Don’t miss the last Club of this academic year on 5 June 6-9 pm, followed by sound performances and wine!!

JUNE 5 with ALEX MCLEAN & DAVE GRIFFITHS: Live Coding:
Live coders program in conversation with their machine, dynamically adding instructions and functions to running programs. Here there is no distinction between creating and running a piece of software - its execution is controlled through edits to its source code. Live coding has recently become popular in performance, where software is written before an audience in order to generate music and video for them to enjoy. McLean and Griffiths have played around Europe together with Adrian Ward as the live coding band “slub”. They will talk about the history and practice of live coding, and give some demos of their own live coding environments.

ALEX MCLEAN has been triggering distorted kick drum samples with Perl scripts for far too long. He is a PhD student at Goldsmiths Digital Studios.

DAVE GRIFFITHS writes programs to make noises, pictures and animations. He makes film effectis software and computer games.

Dave & Alex are both members of the Openlan free software artists collective and the TOPLAP organisation for live algorithm promotion. slub.org ; toplap.org ; pawfal.org/openlab ; pawfal.org/dave ; yaxu.org

*With Sound Performances from: CLAUDEl HEILAND-ALLEN

Claude Heiland-Allen (aka ClaudiusMaximus) is a digital artist from London. He has been using computers to make art for longer than the time he didn’t. As part of GOTO10, working with and creating Free/Libre

Open Source Software gives him freedoms he never had before, and he hopes to become a better workman by building his own tools. http://claudiusmaximus.goto10.org | http://goto10.org

EDWARD KELLY
Edward Kelly is a London-based artist working with bespoke live performance software. His work has spanned formal electroacoustic composition, classical score-writing and live electronics. Currently, Dr Kelly is working on a live audiovisual performance system in Pure Data, and the continual redevelopment of this system means that every performance is a premiere as well as an improvisation. Releases of his software reside at sharktracks.co.uk, and as a sometime electro musician his music can be heard at pyramidtransmissions.com (asLone Shark). http://www.sharktracks.co.uk

RYAN JORDAN
Ryan Jordan comes form a noise/tekkno/experimental music background but works with all available medias through the computer. He has organised many events and performances in the UK and has performed nationally and internationally. Jordan’s exploration of sound and music performance with computers led to the development of his prototype MIDI controller, the M.G.I (Movement and
Gesture Interface) which was an attempt at bringing a more physical performance element to laptop and computer music. Now working in the intersection of the arts and sciences he explores and develops systems which merge all medias together through the physical augmentation of the body as a controlling device for computational applications. He is currently studying MFA Computational Arts at Goldmiths, London.

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THE THURSDAY CLUB is an open forum discussion group for anyone interested in the theories and practices of cross-disciplinarity, interactivity, technologies and philosophies of the state-of-the-art in today’s (and tomorrow’s) cultural landscape(s).

For more information check http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/gds/events.php or
email Maria X at drp01mc@gold.ac.uk

or visit: http://transition.turbulence.org/networked_music_review/2007/12/04/toplap/#more-2442

To find Goldsmiths check http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/find-us

The Retrosabotage project is less “artistic”, but in a way more sophisticated: every week it publishes a famous arcade variance. The algorithms are treated as if they were jazz standard, falling short of player’s expectations, still maintaining well-known mechanisms. Mokumentary speculates about a never released Pacman version, where you control the ghosts, Incompatible Visions is an impossible mash-up between Tetris and Duck Hunt, while variances on Space Invaders theme variations push to the absurd the tragic spaceship destiny. Sometimes the “sabotage” generates new game patterns: “Compomise” is a Tetris short circuited for two players, “Build On” and “Balance” turn over the tedious Break Out with new original features. Retrosabotage is a little more than a collection of jokes but nevertheless it gives pleasing disappointments to the Skinner’s mouse hosted in our brain. But probably the most radical experiment in this tradition is probably Rom Check Fail, a sort of psychedelic remix of a dozen classic arcades. Graphic, enemies, scenes and their respective dynamics are randomly remixed by a software gone crazy. Every game is a frantic zapping among unpredictable situations but oddly playable. Remix culture, contaminated the video and now invades videogames. With astonishing achievements. - Paolo Pedercini, Neural.

