The year of 2012 marks the 80th anniversary of Nam June Paik’s birth and the 100th anniversary of John Cage’s birth. The exhibition includes Cage’s and Paik’s works, but also works of today’s sound artists inheriting the two frontiers’ experimentations.

The term “x_sound” has a triple meaning: a sound that is unknown(x), that is ex-panded and that ex-pels fixed ideas about sound. “Sound” itself is literally a neutral and straightforward term, but in the contemporary art’s context, it’s a complex arena of different questions and discourses. Sound in experimental music opens up the possibility of overcoming the limitations of harmonious but canonized twelvetone music. Sound in visual art leads to the indeterminism of visual art, beyond ocularcentric perspectival space, and becomes an ingredient for expanding the concept of architectural space. The sound was a symbol of alternative art which goes against the rationalistic and evolutionary attitude of Western art, and therefore fascinated many contemporary artists, among whom are John Cage and Nam June Paik.

Cage opened a new chapter in music with his 4′33” in which a performer sits at the piano and plays nothing for 4 minutes and 33 seconds. His experiments in the 1960s and Zen sensibility had great influence upon Paik. Inspired by Cage’s experimental music, Paik who had studied contemporary music in Japan and Germany paid homage to Cage and developed his mentor’s sound experiments into installation and performance work (a.k.a. “Action Music”). Now the typical ‘music’, consisting of melodies and rhythms, was expanded to include everyday ’sound’ indistinguishable from ‘noise’ and even the audience’s response. Furthermore, Paik rendered the mechanisms of sound visible in space by applying such things as pieces of paper or toys to musical instruments, and also created more unexpected scenes by including the audience’s action in the performance. The exhibition will present proofs of their interaction with each other, as shown in Paik’s Hommage à John Cage (1958), Variation 5 (1965) and A Tribute to John Cage (1973).

The waves initiated by Cage and then extended by Paik are generating certain resonances in sound installations by our contemporary artists with new media, new context, and above all, new sensibility. Kichul KIM (Korea), who has persistently explored the visualization of sound, arranges speakers emitting the sound of nature in the exhibition space in a way that they can maximize the associations of hearing and sight. Haroon MIRZA (UK), uses two kinds of sounds, one created by non-acoustic devices in everyday life, and the other produced by acoustic devices handled in unusual manners. ZIMOUN (Switzerland) uses a weird frictional sound in order to draw the audience into a structure made up of empty boxes vibrated by hundreds of small motors. Anri SALA (Albania) catches the emotional interaction between sound and space, by filming a break-up conversation. Susan PHILIPSZ (UK) edits various songs with rich but complex historical implications and sings them herself. She leads the audience to encounter her songs in an unexpected spot. Inspired by Cage’s experiment, Loris GRÉAUD (France) recorded the ’silence’ made when Sonic Youth’s legendary guitarist Lee Ranaldo was ‘thinking’ about his music, and photographed the scene. And Otomo YOSHIHIDE (Japan), famous for his unique sound installations and performances, composes a concerto of different noises using dozens of turntables. The works of these artists do not make sound that you merely listen to in the exhibition room; rather, they show psychological and physical tensions caused by sound, an environment built up by sound, the ways in which sound mixes history and emotion, the ways in which sound crosses between mathematical order and chance, a close inquiry into the relationship among space-sound-body, and so on.

Various sound performances will also be presented along with the exhibition. On the opening day there will be a performance of John Cage’s Imaginary Landscape No.4 (1951), a ‘radio’ orchestra with twelve radio receivers by 24 students from the Department of Composition in Chugye University For The Arts and Yoshihide’s performance using turntables. During the exhibition period, a series of contemporary music concerts of Cage’s works will be held to facilitate the understanding of his music.

Participants Didier Faustino, Loris Gréaud, Haroon Mirza, Susan Philipsz, Anri Sala, Takahiko Iimura, Yuko Mohri, Kichul Kim, Sei Rhee, Otomo Yoshihide, Tetsuya Umeda, Zimoun, John Cage, Nam June Paik

Curated by Sohyun Ahn, Sooyoung Lee, Chaeyoung Lee

On January 5th 2012, on RaiTunes, the sounds of Alessio Bertallot meet the hybrid, neo-real worlds of Salvatore Iaconesi and Oriana Persico. The language of radio will be contaminated with the language of new media arts, generating novel forms of expression and narratives.

