The school of Art in Aix-en-Provence invited us to animate a workshop during one week around the theme of "live coding" with Vision Factory.
What ?
Live coding is a practice aiming at modifying the instructions of a program while it is running. These changes take effect directly into the program logic and become interesting when the software is used for generating visual effects.
The process happens usually on only one computer, hosting the lines of code to be tweaked while a special piece of software is interpreting them.
Multi-hands programming
The workshop was the opportunity to push the concept a bit further by setting up a collaborative live coding on several computers. The students took part in a programming session on a local server-clients network architecture.
The final rendering was done on a server computer where the number of layers was directly related to the number of possible connected clients. Each layer was then driven by a javascript program typed on the client computer and then sent to the server to be run.
*deggv ...
... ou "Démonstration d'écriture de graphisme génératif à la volée", standing for "Demonstration for generative graphics written on-the-fly".
The students experimented during four days with the platform Vision Factory that was set up as the server. The client software, written with Processing, allowed them to connect and send their lines of code to the server. The principles of 3D drawing with OpenGL were explored to perform a final composition. Based upon the cadavre exquis concept, students were asked to relay every five minutes in front of computer in order to code graphics. Lines of code as well as the result were projected on two distinct screens.
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