Software over the rainbow

Mine was just half an hour ago, listening to daedelus live on the wonderful dublab podcast. At around minute 43 of the session, if you ask…

Yes, you should check it out

Some days ago, I added a list with my last bookmarks in delicious to the sidebar. As soon as it began to work, I realised something: as in most cases I didn’t change the bookmark’s title and I usually left the extended description empty (trusting heavily in tags as a retreival tool), most of the links said very little about its content.

The thing I love most of delicious is its cognitive economy, and I use delicious for myself. I thought that adding that extra information would be cumbersome, so I thought of removing the thing on the sidebar.

But instead I began editing titles and adding some extended descriptions. Now it takes me something like 10 to 30 seconds more to add a link, but instead of losing, I think I’ve taken advantage of it:

• better self-filtering when adding (when I’m thinking of a description i can decide if I’ll really need it or will be of interest later).
• improved retrieving (either me and the delicious search engine have more information when having a look or searching through my bookmarks)
• overall consciousness of what I’m adding (It had become such an automatic thing that rarely I remembered what I had after a couple of days). This last consequence is the best, as it keeps in my head a nice limbo of things to review

So as it happens with blogs, if you do things for yourself, but publicly, you do them better.

bubble sort by x3j11, something like alvin lucier’s I am sitting in a room but backwards and with a sorting algorithm instead of feedback. Genius.

I don’t mind listening to Steve Reich after Stereolab. Ornette Coleman is not bad after Odd Nosdam. Beans and Beastie Boys are a good couple too… but I can’t stand Daft punk after Daedelus, nor Dizzee Rascal after Dinosaur Jr; and I just hate listening to Cat Power everytime I finish listening to Caribou.

Definitely, I don’t like listening to music alphabetically ordered as Itunes wants me to.

Chelpa ferro is a brazillian collective of visual, video and audio artists.

As with Jessica Rylan, I don’t really know how their installations sound like, but I love them.

More chelpa ferro

via

So this morning I found that someone had already done an idea which I had been thinking of for some time (probably since I did the Steve Reich’s Clapping Music version in ChucK):

Source code for “In C” by Terry Riley in ChucK

No problem. With the amount of information we have a few clicks away, it’s impossible to maintain the naive belief that our ideas are original.

Having a look at the programmer’s website (ah, curiosity) I’ve discovered why the url sounded so familiar: He’s also the man behind whitney music box, a well known series of animations inspired by the work of john whitney, as described in his book Digital Harmony: On the Complementarity of Music and Visual Art. The post explaining the work is worth a look.

(on a deeper look, I’ve found more gems, such as the article Processing as a first language, as compared to flash, his processing gallery or the JSyd Java Synth)

Anyway, what I find particularly interesting is the exercise of trying to emulate in code art works which weren’t originally conceived for that. We know the construction rules (the score and/or the composer’s instructions) and the final result (the recording), so I see them as ideal programming practice problems.

Because of its main focus on processes rather than final products, I’d say that some art of the 60’s and 70’s is specially suitable for this task. We’ve talked about minimal composers (reich, glass, riley), but I’m also thinking of process art (see Casey Reas implementations of instructions by Sol Lewitt) or even John Cage (whom most famous work has been also versioned by Jim Bumgardner in justone line of chuck code: (4*60+33)::second => now) .

A couple of other examples:

• Piano phase after Steve Reich with source code in JMusic (Java)
• PD Repertory Project: Some live electronic music repertoire pieces in Pure Data (including works by Pierre Boulez, Steve Reich, Stockhausen and others)
• (Update) The Riley-o-matic by Daniel Iglesia, more In C (implemented in, well, C)

Do you know of more examples? Let me know in the comments.