New Focus Group: Pure Data, Wednesday, 2/18, 4-6pm
Would you like to create and manipulate video, graphics, and images in real time? Explore endless possibilities for interactivity with audio, video, cameras, and other or external sensors? Collaborate live across networks or the internet to create dynamic music and performance events with fellow artists, educators, technologists, geeks? Whether a novice, an expert, or something in between, get those creative juices flowing by joining the new Pure Data (pd) Users Group.
PD user groups meet in cities throughout the world, and the puredata community – like the communities supporting Wikipedia or Linux – spans all countries and cultures. An established NYC pd user group exists for lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, but here’s your chance, closer to home. The Gottesman Libraries is hosting a Pure Data focus group for members of the Teachers College and Columbia University communities. This focus group will share ideas, experiences, techniques, and thoughts learning pure data if you’re new to it, and for working and with a community that develops this cutting edge software including instructional modules, course work, learning environments, and creative projects ---while stimulating uses across the different academic disciplines.
On Wednesday, February 18th
Miller Puckette, music and computing pioneer, writer, and designer of pd, will lead an introductory discussion. Puckette is Professor in the Department of Music; and Associate Director, Center for Research in Computing and the Arts, at the University of California, San Diego. He will be introduced by
Joseph Deken, Director, Research Program Development at the University of California San Diego, California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology. Dr. Deken is a visiting scholar at Teachers College who participated in the Gottesman Libraries’
Subway Seminar Series. In 2008 Deken, together with a group of colleagues from across the nation, launched
New Blankets, a non-profit organization chartered to develop new technologies and participation mechanisms -- reinventing the “Community Free Public Library” concept of Andrew Carnegie.
Hans-Christoph Steiner, a leading Puredata developer, community leader, and Adjunct Assistant Professor, Department of Interactive Telecommunications, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, will join the presentation and discussion. Professor Steiner also orchestrates a "southern" puredata group in Brooklyn, having received an MPS in Interactive Technologies from New York University in 2004.
As described in free
FLOSS manual at http://en.flossmanuals.net/puredata:
- “Pure Data (PD) is a real-time graphical programming environment for audio, video, and graphical processing. Because all of these types of media are handled as data in the program, many fascinating opportunities for cross-synthesis between them exist. Sound can be used to manipulate video, which could then be streamed over the internet to another computer which might analyze that video and use it to control a motor-driven installation. PD is commonly used for live music performance, VeeJaying, sound effects composition, interfacing with sensors, cameras and robots or even interacting with websites.
The core of Pd is written and maintained by Miller S. Puckette (http://crca.ucsd.edu/~msp/) and includes the work of many developers (http://www.puredata.org/), making the whole package very much a community effort.
The community of users and programmers around PD have created additional functions (called "externals" or "external libraries") which are used for a wide variety of other purposes, such as video processing, the playback and streaming of MP3s or Quicktime video, the manipulation and display of 3-dimensional objects and the modeling of virtual physical objects.
PD runs on Linux, Windows and Mac OS X, and there is a wide range of external libraries available which give PD additional features."
For additional information about Pure Data please see the web references: http://crca.ucsd.edu/~msp/ and http://pd.iem.at/. Some popular youtube videos, showing just a tiny slice of works created with puredata, may be viewed online at:
Persons interested in joining the Pure Data Focus Group and attending this presentation are encouraged to e-mail library@tc.edu in advance of the preliminary meeting. Please note that space is limited to members of Teachers College and Columbia University and their invited guests.
Where: 306 Russell
