MakeArt2009: Day 2


Blogging from MakeArt 2009 in Poitiers, France. Tonight I’m watching presentations from IOhannes M. Zmölnig (AT), Gábor Papp & Agoston Nagy (HU), Wesley Smith (US).

IOhannes’s talk was about software as “intelligent” agents, which boiled down to programming using Pd (involving visual boxes you connect by wiring together bungee-like “patch cords”) using visual objects.  What I really enjoyed about his talk is depth of his curiosity and his willingness to experiment.  For example, making cannibalistic objects, where one ropes another with its patch cord and sucks the life (screen size) out of it.  Or boxing, and using that as controller data for a performance.  With his agents, though, the idea of making your computer code work with (or against) you is a powerful notion.

Gabor Papp fooled us all into thinking he was livecoding his talk, but it really turned out he recorded movies of his livecoding and edited them together or loaded them into fluxus.  Still, bonus points to Gabor for doing his entire presentation from within Fluxus.  And of course, he’s been doing some really interesting things, especially with “simple” geometric animations. (Not really so simple, but they look that way)

Wesley is demoing yet another amazing-looking audio-visual programming environment called LuaAV.  Seriously, the last thing I need to distract me from doing something productive is another audio-visual programming development tool in a language that I should learn.  The system itself shows the experience of the developers; it’s an asynchronous events-based system, which in plain-speak means that you can set up many interesting audio-visual things to happen at different times and they all occur independently, as if you were a big shot investment banker with a bunch of secretaries whom you could trust to carry out all of your wishes once told, and not step on each others’ toes (too much).


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