What I learned last time from my last time blogging (and especially learned from from the ~5 years since where I procrastinating restarting blogging) was to not get bogged down by the first post.
So this is just a random weekly update! This week, I got back from Europe where I was at ICLC and ErrorCamp! So a lot of live coding, which is a great thing to have a lot of.
Coding-wise this week, I’ve been working on a couple of different angles.
I finished up a shape grammars inspired curve system, and then brought over some things from this new anisotropic system, where I break down shapes into triangles and assign vertex data, and then modify a live shader to adjust what happens in those triangles. It’s probably how I’m supposed to do 2D shaders, where you incorporate information about the geometry instead of just having two big triangles cover the screen. It still doesn’t quite come as naturally as I’d like (I read in a texture from the previous frame.. and it’s upside-down and inverted and I have no clue why), but I got some (low res) results out of it that I think are promising.
I have a system that let’s me weave a thick line over and under itself, or other lines. Each crossing is aware of its index along the string, so you can program it to go “over-under-over-under” or “under-over-over-over”, and it’ll do the best it can. I have an idea of trying to do dailys with this system because I think there is so much I’ve been wanting to explore with the idea of weaving/intersections with 2D shapes. Not to mention the all of the relationships between textiles and computation!
2025 is the year that live code visualists in Boston are making sounds, and ICLC nudged me to join them. I’ve been wanting to have Murrelet trigger sounds for a bit. On the practical side, maybe I could book last-minute random shows without needing to find a musician (as much as I like pairing with folks!) I also have this wild idea that maybe I can push the rhythm and composition of my visual compositions by thinking about the sound they’d make.
So I came back from ICLC curious about SuperCollider. I think I saw more SuperCollider that week than I’ve ever seen before. It seems like it’d fit my system pretty well: I can trigger sounds with OSC from Murrelet, and the definitions are written in code, which means easier copy-paste/version control, etc. I started reading through the built-in tutorials and watching through playlists on SuperCollider, and it’s feeling a lot like how I want to make sounds: I read the 1978 “Practical Synthesis for Electronic Music” a couple years ago because of the cool diagrams, and I guess now I’m doomed to want to create music from oscillators.
So I’m taking another step to being able to make music. I also have this feeling that this.xor.that has more to it than can be expressed in visuals alone. But that will probably take a while to reach because I haven’t made sounds before and I kind of feel like I have some hang-ups around making music, like my fingers get confused and noises get all mixed up in my head or I move 1.5x faster than I should or I get annoyed at screechy sounds or I get stuck listening to a sound for too long cuz I like it. But I think that’s usually how new things start, and I’ve figured out how to do things in the past.
On Friday, ICMC came and visited the MIT Media Lab. It was cool to get to keep talking to computer music folks after coming back from ICLC.
I’m also helping organize a creative meetup group, following the footsteps of what came out of ITP Camp a couple years back. This week, I shared my weaving project and got a lot of references for computational knitters and such. There’s also a possibility of turning the project into a tool for researchers and such to illustrate their knitted shapes.