It's been a wild couple of months. Despite the first nice British summer in recent memory, I've barely had a chance to enjoy a single idle afternoon in Brockwell Park, though I may be experiencing some tanning-like effects from CPU glare.

After a hectic few days at NIME, with whirlwind 15-minute talks interspersed by stunning demos from the likes of Madrona Labs' stunning SoundPlane A (which is the future of digital instruments -- believe!), Roger Dannenberg's robot-bagpiping McBlare and a stunning performance by the Princeton Laptop Orchestra, I was fortunate enough to make it to the 5-day symposium on "Computation and Creativity" at the Dagstuhl centre for informatics, nestled in the German countryside. This meant exchanging ideas and banter with the likes of Jon McCormack, Philip Galanter, Peter Cariani, Maggie Boden, Frieder Nake and countless other luminaries of the evolutionary art/science/theory/AI world. Insane, but wonderful. My brain is still somewhat aching.

The one concrete outcome that I was involved with was the development of a play world for multi-participant visual creation, a continuous shape manipulation environment for 9 participants. It's intended to exemplify, in the simplest manner possible, an emergent visual language that appears through the interplay of a handful of forms.

We'll hopefully be developing some of these ideas further in the near future, incorporating some of the ideas of François Pachet's beautifully elegant Continuator.

Virtually straight off the back of this, I'm now hurriedly working on some code for the 2009 Live Algorithms workshop taking place here at Goldsmiths. The premise is to create a series of completely autonomous software agents which can respond to a purely auditory input from a human performer -- in this case, the brilliant percussionist Eddie Prevost, who is leading the performative sections of the workshops. This is culminating in a gig tomorrow night (6 August) at Cafe Oto, where each of the algorithms will be appearing in a duet with Eddie. It's somewhat unusual to feel nervous about a gig in which I won't be playing a single note.

Recordings and code will be up shortly. In the meantime, here's a visual scrapbook of other things I've been working towards over this manic summer.