In an abominable act of oversight, one of the major projects keeping me occupied in 2010 has yet to receive an official announcement here. So, I'm belatedly pleased to herald Variable 4, an environmental installation taking place on the other-worldly shingle plains of Dungeness in May 2010.

In partnership with James Bulley, and with kind support from the PRSF and Campbell Scientific, we're building a system which will be embedded into the desolate landscape and equipped with an array of meteorological sensors. Using algorithmic compositional techniques, it will then respond sonically to the real-time weather conditions, transforming and recombining a bank of precomposed movements and recordings via a multi-channel all-weather soundsystem.

It is taking place over a single 24-hour period, from noon till noon on 22-23 May, and so encompasses one complete daily cycle of solar and environmental conditions. For those not living in the Romney Marsh area, there will be a couple of coaches operating from London - booking info coming soon.

It's been a bit of a baptism of fire as far as project administration goes; who'd have thought that licensing and insurance concerns could occupy so much time? Current top of the anxiety checklist is ensuring that local fisherman aren't somehow entangled in wiring as they begin their 3am working days. Anyhow, we're finally well into the composition phase - leveraging Max For Live and the endless generative musical possibilities that it offers.

We'll be documenting the compositional and technical development on the Variable 4 blog and twitter @variable4, releasing relevant sourcecode and patches wherever possible.

Imperial's Complexity and Networks group are hosting a day-long meeting on music, beauty perception and neuroscience this coming May (Wednesday 19th). With a focus on the neural correlates of creative and aesthetic processes, and the complex dynamics thereof, it's one not to miss for art-and-emergence junkies.

See the attached list of talks (PDF) for more info.

Final push on getting together this belated report on the Dagstuhl seminar Computational Creativity: An Interdisciplinary Approach I attended a couple of months ago. Features such diagrammatic gems as the attached, depicting ongoing interactions in group improvisation.

The first (and, most likely, last) analogue hackpact entry: a gleeful hour spent playing with "The Putney", more commonly known as the Electronic Music Studios VCS3 (courtesy of James). The unit's matrix-based routing is quite unlike any modular or integrated interface I've seen before, more akin to a strange, solitary game of Battleships.

It's also pretty well-equipped for an antiquated monosynth, with a sexy radiophonic spring reverb, ring modulation and input channels to modulate arbitrary audio inputs. Capable of some screaming 60s tones, and very, very addictive.

(audio CC available as by-nc)

Attached is the audio recording of my segment of Songs for Dynamical Systems, the workshop-plus-gig I recently mentioned, part of the Live Algorithms for Music network. The workshop itself was enormously stimulating, bringing up many interesting issues that only emerge when a software system is forced to improvise entirely autonomously with a human performer -- mostly the class of judgments which are entirely intuitive to a musician, and broadly without generalisable rules. Without any symbolic input, for example, how can an autonomous system gauge when to cease playing?

The gig itself, which was the culmination of a feverish few days' collaborative coding (using the P/F/Q = machine-listening/algorithmic-sequencing/machine-synthesis trio that constitutes the core Live Algorithm philosophy of modularity), showcased an impressively wide range of approaches and sonic palettes. It was also great to see collaborative performances pulled off with such panache, with OSC used for communication between participants over a wireless network.

My approach, audible in the recording above, was to develop a minimal responder that would roughly mimic Eddie's playing along a number of axes, each of which corresponds to a high-level musical feature (density of onsets, loudness, roughness/smoothness, frequency centroid, etc). Due to the noisiness of these measurements, and a certain degree of chaos inherent within the sequencing system, this is never remotely as linear as it sounds on paper! I also adopted a vaguely agent-based approach to positioning the sounds in stereo space, with a notional 9 agents responding autonomously to Eddie's playing.

Eddie himself was applying extended techniques to his tam-tam, with bowing and scraping supplemented by a motorised set of wire-beaters that he has affixed to it. It was an enthralling performance to watch, despite the nerves inherent in watching a bunch of piecemeal code attempting to play along with such a marvellous performer.

Thanks to Ollie Bown and Sam Britton for the recording.

Currently in Pittsburgh, PA for NIME 2009, a packed 3-day conference featuring the cutting edge of musical interface design (pdf program). This afternoon featured some neat robotics with Shimon, the mechanical marimba player, and writing instruments for sound control from the folk at MIT's Responsive Environments group.

En route here, we stopped off for a few days in New York. This gave us the opportunity to visit the great people at Eyebeam, whose hospitality was unrivalled (though it did help to inadvertently wander in during their weekly open-studio hours). We also caught the superb Tangled Alphabet exhibitions at MOMA, followed by Sophie Calle's stunning "Take Care Of Yourself" at the Paula Cooper Gallery. One nine-hour drive later, the sheer verticality of New York has given way to Pennsylvania's expansive forests and rolling hills. Driving through Squirrel Hill Tunnel on Interstate 376 was a highlight; $25 tolls, less so.

