Behind The Screens: CNDSD
An interview with live coder Malitzin Cortes, also known as CNDSD.
Malitzin Cortes, also known as CNDSD, is a musician, creative technologist, and speculative architect. In this interview, we’d like to talk about her practices and tools, as well as work in the community and her upcoming activities.
What is live coding, what does it mean to you and how has it influenced your practice of making and thinking about art?
Many people have asked me in recent years to talk about the practice of live coding, and as its name states, coding in real time may seem very obvious, over time I think I have understood that live coding is also a process that can be applied to many disciplines and also a community and a way of sharing art and pedagogical processes in a network around its tools and its aesthetic results.
I dare to say that fresh “subgenres of algorithmic music and electronic music” have also emerged from this process as a result of the languages used and the way in which artists appropriate these tools and their new possibilities.
For me, creative code and specifically live coding really means reaching the most abstract and deepest of my thoughts, reaching a place that I didn’t even know existed but that is activated, every time I enjoy music or analyze an image or a space, after an emotional experience through mathematics that can remain invisible unless you state them.
Could you tell us what your first encounter with live coding was and what are your sources of inspiration?
I come from architecture and in a certain way my first approach to “drawing in real time, through text” was to use AUTOCAD to draw architectural plans. I remember that you had to learn the commands and especially what I now understand as functions, for example “line”, “ellipse”, “array” etc. I later began to learn Processing for architects, and it seemed completely natural to me but with a power that I had not yet been able to understand, the power of generative design. I understood when I enunciated textually 1000 circles and then they drew randomly using a for-loop, there my processes changed forever. I was wondering if the same existed for music and a new world was about to be discovered for me.
In Mexico, the live coding community emerged from the multimedia center in Mexico City, when someone spread the word to me that they were teaching something similar to Processing, but for music, I did not hesitate to learn it.
I began to learn SuperCollider and in that nucleo was where I really trained and also on the internet in a self-taught way, I met more people passionate about this. In parallel, I joined two communities close to my interests, that of live cinema and electroacoustic music and sound experimentation. It was a time of great learning because everything related to sound and audiovisual experiences interested me a lot.
Do you have any preferred platforms and/or languages, how did you come to use them and do you have a specific reason for it?
I learned TidalCycles thanks to Rodrigo Velasco having learned it from Alex McLean. My life changed forever with Tidal. I found in its lines, its methodology, and thought the way to make the music I was dreaming of, although I use many tools to create audio and I have studied different languages, even SC, Pure Data, Orca, among others, I am in love with tidal. The last few years I have dedicated myself to studying it, teaching it, and experimenting with this wonderful language and its paradigms.
I find everything that Alex understood about live coding to create Tidal fascinating, those reflections about how to make the live act dynamic and the poetics behind the functions with the intention of equipping you with tools that allow algorithmic ideas to flow like a flow, a continuous tide.
I have always liked mathematics although I never considered myself the most brilliant, the degree of complexity and intuition that I found with Tidal is an ideal balance to improvise and compose.
Curiously, in some purist spaces of algorithmic music and live coding, Tidal seemed to be a more lax language that implied less complication to create an algorithmic sound idea. I think that therein lies its genius and its complexity, which is absolutely delightful to me. Reach complexity with little text by taking advantage of its nesting ability where you can have full control or let her surprise you by doing things for you. A lot of the music I’ve managed to compose with Tidal has to do with how surprisingly effective she is for order and make complex in time and the malleability that you achieve with the sounds, destruction of samples, but also of synthdefs or other instruments that you can control with Tidal.
Tidal Cycles is the great orchestrator.
The sounds can come from anywhere, from the purest digital synthesis to the home recording of a couple of broken porcelain cups.
Are there any platforms, tools, libraries or other extensions you have developed yourself and if so can you elaborate on why and for what purpose?
More than a language together with Ivan Abreu, programmer and digital and electronic artist, we have created a series of tools with the intention of taking the logic of Tidal Cycles to other horizons.
