Live coding at GOGBOT festival 2021
Arriving in Enschede at Sickhouse, the venue where the live coding concert would happen as part of the GOGBOT festival, we were presented with what looked like an old hospital table for the performance in the small auditorium. The event happened on the 9th of September. It was a collaboration between the festival and Creative Coding Utrecht.
Blaž Pavlica, Iván Paz, and I drove there from Utrecht. Yota Morimoto met us there coming from The Hague. After the three performers set up on the table and did a soundcheck, the group went for dinner. We also took the opportunity to check the festival exhibitions.
Back at the auditorium, as the concert was about to begin, we were all concerned that we had no audience yet. Yota was first. He live coded using Supercollider with a stunning minimal visualization that connected directly to his music. Yota embraced a raw digital sound. It started with a static deep bass drone that eventually got thicker, acquired internal movement, and was superposed with shorter glitch sounds. Sticking to an overall digital and glitch sonority, Yota took us through multiple textures, often contrasting with the preceding one. The initial drone gave way to a section with a bass-sounding element and some noise interspersed with gaps of silence. After a harsher break, the previous texture morphed into a driving, danceable rhythm that got gradually richer. This was the shape of the rest of the piece: rhythmic sections with varying sonorities alternated and sometimes combined with harsher and glitchier segments.
Audience-wise, the blinking lights from the screen and the noise from the room must have triggered the curiosity of the festival public. People started dropping in to watch the concert. Some stayed for the entire performance, while some stayed for a few minutes and left, treating the concert as one more exhibition in the festival. This happened consistently throughout the night with the three performers.
Iván was next. He also live coded Supercollider. We got to see his text editor, Vim, and his terminal. His performance also started with a static drone sound. However, this time we had a higher-pitched brass sounding pad. Over time it got richer and richer, with more harmonic content introduced, making it sound more and more massive as if it was filling up the entire room. Having established this sonority as the main element of the piece from the start, Iván developed it for the length of the performance and gave us multiple views of it. He rearticulated it with sharp attacks, performed dynamic swells over shorter and longer periods, and transformed its harmonic content. He also introduced more notable rhythmic elements, either with the sonority itself or with percussive sounds, at times giving us a sense of polyphony.
Blaž was the last one, and again Supercollider was featured, but this time the text editor we saw was Supercollider’s one. He started with very brief sounds building a sparse granular texture where grains had different filter parameters. A shift in texture happened, and we started hearing longer grains with a more apparent pitch content and a metal-like timbre. Filter configurations still seemed to vary among and within grains, giving them a very dynamic quality. Another shift in texture took us further along in the same direction. Some grains were so elongated that they could hardly be seen as grains anymore. This led to a denser texture at first. From there, Blaž very naturally turned our focus to a single stream of a quasi-continuous sound with a lot of internal harmonic movement that he altered and transformed until the end of the piece, giving us the feeling of listening to an evolving melody rich with glissandi.
One of the goals of the event was to expose the practice of live coding to new audiences. Reactions seemed to vary from people staying for a short moment to people intrigued by the music and projected code. Despite all three players having used the same environment, Supercollider, GOGBOT festival attendees who happened to stop by the concert saw three distinct aesthetics and approaches to live coding. A testament to that environment’s versatility and the many possibilities of the medium.
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on-the-fly is a project to promote Live Coding practice, a performative technique focused on writing algorithms in real-time so that the one who writes is part of the algorithm. Live coding is mainly used to produce music or images but it extends beyond that. Our objectives are: supporting knowledge exchange between communities, engaging with critical reflections, promoting free and open-source tools, and approaching live coding to new audiences. The project runs from 10/2020 to 09/2022, is co-founded by the Creative Europe program, and is led by Hangar in collaboration with ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Ljudmila, and Creative Coding Utrecht.