Now on CMU's wireless so will again be checking email sporadically.

The fifth edition of OpenLab is taking place this Saturday night in the fine surrounds of Dalston's Café Oto. I'll be presenting a quick howto on integrating SuperCollider and Processing for generative audio-visual works as part of the free daytime workshops, and performing with AtomSwarm during the evening. Entry for the night-time events is £5 to cover running costs.

The great Music Machinery blog has written a short but compelling piece summarizing their investigations into click-track detection in pop music. It uses The Echo Nest's machine listening API + python + gnuplot, with convincing effect.

I was fortunate enough to catch the very tail-end of George Maciunas: The Dream Of Fluxus at the Baltic, Gateshead, a couple of weekends ago. It did a great job of putting Fluxus in its context, revealing a number of things that I had previously had no idea about — George Maciunas' colourblindness, for example, which perhaps goes some way to explain Fluxus' monochromatic aesthetic, and his key role in establishing the New York loft space co-ops which clearly leave their SoHo legacy to this day.

The other floors of this stunning building featured a Yoko Ono retrospective and an instance of Miranda July's unerringly sweet and genuine Learning To Love You More project. Both of these I was aware of previously; they also served to complement each other nicely. I hadn't heard, however, of A Spoken Word Exhibition, taking place at the same time. This group show was startling in its content and delivery: short textual pieces by the likes of Douglas Coupland, Lawrence Weiner, Yoko Ono herself and others, read on request by the gallery attendants dotted around the building.

It was a charming way to access a piece of work, inevitably involving an encounter with the attendant and the side-stories that this entails (one told me of the tourists incessantly photographing her as she sang one of the pieces). I enjoyed the reading of Vito Acconci's tale of conceptual Antarctic architecture, "Halley II Research Station: First Impressions & the Beginnings of a Conceptual Approach", neurotically revising plans for a structure of light.

The first reading I requested, however, was a date-specific piece by the world's favourite tender pervert Momus. He's perhaps my most-read blogger right now, so I was naturally curious to see what he'd written. I didn't expect to be greeted by just a pair of numbers: "2015 and 2058". Years, I presumed, but couldn't make any further connections.

Later investigation revealed that this was the title of an earlier blog post of his, in which he sketches predictions for the near future of 2015. Representing the dislocated title in this way serves to further fragment pieces of this digital fabric, hurling them out into the real world of flesh and speech without an obvious referrent -- a mischievous way to induce koan-like contemplation of naked morphemes.

This whole process reminded me of three things relating to Momus that I have intended to write about but failed.

1. As a festival bestowal just before Christmas, he collated and re-released his 6 early LPs on Creation Records, all free of charge in mp3 format (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6). There are some gems on their - particularly some of the nostalgic jungle-influenced sounds from Timelord.

Incidentally, there's a handful of gigs forthcoming at The Dream Machine, Dulwich, featuring other early Creation artists...

2. The below film, a narrated slideshow of boring book sleeves, is one of the funniest things he has produced. Hints of Peter Greenaway and Popper/Serafinowicz.

3. Having spotted some intriguing makeshift-looking storage solutions in a couple of photos of his apartment, I have shamelessly lifted his excellent postmodern storage solution of stacked Ikea Trissa boxes. It's the storage equivalent of lego. I hope this doesn't make me a cyberstalker.

Not one, but three What They Could Do, They Did-related events this week for your delectation, all with free entry as usual...

The Pictures (Barden's Boudier, Wednesday 18 Feb)
http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?gid=26568428070
The latest installment of London's most entrenched underground film club, curated by Garry Sykes. This month featuring "Silver Jew" (exclusive UK screening), live music from Trace Fluids and The Super Shirani Nitemare Band, plus Boring Girls DJs, bingo, free popcorn...

A+B=C
Escape, Herne Hill, Thursday 19 Feb)
http://www.theydid.org.uk/2009/escape/

All bases are manned with our thrilling collaboration with Brighton's Beatabet collective (beatabet.net) for this month's Escape, featuring AK/DK, The Beatabet Band, The Capsized Smiles and so very much more.

"In C"
The Rochelle School, Arnold Circus, Saturday 21 Feb, 3pm
http://www.theydid.org.uk/2009/in-c/

As part of the "24 Fragments" event (thefragmentedorchestra.com), we're performing Terry Riley's classic piece of unpredictable modern minimalism "In C" using a homebrewed ensemble specially trained for the purpose. Also accompanied by a talk by the Stroke Assocation.