Adam Florin // creative coder

Jacquard Loom. Photo: Frank da Cruz, via Columbia Univ. Computing History

Over the past year of generative music experiments in performances and installations, I’ve been chipping away at a homebrew, Ruby-based platform for Ableton Live which I call Loom—named for the textile pattern-generating ancestor of the computer. In hopes of getting more ears on it, I’ve recently distilled it all down to a lean and modular (albeit very alpha) core, and published the source on GitHub, where you’ll also find a slightly more technical introduction than the pontificating, hyperlinking, and screencasting below.

Read more »

The faint ebb of Steve Jobs’ influence on personal computing this week seems to have set off a moment of reflection and nostalgia on the emergence of a medium and its guiding principles. No better time, thought I, than to self-publish the soul-searching essay I wrote last spring to make sense of a half century of computing, ultimately reading code and computers as, well, texts, media, literary documents.

Read more »

Sound installation for brass slide on guitar strings with computer processing; activated by Arduino, servo, found wood, and a lot of fishing wire.

Shown at the Wave Cave at CalArts, spring 2011.

Read more »

Last spring I was approached by the always-awesome Tellart to consult on a fairly unique generative music street installation, to be deployed in lower Manhattan for Parsons The New School for Design. There was going to be a long wall on 5th Ave rigged with cameras and sensors of all sorts, data visualization on the website, and a 24/7 streaming soundtrack. The only question was: what will it sound like?

UPDATE: new, official video from mono!

Read more »

Last fall, Triple Canopy released a fairly massive redesign, including a ground-up rewrite of our familiar side-scrolling layout system.

Screenshot from the beautifully-illustrated “To Have Is to Owe”, from issue 10.

Read more »