Thanks to Farrows Creative we have some great photos of the livenotations performance with Alex McLean, Hester Reeve and me at the Arnolfini a few weeks ago. This was a completely unrehearsed combination of Hester Reeve’s live art and slub’s live coding. A score was made from rocks and stones, using their position and also drawing on them with brushes and water, made temporary with a heat gun. A selection of good branches from Alex’s garden provided a tripod for the camera which allowed us to project the score along with a clock time marker, my code and Alex’s emacs overlaid with a second projector for a multi layer image of what we were all doing.
I could see the output from the camera (running using Gabor’s fluxus addon code) underneath a semi transparent version of scheme bricks, and my original plan was to attempt to read the score in some symbolic way. Instead I found myself using more playful methods, dragging sections of code over particular stones – and switching to using them when Hester worked on the relevant one. Her movements also helped me break out from normal programming flow more than usual, reminding me of nearby unused bits of code and I generally took a slower more considered approach.
As I said in my previous post, this seems like an encouraging direction for livecoding to follow – given how naturally it fits with performance/live art, it seems refreshing. The impulse is to augment this kind of performance with further machine vision and tracking software, but perhaps much like slub’s preference for listening to each other over complex networking, it’s interesting to concentrate on interpretations on a more open ended manner, at least to begin with.
