Behind The Screens: Patrick Borgeat
An interview with live coder Patrick Borgeat.
Patrick Borgeat is a live coding artist who creates music and visuals. 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?
In my study years at the Institute for Music Informatics and Musicology (IMWI) at University of Music in Karlsruhe I was lucky that Julian Rohrhuber and Alberto de Campo were invited to give SuperCollider classes. They introduced me to the idea of live coding and I was amazed by their laptop band Powerbooks Unplugged. At that time some fellow students and I were experimenting with Wii controllers, joysticks, and MIDI devices to make music, but we became frustrated with all the gadgets and finicky software configuration to make things work. We liked the simplicity of using just the laptop and the programming language as an interface for musical improvisation. Together with Holger Ballweg, Juan A. Romero, and Matthias Schneiderbanger we formed the live coding band Benoìt and the Mandelbrots with its proclaimed goal to “live code everything — everywhere” and performed now over 90 times together in Karlsruhe and all over Europe.
A highlight of my live coding journey was hosting the 2013 live.code.festival in Karlsruhe along with Juan. It was a great opportunity to bring together so many live coders from all over the world. Still, now I see ongoing collaborations and connections that probably have their origin at this festival, which fills me with joy.
Lately, a deep fascination for the fungal kingdom infiltrated my life. At first by becoming an avid (but still novice) mushroom forager — maybe desiring to follow the footsteps of John Cage — later finding a deep admiration for fungal textures and forms by documenting my findings photographically. I am in the process of incorporating my mycological explorations into my digital art practice — in its first iteration with the live coding performance “Mushroom Clouds”, a stochastic improvisation with fungal textures.
2. What are your preferred platform(s) to use and why?
Almost all my audio work is done with SuperCollider. I am generally more interested in the synthesis of organic sound layers than creating event-based music and SuperCollider has some great features for that. In particular multichannel expansion is a game-changer for me. I also like how OSC is a native citizen within the environment so it is very easy to connect it with other tools and programming languages.
Learning about fragment shaders and GLSL opened up a new way of thinking about programming for me and I regularly use them in my visuals — even though often in very simple ways. As the shader compiler is always available at runtime and runs very quickly it is also a good platform for live coding.
Out of practicality I am currently more and more using JavaScript-based environments, which also enable live coding strategies easily. It is amazing how capable the browser has become over the years with technologies such as WebGL and WebAudioAPI and how Node.js and socket.io make networking a breeze.
3. Are there any platforms, tools, or extensions that you develop yourself and if so can you elaborate why and for what purpose?
For the Mandelbrots I developed the SuperCollider extension BenoitLib which we use for tempo synchronization, data sharing, and sending messages to each other. It is available as a SuperCollider Quark even though it is not actively developed anymore and nowadays there seem to be better options available. It still works for us though so give it a try!
For live coding club visuals I developed, but never released, a Lua/GLSL visuals live coding environment called NeoJuiceX. It is still used as the engine to run the Ganzfeld visuals but its development is also discontinued and I don’t use it for new projects anymore. I planned to rewrite and release it someday but never found the time for it.
4. How has live coding influenced your practice of making and thinking about art?
In one way it influenced my programming practice in general: First thing I consider now when starting a new software project is “can I make some aspects of it live-codeable”?
When creating music, live coding already feels so natural to me that it is actually hard to imagine to do it otherwise. I get a feeling of being immersed both in sound, the code, and how they relate to each other. Ideas flow naturally. I am now far less interested in using graphical user interfaces or external controllers, as the code itself allows me to shape and change everything in both subtle and drastic ways. Whenever I have to use a Digital Audio Workstation I feel a bit lost. And sadly my Saxophone also has not seen much daylight anymore after I discovered SuperCollider.
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?
Serendipity for me usually does not come from randomness. Some of the most interesting results I stumble upon are unintended, either by messing things up or by not yet understanding well enough what I am actually doing. For me, this is one of the main reasons why I like creating with programming: Not to get things done or to reach a certain result but to get inspired by what is unfolding in the process and to expand the imagination.
I often use randomness as a filler when the general shape and density matters more than every little detail, or to give variation to things that are otherwise too uniform. Especially in my visuals work, rather than using pseudo-random number generators, I often sample from natural textures like tree bark, fungi, or other organic sources. By selecting an appropriate texture I can select the degree of cohesion and certain characteristics of the seemingly random field of values. Usually, the source material will never come apparent though.
6. Could you share a sneak peek into any upcoming projects or things you are currently working on?
With Anne Veinberg and Felipe Ignacio Noriega I am working on ARquatic, a music performance with AR visuals using their CodeKlavier programming language. By playing the piano Anne can code rules for L-Systems to generate both the visuals as well as an electronic accompaniment. If Covid allows, its first iteration will premiere in Amsterdam at the end of May.
I am also currently working on a large projection mapping project that will hopefully unfold itself this summer in Karlsruhe.
7. Do you have any other thoughts you would like to share with the readers?
Be observant of your environment — there is always something to discover … and I am of course not necessarily talking about your programming environment. I also want to invite anybody who is interested in live coding to on-the-fly cantina, a monthly video chat about live coding, hosted by the on-the-fly research group. See you there!
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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.
