Imagine Pd everywhere. Pure Data, a free tool for constructing music and media by creating graphical code, is spotted this week hacked to run on a lowly Nook tablet and interfacing with the powerful Kinect camera system. A community in Los Angeles and Southern California is growing around the idea of the “patching circle,” in which users of various tools (Processing, Max for Live welcome, too) gather to share the process of making, like knitting circles of yore. (Yeah, okay, I made up the term, so you can take it up with me if you don’t like it.)
LA is launching a whole effort to build this community on the West Coast. If you’re in the neighborhood, you’ll want to clear your schedule; if not, this could inspire similar events in your neck of the woods. Los Angeles joins a larger worldwide movement around this tool as a kind of lingua franca for DIY software. (Pd everywhere is therefore the moniker I slapped on our Noisepages group for embeddable libpd; hope you’ll join us.)
Pd this week in LA is in the hands of advanced users — Pd and Max/MSP creator Miller Puckette is on-hand — and non-programmer, first-timer, curious musicians, too. You can learn beginning or advanced skills and meet other folks interested in exploring.
The shindig has already met up at University of California San Diego and Long Beach’s Boys and Girls Club. Now, it procedes to Culver City’s CRASHspace hackerspace.
Tonight, 7:30-10:30 PM, Hans-Christoph Steiner offers up a master class with patching, which I believe will either cover audiovisual work or extracting data from audio signals for triggering.
Friday, Chris McCormick offers a more advanced look at making Pd an embeddable audio engine with libpd – something that could empower everything from interactive music for games to new mobile tools for Android and iOS.
Saturday, the pd-la Patching Circle has its first meeting and the party gets started. Patch noon-2p, take an intro Pd workshop at 2p, and then spend Saturday night with discussions, demos, performances, and a patching party.
Sunday, Pd/Max creator Miller and Natacha Diehls will be performing at The Wulf downtown.
I raise all of this in the hopes that some intrepid CDM reader will go and be a great investigative reporter, talk to people there and find out what they’re doing, and share some info with the rest of us. (I’ll be here in NYC.)
More info:
http://pd-la.info/
http://pd-la.info/pd-launch-schedule/