Alex McLean: Recent Episodes
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I’m just back from a productive week working with Mika Satomi and Lizzie Wilson on a mini project ‘Modulating Time’ at the annual, week-long PIFcamp gathering in Slovenia’s Julian Alps. We worked on handheld stick-based and woven devices for tactile control of musical pattern and tempo, so that audience members could manipulate our live coding performance. Here’s a sneak peak at what we ended up with!
This was a fun chat with Mylar Melodies for his Why We Bleep podcast, about algorave, tidalcycles/strudel, live coding and patterns. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or on youtube below !
I’ve been a bit behind on blogging in general, but made five posts in the Algorithmic Pattern blog yesterday.. On tangible pattern notation (khipu-inspired open hardware for coding with with Dave Griffiths and Paola Torres Núñez del Prado), the meaning of live (some reflections on what makes live coding radical with Julian Rohrhuber and Renate Wieser), making space for algorithmic alphabets (background work on hand-drawn pattern notation with Luke Iannini), live notation for patterns of movement (algorithmically choreographing movement and robots with Kate Sicchio), and drawing Kolam patterns in stitches and code (Anu Reddy’s residency report). Fill your boots!
I publish this blog post with some nervousness, as I’m not a historian or musicologist. This is something I feel strongly about though, and as ever am very happy to receive feedback and corrections in the comments, either on this post, or on the fediverse or facebook.
Luigi Russolo was an Italian painter and composer who wrote the Art of Noises manifesto in 1913, which has become influential particularly in the academic, electroacoustic music genre. He gave the first concert of futurist music the following year, together with his collaborator and the founder of the futurist movement, Filippo Marinetti.
To understand the context of this work, we can read the Manifesto of Futurism, one of Marinetti’s manifestos published some years earlier, in 1909. The manifesto points are below, translated into English from the original French version by R.W. Flint. You could probably skip the first points and jump straight to point 9, which gets to the heart of the matter.
- We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness.
- Courage, audacity, and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry.
- Up to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap.
- We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.
- We want to hymn the man at the wheel, who hurls the lance of his spirit across the Earth, along the circle of its orbit.
- The poet must spend himself with ardor, splendor, and generosity, to swell the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements.
- Except in struggle, there is no more beauty. No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece. Poetry must be conceived as a violent attack on unknown forces, to reduce and prostrate them before man.
- We stand on the last promontory of the centuries!… Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.
- We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.
- We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.
- We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicolored, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon; deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.
So, futurism, as expressed by its founder and Russolo’s close collaborator, was about violence, the glorification of war, destruction of museums, libraries, academies, and the fight against moralism, and feminism. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Benito Mussolini was a fan of Marinetti’s writing, and when Mussolini founded the fascist movement in 1919, Marinetti co-wrote the fascist manifesto.
So although the wider picture is of course complex, the history of Italian futurism can’t really be separated from the history of Italian fascism. There has however been some academic effort to do so, particularly with regard to Russolo’s image. The one book written on Russolo, by Luciano Chessa and published in 2012, briefly covers this whitewashing:
Russolo’s documented involvement with fascism has until now been erased from Russolo scholarship; his participation in the Duce-endorsed futurist exhibit at Turin’s Quadriennale in May 1927 has been thoroughly suppressed, as has his involvement with the exhibit at Milan’s Pesaro gallery in October 1929. His fascist connection is further covered up with the designation “antifascist,” which Giovanni Lista first applied to him in 1975. Lista supported this designation with a number of disputable post–World War II testimonies, and he claimed that in 1927 Russolo voluntarily went into exile in Paris to protest fascism.
What led Russolo to Paris were professional opportunities, not politics. In fact, his permanent return to Italy in 1933, as well as some of his subsequent writings, signal first acceptance of and then allegiance to the fascist regime. Yet the fable of his antifascism runs through all Russolo scholarship—it is still maintained in Tagliapietra (2007) and Lista (2009)—with no convincing evidence to support it. In fact the opposite is true: for instance, on the title page of the publication Arte Fascista, published by the Sindacati Artistici Torino in December 1927, Russolo’s name is prominently displayed.
