LOSS Livecode Festival

Well that was fun!

Many photos are up on the spacers wiki, in particular here, here and here. A few more over here. Let us know if you have more!

Recordings taken during the festival (hopefully including Valentina’s electromagnetic recordings) will appear at the LOSS repository, although it might take a bit of time to get them up there.

And of course, happy memories.

Hi, welcome to the LOSS Livecode festival website. We hope you can join us for some livecoding in July.

We’ve got livecoding artists and researchers coming to Sheffield from around Europe and beyond to create a weekend of presentations and live music and video. It will all start with a workshop, even if you have never livecoded before, this will be your opportunity to start.

To see what’s happening, see the schedule, and for a map of venues where things are happening see the travel page.

If you’re wondering what live coding is, perhaps it would help to say “describing art while it is being made, in order to make it” or “on-the-fly computer programming”. Well perhaps we will come up with a better definition during the conference, but for now perhaps the videos below will make things clearer…

ChucK is a livecoding language for audio and music, with some crazy visualisation built in to the editor. Like almost all the software listed here, it’s free software, with a vibrant development community behind it. Screencast from lead developer Ge Wang is below.

Sadly Ge Wang can’t make it to the festival, but ChucK user Graham Coleman will be flying the flag with a presentation and performance with ChucK.

Impromptu, like fluxus, is a livecoding environment based around the Scheme programming language, and can be used to livecode both music and video. The performances pulled off by aa-cell (featuring the author, Andrew Sorenson and Andrew Brown) are taking livecoding somewhere else. Andrew Sorenson will be flying from Australia to join us at the festival, giving a workshop, presentation and performance.

An excerpt from a recent aa-cell performance is below, more on the impromptu website.

Fluxus is a “game engine” for live coding audio and video in the scheme programming language. It can be used for VJing and audio/visual performances, where the code floats above the video output it is enacting.

Al-Jazari is a live coding environment written within Fluxus - live coding within live coding. You give robots
instructions for moving around a musical environment, only using the gamepad.

Here’s an illustrative, simple example of Al-Jazari in use:

Dave Griffiths, the creator of Al-Jazari and Fluxus will also be running an introductory workshop on the Friday as well as performing as part of slub along with Adrian Ward and Alex McLean.

Supercollider 3 is a language and synthesis system that is both free and beautiful. The language is object oriented, based on smalltalk with a C syntax. The supercollider synthesis server runs separately, and indeed can be controlled by other languages such as haskell and scheme. It runs on Mac OS X, Linux and Windows.

If you want to try it out, Julian Rohrhuber and friends will be giving an introductory workshop at the festival.

SuperCollider can be turned to all kinds of music, but here’s a video of what happens when lots of supercollider enthusiasts get together: