(2024-07-07) Wilson Arroost Unblocking Creation With Friends

Lu Wilson on Arroost: Unblocking creation with friends. Live Coding is uniquely suited to creative work. It can remove many of the creative blockers that individuals experience when trying to produce it. But we could place much more explicit emphasis on the removal of emotional blockers from the creative process, as opposed to only focusing on intellectual blockers. Arroost is a project that seeks to do that — an experimental live programming tool for making music.

For me, creative work is when you use your imagination to "make something" (maker). This could be performing a song, writing a book, painting a picture, drawing a diagram, baking a cake, giving a speech, designing a game, or coding a program.

In any creative work, the person doing the work might experience blockers

We could categorise all of these potential blockers into one of two categories:
Intellectual blockers
Emotional blockers

Intellectual blockers are when you don't know how to solve a problem, or create what you intend, even if you know what you want. You might not know how to use a tool, or you may not have the right materials.

Emotional blockers are when you have the tools and materials and skills that you need, but you're feeling too nervous, or too scared, or too embarrassed, or too distracted.

Live programming has often been paired with creative work

Live programming's immediate feedback encourages exploration and play. This allows the coder to discover new possibilities, and to feel their way through the tool. And the emphasis on tangible representation of code allows the coder to directly manipulate their work, and visualise what is going on. They can see it.

Personally, I feel that there has been a lot of attention on removing intellectual blockers, and there is still far more to explore in terms of removing emotional blockers.

We work alongside/within the tools for thought space, where interest is around supporting a person's thoughts, enabling them to use the computer as an extension of their brain. And this ties into the ever-cited bicycle for the mind metaphor.

We should acknowledge that our emotions have limits, and we can use computers to help support them. Perhaps we could call it... tools for feeling... no that's too cheesy... how about... bicycle for the heart... no I don't like that either. Let's move on.

It turns out, there are many tools out there that try to remove emotional blockers.

tldraw is a whiteboard tool and library. It's interesting because it's all very wobbly. Whenever you draw, or write, or make shapes, all of your marks are imperfect. Everything looks slightly wonky and scrappy. This wonkiness is intentional. tldraw makes it difficult to line up your work perfectly. It's so hard that it stops you trying, and you carry on drawing and writing instead.

Sandspiel is a video game that simulates different elements on a pixel-by-pixel basis. Elements like sand, water, fire all behave differently and interact together in combinatorial ways. This kind of game is known as a falling sand game. The unusual thing about Sandspiel is that most users don't use it as a falling sand game. They use it as a drawing tool instead. Why would they do that?

in Sandspiel, they feel free to draw to their heart's content. And they feel free to share their work with the world.

And with Sandspiel, there's some warmup time. When you enter Sandspiel, you have something to play with. You can place down elements, and interact with the game while you're deciding what to draw.

Sandspiel Studio is a live programming tool that I worked on with Max Bittker, the creator of Sandspiel. It's an end-user-programmable version of Sandspiel. Users can use its block-based code editor to change how the elements behave and look

Algorave is a practice where someone live codes visuals and music, and a crowd dances to it, in response

This puts the live coder in a vulnerable position

However, the fact that it's being done live as a performance means that the expectations are adjusted.

There is a culture of embracing the mistake within live coding and Algorave, and that removes emotional blockers around failure.

Toshio Iwai is an artist who has developed various live programming tools for making music. These include Sound Fantasy and the more widely known Electroplankton.

Both tools provide the user with puzzle-like musical instruments. But using them feels less like playing an instrument, and more like playing a game

Maywa Denki is an art collective disguised as an electric company. They produce musical instruments known as nonsense machines, some of which are programmable.

Instruments like the Otamatone are intentionally hard, and can sound terrible in the hands of a beginner, even grating. The effect of this is that there is no pressure on the user to perform or create something good. The expectation is that it will sound bad, so there are no emotional blockers.

Is it possible to try to combine the strengths of these tools into a single live programming environment?

To try this out, I made a live programming tool called Arroost. It's pretty buggy.

When you click, a single shape slides onto screen. As an introduction, this first moment is important. It shouldn't feel like you 'created' this shape. It should feel like a surprise. And it shouldn't slide to where your cursor is — that would be too helpful.

You can feasibly spend a lot of time just playing with the shapes and sounds. I would like to point out that this all happens before you start doing any live programming

At some point, they might hear back a certain sound that inspires them to live program a song.

Recording sounds yourself (eg: with your voice) can be intimidating for some people. This makes it a good candidate as a use case for exploring how to remove emotional blockers. One way this is overcome is through mess.

The Connection shape allows you to connect two shapes together.

By connecting two sounds together with wires, you can start to create more complex noises.

There is also no capacity to edit the sound itself. There is no noise reduction, and no effects available. There is no decision paralysis around this.

Responsibility

By clicking the timing button again, you can change the timing of a wire to "one beat earlier".

(more explanations for how to use it)

As researchers within live programming, we should see the tools we make within their context. They do not exist in isolation, and it would be a failing to ignore the international communities that already exist around live programming, namely the Algorave and live coding communities. A tool can only succeed within a community. (scene)