Encore et surtout @ Semencerie Strasbourg (FR) With : PPaulus...
Read More25th of March 2023 @ Kunstmuseum @ Stuttgart
Stuttgart
### six in one !
The Stuttgart’s Kunstmuseum invited us for the city-wide event of the [Lange Nacht].
Hey, would you be interested in playing six live gigs in one evening ? Yes, sure ! Of course we would. Little did we think at that time of what that implied.
Stuttgart is just a hop away by ICE from Strasbourg. After a few mandatory last minute checks (did you take the hdmi adapter ? Did you copy the newest videos ? Is our Hap decoder working ? Can we trigger our lights via DMX correctly ? Are our led strips and red buttons working ? Did you update foxDot with our latest functions ?). You know, the usual. Then we were on the move.
Waiting at Stuttgart main station was Christian our guide and the representative of the digital part of the Kunstmuseum. A warm welcome but no time to spare at this time, we were eager to see our venue and begin our setup.
The installation was strangely quite straightforward, especially with a very efficient local tech team.
On the video side of things we had the possibility to use three different projectors. Our initial goal was to copy the video output of our openframework app to the three beamers but apparently I had some problems to simultaniously use all three of them. It might have to do that my video bandwith was not enough to send two hdmi signals + one usb-c to hdmi + my laptop. All four streams in 1920 x 1080 on a 1660 Ti. It might also have to with a driver issue, especially with the usb-c thingy. Anyway, it was the occasion to try out a new approach :
From my laptop we would display open frameworks (code + video) on the center and right beamer whilst the other laptop would display the raw foxDot code.
That configuration would would actually be a blessing in disguise, more on that later.
We setup our DMX and lightstrips to control two stage lights that were influenced by our code evaluating and state of our server. We installed our fx pedals, booted everything and setup our BIG RED BUTTON.
At 19:00 it was showtime. Surprisingly the crowd was there and on time. I mean, like really on time, following an empty room just a few minutes earlier. We played for about 20 minutes for the first gig, going through a dark intro and introducing slowly some beats. We try to emphasize communication with the public. Therefore our third screen became really helpful. The two other displays changing quite rapidly, the third one kept the text on screen and showed the “behind the scene” aspect of our coding.
As most of the public was discovering for the first time live coding that was a nice way to keep in touch with the public and explain what we were doing (or trying to do ! )
The public reception was really nice and that only grew better after each session.
So yes, we were mandated to perform 6 times, about 15-20 minutes each time, separated by about 30 minutes for recuperating our mental health and getting coffee/beer or taking a breath of fresh air. 10 minutes before we would go on stage, write a few messages in order to invite people to come and then play again.
After the first gig we begun loosening up and we could see from the public reaction that indeed we were. People shyly begun to dance and be more implicated. That was the time we introduced our big red button. Put on the floor between the public and ourselves we invited the public to activate it, triggering and the activation of the server and all its wizardry with it. Noizy sounds, blinking lights and randomly generated music that we were fighting against.
Each session’s struggle was of course, “what should we play”, it was 100 % improv of course, but ” Should we each time play a sort of introduction to live coding. Should we prepare for the crash ? Should we introduce the “server” ? ” Should we go full on ?
In the end after what was an amazing experience I think we found a balance after the first gig between introduction, having a enjoyable time and beging full-on crash server.
The last gig was probably the most difficult one as all the pression was taking a toll on our physical and mental capacities. After all it was live coding on and off from 19:00 to 00:30 in the morning. Quite longer than our usual 30 – 45 min – 1 hour gig.
Thanks again to Christian for inviting us to Stuttgart, I was a really great experience, we’ll be back !
