Software Art Panel - Künstlerhaus Bethanien part 1

Software Art Panel - Media Arts Lab at Künstlerhaus Bethanien
In cooperation with transmediale.03
February 4th, 2003, Studio II

Part One of Two
Introduction, initial presentations

Edited by Inke Arns

We gratefully acknowledge the support by Initiatief beeldende kunsten vzw / Digitaal Platform, Brussels, for this transcription.

Inke Arns: [...] The somewhat polemic title of our panel today is "software art - a curatorial fiction or an artistic tendency". 2003 marks the third anniversary of the transmediale software award which since its first installment 2001 has instigated an ongoing debate about software art and its legitimacy. On the one hand the idea that artists may not just be users of prefabricated software to produce something else but engage with programming and software and code itself in playful inventive and critical ways has caught on and spread over to other festivals, exhibitions and artistic projects. On the other hand there is no comprehensive identity or network of software artists. Jury work for software art competitions often turns to be difficult because of little and mixed quality input and because much if not most of artistically interesting software - hacker code, conceptual art, algorithmic musical composition for example - is written either outside the art system or is not being thought of as software art by its creators.
This international panel gathers artists and critics from Russia, the United States, France, Great Britain and Germany: Olga Goriunova, Amy Alexander, Florian Cramer, Antoine Schmitt and Alex McLean - most of whom happened to be involved with the transmediale software prize either as winners or as jury members. Perhaps here I should mention, in the program it says that Margarete Jahrmann would participate, she could not come, so we have to do without her. The idea of this panel is to critically discuss software art and its curatorship in the last three years and draw a preliminary conclusion, if this is possible, of its viability. So before presenting the participants, let me give a brief outline of the topic of our discussion.

Software art, which I would consider as a heuristic term, in the broadest sense describes activities which use software or code as an artistic material. I will not elaborate on the notion of software art any further because I'm sure that each of us has a slightly different perspective which will be addressed during the discussion. I'd rather direct your attention on the question of why software or code could be at all an interesting material for artistic production.

So why software? Software has become ubiquitous which means that even unknowingly you cannot avoid it anymore today. Software nowadays can be found not only in computers but in almost everything ranging from communication devices, telephones, all sorts of media machines, even washing machines and other household devices. But ubiquitousness in this case does not only mean that software is everywhere, that it is all pervasive but it also means that most of the time it remains invisible. This general invisibility of software applies on two different levels. First in most cases so called "raw software" or the code is covered by glossy surfaces where you are not manipulating the code directly but where you are working with a graphic user interface. The second level of the invisibility of software applies at the interface itself. It is what computer scientists call the "transparency of the interface". In everyday language transparency normally means visibility or clearness, or controllability through visibility. Transparency in the case of computer science rather stands for information hiding, which means that the user does not notice the software working in the background.

Even if information hiding in the case of interface design can be useful, it can be said that at the same time it suggests to the user or to the viewer a direct or even natural view or access to the data. This is of course not the case as Lev Manovich notes in his book "The Language of New Media". A short quote: "Far from being a transparent window into the data inside the computer the interface brings with it strong messages of its own." Today, in a time when our environment gets increasingly mediatized and digitized and thus can be said to be based increasingly on software, it becomes more and more important to be aware that code or software directly affects the virtual and actual spaces in which we are moving, communicating and living. It has the capabilities to directly mobilize or immobilize its users.

This is why Lawrence Lessig in his book "Code and other laws of cyberspace" claims that program code increasingly tends towards becoming law. This is his by now almost famous short motto: "Code is Law." Today control functions are being build directly into that very architecture of, for example, the net, which means into its code. Taking as an example the online service America Online (AOL) Lessig poignantly makes clear how code directly enables or disables freedom of movement, of speech and of behavior. Code should - even if it remains largely invisible - not be accepted as something natural or as god given fact. It is rather written by humans and can therefore be changed or conceived differently.

Code works or software art deals with this code and software structures underlying and generating visible surfaces. Software art focuses our attention on the all pervasive raw program code which our increasingly digitized working and living environment is based upon and uses this code or this software as its artistic material.

