Back in May I had a lot of fun visiting IMAL in Brussels, for an experimental event bringing together live coding, knitting and cooking food. This included a two day ‘masterclass’ lead by Agathe Herrou and myself, exploring live coding patterns and tangles. Agathe is a keen knitter as well as a live coder (performing as TH4), and we devised a programme involving teaching live coding with strudel, knitting with Agathe’s cnytt procedural knitting environment, and making tangles with live coded handmade robots controlled by strudel.
We also did an evening dinner performance, but where the food was created by artist Peter Sattler as performance art, fitting with IMAL’s event series theme of “The Cookery”. We discussed with him beforehand about how to present cooking and live coding on equal terms, where our music could follow a structure creating space and responding to moments in the cooking – steam clouds, cracking open salt-ash, and so on. In reality we were all just too hard at work to really respond to each other, but as Agathe and I were taking turns performing it was amazing to enjoy some amazing food between performances. It would be great to explore this more!
It was also great to manage to visit Green Fabric while I was in Brussels – an amazing textile makerspace run by Stéphanie Vilayphiou. I’ve since been collaborating with Stéphanie on live coding knitting machines.. More on that soon!
Here’s a short film about the events in IMAL:
