Livecoding crash-course workshop, Superbyte 2015

This year's Superbyte Festival is shaping up to be a busy one for me - as well as vjing the main stage on the second day, I'll also be running a livecoding crash-course for beginners beforehand too. I've been asked a bunch of stuff about it already, so here's all the practical info in one place:

The workshop will be held on Saturday 12th September, at Sandbar (M1 7HL). There are a whole load of other workshops happening on this day too, definitely worth sticking around - I certainly will be doing. My workshop is at 12:45pm, ish. I think.

If you wanna attend, just turn up! No tickets or anything, and it's free.

You will need:

• Laptop of some kind. Windows/OSX/Linux are all fine.
• Google Chrome installed ideally.
• Maybe bring some headphones if you want to make loads of noise and actually hear it over everybody else.

I'll be speaking a little bit about what livecoding is, what it entails, and why it's an Awesome Thing To Do. If there's time/interest I can demo my vjing workflow too, and try to explain how I cram livecoded visuals into GIFs and video and glitch and all sorts of other stuff. Then we'll dive straight into some practical hands-on learning, which is absolutely beginner friendly, I promise. If you've written any code before then great, if not then you should be able to pick a bunch of this up anyway.

Software-wise I'll be taking people on a quick tour of Livecodelab for visuals, mostly as a warm-up and to demonstrate how ludicrously easy and fun it is to make live visuals. We'll then move on to some Gibber work, making beats and bass and looking at piping the noise into more audio-reactive visuals. Both of these are browser-based, which I've chosen on purpose so there's minimal setup and faff on the day.

I'll also be handing out written-up notes on what we cover, plus a ton of links to resources and software and inspiration to take away too.

If this sounds like good nerdy fun, come join, and please do spread the word. See you down there!

Obligatory New Year's Post - 2014 edition

Right, so: 2014 is about up, and it's been a blast. I thought I'd try and bash out some words like I did last year. It's quite interesting looking back at what I wrote last time around - I definitely did achieve most of the resolutions I set out for myself, and failed on a few too, but either way the direction everything has gone in this year caught me by surprise as much as anyone (this is definitely a good thing).

Dan vs SuperByte 2014

SuperByte returned to Manchester this weekend, and it was an absolute blast!

I'd been kindly invited to do visuals at the pre-party and open mic session at Fab Cafe, and I jumped at the chance to throw down, of course. I ended up doing something like five-ish hours in one long set, which was quite challenging considering this was mostly over short open mic slots - most of my live coding work is fairly long form and experimental, so this was a good chance to mix it up.