Chessa, Luciano: Luigi Russolo, Futurist: Noise, Visual Arts, and the Occult. University of California Press, 2012.
The Arte Fascista title page is shown in the image at the top of this post. It’s worth mentioning that Luciano Chessa himself is writing here to explain why Russolo’s life and interest in the occult isn’t much written about, the context of fascism being one of the reasons. Chessa points out that Russolo wrote his Art of Noises in 1913, whereas the fascist manifesto wasn’t written until 1919; on this basis, he argues that the former couldn’t have been touched by fascism. This argument doesn’t seem to add up when you consider that the futurist manifesto came first, was full of fascist sentiment, and was written by Russolo’s close collaborator in 1909. The Manifesto of Futurist Painters, co-written by Russolo the following year in 1910, was marked with similar calls for violence.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that Russolo and the wider futurist movement should be wiped from the history books, after all destroying libraries is what the futurist manifesto advocated. But I do feel that futurism should be explained in context. Russolo is frequently and uncritically referenced by academics and others simply as the founder of noise music. There is even an international prize for electroacoustic music named in his honour, the Prix Russolo. When I asked why the prize was named after a fascist, their facebook page maintainer simply said he wasn’t one, because Russolo (the prolific writer of manifestos) was simply a mystic who didn’t have any political thoughts.
Nodding towards the chip on my shoulder, I suppose music academics really love a dead white European or American male genius to associate themselves with, building an origin story for their music culture. In electroacoustic and computer music circles, the same half-dozen influences come up again and again. These male geniuses often do themselves cite diverse influences, from Ghanaian timelines to Indonesian Gamelan, but it’s their name that becomes associated with these influences, from a Western perspective synthesising vibrant, continually developing cultures into a fixed body of recorded or notated work, attributed to a single person. Our obsession with the creativity of singular authors rather than cultures of practice works not only to misappropriate, but also to limit creativity. Especially when an idea as rich and open to possibility as noise art gets associated with a singular, deeply problematic man like Russolo.
As an example, this breathless article claims that Russolo was the first person to make music from noise. This is clearly a ridiculous claim in denial of percussion, humans were making noise music by hitting things long before futurism or fascism came along. For example Al-Jazari made robots that would not only serve drinks and danced but “perform with a clamorous sound which is heard from afar”. He published his designs in his “Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices” in 1206, some 679 years before Russolo’s birth. Furthermore it didn’t take a singular genius to turn industrial noise into music; this seems to have been a universal human response, from the e.g. African and Italian diasporic music communities that founded house and techno in the USA, to the clog dancers responding to inhumane working conditions in cotton mills to create repetitive, and frankly astonishing noise music through dance that mimicked the machines (full performance here if you’re curious!).
So how to conclude.. I suppose I wonder that when people uncritically cite Russolo and Marinetti as influences, are they aware of the history? Indeed are they calling for the destruction of history, to make culture afresh? Is an unapologetically institutionalised practice such as electroacoustic music, really founded on the principles of a movement that calls for institutions, museums and libraries to be destroyed? I don’t think so, and perhaps twenty years ago, it was more understandable that people would cherry pick otherwise palatable ideas from fascists, while brushing the violence and destruction under the carpet. With far-right politics seemingly in the ascendancy in Europe and elsewhere, I think academics should be more careful, though. Either separate the ideas from the person, or carefully acknowledge the history in order to move away from it. But don’t award music prizes in the honour of fascists.
Update
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I received some pushback from this post, including in the comments below. In his talk “Russolo’s antifascism revisited“, Luciano Chesso (who is quoted above) goes into much more detail about Russolo’s close relationship with fascism. He clarifies many things, including the reason why Russolo didn’t participate in the founding of the fascist party (he was out of action with a fractured skull), why he spent so much time in Paris (he had a mistress there), that he nonetheless still performed in Italy and wrote for fascist newspapers during this time (so not at all in exile as often claimed), that when he returned to Italy in 1933 (which he would definitely not have done had he been an anti-fascist) he received a pension via Mussolini himself, and so on. The testimonials in support of him were all made post-war, by people who had their own links to fascism to obscure, and so were therefore unreliable. Personally I find his account much more convincing than that of Russolo’s supporters.
