DVD Program Notes
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DVD Program Notes Part One: Thor Magnusson, Alex Click Nilson is a Swedish avant McLean, Nick Collins, Curators garde codisician and code-jockey. He has explored the live coding of human performers since such Curators’ Note early self-modifiying algorithmic text pieces as An Instructional Game [Editor’s note: The curators attempted for One to Many Musicians (1975). to write their Note in a collaborative, He is now actively involved with improvisatory fashion reminiscent Testing the Oxymoronic Potency of of live coding, and have left the Language Articulation Programmes document open for further interaction (TOPLAP), after being in the right from readers. See the following URL: bar (in Hamburg) at the right time (2 https://docs.google.com/document/d/ AM, 15 February 2004). He previously 1ESzQyd9vdBuKgzdukFNhfAAnGEg curated for Leonardo Music Journal LPgLlCe Mw8zf1Uw/edit?hl=en GB and the Swedish Journal of Berlin Hot &authkey=CM7zg90L&pli=1.] Drink Outlets. Alex McLean is a researcher in the area of programming languages for Figure 1. Sam Aaron. the arts, writing his PhD within the 1. Overtone—Sam Aaron Intelligent Sound and Music Systems more effectively and efficiently. He group at Goldsmiths College, and also In this video Sam gives a fast-paced has successfully applied these ideas working within the OAK group, Uni- introduction to a number of key and techniques in both industry versity of Sheffield. He is one-third of live-programming techniques such and academia. Currently, Sam the live-coding ambient-gabba-skiffle as triggering instruments, scheduling leads Improcess, a collaborative band Slub, who have been making future events, and synthesizer design. research project hosted by the people dance to their algorithms Finally, the viewer is shown how Crucible Network for Research across Europe since 2001. Alex is jan- a simple musical sequence may be in Interdisciplinary Design at the itor of many organizations including composed and then converted into University of Cambridge. The TOPLAP, POTAC, dorkbotsheffield, an intricate phase ala` Steve Reich. mission of the project is to explore and the placard headphone festival. The main body of the video was the combination of powerful sound Further details are found on his Web recorded in one take and features synthesis techniques with tactile site (yaxu.org). an Emacs buffer for editing text and and linguistic user interfaces to build communicating with Overtone, an new forms of musical device with a Thor Magnusson is a musician/ expressive Clojure front-end to Super- high capacity for improvisation. writer/programmer working in the Collider. Clojure is a state-of-the-art fields of music and generative art. His functional Lisp dialect emphasizing ∼ PhD from the University of Sussex immutability and concurrency. 2. blind date—Pd graz focused on computer music interfaces from the perspective of philosophy Sam Aaron (see Figure 1) is a re- blind date is an audiovisual perfor- of technology, phenomenology, and searcher, software architect, and live mance that aims at an artistic exten- cognitive science. He is a senior lec- programmer with a deep fascination sion of common patterns in computer turer in the School of Art and Media surrounding the notion of com- programming. Instead of featuring at the University of Brighton. Thor municative programming. He sees isolated programmers, several artists is a co-founder and member of the programming as a communication work concurrently on a single pro- ixi audio collective. With ixi he has channel for descriptions of formal- gram (a Pure Data, or PD, patch), written a variety of musical software ized processes of any kind, be it a with all participants operating their and given workshops and talks at business process, a compiler strategy, own physical keyboard, mouse, and key institutions across Europe on the or even a musical composition. His monitor. In earlier performances, design and creation of digital musical previous research focused on the de- these devices were all controlling the instruments and sound installations. sign of domain-specific languages in same logical interface. The players Further details are found on his Web order to allow domain concepts to be therefore had to coordinate their site (www.ixi-audio.net). communicated and transposed programming efforts at an immediate DVD Program Notes 119 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/COMJ_e_00098 by guest on 27 September 2021 Figure 2. Pd∼graz. ate/destroy (2003) and a twelve-hour audiovisual live improvisation at the Lange Nacht der Musik (2003), both at the ESC Gallery in Graz. In 2004, the collective organized and hosted the First International Pd∼Convention in Graz, with sup- port from the ESC