Max/MSP: A visual programming language for music and multimedia

Anyone familiar with music design languages—-how do this and others mentioned in comments (supercollider, puredata) compare with Ruby/midi based sonic-pi?

Sorry, I should have specified that the third object is a unary operator (was thinking just print). The point is that it can execute something twice, and that differs from a proper flow-based language.

The main point is that the semantics are, shall we say, interesting.

Bravo! If you enjoyed that anti-Max performance art trolling, but thought it wasn't spectacularly hyperbolic and sociopathic enough, I recommend looking up some of the classic flames on the nettime mailing list by Netochka Nezvanova aka "NN" aka "=cw4t7abs", "punktprotokol", "0f0003", "maschinenkunst" (preferably spelled "m2zk!n3nkunzt"), "integer", and "antiorp"!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netochka_Nezvanova_(author)

>Netochka Nezvanova is the pseudonym used by the author(s) of nato.0+55+3d, a real-time, modular, video and multi-media processing environment. Alternate aliases include "=cw4t7abs", "punktprotokol", "0f0003", "maschinenkunst" (preferably spelled "m2zk!n3nkunzt"), "integer", and "antiorp". The name itself is adopted from the main character of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's first novel Netochka Nezvanova (1849) and translates as "nameless nobody."

She (or he or they or it) were the author of the NATO.0+55+3d set of extensions for Max, which predated Jitter:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nato.0%2B55%2B3d

>NATO.0+55+3d was an application software for realtime video and graphics, released by 0f0003 Maschinenkunst and the Netochka Nezvanova collective in 1999 for the classic Mac OS operating system.

Behold this beautiful example of fresco-based write protection:

https://enacademic.com/pictures/enwiki/78/Nato.0%2B55%2B3d.p...

http://www.skynoise.net/2005/10/06/solu-dot-org-vj-interview...

>>>What’s your connection with the notorious ‘nato’ software?

>Nato was the first software that gave me the push to start exploring the live visual world.. before that I did video art making analogue video, and imposing graphics with amiga. Then multimedia and internet projects seemed to offer more possibilities and not until finding Nato did I return to pure video. Fiftyfifty.org was distributing Nato in the beginning, and invited Netoschka Nezvanova various times to Barcelona, my connection with Nato was quite close but now I’m using the “enemy” software Jitter and sometimes Isadora. Jitter is far more complicated and more made for engineers/programmers than Nato, which was basically a video object library for max/msp, and more fun – it seemed always so fragile, and easy to lose.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8418703

DonHopkins on Oct 6, 2014 | parent | favorite | on: "Open Source is awful in many ways, and people sho...

Does anybody remember the nettime mailing list, and the amazing ascii graphics code-poetry performance art trolling (and excellent personalized customer support) by Netochka Nezvanova aka NN aka antiorp aka integer aka =cw4t7abs aka m2zk!n3nkunzt aka punktprotokol aka 0f0003, the brilliant yet sociopathic developer of nato.0+55+3d for Max? Now THAT was some spectacular trolling (and spectacular software).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netochka_Nezvanova_(author)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nato.0%2B55%2B3d

http://jodi.org/

http://www.salon.com/2002/03/01/netochka/

The most feared woman on the Internet

Netochka Nezvanova is a software programmer, radical artist and online troublemaker. But is she for real?

The name Netochka Nezvanova is a pseudonym borrowed from the main character of Fyodor Dostoevski’s first novel; it translates loosely as “nameless nobody.” Her fans, her critics, her customers and her victims alike refer to her as a “being” or an “entity.” The rumors and speculation about her range all over the map. Is she one person with multiple identities? A female New Zealander artist, a male Icelander musician or an Eastern European collective conspiracy? The mystery only propagates her legend.

Cramer, Florian. (2005) "Software dystopia: Netochka Nezvanova - Code as cult" in Words Made Flesh: Code, Culture, Imagination, Chapter 4, Automatisms and Their Constraints. Rotterdam: Piet Zwart Institute.

https://web.archive.org/web/20070215185215/http://pzwart.wdk...

