Object and Identity in a Digital Age
CHArt 25th ANNUAL CONFERENCE
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Object and Identity in a Digital Age
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Alex McLean, Geraint Wiggins, Goldsmiths, University of London.
Patterns of Movement in Live Languages
Programmers do their work by writing and modifying software in text form. That is, a piece of software is a structure made from words. These structures are generally too big to comprehend in their entirety, so programmers instead focus on small detail and overall plans; looking up for parts to combine and simplify and looking down for places to build. But this is not architecture, these structures are more like machines than static buildings. A programmer's work is set in motion by a program interpreter, with information flowing in and around processing units before being directed outward in response.
Usually a programmer will build their work off-line, stepping back to start it up, watch it work and decide upon the next edit. Live coding programmers however work on their software while it runs, much like modifying a running machine. Because the software is built from words, this is done by editing it as text, adding new routines or changing the character of an existing one. Such a change affects the output immediately, allowing fast creative feedback.
Where a written novel exists to describe human activity, written software exists to simulate it. Therefore the live coder can take the role of an artist, constructing simulators in order to generate patterns of movement, either as music, video animation or both. This can be done in front of a live audience, so that the process of building software becomes the process of improvising music or video in performance art.
Programmers are finally taking to the stage. Introspecting and encoding their musical thoughts before an audience. A tradition of live coding has quickly formed where computer screens are projected, making the programmer's reactions to their work visible. Questions of authorship disappear; the performance is live, the programmer improvising through the medium of written language.
Live coders allow us to look upon the interplay between language and performance art with renewed interest. In this paper the current activity of live coders will be reviewed, to try to understand where this relatively new practice is taking us.Alex McLean is a PhD student in Arts and Computational Technology at Goldsmiths Digital Studios, researching text based music including vocable synthesis and live coding. He is a programmer/musician performing as a member of the live coding band Slub, making electronic music through dynamic use of handmade software and programming languages. Slub have performed widely including at Sonar Barcelona, Secret Garden Party Cambridgeshire, Sonic Acts Amsterdam, Ars Electronica Linz, STRP Eindenhoven, Club Transmediale Berlin and Tate Modern London. Alex
is a founder member of dorkbotlondon, co-organising over 60 events showcasing electronic art in London since the year 2001. He is co-founder of the TOPLAP live coding organisation, recently awarded a grant by the PRS Foundation to promote live coding in the UK. He is also engaged with the world of Software Art, winner of the Transmediale software art award for ‘forkbomb.pl’ in 2002 and co-developer of the runme.org software art repository which was awarded Ars Electronica honorary mention in 2004. (http://yaxu.org/; http://slub.org/; http://dorkbotlondon.org/)Geraint A. Wiggins has an MA degree from the University of Cambridge, in Mathematics and Computer Sciences, and PhDs from the University of Edinburgh, in Artificial Intelligence and in Musical Composition. He works in the Department of Computing and the Centre for Cognition, Computation and Culture at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he holds the Chair of Computational Creativity and leads the Intelligent Sound and Music Systems (ISMS) research group. His research interests cover a wide range, centred around computational cognitive modeling of creative behaviour, particularly in the context of music, the aims of the work being to understand better how human creativity arises, both in evolutionary and mechanistic terms, and to begin to understand how it works, on an individual basis. He is an Associate Editor of Musicae Scientiae, the journal of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music, and a Consulting Editor of Music Perception, its North American counterpart. From 2000-2004, he was chair of AISB, the UK learned society for Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science.