Starting at 11pm and up to 11:40pm, “VersuS, the real time lives of cities” will be showcased in an entirely new version created to interact in real time with the RaiTunes playlist.

This version of the VersuS project will be officially presented during the broadcast, in which listeners will be invited to a realtime voyage into music and the emotions of London, New York, Philadelphia, Berlin, Bristol and Milan.

Moving from city to city, Alessio Bertallot will lead the audience through the discovery of the music that originates in those places, expression of concrete and flesh.

Simultaneously, planet earth will revolve towards the cities: a plunging zoom will allow us to experience cities’ chitchat in front of our eyes; the messages which people, in that moment, are exchanging on social networks will be captured, analyzed, and shown over the places in which they originated, in a dynamic, neo-real, visualization, showing in realtime the sensations of the people which live in that city, transforming us into global eyes, in emotional voyeurs of the whole planet.

January 5th, 11pm – 11:40pm, on RaiTunes.

Realtime updates and dialogue with Alessio Bertallot and the creators of VersuS will take place on RaiTunes’ Facebook page.

This project on FakePress.

Juggling Sound Ball Demo from STEIM Amsterdam on Vimeo.

Sounding Juggling Balls, minimalist music in projectile motion: At Patterns + Pleasure Festival in Amsterdam STEIM presented the premiere of several pieces written by Tom Johnson for the Gandini Juggling company. For these pieces STEIM developed a set of interactive juggling balls that react to movement by emitting sound. Tom Johnson is an American composer and former music journalist, credited with introducing the term “minimalist” into music criticism in the early seventies. Many of his pieces are based on simple mathematical procedures that give rise to self-similar structures. The Gandini company had already been making juggling renditions of Steve Reich’s Clapping Music when about two years ago Johnson approached the group and asked STEIM to develop a set of juggling balls that could produce simple tones based on the actions of the jugglers. At STEIM’s laboratory, Byungjun Kwon and Luuk Schipperheyn have designed and fabricated a set of sounding juggling balls that combine compactness with versatility. Each ball contains a chip with six oscillators connected to an embedded amplifier and speaker. A stream of data from a contact sensor and an accelerometer is processed to drive the oscillators. In the pieces performed in Amsterdam, each ball was programmed to play a tone whenever it fell back into the hand of a performer, so that the height of each throw determined the duration of a musical rest. As in his previous work “Galileo”, Johnson turned gravitational acceleration into rhythm. Hypnotically capturing eyes and ears, the synchronous movements of the jugglers provided a wonderful visualization of the mathematical processes employed by the composer.” - Matteo Marangoni, Neural.

Audio Data courtesy of CARISMA, operated by the University of Alberta, funded by the Canadian Space Agency. Special Thanks to Andy Kale.

Made for the exhibition Invisible Fields at Arts Santa Monica in Barcelona Spain.

05.00 minutes. / HD / 2011
HD single channel and HD 3D single channel.
20Hz is co-commissioned by Arts Santa Monica + Lighthouse . Supported by the British Council.

Ursonate is part of The Next Big Idea Festival, with Jack Ox and Kristen Loree as artists-in-residence: The exhibition of Jack Ox’s 800 Sq.ft. hand-painted, hand-collaged visualization of Kurt Schwitters’ Ursonate opens September 16 at 4:00 pm at the Mesa Gallery. The performance by Kristen Loree speaking, shouting, and singing the Ursonate will be on Sept. 17 at 2:00 pm in Bradbury Science Museum. Ox’s digital projection of the syllables from the painting will accompany Loree’s performance.

The performance will be streamed live to the Merz Barn in Elterwater, Cumbria, NW England. Florian Kaplick will stream his performance back to Los Alamos. Thank you to LITTORAL for arranging our back and forth streaming of Ursonate performances!

