The latest absolutely eye-popping work made with free Web live-coding tool Hydra comes from artist Naoto Hieda, with sound by the duo Ekheo (Aude Langlois and Belinda Sykora) and some eerie AI poetry. If that didn’t melt your brain entirely, you can follow along with tutorials to harness the powers of Hydra, too.
Which music does Leewa like? Leewa likes to sing!
That should qualify as a substance-free total mind trip.
But if that got your eyes open, Naoto-san has a whole series of very useful Hydra tutorials and other AV goodies on their channel, largely in English (though I’ll toss in one in Japanese as we have a few readers who speak that). And yeah, that as always reveals the wonders of the fantastic free and open-source, artist-friendly tool created by Olivia Jack. It’s great for coders who feel uncomfortable making art, great for artists who feel uncomfortable writing code, great for people who are generally uncomfortable and just want to fill their screen with colors, just all-around great:
Actually, I can even follow this tutorial for combining Hydra with p5.js (the JavaScript version of Processing):
Previously, in Hydra:
Find more of Ekheo’s work – research, gender, identity – at their project site:
And you get more performances like this one, alongside Hieromorphe, channeling Carl Jung into a sea of textures and voices that seem to spill out of the channels. I don’t know why people think Berlin is only “Berghain techno”; it’s very often we’re doing this … just maybe y’all aren’t lining up for hours for it, sure (maybe in an alternate universe that’s reversed? dunno):