International Women’s Day 2022
For International Women’s Day 2022 a group of women live coders from around the world collaborated to organise LiveCoderA: A Global Live Coding Community Gathering. The event includes performances, jams and artworks from the live coding community. Iris Saladino wrote the following text explaining the concept of LiveCoderA:
// What, how and who is a livecoderA
// A livecodera is a woman who arrived to code to use it as a weapon, a song, a dress. Looking to society, she decided to create a different possible future for it through its most potent element: culture.
// Livecoderas care about eating, doing art, fucking, sleeping and coding.
// A livecodera, with some or a very few privileges, made a life route through patriarchal hostility. This livecodera is fully aware. Each space gained is an opportunity to subvert logic, to weave ties, to implant love.
// A livecodera is a code worker (which is never neutral) who has to fight for her rigths on several spaces. Daily she faces different types of gender violence (symbolic, psychological, economical, physical, sexual), but she debates them in order to mend it collectively.
I made an interpretation of Pauline Oliveros’ Deep Listening piece Earth: Sensing/Listening/Sounding (1992) to start the event with a meditative deep listening practice. I generated a visual backdrop for the piece using Hydra which was developed by Olivia Jack.
Deep Listening Meditation from Shelly Knotts on Vimeo.
Live @ IKLECTIK released on Bandcamp
A binaural recording of the live set that I played at IKLECTIK Art Lab on 18th September 2021 is now available on bandcamp. Check it out for some apocalyptic vibes including live coded synthesis in SuperCollider, generative rhythmic patterns and some intense cymbal sample action…
Computer Core
The 1st edition of my new radio show Computer Core was played on Slack’s (Tyne and Wear’s weird radio) on Saturday 17th July and is now archived at the sound cloud page above.
Computer Core traverses the weird and wonky world of computer music from Algorave to musical AI to bleeps, bloops, glitches, errors, DIY computer punk, network jamming, and other sound experiments expressed as streams of 0s and 1s. With the show I aim to mix new experiments in computer generated sound with historical precedents and the more experimental end of electronic music.
The show will air once a month online @ https://slacks.world/
Full track list:
Celeste – Marea (En tus pies)
Holly Herndon – Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt
The Hub – The Glass Hand
Beatrice Dillon – Square Fifths
The Lappetites – Tzungentwist
Antonio Roberts – Pulse
Renick Bell – Mutual Influence
Kindohm – FrsF F
CNDSD – seeyouu
Michel Chion – La Machine à Passer le Temps
Scorpion Mouse – I Was Wrong
Mouse on Mars – The Fear of Machines
Ivan Paz – r.bit
Laurie Spiegel – Appalachian Grove – I.
Deerful – Loop
Residencies etc…
At the end of this month, my academic contract at Durham is ending and I’ll be transitioning into freelancing as a live code/network musician/data artist full time.
I’m heading straight off for a residency at Hangar in Barcelona as part of the On the Fly project. I’ll be there for 5 weeks working on software for live coding with networked visual and movement artist collaborators, Sojung Bahng in Toronto, and Kirby Casilli in Melbourne.
When I return from that I’ll be working as an Artist in Residence on the Sea AIR Research & Development Labs, at Co-Lab, University of Sunderland.
Hoping in July/August I’ll have some time to overhaul my website and add some documentation of projects I’ve worked on in the last couple of years!
In the meantime, here’s a video from an online gig I played in January this year:
OFFAL @ No Bounds
In June OFFAL played at No Bounds festival in Sheffield (UK) and got a little review in Resident Advisor: https://www.residentadvisor.net/reviews/21122
We performed using OFFALCommandLine – a web interface we’ve developed for sending each other musical directions. We couldn’t actually hear each other as a dodgy network connection meant Joanne (who was running the performance at the venue) wasn’t able to upload the live mix of the streams to the server. But maybe because of CommandLine it still somehow sounded reasonably coherent:
Molecular Soundscapes
From January to May 2017 I am working on a Leverhulme Trust Artist-in-Residence project in the School of Chemistry at Newcastle University. The project is a collaboration with Agnieszka Bronowska – Lecturer in Computation Medicinal Chemistry – and aims to explore ways to represent drug design processes in sound in a way that is useful to scientists and accessible to non-specialists.
As part of the project I have made an audio-visual sound installation, written algorithms to produce graphic scores for musicians, and I am organising a chemistry themed Algorave inviting Algorave artists to make dance music and visuals out of the data we are working with. A full description of the project is here.
Also as part of the project I recently spent a week working with Dave Griffiths and Amber Griffiths at Foam Kernow (and art-science research lab in Cornwall). I wrote a blog post about my week at Foam, which you can read here.
Algorave is 5!
Friday was Algoraves 5th birthday, so we celebrated by live streaming 24 hours of of live coding from many members of the international Algorave community.
I’m happy to have been at the first Algorave in 2012, to have played at many of them (and organised a few) but most of all to be part of such a great community of artists, musicians, and coders.
Most of the sets are archived here.
And here’s my set:
Live Lessons: Data Music with BBC micro:bits
Here’s a thing that I did using the BBC’s micro:bits to make a music band, then slightly surreally being interviewed by people from TV shows I don’t watch about it. Part of the BBC’s Live Lessons education series promoting computing education in schools.
The micro:bits use the accelerometers to change a 4-note melody, changing one note for each direction you can tilt it. The buttons change the octave and tempo and if you turn it upside down it goes silent. Tried to get a bit of network interaction on the go – if you shake it it plays a different melody on your micro:bit and forces a 4-bar rest on the next micro:bit in the chain.
Programmed in MicroPython.
Check out the video here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03pdg3s
I’ve been documented!
Despite my best efforts to remain mysterious, rare documentation of me live coding beats has emerged on the internet! :O
Performance was a very impromptu Algorave set from the International Conference of Live Coding, Leeds, UK in July 2015. Performance is at the awesome Wharf Chamber. Sound is in SuperCollider. Obi Wan Codenobi is on the visuals.
Things coming up…
OFFAL
The Orchestra For Females and Laptops have their first 2 gigs coming up: 27th Feb as part of Audioblast #4, an audio streaming festival run by APO33 collective in Nantes, France; and 8th March for International Women’s Day.
Making Museum
I’m facilitating a Making workshop at the Great North Museum in partnership with Future Everything. The students will learn to use Sonic Pi and video editing software to create audio visual works out of data from Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums.
Yorkshire Sound Women Network @ National Media Museum
I’ll be running informal show-and-tell and workshops in electronic music making along with members of Yorkshire Sound Women Network as part of a number of public events at the National Media Museum in March.
Women/Music/Technology Gig
8th March at the Hyde Park Book Club in Leeds I’ll be playing a live coding gig with Leeds-based noise and synth artists Joanne and Marlo Eggplant
Commons Are Forever
I’ll be running a workshop and giving a public talk and performance as part of Newcastle City Library’s Common’s Are Forever Project on 19th/21st March. The workshop will be on downloading and editing samples with a Creative Commons license and using them as part of a live coding performance in Ixi Lang.
shellyknotts.wordpress.com 