Cluster #29: Alexandra Cárdenas

In the context of Cluster Series 2023 Labor Neunzehn is pleased to present a 2-day live coding workshop with Alexandra Cárdenas.

Anyone interested in arts and technology is encouraged to attend the workshop.
No specialist knowledge is required to follow the two-day workflow, other than own laptop + headphones, curiosity, open-mindedness and an attitude for listening to sound and music. All open source software required for the livecoding practice sessions will be downloaded and installed during the workshop.

The workshop is intended to be inclusive and welcoming to everyone interested, emphasizing non-male, non-white people.

Introduction in live coding
Live coding is a practice in the digital arts that was born in the electroacoustic music academic scene and flourishes in diverse performing arts and other disciplines that look for new ways to approach liveness in creation.
Live coding is centered upon the writing and manipulation of source code and the use of interactive programming in an improvised way. Typically, the process of writing source code is made visible by projecting the computer screen into the audience space. Live coding techniques are also employed outside of performance, such as in producing sound for film or audiovisual work for interactive art installations.

Alexandra Cárdenas
Alexandra Cárdenas is a composer, programmer, improviser, and live coder. Her work focuses on the algorithmic behavior of music and the exploration of musicality within code.
She is a core member of the international live coding and algorave communities and teaches and performs worldwide using the live coding languages SuperCollider and TidalCycles. In 2017, she was the Chair of the International Live Coding Conference in Morelia, Mexico. Alexandra studied composition at the Los Andes University in Bogota, Colombia, where she was born, and later completed a Sound Studies and Sonic Arts Master’s Degree at Universität der Künste, Berlin, where she lives. Besides her live-coded music works, she has composed contemporary pieces for orchestra, ensembles, and soloists and worked with theater companies in Mexico, Belgium, and Germany. Her independent research on the idea of control in music composition through live coding has taken her to investigate topics such as the sublime, randomness and generative creation, embodiment, and more recently, privacy and freedom in digital media. Her current work in progress, the opera CITIZEN 4 for Virtual Reality, is a juncture point in her research and performing, and composing experience.

Cluster is a new-music series devoted to the investigation of sound and notation, which provides musicians and composers with an exchange area in Berlin, at the crossroad of compositional and performance practices.

Labor Neunzehn is an artist-run project engaged in a cross-disciplinary discourse on time-based-art that involves expanded cinema, modern music, publishing, and the critical reflection in media art, with a specific focus on the migration of these languages between the online and offline domains. As an independent curatorial platform and a non-profit initiative for the production of research projects, exhibitions, performances, workshops, we are committed to the presentation of collaborative outcomes and hybrid formats.