People want what they want NOW. Instinct tells us to get as much as we can as fast as we can – and the Internet obliges. Instant gratification meets infinite opportunity – be it information, commerce, employment, acceptance or love. And yet the majority of bandwidth is dedicated to base human behavior, i.e. celebrity gossip and pornography.

Nobody needs poorly Photoshopped pictures of naked Britney Spears – but hey! If they’re out there, why not look? The Internet gives our less-seemly desires space to grow, allowing us to anonymously indulge curiosities, perversions and fetishes that most would never pursue in a public space. And yet “virtual reality” has ceased to exist. What we think of as the “real world” now encompasses the Internet. We download movie clips and call our co-workers to watch. We shop online and have goods delivered to our home. We meet through matchmaking web sites. No more virtual vs. real. It’s all real now.

Want explores the current climate of society over-stimulated by the bombardment of technological instant gratification, and the very definite, yet-to-be-revealed implications and issues of accountability and responsibility surrounding virtuality. Here, the Internet’s underbelly is exposed; pushing the quiet, anonymous behavior that flourishes in cyberspace into public space, forcing us to reevaluate this behavior if it were to take place in the physical community.

The life-sized six-screen video display uses custom software to monitor real time Internet searches. When the software finds a programmed keyword, it triggers a video clip of one of several actors/avatars who translates the virtual request to reality.

A soccer mom says, “I want French.”
A rocker dude says, “I want Star Trek Enterprise.”
A nondescript middle-aged guy says, “I want Little Girl.”
A girl says, “I want Forever.”

The six video screens are triggered almost concurrently, causing the voiced requests to overlap. The result is an audio-visual cacophony of desire; an online echo chamber of warped reality.

Want @ Beall Apr 3, ‘08 from T.Whid on Vimeo.

The work is based exclusively on Internet recoverable data. Internet is then compared to a gigantic database, a “datawarehouse”. The type of recovered data are: geographical, ecological, social, economic, financial and geopolitical. Data are stored in a large database, then processed using DM genetic algorithms. This method allows to establish several meaningful – or particularly important – cross correlations.

The wide range of used datas, defines the project’s multiple investigation fields, including sociological, geopolitical and economic fields. The multiple extent of this project requires various multifolded skills from external contributors: artists, programmers, economists, journalists, cartographers… Meetings, exchanges and collective work, feed the project – confronting it to many several thinking systems – and allow to engage a transverse analysis, going beyond specialized fields.

At Pixelache 2008, March 13-16, 2008.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wX6cR2_MHTI

Evolution of the Landscape Series by Christoph Kern. Sound: Jan Truetzschler.
Christoph Kern uses old master knowledge of the material of painting with almost scientific obsessiveness to ‘breed cubes’. In his investigations Christoph Kern follows different tracks: cubes imploding in space, gyrating in science – fiction - like structures that evoke connotations like Star Wars or Kubrick’s 2001. Or monolithic cubes that seem to all but eliminate pictorial space in their attempt to push towards and overflow the edges. And, most recently, a focus on futuristic landscapes that appear to have been generated by the cubes themselves, yet in which the cubes tend more towards dissolution.

Kern’s paintings are an accumulated history of their own making. The paintings are worked up in many layers, beginning with the initial scenario under investigation, setting the scene. With each progressive layer the cubes’ evolution, their growth, colour, position and movement in space as well as their relationship towards each other is traced, the positions at which they arrive are tested and pushed towards a point at which the image can rest. This stage is documented before the painting process continues. Pentimenti and animated films show the different stages of one painting’s transformation and are a way for the viewer to share in the painting’s evolution.

What makes Kern’s paintings powerful is that in the end the paintings generate meaning by evoking specific situations and depicting very particular worlds that seem utterly convincing, sometimes even familiar, even though they originate in the purely formal and abstract. — Nikola Irmer