Deershed is a music festival designed to accommodate families with lots of activities for children. Part of this year’s festival was a Machines Tent, including Lego robot building, Mechano constructions, 3D printing and computer games.
Slub’s daily routine in the Machines Tent started by setting up the Al Jazari gamepad livecoding installation, a couple of hours with Martyn Eggleton teaching Scratch programming on an amazing quad Raspberry Pi machine (screens/processors and keyboards all built into a welded cube).
At some point we would switch to Minecraft, trying some experiments livecoding the LAN game world using Martyn’s system to access the Minecraft API using Waterbear, a visual programming language using a similar blocks approach as Scratch and Scheme Bricks.
During the afternoons Alex and I could try some music livecoding experiments. This was a great environment for playful audience participatory performances, with families continually passing through the tent I could use a dancemat to trigger synths in fluxus while Alex livecoded music designed to encourage people to jump up and down.
One of the most interesting things for me was to be able to see how lots of children (who mostly didn’t know each other) collaborate and self organise themselves in a LAN game, there was quite a pattern to it with all the groups:
- Mess around with Minecraft as usual (make some blocks, start building a house).
- Find something built by someone else, destroy a few bricks.
- Snap out of the game to notice that the other kids are complaining.
- Realise that there are other people in the world – and they are sat around them!
- Attempt to fix the damage.
At this point other people would join in to help fix things, after which there would be some kind of understanding reached between them to respect each other’s creations. This has all really inspired me to work on Al Jazari 2 which combines a lot of these ideas.