Perhaps so much for an introduction to this broad field we are supposed to discuss today. I would now like to briefly introduce the panelists. Before I do this I should say that we decided two days ago that everyone of us will present a piece of software art - very briefly in five minutes - to give you a very broad overview of this field that could be called software art. We are trying to cover a broad range of practices from political activism, interface manipulation, simulation, programmers' humor and also music. This what we are going to start with.

Florian Cramer: Just to mention briefly why this panel came together: There was a mailing list discussion between Antoine, me and Amy, and then it somehow broadened. We discussed recent developments of software art, decided to meet in Berlin during transmediale and continue our discussion in person. Then somehow it became a public panel.
That we are sitting here and you are sitting there doesn't say much because I recognize so many faces and see so many people here in the audience who could sit and speak here in front as well. So we hope to make it as open as possible and involve you all. But as we also don't want to make it an insider discourse, we will first show you what we think of as software art to give you a better impression and to ground our discussion.

Inke Arns: This will be of course one of the questions: How much do you have to be an expert to enjoy software art?
I will start with Olga Goriunova who is sitting second left from me. She is from Moscow. She is the co-organizer of the Moscow based Read_me 1.2 and Helsinki based Read_me 2.3 festivals and of the software art repository Runme.org. I think we will have the chance to talk about this project later on because several people on this panel are involved in this project. She is the author of the suicide letter wizard for microsoft word which she will talk about and she also published several articles on digital culture. Currently she is a Ph.D. student in the media lab at the University of Industrial Arts and Design in Helsinki. She is based in Moscow and Helsinki.

Olga Goriunova: Hello, I'm starting, I'm the first one to present two projects. I'm the first one because the projects I'm presenting entertaining software art pieces with an intellectual touch or maybe pop software art. Both projects are easy but at the same time deeply critical.
The first one was recently entered to runme.org. As Inke has mentioned almost all people who are sitting here and also some in the audience are involved in creating this big software art repository. The project is called SPS and was made by Karl-Robert Ek. It is a screensaver and it plays a “paper rock scissors” game with the user.

A gesturing hand is projected onto the wall. It plays the poses of "paper - rock - scissors". Olga Goriunova interacts with the projection and plays the game.

One - two - three. One - two - three. One - two - three.

Laughing from the audience

So as you see it is a very simple piece made in Flash but I think it is very conceptual and carries a lot of theories within it. It brings the game outside of the computer, in the physical space. It excludes any physical interaction of the user with the computer interface but it is a computer game anyway. I won't give you any further theories about it as they can go on for too long.

The second project is called "Suicide letter wizard for Microsoft Word". It is a wizard that generates templates for suicide letters. Basically it is an add-on to Microsoft Word. When it launches itself it also opens Microsoft Word. It is similar to many existent templates that are made to cover all possible areas of human life.

So here we have the wizard where we can choose a layout which is of course very important when writing a suicide letter … then we can use a sample salutation. Then there are a few categories why …

She demonstrates the suicide letter wizard for the audience. A pop-up box where the user can choose from menus similar to other "wizards" in Microsoft programs. Laughing from the audience during the demonstration.

Each category has its own text. Then there is a conclusion and also a closing. We enter the address. Then we can use style. I will choose modernistic now and then we finish.

Here we have the letter with a date and an address. Here you can put your signature. And some information. And it has a nice layout.

When I was making this piece I wanted to make a critical comment to mainstream culture, the mainstream software culture of proprietary programs especially from Microsoft who pretends to satisfy all needs of every individual user. But of course like any other part of the culture industry it aims at satisfying the needs of capitalist information production. Topics that refer to other parts of human life are never covered and they are always taboo.
Thank you, I think I got my five minutes.

