by Charlie Roberts as part of ATLAS’ Creativity Technology Today symposium
When: 12:00 – 12:25 PM, Thursday, March 19, 2015
Where: Roser ATLAS Building, Cofrin Auditorium (ATLS 100)
In the digital arts, “live coding” is an experimental performance practice where performers program audiovisual works in front of an audience; typically the source code is projected for audience members to follow. Programming environments supporting live coding performances require the ability to rapidly create and iterate audiovisual content, and to provide feedback to both performers and audience members. For these reasons, many live coding environments use domain-specific languages that encode creative affordances directly into their notations. While these idiosyncratic languages are flexible in the context of live performance, the programming knowledge acquired while learning and using them does not easily transfer to other environments.
In this talk I will present Gibber, a creative coding environment I designed for live coding performance and audiovisual authoring. Gibber includes powerful programming abstractions for live coding in JavaScript, a general-purpose scripting language applicable across a wide variety of domains; this increases its utility for computer science education. I will provide an overview of Gibber’s use in teaching computational media to middle school, high school and university students around the world, and will also describe its use in both formal, concert hall performances and at the algorithm-driven dance parties known as Algoraves. I will conclude by discussing my research on human-centered computing in the AlloSphere virtual reality environment, and efforts to incorporate live coding methodologies into the rapid implementation of scientific visualizations and sonifications.
Charlie Roberts researches the potential of web technologies in both collaborative, large-scale virtual reality environments and for use in creative coding. His work in the AlloSphere, a three-story spherical visualization instrument enables scientists to create customized interactions with data visualizations and scientific simulations. Instead of imposing a predefined interaction palette for data discovery, scientists select the tools they are most comfortable using to interact in the AlloSphere, whether gloves tracked via computer vision or the personal mobile devices they carry in their pockets. His artistic practice relies on web technologies; for the past three years it has focused on the genre of audiovisual performance known as live coding in which the performer creates an audiovisual work by coding it in front of the audience; the source code of the performance is projected for the audience to see and follow.