Goodbye Apple, Hello Linux

Over the last few months, my much-loved but massively abused Macbook Pro has started to die on me, and I've replaced it - with a Linux machine, full time. GASP! I've been getting tons of questions from a people about both my reasoning for the switch, and of course the gory details on my new setup, and so I thought I'd throw a post together.

Live Visuals 101

OK, here it is! The blog post with the gory details.

Live visuals image dump

As detailed in my last post, I've been capturing my live visuals sessions and creating print pieces from them:

Sharing is caring, and I promised I'd upload every single image I captured. It took a while, but I've uploaded the complete set of Manchester and Sheffield Algorave captures to Flickr at full resolution. I used their basic but quite handy Uploadr tool, which you can just point at a directory and leave running, which is useful. The only drawback I found was that it sets everything private by default, so afterwards you have to batch the permissions, but apart from that it was painless (albeit a bit slow).

I also have the complete set as a compressed archive if anyone really wants the whole lot, let me know.

These images are distributed under the Do What The Fuck You Want license, and I invite you to take them and do whatever the fuck you want with them, as per the complete terms in the license:

0. You just DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO.

The total image set is comprised of 5,665 images split into logical sets, making a total of just over 10.5GB of data. This is after trimming out any black images that got caught up between sets etc, and the Flickr uploader also removed anything it deemed to be duplicated, so each image should be wholly unique.

Here's some links to the individual sets:

• Manchester (part one) - 1836 images
• Manchester (part two) - 865 images
• Sheffield (part one) - 889 images
• Sheffield (part two) - 673 images
• Sheffield (part three) - 1402 images

And of course the finished prints are still up for sale if you feel like supporting your friendly neighbourhood printmaker.

Generative print series

For the last year or two I've been doing a lot of live visual performance work - initially via the Algorave movement, leading on to countless chiptune gigs and even the odd festival. This has been a lot of fun, and is very creatively fulfilling, but of course in my usual manner I've tried to keep the momentum up and use my live work to power other stuff.

The latest outlet for this is my new print series, which I've started to put together using my livecoding work as a source. The transient aspect of performances is what really interests me about doing things live - once the set has finished the code no longer exists - and I wanted to really try and capture that in some way.

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.

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!

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 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.

Snow In Tokyo - go!

I promised I'd write more about what I'm up to, so:

At the moment I'm working on a really fun little project for my partner in crime, DEADBEAR (although I assume his mum calls him Nick). He makes lovely bleeps, and I offered to add some visuals to the mix.

It definitely took us a while to really figure out what we wanted to do (as is always the way with self-directed "let's make something cool" vanity projects), and after a mild lull in activity while I finished some other stuff, my brain has fully whirred into action now. My recent interest in live-coding has spilled out into this project, which for me is no bad thing at all - Nick gets a sweet video, and I get to noodle with something that really interests me enormously. I'm also using this to start being more active in open source projects, at the moment I'm using Cyril, a live coding environment built on OpenFrameworks. It's very new and completely open source, so hopefully I can contribute there too.