Behind the Screens: Anne Veinberg
An interview with Anne Veinberg, a music driven digital artist.
Anne Veinberg is a digital artist whose work is driven on music. She has been working on a project called CodeKlavier, where she and Felipe Ignacio Noriega use the piano as interface for programming.
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 her practice resulting from the corona crisis.
What is your first encounter with live coding and what are sources of inspiration?
My first encounter with live coding was with Marcel Weirckx when he asked me to work with him on a series titled “Duets for live coder, pianist and disklavier”. The first work, Ostinato, was invited to the Live.Code.Festival 2013 in Karlsruhe and that’s where I met the community. At the festival, our performance was the only one with an acoustic instrument, so for me this felt like a calling to start incorporating collaboration with live coders into my piano practice.
At the same time, I already had a trio, later duo, called “Bang Sessions” with Felipe Ignacio Noriega who was in fact live coding without really realising it. This duo later renamed itself to “Off<>zz” and for many years we would jam every Tuesday night at the Conservatory in Amsterdam. It was through Off<>zz that I learnt to improvise and discovered the practice and quirks of live coding and how that impacts acoustic music making. From Off<>zz, Felipe and I launched the CodeKlavier which is a system that enables me to code by playing the piano and is the backbone of the performance that you will hear (alongside Timo Hoogland’s Mercury).
Which platform do you use and why?
CodeKlavier is the only platform I use. However, the CodeKlavier family is growing and we now have a number of code-output-extensions for me to use other platforms via CodeKlavier. Besides the native CodeKlavier outputs of lambda numbers and a CK supercollider environment, there is a Java Script extension by Joana Chicau, an extension of Olivia Jack’s Hydra by Sebastian Pappalardo, an Augmented Reality extension for Unity by Patrick Borgeat, an extension for Caffeine by Craig Latta and an extension to Timo Hoogland’s Mercury environment which I used for the 10 Minute Livecoding Challenge.
How has live coding influenced your way of making things?
As a live performer, and not someone who’s ever thought of themself as a composer, live coding is the only way I’ve ever thought about making digital, or rather, hybrid art.
Looking back on the times of lockdown, how has your practice been the past few months and are there things you’re taking with you when you return to your practices?
I guess the key difference has been only working remotely. I love the lack of travel time involved with this, but creatively it is more inspiring to work in person. I’ve always used a mix of both in my day to day, but perhaps the balance of the two will shift to more remote work.
How did the lockdown influence your projects and did it influence you to work on something new?
I think the lockdown gave me more time to work on the CodeKlavier since all of my other piano work got cancelled. It’s been wonderful since CodeKlavier is really my artistic baby.
Find more of Anne’s work here:
Personal website — CodeKlavier website — Personal Twitter — CodeKlavier Facebook
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This article is part of the 10 Minute Livecoding Challenge by Creative Coding Utrecht and Netherlands Coding Live — a series of events where digital artists and live coders create a piece in ten minutes.
The 10 Minute Live Coding Challenge is sponsored by Stimuleringsfonds Creatieve Industrie.
