Cantinas

Cantinas were a series of monthly casual video chats, organized by the on-the-fly research group. Each session was hosted by one or more members of the community revolving around a different question. Rather than focusing on tools and specific programming languages, these meetups provided a space to discuss aesthetics, meta levels and how we relate to live coding - both as artists and as audience. Moreover, specific subjects, concerns, perspectives and questions ranging from virtuality to machine learning were discussed between peers. The series of cantinas carried out set the pace of the research line of the project. At the following link you will find a report "on-the-fly-cantina" of some Cantinas described by the members of the research group, named: Iván Paz, Anne Veinberg, Patrick Borgeat and Luka Frelih.

Introduction

ABSTRACT

On-the-fly cantina’s are a series of monthly online meetups hosted by the on-the-fly research group. The purpose of these meetings is to create a space for members of the live coding community to have casual informal conversations about their thoughts, concerns and interests in live coding. This paper gives an introduction to the on-the-fly cantinas and a summary of four of the cantinas that have taken place. Namely: “Now that we have gathered - what shall we discuss?”, “How alive is a live-streamed Algorave”, ˝Live Coding Machine Learning˝ and ˝How do the tools we use shape our artistic statement?”

INTRODUCTION

on-the-fly is a Creative Europe co-funded project initiated by Hangar in Barcelona, in cooperation with Creative Coding Utrecht, Ljudmila Art and Science Laboratory, Ljubljana, and ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, which aims to support and foster the exchange of the different practices among live coding communities. In this research space we discuss, explore, identify, reflect on and imagine creative directions in the live coding practice. Live coding activities have many layers and composer-programmers have spent extensive hours designing, understanding, or extending numerous languages or libraries before performing with them. In addition, reflecting on live coding nature and possibilities contextualizes and restricts the possible paths to follow. This is an essential process as the possibilities would otherwise be infinite. With this in mind, the on-the-fly research group holds monthly casual video meetups for the live coding community under the title on-the-fly cantina. Each session follows a distinct central question and is hosted by a member of the research group or another member from the live coding community. Rather than focusing on tools and specific programming languages, these meetups have provided a space to discuss aesthetics, meta levels and how we relate to live coding - both as artists and as audience. In this paper we report on four of these sessions that touched on different live coding practices, activities, concepts and artistic questions. The topics included in this paper represent an incomplete live coding panorama and the aim is not to give an elaborate overview or thorough discussion but to present a compilation of opinions and ideas exchanged in the video chat sessions. Nevertheless these reports might serve as a pool of ideas that can be investigated further in a more thorough and scientific way or can just be used for personal inspiration. The central questions of the sessions reported on in this paper are: “ Now that we have gathered - what shall we discuss?”, “How alive is a live-streamed Algorave”, and ˝Live Coding Machine Learning˝.