Inke Arns: I would like to briefly present Amy Alexander now who is sitting to my far right. She has been working with film, video, music, computer animation and new media. She is currently assistant professor at the University of California, San Diego. Since 1996 she has been working primarily in net and software art exploring net culture as well as dynamic processes and structures. Her recent work has been primarily in live net performances and software projects. Her internet projects include plagiarist.org, theBot and The Multi-Cultural Recycler and her latest performance work is called b0timati0n. She is on the software jury of the transmediale.03 - we are all looking forward for the award ceremony tonight where she will present the prize for software art - and she also has been on the jury of the read_me 1.2 in Moscow. And as I mentioned earlier she is a member of the runme.org software art repository group. OK, it's your turn.

Amy Alexander: My projects and my interest in software sort of run all test over from pop software to political to algorithmics so I thought I'll show you two extreme but related projects.
We have all seen something like the Windows screensaver [shows flying text screensaver] - this delightful monstrosity - so before we go into seizures we are going to look at a project that was one of the winners of the read_me 1.2 festival last year. It is called "Screen Saver" and it's by Eldar Karhalev and Ivan Khimin. This is the project right here.

Opens a text document.

It's basically instructions to modify the screensaver to do something else. So we go back in, select screensaver, select 3D-Text, select settings, in section display select text - it is a technically very difficult piece … in section size select large, in section resolution we select max, in selection surface style we select solid color, for speed we select slow, at spin we select none, and most importantly in the text area put in a full stop. Now move on to the choice of font and we should select Verdana Regular. Okay, okay and apply …

She presses the buttons.

… and now we've got something much better.

Laughing from the audience which sees now an oscillating square moving across the screen as the new screensaver.

This obviously makes the high-tech 3D, obnoxious icon of the Windows screensaver do something its programmers didn't intend it to do. So you could call this “software art for users” or “user generated software art,” as opposed to the traditional programmer-generated software art. It shows the users' resistance to the restrictions imposed by software and technology but also points out that software art is not just for programmers.

But what about programmers? She opens a text on a website which documents a piece of software. This project is called "Acme-Handwave" by Simon Batistoni (sometimes also called Simon Kent for some reason) and it's a software library. Libraries are pieces of software that programmers use to build other software out of. The Acme collection is a bunch of software that subverts the usual utilitarian uses of libraries to make things that are clearly not utilitarian. This is a something for programmers who want a certain result without tedious algorithms or real programming. As any programmer knows sometimes you are writing something, you are writing this algorithm, you are expecting a certain answer but that's not the answer that's coming out. So what Acme-Handwave does: it asks you what kind of data you are putting in, what the expected result is, and it will sort of wave its hands and give you the result that you want. So you can just give it what you want; it does some hand waving magic and the result you were looking for comes out.

This is a goofy little simple thing, but it also reminds us that it is not only users who are restricted by and trying to resist technology, but programmers are in this position as well. More importantly it reminds us that the programmer is not a mechanical part of the software or the interface but also a human struggling with the technology. Finally, it reminds us that programmers and algorithms are not neutral, objective, mechanical and interchangeable, but in fact they are highly subjective. So maybe when you punch in something in a piece of software and it gives you the answer it’s not the answer, the neutral godlike sterile, infallible technological answer, but rather it’s the programmer's voice expressed through an algorithm.
Next victim, please!

Florian Cramer: Since Inke now is going to present something, I will introduce her briefly. Inke is very well known in net culture: She's the co-founder of the Syndicate - now Spectre - mailing list together with Andreas Broeckmann and a founding member of the Berlin-based mikro e.V. net culture collective. Apart from that, she studied art history and Slavic philology and just completed her Ph.D. thesis on the artistic reception of the historical avant-garde in Eastern Europe in the 1980s and 1990s. She has also worked as an exhibition curator and a critic of net art. I'm sure I forgot something but I hope my introduction did her justice.

Inke Arns: It is difficult to show anything because it is a piece that is strongly process oriented. It is a piece by Dragan Espenschied and Alvar Freude entitled “insert_coin”. They were both students at the Merz Akademie in Stuttgart studying with Olia Lialina. They started the project in 2000 and it went on until 2001. It was a project they realized within the Merz Akademie as a diploma work.