Schwitters’ own comments:

‘The Sonata consists of four movements, of an overture and a finale, and seventhly, of a cadenza in the fourth movement. The first movement is a rondo with four main themes, designated as such in the text of the Sonata. You yourself will certainly feel the rhythm, slack or strong, high or low, taut or loose. To explain in detail the variations and compositions of the themes would be tiresome in the end and detrimental to the pleasure of reading and listening, and after all I’m not a professor.’

‘In the first movement I draw your attention to the word for word repeats of the themes before each variation, to the explosive beginning of the first movement, to the pure lyricism of the sung ‘Jüü-Kaa,’ to the military severity of the rhythm of the quite masculine third theme next to the fourth theme which is tremulous and mild as a lamb, and lastly to the accusing finale of the first movement, with the question ‘tää?’…’

The fourth movement, long-running and quick, comes as a good exercise for the reader’s lungs, in particular because the endless repeats, if they are not to seem too uniform, require the voice to be seriously raised most of the time. In the finale I draw your attention to the deliberate return of the alphabet up to a. You feel it coming and expect the a impatiently. But twice over it stops painfully on the b…’

‘I do no more than offer a possibility for a solo voice with maybe not much imagination. I myself give a different cadenza each time and, since I recite it entirely by heart, I thereby get the cadenza to produce a very lively effect, forming a sharp contrast with the rest of the Sonata which is quite rigid. There.’
‘The letters applied are to be pronounced as in German. A single vowel sound is short… Letters, of course, give only a rather incomplete score of the spoken sonata. As with any printed music, many interpretations are possible. As with any other reading, correct reading requires the use of imagination. The reader himself has to work seriously to become a genuine reader. Thus, it is work rather than questions or mindless criticism which will improve the reader’s receptive capacities. The right of criticism is reserved to those who have achieved a full understanding. Listening to the sonata is better than reading it. This is why I like to perform my sonata in public.’

Neuroplanets is an audio project which explores the aesthetics of information on sound. Initially, I worked in commissioned tracks from other artists, by transmitting on them sound analysis results from extremely rare sonic phenomena in other planets. After that, I manipulated these tracks by applying on them numerical/quantitative data and statistical elements from Neurosciences research in serious diseases. My aim was to ‘visualize’ on sound the diseases characteristics and impact on human nature.

The analysis of sounds includes methods enabling the permanent extraction or automatic structuring of diverse sorts of information given off by the signal, such as the fundamental frequency or the spectral evolution determining the pitch and timbre of a perceived sound. The methods used are based on signal processing, statistical analysis, information theory, machine learning and recognition techniques, but also on knowledge of auditory perception and acoustic system sound production.

Contemporary Neurosciences suggest the existence of fundamental algorithms by which all sensory transduction is translated into an intrinsic, brain-specific code. One of Neuroplanets main goals was to directly stimulate these codes within the human audible range. More here >>

Part of her Sewing Sonifications series, Waveforms originated from a collaboration with UW Oceanographic Scientist Dr. Neil Banas and is an exploration into using data from ecosystem models along the Washington coast to create tangible experiences of research through art. Sound is translated from data, then visualized and made tactile by the artist embroidering the combined waveform into a continuous sound wave.

Waveforms was made with the support of Seattle Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs, 4Culture, and Harborview Medical Center.

Visualisation of Live Code by Alex McLean (Goldsmiths), Dave Griffiths (FoAM), Nick Collins (University of Sussex) and Geraint Wiggins (Goldsmiths) — Abstract: 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.

1. Introduction

Live coding, the improvisation of video and/or music using computer language, has developed into an active field of research and arts practice over the last decade (Wang and Cook; 2004; Ward et al.; 2004; Collins et al.; 2003). Live coding is made possible by dynamic language interpreters, which allow algorithms to run while they are being modified, taking on changes without any break in the audio or visual output generated by the code. The development of software becomes part of the art in a very real sense; at the beginning of a typical live coded performance there is no code and no audiovisual output, but the output grows in complexity with the code.

A frequent criticism of computer music is the lack of performance, where an artist hides behind their laptop screen, and the audience is unable to see any activity that might ground their experience of the music (Cascone; 2003). Solutions continue to be explored, with many researchers focussing on developing tangible interfaces which bring the computer closer to a traditional instrument. However, a live coding tradition has developed taking the straightforward approach of projecting whatever is on the artist’s screen: the code, moving cursors, the debugging output… The audience is then able to see the human movements and code structures behind an improvisation.

