December 7th, Stammtisch #128

~47pp

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Alex

Research project, generative art. About an immortal worm that lives forever (called Planaria). If you split it, each part continues to live. Each part knows what part is missing and it grows it back. A scientist convince(d?) a worm to grow two heads. Eww. The parts use bioelectrical patterns to decide what to grow. Alex shows a cellular automata simulating that work. Similar to game-of-life. In that simulation one can erase part of the creature and it grows back.
https://distill.pub/2020/growing-ca/
https://distill.pub/selforg/2021/textures/
The algorithm is interesting. All the parts have the same information, they observe their surrounding to know how to evolve. Mentions Turing, who was interested in how zebras get their stripes.
Alex built such a simulation in ShaderToy. It is an automata algorithm that creates a pattern reminiscent of Bauhaus art.
Due to limitations in ShaderToy, Alex went to develop a webGPU version.
https://compute.toys/view/359
Alex build a portable installation work wth a powerbank + beamer to display the shader.
https://twitter.com/algroznykh

Carlo

He went from very high level programming to very low level, painful.
The final group project at 42 School was made in JavaScript, Python and C. An online pong game. Also a terminal client using a self made library in C
to render graphics on terminal, using only 1 write system call per frame.

Looking for job/internships

https://github.com/CarloCattano

Terminal graphics in C:
https://github.com/CarloCattano/ft_ascii

Ft_transcendence: final project https://github.com/mc-putchar/ft_transcendence

Software school in Neukölln, no teachers no fees
https://42berlin.de/

Servando

http://servando.teks.no/
Passionate about audio & tech. Made audiovisual synthesizers. On using Lissajous curves. Specialized in PureData and interactive installations and performances. VJ for 7 or 8 years. Studied electronics. RBMA-20 the largest sequencer in the world (10 meters and 3 lanes).
http://servando.teks.no/?serquencer
Servando also made the MultiJonas software, and audio based MIDI-&-OSC controller.
The software is built for a band of musicians, analizing the sound of each performer, converts the audio pitch and amplitude via MIDI and OSC.
Presents many of the projects found on their website. One of them prints all the Unicode characters on a web page:
https://editor.p5js.org/servandisco/full/gS1z2_-Cf
The code is very minimal and fits in a tweet.

== announcements ==

• Tonight. TAG 10 years anniversary at OHM https://ra.co/events/2054917
• Novi - AVJam happening soon, December 13th Friday at 8pm. At MotionLab AV artists showing their work. 10€ at the door.
  https://www.eventbrite.de/e/avjam-x-soiree-xd-december-13th-1930-2400-tickets-1093531053819
• Victor sells Razer blade laptop 14 with RTX 3070 and AMD Ryzen 9 - memory: 16gb, keyboard Layout: DE >:( -> sorry :(. (2021 model) No scratches.
• Chromebook for cheap for testing for Raphaël. Oldish one ok.
• https://prachtsaal.berlin Art Market this weekend.
• Touch Designer meetup 17th December. At Trude Ruth und Goldammer from 7pm on.
• At “Pedal Markt” workshop on audio-electronics. This and following weekends.
• Creative Coding Utrecht. Online workshops.
• Art+Com talk by Raphaël this coming week. https://www.instagram.com/artcomstudios/reel/DDKWlE7Mzve/
• Matti. Berlin Modular Society at Neulant van Exel, concert and Party starting at 9pm on Friday 13th. Modular Synthesizers.
  https://berlinmodularsociety.com/
• Every Wednesday from 19:00. Synthlab at the Fablab Neukolln (42Berlin)
• Christian (https://chrpaul.de/about): Software dev looking to collaborate with artist(s). Has hardware to try out: e.g. color e-paper, receipt printer

== break ==

Gabor

https://aka-gabor.xyz/
https://www.instagram.com/gbrgnrt/
Tintenpflanze. An e-paper based growing tree. It detects the light of day and night, and then during the day it grows a tree. He saw in mastodon someone posting about an e-paper display. Used an L-System (The algorithmic beauty of plants) and grammars.
It seems like his device is a bit finicky with power: powered via USB sometimes just shows noise. It works best when powered via batteries.
A small component detects light intensity and decides if it’s day or night.
That ESP32 tiny computer runs an 120 Mhz, when his first Commodore 64 ran at 1 Mhz.

Tony

Archeology. Finding old things and archiving them. Art restoration and preservation.
And video games. Tony tries preserving old video games from a Nintendo 3DS by emulating them on a modern computer. Shows Super Mario and Legend of Zelda.
Nintendo 3DS emulation history goes back 10 years now. Tony will give a talk about this history at Chaos Communication Congress.
Another thing worth preserving is the social network they had online, with all the messages and drawings that people drew with the stylus. And even video clips featuring music and animation. Old developers are now involved in bringing back functionality even if Nintendo did shut down the servers.

https://archiverse.pretendo.network/
https://archive.sudomemo.net/
https://pretendo.network/

Slides made with https://github.com/FormidableLabs/spectacle (A ReactJS based Presentation Library)

Reference: https://www.gamebrew.org/wiki/BetablockerDS by Dave Griffiths. Hacking old Nintendo devices to perform live, produce live music by random editing the RAM on the device until it crashes.

CCC talk is called “10 years of emulating the Nintendo 3DS”.
Talk will be on Dec 28th and livestream at ccc https://www.ccc.de/en/

Gilbert

Has been building designs for TV using the video titles generators, in ASCII, using a limited character set. Gilbert presents a web application for drawing animated ASCII artworks, used for submission to Arecibo Message 50 year anniversary. Characters and colors can be controlled with oscilators and MIDI assignements. A video was produced with music by Boxcutter and shown at Bochum and Hamburg planetariums. He shows an initial test print of the artwork on canvas paper.

https://instagram.com/autr.tv

Victor

Victor left his job. 👏
And has been working on a personal project (llm party). A series of small works, with a small deadline, using AI.
Has been using a coding tool called aider: https://aider.chat/
Since having kids, Victor hasn’t had any time for personal project, and Aider has drastically changed how much he can achieve in his limited time.
He shows a small p5js editor with an AI assistant that helps him write and modify code while summarizing the actions and highlighting the affected lines.
He realizes that with this kind of assistance, he changed the way he code. A middle way between coding and managing a team of developers.
Victor is using Claude by Anthropic. There is a local model that can do this that was released one month ago called qwen2.5-coder. You can download and run it using Ollama: https://ollama.com/library/qwen2.5-coder