Smoltech events
smoltech is a movement to reduce waste from technology, principally by using existing technology for as long as possible to reduce the overall environmental cost: the cost of device manufacture typically outweighs the cost of ongoing usage 10-fold.
Curated by Laura Netz, this series of events includes an exhibition at CT20, Folkestone UK, two workshops on live coding sound and visuals at IKLECTIK, London UK, and a closing concert also at IKLECTIK. The exhibition opens on Friday 26th November 7pm, and I'll be giving an artist talk on Saturday 4th December 5pm. The exhibition will run until Saturday 11th December.
The exhibition of my work has two new pieces as well as some older ones. The two new works are hopefully the last of their era: I've found that the computation performed by my pieces tends to expand to fill the available computational resources, no matter whether the computer is fast (Rodney autonomous fractal explorer bot running on a late 2010s desktop computer at 3 GHz) or slow (Deep Disco unpink noise generator running on a mid 1980s home computer at 7 MHz). Moving forward I aim to be more frugal and economical with computing resources in my digital art, so that having a powerful new computer is not a prerequisite, and old devices can be used just as well.
In the new year I'll be leading a workshop on Clive for live-coding audio in C on Linux. I've been toying with Debian Live Builder to make a USB-bootable distro in case participants don't have a Linux installed or have trouble installing the dependencies and configuring sound. Building the image is quite straight-forward now, much easier than the Puredyne days, but I haven't needed to make many customisations (mainly setting it up to use the PipeWire audio system with bridges to JACK, PulseAudio, ALSA and OSS). If anyone wants to beta-test then get in touch and I'll be delighted by your help making sure it works smoothly.
The other workshop on LiveCodeLab is led by Rumble-San, and should be a much easier tech setup for participants. We'll both play at the final concert along with xname, digital selves and Heavy Lifting.