This tradition of projecting screens is itself open to criticism; the audience members may feel distracted, or perhaps even excluded by the projection of code written in language they do not necessarily understand. The alternative of showing nothing, hiding behind a laptop screen, is felt to be untenable, but perhaps more should be understood about the practice of projecting code. Watching the articulations of a live guitarist may enhance the experience of a listener who does not play a musical instrument themselves. Can a live coder elucidate the more abstract thinking gestures of their practice? The search is on for ways of visualising code development that allows non-programmers to enhance their enjoyment and understanding of a live coded piece.

2. Perceiving code

Generally, a programmer cannot work with their eyes closed; a programmer’s text editor is a visual interface1. Text editors have gained many features over the last few decades, to the point where we no longer call them text editors but Interactive Development Environments (IDEs). The visual presentation of code has developed its own aesthetic; colour is used to highlight syntax, fonts have been designed for code (e.g. ProFont, proggy), and visual tools for navigating around tree-like code structures. Nonetheless computation is fundamentally about symbol manipulation, and the composition of symbols lies at the heart of every IDE. When our eyes saccade across code, the shapes on the screen are categorised into these symbols, and we perceive them as the tokens (words) and statements (sentences) making up our program. The computer interprets code as a one dimensional string of discrete symbols, but humans perceive it as symbols within a spatial scene. Expert programmers may be able to chunk larger blocks of code as meaningful entities; less experienced live code audiences may become stuck on small details, but an elaborate dance of spatial change to code is evident over time.

Our perception of source code is aided not only by spatial organisation, but also by colour highlighting, in-line documentation and the well chosen names given to abstractions and data structures. These features are collectively known as secondary syntax2, being that ignored by the interpreter but of benefit to programmers in understanding and organising their code. A challenge to those pushing the boundaries of programming language design is to find ways of taking what is normally secondary syntax as primary. For example the ColorForth language uses colour as primary syntax, replacing the need for punctuation. Even more radically, the instruction set of the Piet language illustrated in Figure 2 is formed by first order colour relationships within a two dimensional grid; instructions include directional modifiers so that control flow travels in two dimensions. Piet, among many other esoteric languages, is inspired by the two dimensional syntax of Befunge shown in Fig. 1, a textual language where arrow-like characters change the direction of control flow. Some languages bordering on mainstream, such as Haskell and to a lesser extent Python have a syntax that takes two dimensional arrangement into account when grouping statements, although this is otherwise unusual.

Secondary syntax is of great importance to human understanding, despite being ignored by the computer interpreter. Without spatial layout and elements of natural language a program would be next to unreadable by humans. Humans live an embodied existence in a spatial environment, and while we are perfectly able to perform computation, our spatial ability still supports such thought processes (Gärdenfors; 2000). As a result source code, as Human Computer Interface, is a half-way mixture of geometrical relations and symbolic structures. This is true even of the ‘patcher’ dataflow languages in common use in the digital arts (Puckette; 1988), such as Max and PureData. Patcher languages are often described as ‘visual’, but in fact all the functions are defined textually, and the visual arrangement is purely secondary syntax 3.

Visualisation of code may either act as secondary syntax in order to enhance code comprehension for human viewers, or go further as primary syntax to enhance meaning for both humans and computers. The latter is of particular interest, as to some extent it requires making models of human perception the basis of computer language.

2.1. Morphology of Sound, Shape and Symbols

TurTan is a geometric visual live coding language introduced by Gallardo et al. (2008), using the technology of the Reactable (Jordà et al.; 2007). The functions of the language are manipulated as physical blocks that are placed on a tabletop interface, with nearest neighbours forming a sequence, and relative angle mapping to the function’s parameter. The functions describe turtle graphics operations, and the resulting recursive forms are continuously updated on the table surface display.

