I've recently been swimming around in the new pool of Swift like many others and am particularly enjoying the Playgrounds concept which is allowing me to explore as I learn and develop and keep a set of code scratchpads to one side. I was mulling this over in the car this morning and recollected the article by Alex McLean on Transient and Ephemeral code that I read with interest over the summer which resonated.
In the modern way that new thinking spreads in the internet age, I'd come to Alex's post by way of getting a FB update from the band 65 days of static, who I'd first heard of by way of the Comfort Conspiracy podcast which referenced the LiveCoding tool Gibber, from which I'd explored live-coding languages and found Tidal and Alex's fantastic blog on his various explorations making music with text.
Seeing coding as a performance art was a bit of a mind-blowing revelation to me. Having an engineering background and being used to pair-programming and code demonstrations this was quite a different way of seeing code being used as an artistic tool, just for the joy of it, it's purpose being the 'shape' or effect it generated at that time rather than to craft something that had a longer term goal and necessarily repeated use.
Which had me thinking this morning about the differences of engineering and arts approaches. I'll put my cards on the table as an artist now and say that I'm a printmaker. However, monoprinting never really resonated with me and I always gravitated towards wood/lino-cut and etching which has a strong process element and on the engineering side of fine-art. This again, is about creating something with longevity and practicing/honing skills and the end result into something tangible and permanent.
Where my mind drifted was towards performance art - video, animation, dance and obviously music, where the training was effectively directed to having a set of patterns and expertise that could be called upon at an instant in time to achieve a controlled or experimental result. Isn't this where LiveCoding really challenges and starts to come into its own?
Coding, due to the syntax and range of effort required on a time-basis to achieve a certain outcome result has always seemed (to me) too slow to make a real performance without it being pre-canned and choreographed like a keynote speech. Then it occured to me that isn't that what all performance is to a certain extent? We learn scales and chord patterns repeatedly to get good at being able to reproduce them not so much to conjure them creatively live. Even jazz is building a skilled repertoire that allows the creativity to work within the trained/learnt/explored boundaries. And Tidal is inherently designed to explore patterns.
So, where does this leave us with code? My thinking returned back to the experiments in the playground. I'd seen from Mike Hodnick (kindohm)'s explorations with Tidal in his 365 Tidal Patterns learning and seeing text as a musical tool. Tidal and Gibber, which led me here, and many other custom languages are being driven by the relative ease with which it is now possible to make our own 'text-musical' instruments aka compilers or interpreters and the relative ease with which many concepts are being exposed as high-level APIs or frameworks which can be exploited (similar to the possibilities that Mashups initially simulated through the easy combination of many open, widely available APIs). I'll be interested to see if the open-source release of Rosyln by Microsoft creates any new musical languages, since like a traditional musician this is the syntax (or fingering) that I am most familiar with.
I've found that this has changed my behaviour and thinking more radically than I initially thought. Firstly, I'm sold now on text being an input device for a musical instrument and that live-coding to generate music is going to be an increasing phenomena as a performance art form. Second, I've noticed that I'm much more likely to kick-off some code to solve a problem and use it as a throw-away scratchpad. I still don't delete it, but it's more like one of my many scribbed moleskines and notebooks that contain half captured and explored ideas for code, creations, art and ideas. I've got a littered directory that is building up with results that are going no further than having achieved the results at the time. It's similar to all those spreadsheets that I call-up to do a set of complex calculations rather than using a calculator and then close without saving. I'm finding myself much more used to writing some code.
Which gets me on to the final point, which called to mind an article in the Guardian earlier this year on the need for a new revolution to teaching maths in schools and the approach now used in Estonia for a computer based approach to teaching maths. Seeing how my own children approach education and problems, maybe we need to increasingly consider ourselves that some of these text input tools that we're using have a far wider set of application and we should be using them more ephemerally for achieving our daily tasks - coding television programs anyone, rather than using an expensive, custom video editor??? I'm certain it's being done already.... which is why it's all the more laudable to see the work of the BBC once again supporting education for coding in schools (again, like Estonia)....
Lunchtime over
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