Second update
For a nuanced treatment of this topic, please see the section on Russolo and Fascism in this interview with Luciano Chessa conducted by Felipe Caramelos.
I used to use twitter quite a bit, but now it’s run by a hard-right weirdo who wants to defeat the “woke mind virus” and pays awful people including Andrew Tate large amounts of money to use the platform now known as X, it’s untenable. If you’re part of an organisation that still uses X […]
My publications list was missing some entries and many of the PDFs. I started uploading everything to Zenodo, but although they archive things well, it’s not ideal as a publications list, for example you can’t browse by publication date. So now I’ve switched to keeping my zotero publications list up to date. It’s really perfect for this, and it was quick to add PDFs to as much as possible – it does its best to convert any URLs/DOIs to PDF attachments. It still took a little while to tidy up, but considering how long it took to write, it is worth the little extra time and effort to make it easy to find and read!
The list is viewable here on slab.org/publications, but probably best to view directly on zotero.org/yaxu. Please let me know if you spot something missing.
I’ve been rewriting Tidal again for a while but resisting actually using it, mostly out of a weird sense of delayed gratification.. Ideas expressed as code can get fixed once they become instrumentalised in a end-user interface..
But I’m finally starting to get a feel for Tidal 2.0. It’ll have two sides to it, the existing cycle-oriented pattern transformations, and a new realm of beat-oriented transformations. I wasn’t sure how both could be contained in the same interface, but just by renaming a function from toCycle to beatMode, I can start to get a feel for it. Here’s a tech test (not intended to sound nice!):
In ‘beat mode’, most things will look the same, but act differently. E.g. when you reverse a pattern in beatmode, the whole sequence gets reversed, rather than every cycle reversed independently. Even the mini-notation works, but becomes beat-oriented.
There’s a lot of reworking that’s gone into this. There’s now a Signal type which is like the old Pattern type, as well as a new Sequence type. Both Signals and Sequences are instances of a new Pattern typeclass. The nice thing is that the Signal and Sequences definitions are becoming mostly concerned with how to align and combine things of their type, most of the pattern operations can then be defined in terms of the more abstract Pattern typeclass.
This is only just starting to work, and already it’s fun to play with beatMode with its very strong polymetric affordance. It reminds me of early days of Tidal, when it was only beat-oriented. I love polymeter, and although the mininotation has always made it fairly easy to play with, it feels good to be able to do that outside of the mininotation without having to calculate ratios by hand.
Really though the payoffs for all this work are still to come. Coming up with a nice code interface for doing Carnatic-style addition/subtraction/manipulation of beats fluidly, following Aravind’s work. Also exciting are the possibilities of formalising alignment of sequences before combining them – I’ve been feeling my way around alignment of patterns for a while, including some prototyping in Strudel, and the possibilities feel limitless at the moment..
Of course beat representation is normally the very first thing you would implement in a music tech, using lists/2d arrays etc. It’s fun though to push against the usual grid-based approach, which tends towards score-like representations that are very much geared towards recording/transcribing, and not manipulating or indeed live coding with.. I continue to feel that staff notation, piano roll and all those DAW music interfaces that have flowed from them have really limited music, wherever they dominate. Lets see how it goes.
I’ve been thinking a bit about leadership over the past year or so, especially since being awarded a ‘future leader fellowship’ to explore algorithmic patterns.
Here’s a fun 3 minute talk from Derek Sivers that gives an interesting perspective on this:
His take-home is that leadership is over-rated, it’s really the second and third person who starts turning a lone weirdo doing something strange, into something with real momentum. I can definitely see this with the movements I’ve been involved with (e.g. dorkbot meetings, Placard headphone festivals, TOPLAP, Algorave, TidalCycles and the fledgling Pattern Club). A big part of their success has been in a) folks coming along and taking on an idea, and pushing it forward in their own way and b) co-founders being happy about that, not centering themselves too much or constraining things, letting the movement have its own life as it spreads. An Algorave in Mexico City will feel different from one in the UK. Good !