TurTan inspired a system by Alex McLean and introduced here, with the working title of Acid Sketching. In Acid Sketching, a sound is specified simply by drawing a shape, where morphological measurements are mapped to parameters of an acid bassline synthesiser. The area of a shape is mapped to pitch, its regularity (perimeter length vs area) mapped to envelope modulation, and relative angle of central axis mapped to resonance. Several such shapes are drawn in an arrangement, where a minimum spanning tree of their centroids is taken as a polyphonic sequence, where distance equals relative time. Feedback may be projected back on to the drawing surface, so shapes flash red as they are triggered. A static figure would not make this clearer, however illustrative video is available online at http://yaxu.org/acid-sketching/.

While Acid Sketching and TurTan are far from what is typically understood as live coding, both lead us to challenge understanding of the role of symbols, shape and geometry in computation. Investigating how such concrete forms of interaction could be married with the abstractions of general, Turing complete programming languages could be an interesting research topic itself.

Critically connected to live coding engagement with time-based media, is the time-based revelation of code itself. For electroacoustic music, Pierre Schaeffer’s theories of sound timbre have been further dynamised into the time-variant sonic gestures of Denis Smalley’s spectromorphology (Landy; 2007). For live coding, we might analogously dub ’codeomorphology’ as the changing shape of code over time. Examples include the accumulating code revisions referenced on the edge of ChucK language Audicle documents, or SuperCollider’s ‘History’ class to document a live code performance. More visual representations of change over time would include accessible visualisations of programmer activity. Metrics might be displayed to characterise changes per second, from coarse keystroke counts to the depth of parse tree disruption; this brings us to self-evaluating performances, and coder re-coding of their very visualisations…

3. Visual experiments in live code

This section serves to introduce four novel visual/geometric live coding systems by Dave Griffiths, namely Scheme Bricks, Betablocker, Al-Jazari and Daisy Chain, along with some of the systems which inspired them. All of these languages were constructed within Fluxus, a game engine designed for live coding performances and experiments and available under a free (GPL) license from http://www.pawfal.org/fluxus/.

3.1. Execution flow and operational events

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2
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Figure 1: A pseudo-random number generator written in the two-dimensional language Befunge.

Figure 2: Source code written in the Piet language with two dimensional, colour syntax. Prints out the text “Hello, world!”. Image © Thomas Schoch 2006. Used under the Creative Commons BY-SA 2.5 license.

Figure 3: Core war runtime display, showing visualisation of process memory shared between the players.

Figure 4: A live edit in the Betablocker environment, selecting an instruction from a wheel of possibilities.

Figure 5: The robots of Al-Jazari, each with a thought bubble containing a program, live coded with a gamepad.

Figure 6: SchemeBricks, a lisp environment using colour instead of parenthesis, and flashes as a cue for control flow.

Figure 7: A section of a Daisy Chain program.

Computation is a metaphorical movement, where algorithmic processes operate on data (which can include the algorithms themselves) in memory in the discrete time steps of the CPU. Ways of visualising memory as it is changed have been developed for conventional debuggers, particularly in microcontroller applications where memory is small enough to be viewed in its entirety. More novel visualisations also exist, such as Tierra, an artificial life simulation where code evolves in a Darwinian competition which can only be appreciated when viewed as such, or Core War (Fig. 3), a game where player/programmers write code which fight over memory address space.

Live coding has the unique opportunity to visualise the movement of an underlying process while it is being formed. This helps an audience appreciate a live coding performance in a more meaningful way – as it bridges the gap between an abstract description of a process (the code) and process itself (the generated pattern of movement through memory). Betablocker (Fig. 4) is a raw visualisation of an imaginary 8-bit processor operating in 256 bytes of memory. This brightly coloured live coding environment is operated by writing assembly code with a gamepad. The processes are visualised while they operate on the memory addresses and trigger sound events. Processes are able to modify themselves and each other, resulting in highly dynamic relationships which are challenging to control.

A more traditional method of programming is employed in Scheme Bricks (Fig. 6), a geometric interface for constructing Scheme programs. Scheme Bricks takes advantage of the isomorphism of code and data in the Scheme programming language, and is inspired by the Scratch language designed for use by children (Resnick et al.; 2009). Scheme Bricks allows you to drag, drop and plug together programs rather than typing. This has some potential side effects; in a performance situation, it is impossible to have a mismatched parenthesis error, as is common in other lisp-like languages. It is quicker to change the overall structure of the program as sections can be removed and reinserted easily by drag/drop actions. Unwanted sections are pulled out of the program and set aside rather than being deleted, and accumulate around the program as ‘spare parts’ which are often later ‘recycled’ by being pulled back into another section.

