Workshop: Introduction to live coding with PraxisLIVE

PraxisLIVE is a hybrid-visual libre IDE and actor-based runtime for live programming, with a particular emphasis on live creative coding. It aims to bring aspects of Smalltalk, Erlang and Extempore into working with Java. It offers a powerful way of working with any JVM tools and libraries, including specific support for live-coding with Processing. There is also built-in support for live coding GLSL, working with GStreamer for video input / playback, and a live-recodeable audio engine with JACK bindings.

The workshop will provide an introduction to the PraxisLIVE environment, its intuitive live visual patching (a graphical representation of its actor graph), and the ability to re-code any node as it’s running, using a mixture of Processing / Java or GLSL. It will then consider various strategies to project setup for live coding performance, including working with the PraxisCORE runtime separately from the IDE. Topics covered will include -

• Setting up / adapting simple Processing sketches for live coding, including PraxisLIVE extensions for reactive coding, keyframe animation and patterns, as well as live video textures and mixing sketches together.

• Setting up, live-coding and mixing GLSL components, and controlling uniform values from “outside” using other code, sensors or OSC / MIDI.

• Setting up a simple audio project, including sequencing and synthesis, and how to pass data (eg. FFT) from audio to video and back.

• Exporting a standalone PraxisCORE project that can still be live coded externally of the IDE by listening on a file or sending (fragments of) source code from another program.

  A paper on PraxisLIVE was presented at ICLC 2016. The software has been presented, and workshops given, at various events including Libre Graphics Meeting (London 2016 / Seville 2018), Perte de Signal (Montreal 2016), Live Performers Meeting (Amsterdam 2017), Electric Nights (Athens 2017), Generate (Tubingen 2017), JDD (Krakow 2017) and Piksel (Bergen 2017).

  More information on PraxisLIVE is on the software website at https://www.praxislive.org