I think there is another message in this video though. There’s a clear sweet spot in this ‘movement’, about 1m45s in. The people are having a wild time, getting to know each other, expressing themselves together. After that it quickly gets swamped, and by the end it’s completely lost. People are standing around looking confused, probably not even knowing why they’re there, they just went towards the crowd. The movement was not only created inside 3 minutes, but also extinguished itself. By the end it’s just a very conventional crowd vaguely waving their hands in the air.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing, of course it’s totally fine for a movement to have its time. The Dorkbot meetings of ‘people doing strange things with electricity’ spread from New York City to dozens of places around the world in the ’00s, but there are very few active dorkbot events happening now. If a movement persists for a long time, then it’s not leaving space for new movements to grow and flourish. (This is why institutionalised movements, e.g. electroacoustic music, can sometimes feel ‘stuck’, and as if they’re punching down).
Maybe part of the problem is that we’re living in cultures with a really unhealthy attitude towards growth, and in particular wilful ignorance of the consequences of overgrowth.
I’ve been enjoying the ‘Love is the message‘ podcast a lot, where two cultural theory professors and soundsystem enthusiasts chat about radical musical movements from the 1960s onwards. David Mancuso’s parties in NYC Loft are a clear obsession, and it’s pretty fascinating how someone like Mancuso instigated counter-cultural change by making space for things to happen, basically putting parties on in his house that challenged the social (and financial) rules that constrained conventional commercial venues, to instigate change in the world ‘one lounge at a time’.
So maybe doing something weird, inviting people to join you and quickly getting swamped by your own meme isn’t the best approach to leadership.. Instead, focusing on doing things on a small, local scale, but embracing the out-of-control nature of ideas.. A networked approach where you make space for ideas to be explored, in a way that they can spread, without a centre. Love is the message, indeed..
I was unsure about writing this blog post, but today I was turned away from signing up for the openly-advertised University of Sheffield’s Open Research initiative’s inaugural annual Open Research lecture for not being a current member of the institution. So urged on by a deep sense of irony, here I am with a rant about trying to publish a book open access.
After much collaborative work over many years, I’m really happy that the Live Coding book came out a couple of weeks ago, on MIT Press. A fresh editorial team at MIT were really helpful and responsive in taking it over the line, with copy-editing helping iron over the different voices in the book into what I think is a great text that I hope people will enjoy.
Between four of our institutions – the Deutsches Museum, London South Bank University, Nottingham Trent University, and University of Sussex, we raised the $15k subvention necessary from European and UK public funds to make the book open access under a Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike license. As I understand it, this $15k was required to cover the loss in sales revenue due to the ebook/pdfs being made freely available. Given the live coding topic, it’s great that this means that not only is the book free to read in ‘digital’ form, it can in theory be modified while it’s being read.
In practice though the road was a bit bumpy. Although all copies of the book are openly licensed into the creative commons, some are nonetheless paywalled. Indeed, the ebook is has wide digitally distribution to the kindle, apple, google, kobo etc ebook stores where you can buy access to this creative commons license for $25.99. Unfortunately, the digital rights management (DRM) imposed by the store makes it difficult to benefit from the freedom to share and modify the text that the open license grants you. So really, you are paying $25.99 to lose benefits. No wonder creative commons are against this kind of DRM.
Worse, the MIT Press website steers you towards these digitally-rights-managed, $25.99 paywalls and away from the otherwise identical free-to-download ebook that we paid the subvention for. If you click the big ‘ebook’ button (screen shot below), you are directed to the Penguin Random House commercial distribution of it:
To access the ebook for free, you have to instead click on the ‘resources’ tab, and find a link to the epub or mobi ebook download there. Of course, this isn’t a mere resource for the book, but the actual book, so that’s a bit like hiding the ebook behind a door that says ‘beware of the leopard’. I did negotiate putting some text on the bottom of the page pointing to this badly named tab, but unfortunately the tab could not be changed and the ebook links couldn’t be added to the front page. It also took MIT over a week after publication to make this resource tab appear, the non-paywalled ebooks weren’t available at all via MIT until that point.