Scheme Bricks uses visual feedback to relate sound events to the code; the instruction which triggered a sound event flashes as the sound is played. This minimal approach to process visualisation makes the relationship between sound and code structure clearer than Betablocker’s more complete visualisation, and is useful for the performer to immediately locate the code generating a particular sound event.

Daisy Chain (Fig. 7) is an attempt to embrace less rigid structures while maintaining enough of a computational basis to qualify as a live coding performance. It follows a processing system based on Petri nets (Petri; 1966), where executable instruction tokens move around a directed graph. Daisy Chain programs create and modify the graph topologies that they inhabit, producing sounds as a side effect of the computation. The look of the performance was designed to be as far from conventional programming as possible, hand animated flowers and drawn instruction symbols moving around graphs constrained by spring models.

The nodes of a Daisy Chain graph have a fixed lifetime, which was introduced in order to counter a common problem with live coding where the audience watching and performer concentrating on programming tend to perceive time differently. Daisy Chain prevents musical structures from persisting too long, keeping the performance moving forward at a rate the performer can control beforehand.

3.2. Computation in game worlds

Code has a long tradition of use in games as a gameplay mechanic, an early example being Core War developed in the mid 1980s and discussed above in §3.1. More recent games such as Carnage Heart and Marionette Handler are mainstream games for the Playstation which employ programming environments using icons. These programs are used to control robots which battle it out in large virtual arenas. Popular game titles such as Little Big Planet allow the player to construct machines as part of game worlds, complex enough to support Turing complete computation. Kodu, a research project at Microsoft goes even further, as an end-user games programming environment on the XBox.

Al-Jazari is a deliberate attempt to fuse games and live coding performances. It was designed to use a similar visual process to BetaBlocker, but this time mediated through the actions of robotic agents moving around a 3D world, triggering sounds as they do so (Fig. 5). The use of visual agents following commands rather than abstract processes is intended to make the performance more immediately understandable for the audience. Al Jazari has been expanded as an art installation, audience participatory performance and recently as a facebook game – with the aim to increase the accessibility of live coding to the point where anyone can become a live coder.

4. Conclusion

Visualisation is central to live coding. In this article, we have confronted how code is perceived by performers and audiences, and in what ways visual elements contribute to the primary syntax and semantics of a programming language meant for live coding. Consideration of visual elements of code have also become essential as live coding has formed the basis of virtual game worlds. We have introduced a number of novel systems, presented here as explorations of these themes. Visualisation of live code however remains under-investigated in terms of the psychology of programming; while Blackwell and Collins (2005) lead the way into HCI, evaluation protocols are yet to be adapted and applied to experience of live coded performances. This is however fertile ground for practice based research, and we anticipate the changing shapes of code over time, a codeomorphology at timescales from individual performances to lifetimes of artistic and technological development.

Bibliography

[1] Blackwell, A. and Collins, N. (2005). The programming language as a musical instrument. In Proceedings of PPIG05. University of Sussex.

[2] Cascone, K. (2003). Grain, sequence, system (three levels of reception in the performance of laptop music). In Kleiner, M. S. and Szepanski, A., editors, Soundcultures. Suhrkamp.

[3] Collins, N., McLean, A., Rohrhuber, J., and Ward, A. (2003). Live coding in laptop performance. Organised Sound, 8(03):321–330.

[4] Gallardo, D., Julià, C. F., and Jordà, S. (2008). Turtan: a tangible programming language for creative exploration. In Third annual IEEE international workshop on horizontal human-computer systems (TABLETOP).

[5] Gärdenfors, P. (2000). Conceptual Spaces: The Geometry of Thought. The MIT Press.

[6] Jordà, S., Geiger, G., Alonso, M., and Kaltenbrunner, M. (2007). The reactable: Exploring the synergy between live music performance and tabletop tangible interfaces. In Proc. Intl. Conf. Tangible and Embedded Interaction (TEI07).

