Behind The Screens: Luka Prinčič
An interview with electronic musician Luka Prinčič.
Luka Prinčič is a musician who creates music in various forms and contexts. In this interview, we’d like to talk about his practices and tools, as well as work in the community and the way he copes with the radical and drastic changes in their practice resulting from the corona crisis.
- What was your first encounter with live coding and what are your sources of inspiration?
I had the privilege to see Alex McLean in 2002 performing at a small open-mic-for-laptops kind of event in London (Plug and Play at Public Life) where he used some of his own Perl scripts to trigger sounds and patterns. Hugely inspirational are also two videos by Andrew Sorensen: “A Study In Keith” and “The Disklavier Sessions”. Also, Ryoichi Kurokawa, Herman Kolgen, Peter Tscherkassky.
2. What are your preferred platform(s) to use and why?
I feel like I’m currently at some intermediate level with SuperCollider and I really enjoy using it, because it’s powerful, extended with many libraries, expressive in its language, and quite hackable with extensions. It also has one of the more kind communities among open source projects including taking care of diversity and safety. In the context of live coding performances, I don’t use any custom special libraries in SuperCollider, mainly Patterns and ProxySpace. The other language I use more often is Processing for live video. All of these are used strictly on Linux which is my only OS for about 15 years. The benefits of FLOSS (Free and open-source hardware) for the public (as opposed to the corporation or big companies) are too often unaccounted for. I come from the demoscene tracker music culture, where seeing into the ‘tracker modules’ — a source code of music — was the only way and amazing way to learn. And how else did musicians and composers learn if not from scores, transcribing and playing music from others first? We all stand on the shoulders of giants that came before us.
3. Are there any platforms, tools or extensions that you develop yourself and if so can you elaborate why and for what purpose?
The beauty of FLOSS software is its openness and invitation to hacking, changing code. Especially the so-called Unix Philosophy of creating small tools that do one thing and one thing well. This allows one to combine tools and write scripts that tie desired functionalities together in a platform of choice. Over the years there’s numerous little hacks and scripts written in my practice but nothing over-arching or seriously reusable by others: a VJ environment in PureData, my own audio/video controller in SuperCollider including a GUI for the multi-touch screen. I guess they are mostly tools coming from “scratching my own itch” while staring at the final goal of finishing a sound or audio-visual project.
4.How has live coding influenced your practice of making and thinking about art?
I feel that live coding is an amazing new way of improvisation and performance. Something that didn’t and couldn’t exist until 15 years ago (at least not in this form). I was always looking for new ways on how digital machines could intertwine with the human mind to produce exciting and powerful art. So when live coding came along it seemed almost natural to use it as an art form that can incorporate a multitude of artistic practices, including code-as-art perspective. Since I was not trained in “traditional” art-making (my degree is in audio engineering) I feel I am not troubled by formalistic traditions and limitations. In a sense, I was always a digital artist-hacker looking for cracks and abuses of digital tools and networks in pursuit of telling stories in exciting new ways. Live coding feels almost like a logical progression of the digital art performance.
5.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?
This is a very good question. Randomness is a great tool to introduce variation into otherwise static streams. I use it quite a lot in the early stages of experimentation and exploration — it can reveal possibilities where sound and musical structures can go — and later usually cut back on it to various degrees. I sometimes use chaotic generators and other algorithms to discover textures and variation in the time that seems interesting. Depending on the genre I reduce or amplify random movements or timbres. For me, music and art are always about the interplay between familial and novel, yet unheard; an interplay between repetition and difference. So, serendipity can bring in a lot of weird and new, uncontrolled, structures, but at the same time, for me, it must be in balance and right contrast with expected repetition.
6.Could you share a sneak-peek into any upcoming projects or things you are currently working on?
Last year (2020) I started with a project called ‘trans.fail’. It is an artistic research of two seemingly distinct themes and their overlaps and possible meeting points: transgender expressions and transmedia art in the context of failure. There is a number of questions I’m asking in the process to be inspired by. How (much) does the socially dominant male/female binary enforce a disconnect from a multitude of possible genders, a disconnect from a gender spectrum? Why do detransitions happen? At which point an audience of transmedia art perceives an intentionally used glitch or noise as a failure? Is glitch art political art, and if it is, why and when? Further inspired by Michael Betancourt I wonder about digital capitalism and its critique. This year I continue to work on trans.fail version 1.0 and at the end of the year an upgrade called trans.fail/desktop which is inspired by the genre of desktop films (see Nick Briz for an interesting example of hypermedia essay using the desktop metaphor)
7.Do you have any other thoughts you would like to share with the readers?
Just an invitation to listen to my friends at the boutique netlabel called “Kamizdat” that I’m running. All music is free (name-your-price) and published under Creative Commons license.
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.
