Hi Everyone, and thanks Marc for the invitation. marc garrett said : > So, I would like to kick off this discussion by asking Heather > Corcoran or Aymeric Mansoux why they decided to get involved with > pure:dyne and what it means to them, as practitioners in their own > field, and what it means to them culturally?
My decision to be involved with the project was quite simple: I started it ;) So maybe I could explain how this all happenned and in which context pure:dyne was created, which might give some hints on the cultural aspect. I think Heather's answer's about pure:dyne as a workshop platform is a very good introduction because it is what motivated the creation of pure:dyne in the first place, and still remains a strong component of the project. For the last 5 years GOTO10 has been involved in organising/producing workshops on free software and digital art. The software we used to teach, or the software we were teaching at the time was running on GNU/Linux and on top of that was not easy to get running or install even within a GNU/Linux distribution. As a consequence it was usual for us to come an entire day before a workshop and install all the machines with Debian or Gentoo and compile the software needed (no packages for the software taught). It was a real nightmare and it was very common to only finish in the middle of the night or early morning. It was impossible for us to communicate to the host's technical team or admin what to do as it was requiring a lot of last minute hacking and improvisation to get everything installed properly, not to mention the fact that we could not just say to the people who invited us "install a full OS, re compile kernel modules if necessary, and when you're done, here is the list of libs and applications you need to compile, see you tomorrow". It was also impossible to have a "bring-your-own-laptop" setup as we would have to sacrifice a big chunk of the workshop to install things on the participants' machines (more time because instead of fixing 10-20 times the same type of machine, we would have to deal with 10-20 different laptops). We tried this once and it was a failure, we almost had no time left to teach and an important numbers of participants broke their install/windows/whatever and didn't even have anything running after 3 days (we fixed everything in the end, everyone came back home happy, but you get the point...). Another downside was that we were teaching software we knew that it would be hard for our participants to install, and as a consequence very unlikely to use and to learn further when they went back home. Only a few survived during this pre-pure:dyne dark ages. Tough love, yes, but it was the only thing we knew, until a certain day... I think it's in 2004 (or close), that Marloes de Valk (http://no.systmz.goto10.org) organised a Pure Data workshop at Montevideo/NIMK in Amsterdam, in which I was teaching, and where I met Jaromil (http://dyne.org). He showed me the dyne:bolic liveCD that he was developing and I was quite impressed to see a whole system running from a CD that was able to detect and configure itself automatically to work on a good number of different machines. Similarly, a few years before Jaromil was impressed when he got introduced to the bolic1 liveCD (http://web.archive.org/web/20071208023945rn_1/www.autistici.org/bolic1/) from LOA and which became later both a base and inspiration for dyne:bolic. What happened next was obvious. In just an afternoon we added Pure Data and a couple of externals to dyne:bolic. To be honest, I was just pointing him to the right sources and the right configure flags, and he did all the integration very quickly. We ended up with a new minor release of dyne:bolic that we used a couple of times in workshops with an "ok" success rate. I say "ok" success rate and not good, nor excellent because, while it was very easy for Jaromil to rebuild a new CD with some changes, it was very difficult for anyone else to do so. dyne:bolic was a big hack and was strongly entangled with Jaromil's hard-drive :) The side-effect of this, was that we could not update the CD to support more hardware, we could not update Pure Data, we could not add more externals etc, unless I would ask Jaromil to make this or this change, which I did for a little while, but it was not handy at all. Yet, during this transition phase we started to use the liveCD, doing a mix of dyne:bolic/debian/gentoo depending on the software taught and the machines provided. It sounds a bit messy, and it was, but the addition of the liveCD saved us a lot of time, and simplified quite a few things. Some months later, I had a chat with Jaromil in ASCII and we talked about this issue, and he mentionned to me that he was planning to work on a SDK and a core that would allow to create a new dyne:bolic. So the new dyne:bolic would be rewritten and updated and would be based on a lower subsystem and scripts called dyne:II. It was obviously interesting for us, and because I was quite into Pd at the time being, the name pure:dyne came. So, in brief, pure:dyne was going to be built on top the dyne:II core but maintained by GOTO10. The 1st person to join me was another GOTO10 member, Chun Lee and almost immediately after, Antonios Galanopoulos, also from GOTO10. Very quickly we used pure:dyne as a default solution to be able to teach workshops in all kind of different situations, reducing install parties (read nightmare) to only last minute quick fixes. The added bonus was that we could tell the host organisation to download the liveCD, test it on their machines, and if necessary we could make immediately some modifications to make it work. Last but not least, participants were going back home with a liveCD that had good chances to work on their hardware and they could go on learning on their own without disrupting their main operating system habits/etc.. >From a practitioner point of view, while we were fine-tuning pure:dyne, we started to go really into details to the point where some of us stopped using their regular GNU/Linux distro to only use pure:dyne as their main operating system. After all, pure:dyne was supposed to provide a stable system, high performance and a unique collection of exotic software. So why would we just use that to only teach? Antonios was the first one to make the complete switch, and I followed a little bit after. pure:dyne was not anymore just a teaching platform, it became our operating system, the one we used for our live performances, installations, and any of our artistic projects or experiments. This boosted dramatically the project because we were confronted to it everyday, and any fixes or enhancement or new features that we added "as artist needs" or just "daily user" was immediately available in a new version of the liveCD. At this point things started to go very fast, and we started to modify the core system, the scripts, updating large chunks of the system, stripping things out, adding some bits and bytes, etc. Ending up with a system that was in fact a sort of snapshot of our constantly evolving needs and even mood changes. I could tell you, that since the beginning we had this grand vision of the ultimate software artist environment and that we worked hard to make it happen, of course we thought about it, but just like many other things completely unrelated. So saying it was an initial goal or that we felt the need to fullfill a particular demand we had carefully observed would be lying. As Heather said, and what I find fantastic about working on this type of free software project, is that you just initiate something, it develops itself organically, and you see a whole new world unfold in front of you. We did not try hard, we just followed the flow. In GOTO10, the social and political aspect of free software is very important and is implicit/embedded in every of our projects, but from the perspective of the initial pure:dyne impulse, all this was pretty much very utilitarian and self-centered, it seemed, because we designed a platform to teach our workshops and make our art and we did not really expected what was coming around the corner, or said differently we did not pay too much attention. The project was obviously GPL, we had a website with ISO downloads since the beginning, a public mailing list, etc. So even if the project was mostly directed by our own interests and personal needs, the whole proces was entirely visible/open. Of course we were announcing new releases, and communicating a bit on the project, but this was just a matter of telling what was on our system, waiting for people to try it out and give us some feedback. And then one day, they started to arrive ... ... out of nowhere ... ... our first regular users :) Except that they were not any type of users, they were artists, who had in fact very similar needs to ours. From teaching, to using the system for performances/installation, and even using it as main operating system. Then, things started to get more complicated :) a. _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
