Behind The Screens: Alexandra Cárdenas
An interview with electronic music composer Alexandra Cárdenas.
Alexandra Cárdenas is a composer specializing in computer music, focusing mostly on algorithmic music and live coded performances. In this interview, we’d like to talk about her practices and tools, as well as work in the community and the way she copes with the radical and drastic changes in their practice resulting from the corona crisis.
1. What was your first encounter with live coding and what are your sources of inspiration?
My first encounter with live coding was in the National Center for the Arts in Mexico City where I was learning SuperCollider. My teachers started with the idea to make monthly live coding sessions and we did regular sessions once a month for more than one year. This triggered the blooming of the Mexican Live Coding scene and this marked the beginning of the spreading of the practice in Latin America.
2. What are your preferred platform(s) to use and why?
My preferred platforms are SuperCollider and TidalCycles. The first, because is the most mind-blowing environment for creating audio in real time and it’s also open source. The second, because TidalCycles is wonderful for triggering sounds from SuperCollider and allows me to control through very simple lines of code that allow me to create great complexity. These are for me the best tool to play generative algorithmic music live.
3. How has live coding influenced your practice of making and thinking about art?
I found in live coding the best way to describe my musical thought because I always saw music as sound patterns that can be modified in time. Traditional approaches for composition always resulted very plane and incomplete to me, as they are meant to think in music as a linear and finite discourse. Instead for me music is a living universe and a composition is just a picture, a vision of it. Live coding has reinforced and given expression to my vision of music.
4. In what form are randomness or other algorithms applied in your practice or performance? Do you try to pursue serendipity and how or why not?
Stochastic processes are always a part of my music, I can’t imagine my music sounding the same every time it’s played. I apply it not only in the sounds themselves but also in the way they get distributed in time and in the general resulting form of the pieces.
6. Do you have any other thoughts you would like to share with the readers?
I think learning to code is very important for the new times we are transitioning to. Our perception of life is changing greatly and knowing how to program in the digital world is fundamental. I say this with special emphasis on artists. The more artists we have programming the machines of the future, the better we will be as a society.
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This article is part of the Behind The Screens series of Creative Coding Utrecht — a series of events where digital artists and live coders create a piece in ten minutes.
Watch Season 1 // Watch season 2 // More interviews
The Behind The Screens series is sponsored by Stimuleringsfonds Creatieve Industrie.
