I’m working 3 weeks at iMAL. Two weeks to refresh my knowledge of PureData (Pd), an open source visual programming language we use for the new version of my latest installation DarkMatr. This week, together with Jack and Nicolas, we’re artists in residence in iMAL to further develop the installation. Jack and Nico just passed the morning finding solutions to install the heavy graphical card on our Ubuntu computer. Shit happens when you work open source. They say once it works, it’s stable 😉 Luckily Jack and Nico do the programming so I just have to discuss artistic and other production matters.

Last week Jack gave a Pd workshop for the iMAL summer courses and next week Nicolas is the tutor for a workshop around Gem, a plug in for Pd that enables you to create 3D visuals and objects in real time. I follow both so I’ll be more aware of Pd’s incredible capabilities but I think I will never become a code developer. Because to keep up, you have to work everyday with it.

This version of DarkMatr will be very different from the first version. We’ll be working with an interaction screen of between 4 and 6 meters. In front of this screen you will be able, as an audience, to interact with a humanized internet search robot. It will feel like you’re having a ‘poetic’ ‘knowledge’ dialogue with a virtual robot, in total immersion with textual data coming from the net. Here’s a picture of the graphical environment Jack is developing.