficult to attend to two streams of language at once. I didn’t really know what would happen, but from talking to audience members afterwards it seems at least some people got a sense that something was wrong, but couldn’t work out what it was until I told them.
This was a nice practical demonstration of Dual Coding theory, and lead into my argument for greater integration between visual and linguistic elements of computer languages. However there’s probably a point in there about the design of presentation slides. If you want people to listen to what you’re saying, put short prompts on your slides, but not real sentences, because the audience won’t be able read them while listening to your voice.
Bricolage programming example
July 24th, 2011I wrote this for the PPIG newsletter last year, but as there has been a hold-up in publishing the newsletter, I’ve put it here:
My paper for PPIG 2010 was about bricolage programmers, in
particular artists who write software without any clear plan, but just
reacting to the results of each edit. From feedback it is clear that
the paper could have done with a decent case study, so I thought I’d
contribute the following example to this newsletter. This is not
meant to illustrate great art, or indeed great programming, but just
to act as a talking point when discussing alternative approaches of
programming. Full versions of the examples are available
on sketchpatch.
Imagine a visual artist, programming their work using the Processing
environment, a language based on Java. They begin with an urge to
draw superimposed curved lines, and come up with the following
program, shown with its output:
 |
|
On seeing the output, they are struck first by how hairy it looks,
but then by the suggestion of a scribble. They decide that they are
interested in the latter, and change their program to join the curves
together, removing the hairiness and accentuating the scribble:
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|
The artist reflects upon the letter-like quality of the scribble
forms, and decides to try writing letters across the page, grouped
into word-like forms:
-
float letterSpace = 30;
-
-
float rx() { return(random(letterSpace + 10)); }
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float ry() { return(random(height - 10)); }
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int rWordlen() { return(3 + int(random(4))); }
-
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void draw() {
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background(255);
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int letters = (int) (width / letterSpace) - 4;
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int wordLen = rWordlen();
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int word = 0;
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float x = rx(); float y = ry();
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for (int letter = 0; letter < letters; ++letter) {
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float ox = letter * letterSpace + word * letterSpace;
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if (wordLen– == 0) {
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wordLen = rWordlen();
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word++;
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}
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for (int i = 0; i < 3; ++i) {
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float x1 = rx() + ox; float y1 = ry();
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bezier(x, y, rx() + ox, ry(), rx() + ox, ry(), x1, y1);
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x = x1; y = y1;
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}
-
}
-
}
The output has a handwritten quality, almost appearing to be readable,
a quality of `automatic writing’ used by mystics to supposedly channel
the spirit world. This may bring further conceptual development in
our artist’s mind, but at this point we leave will them pondering.
Programming of the Art Computer
July 8th, 2011After getting frustrated with trying to have a discussion about programming languages within the confines of twitter, I made a mailing list, mentioned it to a few people and suddenly 100 people appeared. It’s called potac, Programming of the Art Computer, with the topic being the design of (rather than the use of) programming languages for the arts. It’s unmoderated, but it’s well worth browsing the archives to get a feel for the topic before diving in.
Events
June 18th, 2011
Live at Vex, Portland Works
Still a bit busy with work & thesis, but had a great time last week at the first dorkbotsheffield, and played to a very nice bunch of people at Vex, Portland Works. Here’s some more things I’m going to:
On Monday the 4th July I’m in Newcastle at a BCS HCI Workshop on Music Interaction presenting a paper with Dan Stowell (who sadly can’t make it). Later that same day I’m presenting at dorkbotnewcastle about future directions in live coding.
On Saturday 16th July it’s the Sheffield Placard Headphone Festival which I’m co-organising with the excellent Access Space. The line-up is looking excellent, still after a few more performers though…
At the start of August it’s the International Computer Music Conference, I’ll be at most of that, particularly looking ofrward to the unconference .
Then 18th-22nd August it’s the legendary dorkcamp, this time in the Lake District. This year dorkcamp will be a collaboration between dorkbotlondon, dorkbotsheffield and hopefully other nearby dorkbots. Hope to see you there!
New job + thesis progress
May 12th, 2011I’m looking forward to getting started as a research assistant (or associate, not sure) with the OAK group at Sheffield University, working with Simon Tucker on a linked data project for the next six months. Well 80% of me will be doing that, the other 20% will be getting my thesis finished… Speaking of which, feedback on my first thesis draft has been very helpful so far and generally positive, although I need to work on the more traditional elements (introduction, conclusion, methodology…).
ICMC paper and Sheffield headphone fest
April 28th, 2011A couple of updates, firstly I’ve had a long paper accepted to ICMC in Huddersfield, namely Texture: Visual Notation for Live Coding of Pattern. That’s a link to a preprint which I won’t finally submit for a week or so, so if you happen to read it and spot some glaring problems please let me know.
Secondly I’m working with Access Space in Sheffield to make a headphone festival on 16th July 2011. Preliminary info is over at http://lurk.org/placard/, if you’re interested in taking part do let us know.
Novels are digital art too
April 12th, 2011
The striated and the smooth
Digital means discrete, and analog means continuous. Digital and analog support each other, as
Deleuze and Guattari put it:
… in the case of the striated, the line is between two points, while in the smooth, the point is between two lines.
When we speak, we articulate our vocal tracts in analog movements, creating discontinuities that the listener is able to segment into the digital phonemes, diphones and words of language. Language is digital, as is clear when we write it with a typewriter. The analog arrangement of ink on paper is woven into a perfectly discrete sequence of symbols, as our eyes saccade across them. But we reconstruct the analog movements of speech when we read; even when we read silently, we add paralinguistic phrasing in our heads to aid processing of the text. This analog phrasing is important, for example modulating the tone of voice with slight sarcasm tone can completely negate the meaning of what is said. Prosody can convey far subtler emotional feeling that this.
A great deal of what is called `digital art’ is not digital art at all, and it seems many digital artists seem ashamed of the digital. In digital installation art, the screen and keyboard are literally hidden in a box somewhere, as if words were a point of shame. The digital source code behind the work is not shown, and all digital output is only viewable by the artist or a technician for debugging purposes. The experience of the actual work is often entirely analog, the participant moves an arm, and observes an analog movement in response, in sight, sound or motor control. They may choose to make jerky, discontinuous movements, and get a discontinuous movement in response, but this is far from the complexity of digital language. This kind of installation forms a hall of mirrors. You move your arm around and look for how your movement has been contorted.
This is fine, computers allow abstractions away from particular perceptual modes and senses, and so are quite good at translation between modes. But computers really excel as machines for formal language, and so I hope the practice of hiding linguistic computation in `digital art’ will be a short lived fashion.
Pitter split
April 6th, 2011More live coding, this time multitrack (oops added wrong one earlier, fixed now):
Some glitches, with audio and video falling out of sync at times… I quite like the results though, as it goes back in again somehow.
UPDATE, here’s another one, with tight time sync this time:
