Reasons To Be Creative 2015

Right! So I finally found time to stick some thoughts and pictures onto the internet about this year's Reasons To Be Creative.

BITRITUALS - live visuals at µChip3, Birmingham

A couple of days ago I did some live visual work at a really awesome chiptune event in Brum - uChip3, curated by the ever-awesome hellocatfood and 2xAA.

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.

Dan vs the NOISE PARTY

Yesterday I had another chance to go and cause trouble with a laptop and projector - this time for the Manchester Girl Geeks NOISE PARTY (full disclosure: I came up with the name, and the capital letters are totally part of the deal).

Dan vs the Manchester Algorave

So last week I finally got to try out some visual work in a live setting, at the Manchester Algorave. It was easily the oddest thing I've ever done with computers, and has absolutely sealed the deal on me doing more of this kind of work - I got to prove to myself I can throw down in a live setting, it was a great opportunity to find out what works and doesn't work (both in terms of my approach, and the software), and most importantly it was hugely inspiring watching so many killer devs/musicians/creators making so much amazing noise!

Coding and raving and workshops, oh my!

If you follow me on twitter/facebook/whatever you'll have no doubt seen me excitedly waffling about the livecoding stuff I've been noodling with recently - I thought it might be wiser to put it all in one place and then you guys can have your feeds back.

I've been working with Cyril a lot recently - it's become my go-to weapon of choice for live-coded visuals, and I like it so much I've started breaking it open a bit and added stuff I want in it. I'm certainly neither a C++ guy or an openFrameworks guy, but what better way to learn than by dicking around with something you barely understand, right? Right. Of course, aside from the fact I selfishly wanted a few features adding right this second, it's also a good chance to start unselfishly giving something back to one of the open source projects I love, and Cyril has been a solid place to start.