Headless Hydra: Live coding on improbable devices—talk
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Abstract
Live coding is an artistic practice that creates sound or video by editing source code in real time, often from scratch. Originating in TOPLAP, it has over two decades evolved a distinctive aesthetic and nurtured a diverse and inclusive community. Live coding has a strong open-source ethic and has produced a wealth of frameworks and tools for creative expression.
One of these is Hydra, a browser-based visual live coding environment created by Olivia Jack. Its Javascript syntax is inspired by analog video synthesis, and it compiles to WebGL under the hood.
Computation has become largely centralized in the hands of a few megacorporations aligned with authoritarianism. As a practice that fosters individual expression, creativity and sharing, live coding is a form of resistance in this context. In that way it is a soul sister of permacomputing, which is about resilience and regenerativity inspired by permaculture.
Headless Hydra is an open-source tool for live coding on permacomputing devices.
I created Headless Hydra, which is still evolving, as a bare-metal version of Olivia Jack’s environment with no WebGL. The animations are rendered on low-end devices like a 2016 Samsung phone running PostmarketOS, or a second-hand Raspberry Pi connected to a color TV. The tool itself is a dependency-less C++ program started from the command line in an SSH session, on a system with no X11.
Join me on this crossover experiment between live coding and permacomputing! The presentation features a smartphone running Linux, and a Raspberry Pi connected to a CRT television. Together we will reclaim the means of computation, and have a rebellious amount of fun along the way.