Espenschied and Freude manipulated the proxy server of the school. When the people in the network are surfing on the internet their computers are not directly connected to the other computers on the internet but mostly for certain technical reasons they are connecting through a proxy server. Proxy in German means "Vertreter". It is sort of caching websites so that your own computer does not have to contact websites directly the whole time. So you can imagine that such a proxy server is quite important.

What they did was to install a manipulated version of a proxy server on their school computer through which they could manipulate the content of websites. Everything the students and the professors of the Merz Akademie saw when they were surfing was completely manipulated web content. I tried this out the day before yesterday on my own website because there I easily can tell what I have done and what has been manipulated.

Florian Cramer: This is unmanipulated right now. Now I will change it to the manipulated.

Inke Arns: Wait a second. This is an unmanipulated website. Here for example you see Neue Slowenische Kunst - this a title of a book that I published. Now we change it to the manipulated server where we get the manipulated version. [...] What you see through this proxy server is not Neue Slowenische Kunst [New Slovenian Art] but Neue Slowenische Schrotthandel [New Slovenian scrap trade]. Neue Slowenische Schrotthandel is of course not equal to Neue Slowenische Kunst what I put on the website. Or it changes … you see the book Netzkulturen - net cultures. It was not published in Munich, it was published in Hamburg. Here you see Regensburg, Showroom Ostdeutsche Galerie. But on my real website it says Museum Ostdeutsche Galerie. What I am confronted here is my own personal website whose content has been changed heavily. Normally only I would have access to this website; no other person would have the possibility to change this.

You can find a very good documentation on their website. You can find a list of all the words that were exchanged by the manipulated proxy. For example the names of the former and the actual German chancellor - Kohl and Schröder, so that when the students of the Merz Akademie would surf the internet on major German news portals like Spiegel.de or Focus.de they would suddenly get very strange information. Even when they checked their email through web interfaces the content of their email was altered.

Question from the audience: What does Schrotthandel mean?

Florian Cramer: Trash trader.

Inke Arns: It changes all the words into the opposite. It changes chancellor into emperor, it changes chief, or head of department into Obersturmbannführer [a military rank in nazi SS-troops] and stuff like this. Words like violence are changed into very positive words and so on. It is funny, when you experience this you get confused at a certain point what is real and what is been manipulated.

Actually this project was set in this whole discussion about filtering net content. There has been a very strong discussion in Germany about sort of cleaning the internet, making the internet free from pornography, child pornography, nazi propaganda and so on. The government [of Nordrhein-Westfalen, a province of Germany] in Düsseldorf is still trying to impose filters on the internet. What this project shows is that these filtering mechanisms can be used not only for filtering “bad” content but also for really effectively manipulating content of internet websites.

OK, I think that's it.

Just one remark: if you have any technical questions about the projects I think it would be okay to ask them immediately during or directly after the presentation of the project.

Question from the audience: When did the students in the school notice that their internet was changed?

Inke Arns: Oh, I forgot to mention. Nobody noticed. The concept was two people control 250 and nobody noticed. Even when they made it public and gave out a very simple instruction for the students how to change the proxy server to normal again nobody cared. It is quite shocking.

Question from the audience: They noticed when the proxy server broke down.

Inke Arns: It was working for several months. Then there was a technical break down and then the system administrator of the school noticed and thought they were intercepting secret information …

Question from the audience: Did they get their diploma?

Inke Arns: Yes, they did. I think so.

[Question unintelligible]

Florian Cramer: It actually was their diploma work. They entered it as their diploma work and it was the class of Olia Lialina, so they got it.

[Unintelligible remarks from the audience]

Remark from the audience: They even changed the logo of the school that was displayed during the diploma ceremony and nobody said anything.

Inke Arns: We should move on to Antoine Schmitt. Antoine Schmitt is sitting at the far right seen from your perspective. He is an artist and a programmer. In his works he is trying to address mostly fundamental problems like free will or happiness these kind of very emotional things. He is producing art works, programs and installations in which he is mostly creating abstract beings. One of his works I saw was quite irritating because it never really did what you were expecting it to do. So the work he does is quite irritating.

