A day roughly divided into three parts:
First part of the day cleaning up stuff in Jamoma that I worked on yesterday and the day before, breaking one or two modules in the process. I got a mail from Andrew Eales at Wellington Institute of Technology, asking for details concerning the query system for OSC we use in Jamoma. I tried replying as best I could, also including a link to the tutorial I wrote yesterday.
Googling reveals that he seems to be doing interesting work.
Long lunch with Norbert Schnell and Diemo Schwarz, discussing a number of pet subjects, such as relationships and mutual dependencies between research, development and artistic creation, if and how artistic development can constitute research, now, nows and exploded nows.
Yet another topic we touched upon was modularity and reuse in development. While writing up the annual report 2008 for BEK a few weeks ago, I noticed a discrepancy in the approach to software and hardware development. While software development aims for modularity and generality, so that code can be reused (an underlying principle of Jamoma development) hardware development is turning more and more project-specific, often also being incorporated as part of the visual aesthetics of the work. Below are two examples:
Alog Live at Museo Reina Sofia Madrid
Sonus barentsicus. Sound installation by Espen Sommer Eide for the Northern Lights Festvial Tromsø, Norway 2007.
Monday, as Diemo was presenting me to some (or many) of his colleagues at Ircam, I noticed the same when we stopped by the office of Emmanuel Flety. He was busy modifying some Adidas shoes for a stage production.
I guess the reason is pretty obvious; while software can be copied and reproduced, reusing hardware either mean using the same physical device again or building a copy, that is as long as one is not involved in industrial mass production.
Today for lunch, the question was whether composers and artists reuse methods in their artistic processes. No clear conclusions, but I believe that this is often the case.
The afternoon and evening was spent working with Nils Peters on a submission for SMC 2009. The paper is summarizing a lot of the work we have been doing for a number of years on spatialization, and the structuring principles underlying the modules.
I will be doing a Jamoma presentation early next week. Tim is doing a presentation of Jamoma tomorrow at the Expo74.
