Artists in residence

Jack Armitage (Hangar)

Jack Armitage is a musician, designer, technologist and researcher based in the UK. Currently he is a PhD candidate researching craft in digital musical instrument design in the Augmented Instruments Lab, Centre for Digital Music (Queen Mary University of London), where he has collaborated with the open source Bela.io project for making interactive audio projects. In the live coding community, he is known as Lil Data, a PC Music signed experimental pop project.

Project

His project seeks to create a technical, pedagogical and creative foundation for music making with MicroBlocks, a not-for-profit blocks programming language for physical computing inspired by Scratch. It runs on microcontrollers such as the micro:bit, Calliope mini, AdaFruit Circuit Playground Express, and many others. While many in the live coding community note the monopoly that text-based programming has had, attempts so far to develop non-textual live coding tools have been largely restricted to graphical user interfaces. The MicroBlocks platform has all of the required features to enable entirely novel, non-textual, non-graphical programming experiences. These could include programming experiences based on audio, tactility and tangibility, using novel materials such as e-textiles, and inspired by a wide variety of non-Western writing systems.

Malitzin Cortés and Ivan Abreu (ZKM)

Malitzin Cortés (CNDSD) is a musician, digital artist, creative technologist and programmer that develops her work between Live Coding, Live Cinema, Data Art, VR and AR, Creative Coding and Sound Art. She has held live events and exhibitions at the Multimedia Center, Alameda Art Laboratory, Ex- Teresa Actual Art, Digital Culture Center, Medialab Prado, Transmediale, ISEA, CYLAND MediaArtLab San Petesburgo, ADAF Athenas, Ars Electronica, MUTEK México, Montreal and Japan. Ivan Abreu is a visual and sound artist and creative technologist. His work explores processes of computational creativity and coding for sound, visual, interactive arts and expanded video. His audiovisual work has been presented at international festivals such as the International Conference of Live Coding Madrid, Aural, Transmediale Berlin, MUTEK Mexico, Japan and Montreal, International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) and Asia Culture Center, Korea.

Project

The artist duo from Mexico will develop an immersive audiovisual live performance for the ZKM's loudspeaker instrument, the Sound Dome. The project synthesizes CNDSD's sound proposal expressed through granular landscapes, algorithmic vocal experiments, hypnotic noise improvisations and asymmetric patterns with the proposals of Ivan Abreu in the field of data-art, software-art and sound art. In an innovative way, the technique of live coding will be merged with the expansive sonic possibilities of the Sound Dome as well as the duo's data-art procedural imagery. It also seeks to narratively combine two artistic possibilities that are complementary: 1) the relationship with the sound spatialization offered by a digital body inhabiting a virtual space and the possibilities of this for composition and improvisation, and 2) the flexibility that live coding offers for create and modify visual, sound or virtual expressions just by enunciating through writing.

Gaia Leandra (ZKM)

Gaia Leandra is a scientific art researcher. She studied biological physical chemistry at the University of Naples. At the end of her academic career, she collaborated with the National Department of Research in Microelectronics and Genetics (CNR). For Gaia, science must be accessible to all, respecting freedom of dissemination, working on what is defined as open science. She moves among transfeminist and transdisciplinary laboratories of the art world, where she collaborates with different projects such as Micromondo, Transmigration, Open Source Estrogen with Mary Maggic, Fotosintetika, etc.

Project

Microscópica, is a performance of the invisible, a biohacking project born from the desire of sharing scientific notions, sounds and images through interactive art. With the help of a DIY electronic microscope and a Processing software, she can display samples of microorganisms taken from the environment. The movement of microorganisms becomes a performative action. The main goal of the performance is to achieve a process of "sonification" through the dynamics that arise from a sample analysed under the hacked electron microscope. A simple sketch, based on Processing, makes the “motion capture” of video frames detectable by the webcam of the microscope through the tracking of bright pixel areas. These data are mapped onto parameters of a granular sound processing algorithm.

