Behind The Screens: Nesso
An interview with coder and researcher Nesso.
Francesco Corvi, also known as Nesso, is an artistic researcher who uses programming as a creative and performative tool. 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.
1. What was your first encounter with live coding and what are your sources of inspiration?
My interest in coding as a performative practice began while I was attending a conservatory in Italy. At that time I was already programming tools with Max/MSP, but I felt the need to find a medium that would give me the same adrenaline that I had performing with a traditional instrument.
I saw in the philosophy of the TopLap manifesto a possible solution to a performative problem in computer music that was limiting my ability of immediate expression. This opened my eyes to how programming could become a performative medium as well as a way to build your own instruments.
The first real moment I realized that live coding would be my preferred performance technique was after playing at Algorave at Klang Roma organized by Amen Rave. That night was a really triggering experience for me, in addition to a very lively audience, I had the opportunity to talk in-depth with Renick Bell who motivated me so much to continue my research by sharing a lot of ideas and experiences. From then on everything went well until the arrival of the pandemic that blocked all the gigs I had scheduled.
2. What are your preferred platform(s) to use and why?
I think the discussion in the world of live coding should start to move away from language-specific problems to the analysis of algorithms as compositional ideas. In general, I’m not that interested in what language people use to make something, the ideas behind it are what fascinate me.
Having said that my setup for a live performance includes the use of TidalCycles, Supercollider, and Hydra.
What I like about TidalCycles is its ability to represent the evolution of patterns in a synthetic and elegant way. Over time I have adopted various tools that I had created to be controlled according to its logic and the results have always been very interesting.
Hydra is another language with which I immediately found myself at ease, after studying Glsl I immediately realized that using it in an audiovisual performance in which I programmed both music and images was something too laborious. Hydra in this is simple and effective and highly customizable.
In general, I think that a fundamental aspect of both of these languages is the community they have created around them. Both Alex McLean and Olivia Jack — the two main developers of Tidal and Hydra respectively — have dedicated a lot of effort to make these languages accessible to artists who are not expert programmers. This has greatly expanded the user base and created an inclusive community through which I’ve seen many people approach programming for the first time. In the various workshops I’ve held with Umanesimo Artificiale I’ve often had to teach the basics of these languages to total beginners and the approach has always been “learning by doing and having fun”. I think there is really no better way to discover the world of programming than playing with images and sound.
3. Are there any platforms, tools, or extensions that you develop yourself, and if so can you elaborate why and for what purpose?
I think that after having passed an initial phase of study of the available resources, developing new abstractions is a natural step in the creation of one’s own language and executive practice. The main difference I find between programming and playing an instrument is that I try to repeat myself as little as possible when programming, while in learning an instrument I need to develop muscle memory by repeating the same gesture over and over again. This is also the reason why you need a lot of practice to learn how to play an instrument even if you know music theory, while in an afternoon you can easily learn a language for live coding provided you have the necessary theoretical basis. For this reason, I believe that developing over time a series of functions to expand your “vocabulary” of live coding is very important. This way you create the basis for developing an environment where you are more confident and save yourself the effort of having to rewrite and think the same concept over and over again.
Over the years I have developed my own library for TidalCycles and various functions for Hydra and Supercollider. Lately, I have also created a series of patches in Max/MSP and Max4live devices controllable by TidalCycles that I use mainly to compose and record sound materials.
In particular, I have developed a device that allows you to control any parameter of Ableton Live through TidalCycles, at this time I’m finishing writing the documentation to publish it and I take this opportunity to thank all the team of Music Informatics that is helping me in the final step of this project.
4. How has live coding influenced your practice of making and thinking about art?
Live coding and programming, in general, have shifted my focus from research oriented on the final result to one oriented on the process. In other words, the process by which the artwork is created becomes the subject of the artwork itself. Rather than working with the goal of creating a single representation, I prefer to work for much longer on the creation of a computational process from which I can then select different outputs that become the actual pieces. This approach allows me to spend a lot of time in the research phase and to be able to work fluidly with various digital media.
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?
In algorithmic music, we have the possibility of not having to specify everything in a deterministic way and relying on functions that can represent trends and distributions. The challenge in using these processes is to correlate them to perception in order to obtain something that resembles what the artist wants to evoke. In my vision randomness is something to be managed to obtain a system that behaves in a certain way but that maintains a certain degree of freedom giving infinite variations of the same idea. Often spontaneous natural processes are the source of inspiration I seek to imagine such systems. Like the organic movement of the branches of a tree shaken by the wind, I want my works to appear ever so slightly different while maintaining their own recognizable identity.
6. Could you share a sneak peek into any upcoming projects or things you are currently working on?
Of the various projects, I am a promoter of, I am very excited about Music Informatics, whose team also supported me in the finalization and in the beta testing of the device which I used in the video for Behind the Screens — Season 2.
For my personal project in September 2021, I will start a master’s research at the Institute of Sonology in The Hague. During this period I want to continue to develop my live coding system according to a series of thoughts regarding the different conceptions of time in live coding versus more traditional systems.
7. Do you have any other thoughts you would like to share with the readers?
I hope that live coding and other forms of artistic expression related to progress will be a cue to develop awareness about the functioning and ethics of the new technologies that will fuel our future.
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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.
