In the years that I’ve been creating things in Pure Data I have amassed quite a collection of unfinished and messy patches. Over the last few days I have been releasing a few of these patches and techniques that I implement when programming in Pure Data.
Live Coding
The last tutorial isn’t that much about actually programming with Pure Data and is more about performing with it. More specifically, live coding. Live coding takes programming to a performative level. There’s been a lot of writing recently about Live Coding so take a look around. I’ve been programming live visuals for Pure Data since 2014 (a lot happened that year). It’s not without it’s problems, some of which I written about in the past.
In the years that I’ve been creating things in Pure Data I have amassed quite a collection of unfinished and messy patches. Over the next few days I’ll be releasing a few of these patches and techniques that I implement when programming in Pure Data.
Stop Motion
It was at the Co-Position meeting of the Libre Graphics Research Unit in 2012 that I first encountered Toonloop. It’s creator, Alexandre Quessy, gave a live performance using lights, Lego pieces and other objects. I was really quite in awe of how stop-motion was used to create quite an enjoyable performance.
In the years that I’ve been creating things in Pure Data I have amassed quite a collection of unfinished and messy patches. Over the next few days I’ll be releasing a few of these patches and techniques that I implement when programming in Pure Data.
For a performance at ChipFest 10 in 2014 I wanted to recreate the look of a scrolling video game but within Pure Data. Sure, I could have just used a console emulator or recorded a clip and used that but doing it all within Pure Data allows me to have some more flexibility with how I perform. Here’s what I made:
In the years that I’ve been creating things in Pure Data I have amassed quite a collection of unfinished and messy patches. Over the next few days I’ll be releasing a few of these patches and techniques that I implement when programming in Pure Data.
Randomise Text
In the early 2010s I had quite an interest in zines. I had co-organised the Birmingham Zine Festival and was quite regularly reading this. As a result of this in 2011 I started collaborating with a friend, Rebecca Evans, on a collaborative zine. The concept is that we would interpret each others’ way of working using our regularly used tools. Rebecca specialises in textiles and has quite a skill at crocheting, amongst other things. I, on the other hand, can barely operate a sewing machine and feel much more at home using a soldering iron or computer.
In the years that I’ve been creating things in Pure Data I have amassed quite a collection of unfinished and messy patches. Over the next few days I’ll be releasing a few of these patches and techniques that I implement when programming in Pure Data.
Image to Signal
If you’re into experimental ways of creating visuals and happened to be on the internet around 2013 you have have been sent information about software called PixiVisor. The software, developed by Alexander Zoloto, allows one to transmit an image via an audio signal to another device which decodes it and displays it as an image. In this way you can then apply audio effects to the signal and make some pretty cool visuals. I never tried it myself but was quite impressed by what I saw.
On 10th September I’ll be delivering a Pure Data for Beginners workshop as part of #ArtistsCompute2016 in Coventry.
Having recognised that computers have changed society beyond measure #ArtistsCompute2016 is dedicated to mapping, presenting, probing and escalating this impact.
The festival, which is built around a large group exhibition of the same name, features many educational, participatory and enjoyable events including workshops, talks, screenings, performances and parties.
On various dates in March and April 2015 I’ll be running a Pure Data Patch Circle as part of Birmingham Open Media’s Creative Code series.
A new ‘Patching Circle’ on creative code designed and run by artists, for artists. A Patching Circle is an informal gathering of anyone who is interested in patching languages such as Pure Data, Max/MSP, vvvv, and Quartz Composer.
As well as covering the basics of Pure Data, we’ll also offer peer-to-peer support for more experienced users and help with specific projects.
I’m happy to announce the release of NeonPlastic, a generative Pure Data artware piece by myself (visuals) and Joe Newlin (audio), inspired by Neoplasticism and all things boxy.
The above video acts only as a preview. To experience this piece in all its hdmegaawesomeness grab the code, open Pure Data, get yourself a cup of tea and press the big red button!
On one of my frequent journeys on the information superhighway I stumbled across Little-Scale’s Mass JPG Killer. This handy little patch allows a user to load any binary file and “glitch” it by overwriting some of the original data with a repeating pattern of user-defined data.
The only problem (for me and people like me) is that I don’t have Max/MSP and can’t install it on Linux, meaning I’ve never actually used it!
Thank you to everyone that attended the Pure Data Play workshop on 2nd November as part of Flip Festival. In the space of two hours the participants went from knowing nothing about Pure Data to manipulating 3D objects on screen, playing videos and webcam streams and controlling their videos using user-defined keyboard shortcuts. Some images of the patches: [caption id="" align=“alignnone” width=“500”]
Patch by Alex Jolliffe[/caption] [caption id="" align=“alignnone” width=“500”]
Patch by Eliza Marcu[/caption] [caption id="" align=“alignnone” width=“500”]
Patch by Jamie Boulton[/caption]
On Friday 2nd November from 12pm I’ll be running a Pure Data workshop as part of Flip Festival at Lighthouse Media Centre in Wolverhampton.
Pure Data is a dataflow programming language that is utilised for a wide variety of purposes including making generative electronic music, creating glitch visuals, interactive live performance and VJing (Video Jockeying). I’ll guide participants through the basics of Pure Data - including general usage, playing and manipulating videos and creating generative visuals that respond to different inputs. No experience of Pure Data is necessary, only a laptop and a willingness to experiment and learn!
For Some of My Favourite Songs I utilised Pure Data Extended (I’m using a beta version) to read the audio files and then save them as images. Pure Data is usually used for the production of music and/or generative live visuals, so to using it to produce jpg images from almost nothing, or random data input is quite new to me!
The most important part of this process is knowing how to construct and apply a jpg header to data. Wikipedia informed me that all jpg images begin with FF D8. I thought that all I would need to do is use a hex editor, such as Ghex or Bless Hex Editor, to add those byte values to a file.
Since November 2011 I’ve been providing visuals for First Fold Records’ monthly Bring Out Your Dead (BOYD) events. This sees me working with the headline acts to create visuals tailored to their performance. I often do a recording of the sets, which you can see on my YouTube channel.
For BOYD 8 I did visuals for local band From Digbeth With Hammers. The band said they wanted any visuals that included “bricks and concrete and things that look like they’ve been hit with massive hammers.” So, I got them lots of videos of explosions, demolition sites and cranes ;-) Here’s a sample of the visuals that I did set to the “Collage” track available from their website
My bumper for GLI.TC/H 2011. Download the Pure Data patch that made this and make your own!
Discuss it with others on the Pure Data forum.
.our_name/website { GLI.TC/H gli.tc/h } .theDates { Chicago_USA: Nov 4-6 2011; Amsterdam_NL: Nov 11-12 2011; Birmingham_UK: Nov 19 2011; }
I’ve also recently started making diagrams of my Pure Data patches. I hope they go some way to helping people learn Pure Data
[caption id="" width=“500” caption=“Pretty pictures”]
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The making of Skin Cells was quite a long process. It started projecting my Bunnies video onto me and filming this. I then took this and ran it through the What Glitch? sgi script to create a glitched version of the video, leaving me with two versions of the video.
When it came to merging the two videos together I took some inspiration from Tidepool by Tabor Robak. Putting the videos on top of each other I wanted to use chromakeying to reveal parts of the video at the bottom at the same time as really oversaturating the video. For this I employed the help of Pure Data:
I’m working on a live performance that in some ways will incorporate glitch and perhaps animation. This is one step towards getting a finished performance down, but also a bit of fun.