Branimir Štivić (Creative Coding Utrecht)

Branimir Štivić holds a master's degree in software engineering from the Faculty of Organisation and Informatics at Varaždin and a M.A in New Media at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. He works from a multidisciplinary approach as a tool to explore perception, probabilistic, systems theory, mathematical models and cellular automata, process music, sound, pneumatics, kinetics, and machine learning synthesis. His current topics of interest are vitality of objects and matter in the age of the Technosphere and Anthropocene, among many others.

Project

For his residency he’s planning to experiment with live coding and pneumatic systems like bellows, diaphonic horns and organ pipes, connected to human breath. We can think of it as a rhythm of paying the oxygen debt in the constant economic game of bodily inflation. It is a system depending on expiration. If we connect live coding with human breath, we can get direct entanglement between geosphere (atmosphere), biosphere(humans) and Technosphere (pneumatics, code). This project is an experiment of open outcome in live coding performance of pneumatic systems like bellows, diaphonic horns and possibly organ pipes connected to human breath.

The Twin Stranger (Creative Coding Utrecht)

The Twin Stranger is an artistic duo formed by Jude Cowan Montague, an author, poet and creative in audio and print, and Riitta Hakkarainen, a scenographer trained in St Petersburg. Together they make up The Twin Stranger, a duo of theatre makers who aim to rejoin art and science to inspire young people, taking extravagant, improvised journeys on the trail of history, poetry and lore from their own Baltic heritage and beyond. The core of The Twin Stranger enquiry is the relationship between the traditional art of theatre and computer coding.

Project

For their residency in the Netherlands, The Twin Stranger will develop a project centered around the figure of the forgotten African goddess Mefiti, the divine female power of the volcano, a goddess reputed to have come to Italy from Libya, cognate with the biblical demon Mefistopheles. Highlighting ideas of female energy and power, the project represents an attempt to resurrect her knowlegde as goddess of the volcano in times of global warming.  In order to display their immersive recreation of the power and energy of the goddess, they plan to combine the script of live coding with the changing script of a theatre. Blending these two scripts, working live with both chemical experiment and equation, the tools of scientific analysis and synthesis will be part of the script. Inspired by the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures which display science as theatre to a young audience their live coded and live scripted play will be entertaining and involve real physical experiments alongside the energy of improvised work.

Bruno Gola (Ljudmila)

Bruno Gola is a sound artist and Free Software hacker from São Paulo, Brazil. He currently lives in Berlin where he studied Art and Media at the Universität der Künste Berlin, in the classes of Generative Art and New Media. He builds sound installations and performs live in different formats such as Live Coding, audiovisual generative pieces and live electronics, usually building his own hardware and software for each occasion. Gola is a big believer in Free Software, he is a GNU/Linux advocate and contributes to different projects such as the SuperCollider language, publishing most of the software he writes so other artists can use them as well.

Project

Bruno plans to build a live coding installation with a domain-specific language where algorithms are running the installation but are also accessible for the audience to change, build upon and play with. For the growing community of live coders in Ljubljana this will be an opportunity to interact, play, perform and execute codes in a more unconventional setting. For his residency stay Gola will use existing infrastructure from his past projects and develop a new high-level language browser interface and this he plans to further investigate with local participants for his live coding workshop.

Anna Carreras (Ljudmila)

Anna Carreras is a Barcelona based artist with a strong interest in physical interfaces that can be incorporated into live coding practices. Carreras' affinity for interactive tools and settings stems from algorithmic environments and generative systems coded from scratch. She develops interactive installations to explore new emerging narratives encouraging the audience to participate and promoting their collaboration. Interaction adds the human diverse behavior to the experience fostering richer outcomes.

Project

For her residency project, Anna Carreras suggests developing a live coding installation in dialogue with visual and physical output interfaces. Together with a local sound artist, Carreras plans to use the installation for a performance and a workshop. Ljudmila's lab aimed at tinkering, hacking and maker culture is a strong generator for her practice that stimulates use of free software in art endeavours. The objective of her residency is to build a large physical output interface that creates sounds from everyday objects, giving them a fresh meaning within a live coding setting, but also to transcend live coding as solely "laptop-and-a-programmer practice".