Made Art

Make Art came and went quickly. Being there for only two full days, while traveling for almost the same length of time, created a dream-like sensation. The experience at the festival was quite amazing, thanks to the hard work of Thomas Vriet and all the GOTO10 team. People in the creative coding and FLOSS community are a big family spread all over the world, literally. And this Make Art really felt to me as we were in one of the family gatherings, meeting with relatives we didn’t see in a long time. I had the chance to discover a few new cousins 🙂 among them Mister Mandayam, Alexandre Leray & Stéphanie Vilayphiou from stdin studio, and Vito Campanelli. As for my “live cinema/animation” performance during the event, some afterthoughts below.
As it happened in this opportunity more strongly than before, the process continues to be a confrontation between coding technique and aesthetic expression, with the former still taking most of the priority in my work. Where most of the energy and preparation does go? To the implementation of highly complex code architectures, in detriment of  a fluid cinematic narrative.

However, the crude nature of the piece in terms of materials and visual quality might have still played well with its main themes (childhood, playfulness, tragedy, death), and even the technical and synchronization glitches somehow became part of it. At least for some of the spectators. For others, these issues were disappointing. In any case, Latent State did prompt a variety of responses ranging from rejection to unsettling feelings. Disturbing by its errors, or by its own internal logic and contrast of images?

Something could come out of this

On the other hand, the coding work for this particular performance resulted in a new version of Andiamo that could serve as more stable platform for further experimentation than earlier versions of the code. In this sense, the performance at Make Art had a very concrete and positive outcome.

Now the question is: more coding, more practice or more error?

Maybe these guys have an answer.

Update: Some video material from the event is here.