Friday lunchtime lectures: Live code as open data

Friday lunchtime lectures are for everyone and are free to attend. You bring your lunch, we provide tea and coffee, an interesting talk, and enough time to get back to your desk.

In conversation with curator-in-residence Hannah Redler, sound artist Alex McLean will present some of the outcomes of his residency at ODI HQ, including music compositions, the ongoing Thinking Out Loud exhibition at ODI HQ, breakthroughs in pattern manipulation, the PatternLib social networking site for open sharing of audiovisual pattern-making, an experimental text editor, as well as thoughts on the positive side of what Luddism might bring to digital art. Following the talk there will be an exhibition tour.

About Alex McLean

Alex McLean is a Sheffield-based musician, artist and researcher exploring the creative possibilities of code. He has developed a pattern-focused approach to algorithmic music and live coding since the year 2000, co-founding the TOPLAP (live coding) and Algorave (algorithmic rave) movements and the TidalCycles live coding environment in the process. He performs and releases solo as Yaxu on the Computer Club label, including the forthcoming crowdfunded album Spicule. As researcher he works on the ERC project PENELOPE, applying live coding techniques to explore the computational processes of ancient weaving. Alex is completing sound artist residency at the Open Data Institute as part of Sound and Music’s embedded programme.