The first was around live cinema[1], we meditated on how live coding converges at many points in this practice, we coined “live cinema coding” for the creation of expanded experiences with video processes or generative graphics and music around a concept, where there can be composition and improvisation with a series of algorithms and pre-compositions created, making each performance a unique experience.
In this attempt we connect Tidal Cycles to Resolume Arena and madmapper, being with the first one more efficient, from there come works like this: “Coding In Atypical Places” a non-linear story about a “cyber decora[2]” girl in Mexico City and the Internet.
CNDSD & IVAN ABREU — Coding In Atypical Places / ISEA 2019
The control of all video generative gestures and lights is tied to the Tidal Cycles patterns.
Ivan created a pattern viewer, this for pedagogical purposes in order to better explain to our students how tidal time happens and the order of patrons. available here.
Right now we are working on this same logic with video game tools and specifically with tools like PatchXR where you can create immersive experiences around sound, thanks to this first logic and Tidal Cycles we managed to do hybrid acts where the code controls some behaviors within the viewer, for an improvisation give yourself the text and the body.
This research is part of another project with the support of the on the fly scholarship at ZKM.
Are you part of a (local) community? How do you organize and do you share works or collaborate often?
In Mexico we have a Toplap node and talks and interactions with other nodes in Latin America and around the world are generated from it.
We organize Algoraves or different programs always looking for financial support and collaborations with cultural institutions, sometimes more casual events are also organized.
In what forms are algorithms and randomness applied in your practice or performance? Do you try to pursue serendipity and how or why not?
I think it is an essential part of my practice as a musician and digital artist, I take collaboration with the machine very seriously, the proposals that come from it, although the parameters are provided by me, the conclusions it reaches seem to me to be agreement with so many other decisions in the process and composition are what make it so special.
In that aspect I feel like when I work with machine learning, although in live coding I am not specifically training the machine to detect, replicate or identify certain things, I am trained by the machine, I discover that some results of some algorithm lead to darker atmospheres or lighter tones, so when I need that feeling, I apply that algorithm. There are too many discoveries in this process.
Do you have any recommendations for people who have not gotten into live/creative coding but are curious to give it a try?
I think people interested in embarking on a path to creative code might be surprised at how humane it is.
Sometimes the fear of these ideas of “talking to computers in mathematical languages” can drive anyone away. The process of coming to terms with computers is totally human and wonderful, a good amount of mathematics and things that we have already learned since we were children are present in the core of the programming.
Could you share a sneak-peek into an upcoming project or something you are currently working on and very excited about?
I will release two albums this year made with Tidal Cycles and Orca, which excites me a lot, I consider them an evolution of my previous EP, one of them is completely thematic and it is about some tracks on an old computer that does not work, for lucky to record these tracks that curiously in a new equipment is heard very differently.
The computing capacity and the variables of each computer make Tidal’s redimension very different, this reaffirms the idea that each computer is unique and is shaped by what we deposit in it, it is an extension of us.
I also want to share the results of our research in On-The-Fly, where we will soon release the final piece that combines immersive live coding, machine learning in the reflection of architecture that is done informally in Mexico and many parts of the world in response to the precariousness, the demographic explosion, real estate speculation and other phenomena, this project is speculative architecture and we are interested in telling this story through live coding.
Is there anything we did not ask about but you would really like to share with the readers?
Just: long life to live coding!
Footnotes
[1] Live Cinema is a genre within performative practices with live projections; represents a new cinematographic conception live cinema, a term that refers to audiovisual creation in real time by artists working on a concept; by definition and in opposition to conventional audiovisual works, it is ephemeral and unique.
[2] “el Decora” was born around the 90s. In addition, it was one of the most extravagant Harajuku fashions that exist. As for the clothes they wear, they tend to be very similar to the Kawaii style; except that “el Decora” adorns his entire outfit with a large number of accessories used in hair, clothing, shoes, bags, backpacks, cell phones and everything that can be put a sticker on.
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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 suppported by Stimuleringsfonds Creatieve Industries and Gemeente Utrecht.
