Dream Deficit Zone #13
Hello,
This is a tale of two streams.
The first was in April 2020, one I’ve written about here before. Char Stiles and I collaborated on a stream at the throes of the pandemic. It was a baby step towards what would go on to be the norm for performances over the better part of the last two years — for this show, we duct-taped several disparate devices and software, and streamed media to each other when the cables and drivers wouldn’t cooperate.
The result is an extremely strange set with starts and stops, lopsided visuals and a palpable amount of noise. What cracks me up, in retrospect, is the tape-like pitch modulation in the music as a result of streaming infrastructure playing catch-up to cut through latency. I’ve come around to looking at the nascent rawness of this set rather fondly. Here it is in its entirety:
The second one is a lot more recent﹣a stream from December 2021. Matthew and I did a virtual stream for the Longest Night stream organized by the Tidalcycles community, a 30 hour-long stream celebrating winter solstice with live coders from several timezones joining in and taking turns playing sets.
This set stands in stark contrast to the previous one; as a reflection of how good all of us have gotten with setting up to stream from our rooms and desks. What we ended up with here is a rather bespoke production, replete with set design, lighting (courtesy of Pat Shiu), and an elaborate signal chain of synced computers and synthesizers feeding into a dedicated encoder that overlaid our text-editor feeds over camera footage.
I’m proud of both the sets and the work went into it, and am now happy to share it with all of you.
Regards
From
Reckoner