[7] Landy, L. (2007). Understanding the Art of Sound Organization. The MIT Press.

[8] Petri, C. A. (1966). Communication with automata. Technical report, Applied Data Research Inc.

[9] Puckette, M. (1988). The patcher. In Proceedings of International Computer Music Conference.

[10] Resnick, M., Maloney, J., Hernández, A. M., Rusk, N., Eastmond, E., Brennan, K., Millner, A., Rosenbaum, E., Silver, J., Silverman, B., and Kafai, Y. (2009). Scratch: programming for all. Commun. ACM, 52(11):60–67.

[11] Wang, G. and Cook, P. R. (2004). On-the-fly programming: using code as an expressive musical instrument. In NIME ’04: Proceedings of the 2004 conference on New interfaces for musical expression, pages 138–143, Singapore, Singapore. National University of Singapore.

[12] Ward, A., Rohrhuber, J., Olofsson, F., McLean, A., Griffiths, D., Collins, N., and Alexander, A. (2004). Live algorithm programming and a temporary organisation for its promotion. In Goriunova, O. and Shulgin, A., editors, read_me — Software Art and Cultures.

Footnotes

1. A counter-example would be programming interfaces for the blind, which employ speech synthesis.
2. The term ‘secondary syntax’ is problematic. Firstly, secondary syntax is only secondary relative to the computer interpreter, and not the human. Secondly, secondary syntax is not syntax in any clear sense; indeed spatial relationships are the basis of semantic meaning as understood in the field of cognitive linguistics. However as secondary syntax is the standard term used in the field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) we persist with using it here.
3. In Max, left-right position alters execution order, although relying upon this is discouraged in favour of the ‘trigger’ object.

It is impossible to imagine art nowadays without the kind of interdisciplinary and multi-media approaches that began to play a key role in the 1960s. Since then, sculpture, sound, film, theatre, performance and many other branches have embarked on a broad spectrum of different kinds of fusion with pictorial forms. Recently, such “inter-mediality” has been given an additional boost thanks to new notions of creativity. It might be argued, albeit somewhat over-stating the point, that media-specific working methods have been replaced by more overarching types of production that short-circuit fairly disparate realms with each other. “Inter-creativity”, a paradigm of working methods located in the zone between individual disciplines, has begun to take the place of traditional models of creativity. “Intermedia 2.0″, produced in cooperation with Vienna’s “departure” initiative, examines the potentials and promises to be found in these broader concepts of media and creativity.

Contents:

Christian Höller: The Promise of Media De-Limitation
Alexander Horwath in Conversation with Eva Fischer about Visualizations of Music
Christa Benzer: Visualizing Classical Music – “Hugo Wolf Festival 2010″
Roundtable with VJs and Visualists Participating in the “Hugo Wolf Festival 2010″
Diedrich Diederichsen: Hatred of “Regietheater” and the New Tendency towards Opera
Christian von Borries: Strategies of the Common – Music, Opera, Politics
numen/for use: Intercreative Textures
Georg Schöllhammer in Conversation with Artist Markus Schinwald
Barbara Lesák: Frederick Kiesler’s Works for Theater
Jasper Sharp: In Two Minds – Creativity and Collaboration
Anne Hilde Neset: Sound Bleed – Music in Other Media
Thomas Keul: From Audio Book to “Visualized” Book
Kathrin Röggla & 4youreye: “die ansprechbare” – Example of a Visualized Reading
Christoph Thun-Hohenstein: The Importance of Intercreativity

Artscribe: Reviews about “Gender Check” (Mumok Vienna), “Afro Modern” (Tate Liverpool), Nasreen Mohamedi (Kunsthalle Basel), Luis Camnitzer (Daros Zurich), “Niet Normaal” (De Beurs van Berlange Amsterdam), plus many more.

Cover Image: LIA – Blumengruß_2010_03_20_16_25_36

The project’s objective is to create an interface where people can explore all the connections between the main styles of electronic music through both visual and audible feedback. The interaction with the resulting network graph leads to “a collective consequence in the spatial visualization of information”. [From infosthetics.com.