Gallery, the Mur.at net art initiative, the Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics, and the Medienkunstlabor at the Kun- sthaus Graz. In the aftermath of this event, Pd∼graz was formally founded together with its publishing body, the Pd∼ label. The first release was a DVD with artworks presented at the Convention (release 0.1, 2005). The book bang: Pure Data (ISBN 978-3-936000-37-5) was published in 2006 in collaboration with Wolke Verlag. It includes articles by de- velopers, artists, and theorists who had participated in the Convention. ∼ level, because only one person could blind date has so far been pre- Pd graz conducts workshops on control the patch at any given point sented at the following occasions: Pure Data on a regular basis, such in time. In later performances, such EarZoom Festival, Ljubljana, Slovenia as at the Film and TV School of as the one documented in the present (2009); International Computer Mu- the Academy for Performing Arts in video, IOhannes m zmolnig’s¨ Peer sic Conference, Belfast, UK (2008, Prague (2006), the CC in Graz (2007), Data proxy provided each player with shown in the video); Second Inter- and the EarZoom Festival in Ljubl- an independent logical interface. Nev- national Pd∼Convention, Montreal, jana, Slovenia (2009). In recent years, ertheless, the individual performers Canada (2007); Roxy/NoD gallery, the collective has performed its au- still need to participate in a common Prague, Czech Republic (2006); diovisual group improvisations blind effort in order to produce a (tech- Netart Community Congress, Graz, date and rec.wie.m on multiple occa- nically and musically) functioning Austria (2005); and the Musikpro- sions in Austria, Slovenia, Germany, patch. Rather than merely represent- tokoll Festival, Graz, Austria (2005). the Czech Republic, the UK, and ing a technical tool for generating Canada. music, the patch also becomes the The media art collective Pd∼graz People who have been associated ∼ primary means of communication (see Figure 2) was founded in Graz, with Pd graz include (in alphabet- between the players. Austria, in 2005 and serves as an ical order): Lukas Gruber, Ypatios The performers start with a blank initiative for the organization of per- Grigoriadis, Reni Hofmuller,¨ Florian canvas (i.e., an empty patch) and grad- formances, installations, workshops, Hollerweger, Georg Holzmann, Karin ually build up and modify a running and publications around the Pure Koschell, Manuela Meier, Thomas program in the tradition of “live cod- Data programming language. Pd∼graz Musil, Markus Noisternig, Renate ing.” Besides the resulting audio (and grew out of the Pd Stammtisch, a Oblak, Michael Pinter, Peter Plessas, sometimes also video), the patches diverse group of independent artists Nicole Pruckermayr, Winfried Ritsch, themselves are also projected into and academic researchers in Graz, Romana Rust, Uwe Vollmann, Franz the performance environment. This who have shared their fascination Xaver, Ales Zemene, Frank¨ Zimmer, offers the audience an insight into for Pure Data in regular meetings and IOhannes m zmolnig.¨ However, the programming and communica- since 2003. This soon resulted in the line-up of actual participants tion processes that occur among the a number of group activities, such varies from occasion to occasion. players during the performance. as the audiovisual installation cre- IOhannes m zmolnig¨ and Florian 120 Computer Music Journal Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/COMJ_e_00098 by guest on 27 September 2021 Figure 3. Andrew R. Brown. Figure 4. Samuel Freeman. Hollerweger are the two players in the 2008 performance of blind date at the International Computer Music Conference in Belfast, which is shown in the video on the present DVD. 3. King’s Anatomy—Andrew R. Brown This live coding performance was performed at the Live Coding @ The Anatomy Museum concert at Kings College London in January 2010. It demonstrates the emergent combina- be queried and set by text commands tion of simultaneous computational as well as being manipulable via processes that have distilled through graphic user interface (GUI) objects. research in computational musicol- This system is being developed as ogy, and been published by the author part of my doctoral research which in various peer-reviewed publica- work is written as part of the perfor- questions the ways in which sound tions over several years. In this work, mance. He has performed live coding is represented visually in computer Andrew battles with the processes around Australia and internationally, music software; how do the ways of succinct music representation as including in London, Copenhagen, in which elements of sound are he performs with the Impromptu and Boston. His digital artwork has represented affect