You can also click on the ‘open access’ tab, if you know what that means. According to my (unscientific) poll on mastodon, unless you have an academic background, you probably don’t, and hopefully this book is of interest to non-academics. After a couple of clicks this takes you to a different website, where the book is downloadable as fifteen separate PDF files. Many people (myself included) would find reading a book as separate PDFs awkward to download/sync to an e-reader, and difficult to read – the layouts are designed for print. So for most people, they’d want to click that ‘resources’ tab.
MIT were happy to discuss these issues, but nothing could really be done. They were open about the fact that they relied upon these ebook paywalls for ‘open access’ books to make the them financially tenable. They said that ‘epub’ ebook files will in the future appear on the ‘open access’ site alongside the per-chapter pdfs, which is good news. They also suggested we made our own website where the ebook can be downloaded, which we’ve done at livecodingbook.toplap.org, but really, promoting and distributing a book is the job of its publisher. I believe that MIT Press are a non-profit themselves, so this isn’t about profiteering, but the pragmatics of publishing research products in a financially sustainable way. The end result though is that authors can raise funds to make their books open access, but the publishers are still motivated to make people pay for them anyway.
So I guess open access can be a kind of performance done to placate the funding requirements that come with public funding, and not a genuine effort to make publicly funded work readable by everyone. If you are considering publishing open access, my advice is to think and negotiate hard before signing the contract, to be clear about what versions will be creative commons, which of those will be open access, and how they will be promoted together.
“Live Coding: A User’s Manual is the first comprehensive introduction to the practice and a broader cultural commentary on the potential for live coding to open up deeper questions about contemporary cultural production and computational culture. This multiauthored book—by artists and musicians, software designers, and researchers—provides a practice-focused account of the origins, aspirations, and evolution […]
I’m happy to have a talk accepted for the first groove workshop happening in Jan 2023, “an online meeting seeking to bring together researchers from a wide range of domains and with differing research questions and approaches, all centered around the topic of musical groove.” Looks like a lovely event, but considering the topic of […]
Here’s a nice interview I did with lovely fellow Sheffield-resident Benjamin Tassie, for his Future Classical show on Resonance FM. It was a fun chat and the 64th episode, you should definitely check out all the others – so many good people!
Kate Sicchio and I had a nice chat about our interest in patterns as part of this year’s International Conference on Live Interfaces, organised by Adriana Sa. I really enjoyed this format, the informal nature of it somehow got a bit deeper as an interdisciplinary exchange than a usual overloaded powerpoint-style conference talk.
I had a great time chatting to Axel, Okkie and Ziphoid for the ZINE podcast, which is all about the demoscene – a really nice movement which has it’s own kind of live coding..
I’ve been getting my head around Robotis AX-12A servos, and am so far at the stage where I can control a weird robot arm with an arduino. It was a bit difficult to navigate to this point, and there was some interest from a friend (Les), so I thought I’d share what I needed to […]
(partly developed thoughts follow that I’ll probably edit a lot..) I’ve been scratching my head over organising modern events over the past few years. There are some really good examples, such as: ICMPC/ESCOM, developing an evidence-led, hub-based model since 2018 that increases participation, affordability, and diversity, while substantially reducing environmental cost NIME, building up excellent […]
I’m fascinated with this video: At the start Sylvie Rasch shows a sock that she says is completely done by the machine, with no adjusted stitches etc. Then she demonstrates how its done, immediately dropping half the stitches in the cuff in order to redo them by hand to make the ribbing. This would clearly […]
While I’m in the beginnings of a new tech-oriented research project, I’m getting a lot from Ursula Franklin’s “Real World of Technology” lectures, which contain the following checklist for projects: “… whether it: (1) promotes justice; (2) restores reciprocity; (3) confers divisible or indivisible benefits; (4) favours people over machines; (5) whether its strategy maximizes […]