    Empire = body.
    hensz nn - simply.SUPERIOR
    
    per chansz auss! ‘reazon‘ nn = regardz geert lovink + h!z !lk
    az ultra outdatd + p!t!fl pre.90.z ueztern kap!tal!zt buffoonz
    
    ent!tl!ng u korporat fasc!ztz = haz b!n 01 error ov zortz on m! part.
    [ma!z ! = z!mpl! ador faz!on]
    geert lovink + ekxtra 1 d!menz!onl kr!!!!ketz [e.g. dze ultra unevntfl \
    borrrrrrr!ng andreas broeckmann. alex galloway etc]
    = do not dze konzt!tuz!on pozez 2 komput dze teor!e much
    elsz akt!vat 01 lf+ !nundaz!e.
    
    jetzt ! = return 2 z!p!ng tea + !zolat!ng m! celllz 4rom ur funerl.
    
    vr!!endl!.nn
    
    ventuze.nn
    
       /_/  
                             /  
                \            \/       i should like to be a human plant  
               \/       _{  
                       _{/  
                                      i will shed leaves in the shade  
           \_\                        because i like stepping on bugs

https://anthology.rhizome.org/m9ndfukc-0-99

Netochka Nezvanova was a massively influential online entity at the turn of the millennium. An evolution of various internet monikers, among them m2zk!n3nkunzt, inte.ger, and antiorp, Nezvanova has collectively been credited for writing a number of early real-time audiovisual and graphics applications. She was also a prolific and divisive presence on email lists, employing trolling as a form of propaganda and as a tool for creative disruption—though, at times, users adopting the moniker also engaged in harassment and other destructive behaviors.

Among her most well-known pieces of software are the data visualization application m9ndfukc.0+99, which runs within a custom browser created for the app, and the realtime audiovisual manipulation tool, NATO.0+55+3d (which would later be repurposed as Jitter by Cycling ’74). Using data as raw material, these applications mined the artistic potential of noise, randomness, and the unexpected.

In spite of (or perhaps in service to) the many pieces of software attributed to this anonymous online entity, the singular lasting impression of Nezvanova has been rooted in her seriously anarchic attitude—in the elusive, yet public, persona that she carefully crafted as a hybrid, internet-based act of performance art.

Whether trailing code poetry across nettime mailing lists and online forums, or distributing software licenses at contentious fees to academics, Nezvanova was using information architecture itself as a medium. Often times, she would forgo the legibility of clean software design to produce unpredictable outcomes, and even reveal discrete truths.

    "I have not been thrown off a mailing list.
    I have been illegally transformed into a yellow flower.
    A young girl one day found me, and with half closed eyes whispered:
    Perfection,
    Today you've peered in my direction."

    —Netochka Nezvanova

https://www.nettime.org/

https://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-bold-0101/msg...

Thanks for that link to the wonderful video of Alan Kay showing a demo of GRaIL recorded in 1968!

Here's a film of another early system called "PIXIE" for editing graphs and circuit diagrams by Neil Wiseman, Lemke and Hiles from 1969, showing the first know implementation of what I call "pie menus". The librarian David Chapman at the Cambridge University was quite helpful and generous enough to arrange for that film to be transferred to video and posted on their site. (Librarians rock, and Cambridge University has an excellent library! ;) It hasn't widely seen, and was only recently published online!

https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/library/archives.html

>This film demonstrates an early graphical user interface in use. It was made in 1969 to accompany a paper entitled “PIXIE: a new approach to graphical man-machine communication” presented at the 1969 CAD Conference held in Southampton.

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/pie-menus-936fed383ff1#8546

>History of Pie Menus

>The classic 1969 “PIXIE” paper by Neil Wiseman, Lemke, and Hiles had the first mention of circular menus, which was referenced in Newman and Sproull’s 1979 seminal book “Principles of Interactive Computer Graphics”. The “lightbuttons” were apparently target area based (selected “by pointing at one of them”), unlike pie menus which are based purely on the direction of the gesture, resulting in a large wedge shaped target area extending to the screen edge, not just the small rectangular area of the “lightbutton” label:

>PIXIE: A New Approach to Graphical Man-Machine Communication

>Wiseman, N.E., Lemke, H.U. & Hiles, J.O. (1969) PIXIE: A New Approach to Graphical Man-Machine Communication, Proceedings of 1969 CAD Conference Southampton, IEEE Conference Publication 51, 463–471.

>"The control lightbuttons which are used frequently within a mode to carry out a sequence of operations. These buttons are displayed around the tracking cross and move about with it so that the user’s hand is always close to these buttons when he needs them. To avoid clustering a large number of control buttons around the tracking cross, it is arranged that only buttons for those actions which are legal at any given time are displayed and also that the user may select different sets of legal buttons by pointing at one of them (which acts as a sort of rotating switch for the rest)."