The most gloriously aptly named festival for livecoding I’ve ever seen, the Lambda Festival in Antwerp this weekend will see quite a lot of action from Slub. Firstly we are VJing on the Saturday, then the first ever Scheme Bricks workshop on Sunday followed by a performance in the evening.
I’m still trying to work out exactly how to livecode this, but I’ve written a little language for building robots in fluxus:
(Audio: “Dang Spot” by Plaid)
These fellows were premiered at Lazy Sunday yesterday, raving to DJ Conehead’s early 90s hardcore techno lushness.
The idea (inspired by Gabor Papp’s marching maggots) was to make a high level language in fluxus which takes care of all the physics operations – automatically creating active objects and joints in ODE. The code can be found here.
This weekend it’s Lazy Sunday (organised by the The Planet of Leather Moomins) – a distributed streamed festival from Helsinki, London, New York, Paris, Stockholm, Barcelona, Montreal – well you get the idea… I’m going to be doing some visuals livecoding, possibly something very new, which usually means it won’t work properly!
Finally an actual release of scheme bricks! (make sure you read the README, it’s not user friendly yet).
I’ve unified the maths operations, previously you had to remember if you were working on nodes or numbers (the only two types in fluxa) now you can just use the standard + – * / (before you had to use add sub mul div for graph nodes). This makes it much nicer to program. I’ve also replaced the asterisk in the font, the old one looked like a smudge on the screen.
This is all in preparation for a scheme bricks livecoding workshop I’m giving in a few weeks at the LAMBDA ELEKTRONISCH MUZIEKFESTIVAL.
I’ve gathered most of the game prototypes I made for groworld and put them into a cross platform release. There will probably be a bit of tweaking still to be done, as the windows version of plant eyes seems a bit unstable.
OSX version (Just extract and run)
Linux version (needs fluxus-0.17 installed which you can get here)
Windows version (Copy the Fluxus directory to “C:\Program Files” and run the executable it contains)
You may recognise the “menu plant” from the Kansallisteatteri building projections, a bit of recycling.
Hampstead is a text adventure game written in 1984, which conveys a certain attitude I find refreshing 26 years later. It’s a document of London life, and rich in satire of the social customs of the time. It even exists as a museum piece – not sure how many computer games can lay claim to that! “The aim of the game is to attain Hampstead, not just to reach it”.
Alex Mclean, Nick Collins and I have written a paper for EVA 2010 on Visualisation of Live Code (link to preprint version).
In this paper we outline the issues surrounding live coding which is projected for an audience, and in this context, approaches to code visualisation. This includes natural language parsing techniques, using geometrical properties of space in language semantics, representation of execution flow in live coding environments, code as visual data and computer games as live coding environments. We will also touch on the unifying perceptual basis behind symbols, graphics, movement and sound.
The paper includes betablocker, daisy, al jazari and scheme bricks.
Fluxus is a 3D game engine for livecoding worlds into existence.
“act of a flowing; a continuous moving on or passing by, as of a flowing
stream; a continuous succession of changes”
We spent too long livecoding and forgot to do any releases, so this is
your semi-annual fluxus release fanfare:
Changes:
* Render to texture makes recursive worlds possible
* Freeframe plugins supported
* Windows support
* OpenAL 3D sound playback
* AR/Camera module
* Planetarium/dome projection
* Livecode text effects to confuse your audiences
* Experimental voxel primitive
* Icosphere primitive
* Unicode support in the scratchpad
* Some proper games stuff – frustum culling, scene inspection etc.
* Stereo panning in fluxa.
Get it here:
I’ve been attending bits of the FoAM update meeting remotely, it’s a strange disembodied experience, but better from the carbon viewpoint. Here’s a screenshot of the planning of next years events:
My last update from pixelache is about the urban projection lab Miska Knapek, Ville Hyvönen and I were doing on Saturday night during Earth Hour. Despite not being allowed to turn the streetlights off and some heavy rain, our projector base station/van managed to beam images through the night onto the Finnish national theater building. My contribution was some specially adapted plants from the groworld code base:
Thanks to Ville for the last image. More images of the other projections are here and here.