Last week was Civic Sound Week in Rotherham. This was originally going to be a full blown festival, but changed format due to the pandemic wave, instead becoming a series of drop-in multichannel sound installations. My original plan for a performance collaboration couldn’t happen, and I was invited to do an installation instead. I didn’t […]
From the introduction to my ICLC2021 paper Alternate Timelines for TidalCycles: The TidalCycles (or Tidal for short) live coding environment has been developed since around 2009, via several rewrites of its core representation. Rather than having fixed goals, this development has been guided by use, motivated by the open aim to make music. This development process can […]
Here’s a major life event – I’m starting a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship with Then Try This! This is a four-year, full time fellowship, developing a theme that I’m calling “Algorithmic Pattern”, building on my work with e.g. TidalCycles and the PENELOPE project to explore new technologies based on ancient pattern-making practices. Getting such a […]
I’m thinking about a humane research workshop/conference model, compatible with mid 21st century climate and health emergencies. How about this: Two page papers/extended abstracts solicited via public call, and peer reviewed by at least three people each from a diverse panel. Chosen papers are presented as pre-recorded 15-20 minute talks. These videos are streamed two […]
It’s volunteer responsibility amnesty day every solstice, the next one on the 21st December 2021. This is good timing for me, so until then I’m going to add to this post with some responsibilities I’m giving up. “I need to put a few things down. I hope other people pick them up and carry this […]
We had some pandemic-related challenges, but Eimear + I had a great time collaborating as part of a residency for IKLECTIK. Here’s a stream of Eimear + I jamming, with Eimear on voice + drum machine, and me live coding using their voice as source material, using TidalCycles+Superdirt with the live looper by Thomas Grund. Later in the video I introduce some Tidal features implemented during the residency.
Here’s the full info about our residency, including our project blog. Hopefully we’ll be able to perform in a live venue soon !
I’m really looking forward to joining JB from Music Hackspace to go through the pre-history, history, present and potential future of Tidal, possibly in that order.. Here’s the youtube live stream, if you click on it you should see the date + time in your local timezone, and click to get a reminder:
More info here:
Livestream: TidalCycles – growing a language for algorithmic pattern
Mostly a note to self, but maybe this is useful for someone else trying to get hifi audio from jack into zoom using linux mint or similar, so I thought I’d make it a blog post.
Zoom processes voice separately from desktop audio. So to send music and voice separately, while jack audio is running, you have to have two feeds going from jack to pulseaudio.
I already have jack set up to connect to pulse, so desktop audio works as normal. I think this was just a case of installing the pulseaudio-module-jack package, and configuring jack to run pacmd set-default-sink jack\_out after startup.
To add a separate stereo channel out of jack into pulseaudio, I ran
pacmd load-module module-jack-source channels=2
Then the new jack sink appears in qjackctl and I can connect up my music sound source (supercollider) to that.
In zoom I then share a window, with stereo hifi audio switched on. pavucontrol is super useful at this point, you can see zoom is listening separately for voice and desktop audio, which appears as zoom_combine_device. Unfortunately I couldn’t simply connect the zoom_combine_device to the new jack source, don’t know why. However it’s possible to create a ‘loopback’ device for connecting sources to sinks in pulseaudio. I tried with this:
pacmd load-module module-loopback channels=2
Now I expected to have to more in pavucontrol to connect this up to zoom_combine_device, but somehow it did this automatically. I think I had to connect it to the second jack source but everything else ‘just worked’ somehow. Lucky me.
With a bit of experimentation I can hear that as expected, supercollider sounds different, depending on whether I connect it to the voice or desktop audio input into zoom. ~~I’ve only tested by recording a solo zoom session so far, and can hear there’s more dynamic range with desktop audio. However I can’t hear it in stereo, which is really what I’m after. I’m hoping that’s just zoom recording in mono for some reason, and that in practice it will be in stereo..~~ After further tests, it all works very well, with hifi, stereo audio from supercollider, and voice treated as voice. So be aware that the record function in zoom does not have the same audio as the other person hears.. Great! I think though that both sides need to have stereo enabled in the zoom settings for the other party to hear it in stereo – I’m not 100% sure that this is the case, but it’s what I’ve read..
