This month’s piece is an augmented drawing tool/musical instrument. Each gesture/line you draw…
…serves as a musical pattern. A cursor will travel along the line and trigger a new note every time it changes direction (and repeat when it reaches the end of the line). And…
…is subject to an external flow field that pushes the points of the line out of their original position.
Because the musical patterns are determined by the shape of the lines, altering the shape of the lines this way alters the patterns. The result is a kind of constantly shifting dronescape.
You can play it with mouse and keyboard, but it works best if you add a MIDI controller, as that will let you control the amount of influence the flowfield applies, the delay time, and the levels of the 3 effects (granulator, delay, reverb) using MIDI CCs.
I feel like I keep coming back to this idea of making music by drawing freehand patterns (and I’m definitely not the only one). There’s something really satisfying and direct about making a freehand gesture and that instantly making sound.
Anyway, if everything goes well, I’m planning on doing a livestream performance with this one later in the month, as part of the upcoming Biome Collective Online Gallery (psst, we’ve been developing a Biome Collective Online Gallery over the summer). I’ll post details on twitter once I know when it’s happening.
Download lost in the echo
Controls: mouse click and drag to draw; wheel to change colour/instrument; space: pause flowfield; f5: reset; escape: quit (see controls.txt for more)
The Rules:
The file at this link will be deleted 1 month from now (03/10/20).
All downloads are zipfiles containing a Windows executable.
All source code and assets are included, licensed under the GPL (code) and CC-BYSA (assets).
As long as you abide by those licenses, you can do whatever you want with the download.
Further Reading
This month I found a lot of my reading mostly focused on 2 specific topics:
On Community Art-making:
It feels like the white pube have been on a clear trajectory for a while now, away from the traditional art world of big institutions and towards more radical, community-driven art projects. {the community, the state and a specific kind of headache} is a fascinating conversation with 5 people involved in that area.
I also read Pablo Helguera’s Education for Socially Engaged Art, which… I mean, there’s useful insights there, but there’s a real tension between the intent of the artist and the needs of the community they’re working with in what he’s written, and he seems to side with the artist over the community. For instance, he appears to protray Santiago Sierra paying “workers from disadvantaged and marginalized groups to do demeaning tasks” in a positive light, I think because he believes Sierra is making an important point. But I don’t care what point you’re trying to make; that sounds outright abusive.
This interview with Avery Alder focuses on her TTRPG work, but also gets into a discussion about community and play, and how we relate to one another.
Emilie Reed wrote about arts funding and videogames, and how neither uk games funding nor uk arts funding is really helpful (or even accessible) to anyone attempting smaller-scale, more experimental work in videogames. Which I think ties into the community art-making discussion because how do you build or sustain a community if you can’t pay rent?
In response, Hannah Nicklin wrote about how we might work within existing funding structures, knowing that they are not designed to support the kind of work we want to do (which I think touches on the ‘abolitionist reforms’ discussed in this amazing panel from earlier this week).
v buckenham also wrote this insightful thread about both pieces, which nicely links us back to the white pube’s writer’s grant at the end.
On Free and Open Source Software:
Following the Mozilla layoffs, boringcactus wrote a detailed post about Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and its failure to meaningfully challenge or offer a realistic alternative to the corporate, capitalist status quo.
Related to that, hir fuck around and find out license is a fascinating example of a license explicitly designed to challenge that status quo and require an ethical responsibility of any licensees.
See also this related thread where Andi McClure talks about her feelings towards FOSS.
“As I see it, code is of low value— there is a lot of it, all mostly the same. What is high value is my time. If my code touches viral code, I’m giving up something valuable (future opportunity) for something not (code)”
This is something I need to give more thought to. I’ve used the GPL for the majority of my code for quite a while now (though I’ve yet to see anyone build on or modify one of my games, so I don’t know if I’m meaningfully contributing to any kind of community by doing so). A more radical and ethically conscious license is probably something I need to seriously consider.
Okay, take care of yourself. Maybe take some time to cook yourself a special meal, or listen to an album you haven’t heard in a long time, or go for a walk somewhere new if you’re not in lockdown. It doesn’t look like the world’s getting any less terrifying any time soon. Hope you’re doing okay despite it all.