Vague Terrain

FABRICATE is an International Peer Reviewed Conference with supporting publication and exhibition to be held at The Building Centre in London from 15-16 April 2011. Discussing the progressive integration of digital design with manufacturing processes, and its impact on design and making in the 21st century, FABRICATE will bring together pioneers in design and making within architecture, construction, engineering, manufacturing, materials technology and computation. Discussion on key themes will include: how digital fabrication technologies are enabling new creative and construction opportunities, the difficult gap that exists between digital modeling and its realization, material performance and manipulation, off-site and on-site construction, interdisciplinary education, economic and sustainable contexts.

Call for Work: Central to the aim of FABRICATE is to interrogate and disseminate difference, similarity and innovation across design and making practices in industry and academia. Submissions will be independently blind reviewed by two members of an international panel of experts. Selected submissions will be featured in ‘FABRICATE: Making Digital Architecture’ published by Riverside Architectural Press.

Deadline: September 20th, 2010. 

For more info on submitting work please see: fabricate2011.org/submissions

You are invited to submit articles and artworks for a new issue of the Leonardo Electronic Almanac edited by FutureEverything. This is a dedicated edition of the leading online journal exploring the FutureEverything 2010 themes of the city and open data.

Deadline: Abstracts due 10 September 2010

ART OF PERVASIVE DATA

This issue of LEA will seek cross disciplinary thinking on art in the age of pervasive data.

LEA is soliciting texts and artworks by artists, researchers, and scholars
involved in the exploration of themes including:

• The networked city
• Data visualisation
• Open data
• Hyperlocal data and the interpretation of proximity
• Community use and generation of data
• Novel means of navigating the data terrain.

Cities today are vast repositories of information, endlessly collecting and archiving data. The growth and proliferation of databases and libraries that we access and update in the course of our every day lives, and new techniques of accessing, visualising and using that data, leads to new forms of representation and social interaction. The vast scale of these databases brings us to a tipping point, entering an era that is increasingly data-driven. This poses new challenges, such as the demands of making sense of a million different data sources, issues of provenance, interoperability, trust and accountability.

The potential for more innovative and novel interpretations of this landscape by creative invention, social innovation and scientific intervention is there to be explored.

The FutureEverything editorial group consists of Karen Gaskill, Drew Hemment, Michelle Hirschhorn, Michelle Kasprzak, Julian Tait and Kate Taylor.

See this link for more info on submitting.

For further information or images submission contact: Ozden.Sahin@leoalmanac.org

Algorithmic composition is nothing new – John Cage and Iannis Xenaxis used mathematics and statistics in their earliest works. Brian Eno produced numerous compositions with SSEYO's Koan generative music system, which produces ambient variations for web-pages, mobile devices, and standalone performance. Autechre used algorithmic technique for their Confield and EP7 LPs, and the list goes on…

Often times algorithmic technique are utilized for experimental pieces, improvisational approaches towards classical, avant-garde music or jazz, but it is rare that computers are programmed to produce really funky music. Even more rare is it that the framework of a project is free (free as in freedom). This is the reason that I'm writing about a new musical work called Squeakyshoecore by Chris McCormick. Chris is a relentless programmer specialising in Open Source software, a Pure Data developer, he worked on the portable "reactive music" project RjDj and developed, among other software, the PdLanParty – a client-server system for associating Pd patches with each other on a local network, and the more recent WebPd – a partial port of Pd to javascript audio (currently only in Firefox experimental).

Squeakyshoecore—McCormick's new album—features funky acid electronic beats composed by his machine using some patches developed in Pure Data. These patches will be soon released under a free software license. I won't discuss here the musicality of those pieces, neither I will elaborate on the specific algorithms he used, but I can assure you that these tracks have a real groove. It is also worth mentioning that Chris has already produced algorithmic hip-hop software and a drum'n'bass generator, both freely available on-line.

To get some more context on the project I caught up with Chris to discuss his recent work.

Marco Donnarumma: Chris why you chose a free software environment as framework for your projects?

Chris McCormick: My choice to use FLOSS was made after I discovered this new GNU/Linux system that was emerging in the 90s, and then I read about the GPL license and the writings by the creator Richard Stallman. Quite apart from the moral implications of that type of software, there are a number of practical, pragmatic reasons why using Free Software makes sense, especially for creative people:

• Obsolescence: what happens when the corporations or people that control the software you use to create art go bust? If you look at the history of computing, this actually happens with alarming regularity.
  Tons of data can potentially be lost. With Free Software you can always have access, completely legally, to the programs that you used to create your art and other works.
• Control: because you have the source code, and because of the open nature of FLOSS, you have much more control over it than you normally have with software. Say for example, that you didn't like the way a particular program does something. You could edit the source code, or get a friend to edit the source code, or pay someone to edit the source code, to work the way you want it to. You can completely customize the way your software works, and you can do this legally.
• Community and collaboration: This is one of the most attractive things about Free Software. The communities which spring up around particular projects and programs are often wonderful, helpful, and collaborative places to hang out. For example, the program that I used to make the software that makes the music in squeakyshoecore is called Pure Data. The Pure Data community is a great one, and people often post patches (the programs used to make sounds), music, and tips to the mailing list and forum. It's very newbie friendly, and one of the things that really made me stick with it was that an early post I made to the list was replied to by the maker of Pure Data himself (Miller S. Puckette). You usually don't get that type of down-to-earth friendliness with commercially developed projects.