I’ve been enjoying the idea of “research products” as opposed to “research prototypes”. Prototypes are understood as a partially working thing as a step towards an answer to a design problem. Research products on the other hand are understood as they are, rather than what they might become. Here’s how Odom et al describe it in their 2016 CHI paper “From Research Prototype to Research Product”. Unfortunately this is a closed access ACM paper, but you can find a pdf online, for now at least. Here’s the four features of research products that they highlight:
- Inquiry driven: a research product aims to drive a research inquiry through the making and experience of a design artifact. Research products are designed to ask particular research questions about potential alternative futures. In this way, they embody theoretical stances on a design issue or set of issues.
- Finish: a research product is designed such that the nature of the engagement that people have with it is predicated on what it is as opposed to what it might become. It emphasizes the actuality of the design artifact. This quality of finish is bound to the artifact’s resolution and clarity in terms of its design and subsequent perception in use.
- Fit: the aim of a research product is to be lived-with and experienced in an everyday fashion over time. Under these conditions, the nuanced dimensions of human experience can emerge. In our cases, we leveraged fit to investigate research questions related to human-technology relations, everyday practices, and temporality. Fit requires the artifact to balance the delicate threshold between being neither too familiar nor too strange.
- Independent: a research product operates effectively when it is freely deployable in the field for an extended duration. This means that from technical, material, and design perspectives an artifact can be lived with for a long duration in everyday conditions without the intervention of a researcher.
The Live Loom I’m finding this helpful thinking about my live loom. It’s not intended as a commercially viable product, but it’s also not intended as a step towards one. It’s intended to be a device for exploring computation, without automation and all its forced simplicity. It works very well, every time I use it I’m blown away by the generative complexities of handweaving, and it helps me see computer programming language design afresh, with a beginner’s mind. So it’s inquiry driven, and finished in that it’s ready to embody an area of inquiry and host exploration of that. In terms of fit – well its lasercut body and trailing arduino aligns it with 21st century maker culture, and solenoids align it with 20th century electromechanics, but its fundamental design is that of an ancient warp weighted loom, so it has some fit there although it has a lot to learn from the past in terms of ergonomics.
In terms of ‘independence’ it’s not quite there yet, but is designed with open hardware principles, using easy to source parts and permissive CC licensed designs. The next step is supporting others in replicating the hardware which will happen in the next few months. This is where it gets exciting for me – how will the live loom function as an ‘epistemic tool’ – will the research ideas carry with the loom, or will the replicators ‘misunderstand’ the loom and take it in a new direction? Of course the latter case would be failure in one respect, but I get the impression that designers see such failure as positive, where objects support divergent use..
In any case by thinking about the live loom as a research product, it helps me explain what it’s for. When I show it to people, they often treat it as a work-in-progress towards a fully automated loom, like one driven by the famous Jacquard mechanism. That’s the opposite of what I’m trying to do, as that mechanism is what separates humans from the mathematical basis of weaving as computational interference. As a research product, the live loom foregrounds computational augmentation rather than automation.
Research papers as research products This leads me to think about research papers as research products too – many will have the experience of publishing a research paper, getting excited when someone has cited it, only to find that they’ve totally misunderstood what you were trying to say, even taking the opposite meaning. What if we treated papers as research products, that we deploy in the world, and then observe what they do? I just read Christopher Alexander’s foreword to Richard Gabriel’s book “Patterns of software”. Alexander is an architect (of buildings), and Gabriel is a computer scientist who has studied Alexander’s work for decades in order to try to develop a similar pattern-based approach in software. What’s interesting is that Alexander seems profoundly disappointed in the book that he’s writing a foreword for, although he’s chooses his words generously he basically asks Gabriel to write a different book, and to learn from his more recent work where he solves all the problems in his older work that Gabriel references. It is amazing that Gabriel would host such a text at the front of his book! Really Richard Gabriel is an amazing computer scientist and thinker, and I think Alexander is being a bit naive in assuming that such a comparatively young field of computer science could solve its core problems by going through his four-volume text on designing physical buildings – these are really very different domains indeed. What is more interesting is that Gabriel gives voice to the person he cites. This goes way beyond peer review to giving his text its own life in the process of being published. I’m looking forward to the rest of the book!