Laughing from Inke Arns and the audience.

Sorry, I'm talking about "Vexation I" which got a honorary mention at the first transmediale software art award in 2001. He is mostly getting his material from video games and artificial intelligence, artificial life. He is dealing with the algorithms of these works. He has shown work in many festivals, he received the first price of the net art competition in "Medi@terra" in Athens 1999.

Antoine Schmitt: Hello, I'm going to talk about an aspect of software art that has not been talked about yet. We have seen conceptual art, we have seen lots of social art, I mean art dealing with social issues. I wanted to say that art can also deal with sensations. That is what is called aesthetics in art history. I'm going to show one work that I think is representative of this aspect of software art that deals with sensations. It is a piece called "Etude organique", that means "organic study", from an artist called Alexandre Gherban who is Romanian but lives in France. He is an artist who has been involved in video and audio poetry for a long time. Now he is interested in programming as an artistic medium and material. That is what he states. He makes programs that are stand-alone and slightly interactive and that are designed to be experienced by a single user in front of his computer.

It’s a very low tech visual work graphically - programmatically actually also. It is designed in scenes like this. This is one scene. If I click on an element I go to another scene. If I do some actions it is not always clear what triggers what. I just clicked here and nothing happened, something else happens now. I clicked - something changed.

We see that the visual elements are very minimal. It's squares, lines and letters. There are various movements like going slow, accelerating, grouping, gathering, being attracted, repulsed. You have minimal actions: If I move the mouse something happens sometimes, sometimes not; if I click something happens sometimes, sometimes not.

All this is dealing with what the artist calls "a-semantics". That is everything that is happening is just below the level of meaning. It looks like it means something, that it has some kind of reason for happening but it is just below. That is the important aspect what he says about his work.

I just play around some more. As you see sometimes things happen, you don't exactly know why. You feel that you have some kind of influence on what is happening. The movements and not the graphics are the thing that attracts our attention almost despite our will. At first you say it's just a cheap graphic thing, but then you wonder. It is quite strange what is happening and you try to find the reason for what is happening.

That is an example for what I feel is important in software art. Programs are mostly actions. That is one of the main and a very specific aspect of programming material. Actions can have some relationship to sensation. This is mostly done through what is called simulation in computer science - that is simulating some kind of behavior and it has also to do with real time. It is important to know that what is happening is happening here and now and has not been prerecorded. So simulation and real-time for me are the two key words for the aesthetics of software art. Thank you!

Inke Arns: The next panelist is sitting next to me. It is Florian Cramer who tries to connect his laptop computer which he build himself. It is quite heavy for a laptop but it is great and I admire him for building a computer all by himself. He is a lecturer in Comparative Literature at Freie Universität Berlin. He does research on literature, art and executable code since 1997. He is a free software activist with - as he writes - his brain attached to Unix and Perl. He has been a member of the jury for the first transmediale software award in 2001. He was also a member of the read_me software art jury 1.2 and - as was already mentioned - he is also a member of the runme.org expert group. He is co-administrating the rohrpost mailing list which is a German speaking mailing list for net culture in the broadest sense and editing the nettime unstable digest. He has published a lot of interesting things about code and code art and software art.

Florian Cramer: Thanks very much. I'm going to present what I already consider to be a classic of newer software art. The artist who created it is Adrian Ward who's sitting right here in the first row. I feel very humbled and am afraid to screw up! Briefly after that I will show you something which you might not think about as software art.

This... He shows the first piece by Adrian Ward on the beamer. ...is an example of a software art piece that relates very closely to what you experience and what you know as computer software. It's called "Auto-Illustrator" and it is a regular computer program for Macintosh and Windows. You can start it up and it looks exactly like a graphics program. If you are a professional graphics designer you probably know Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop - it's very close to that.

He demonstrates Auto-Illustrator.

Now I will try to draw a circle in this program. First it looks like a circle but it doesn't quite end up being a circle. The circle executed by the programme isn't exactly circular. I could even change the style and when I do that - oh sorry, I made a mistake - it ends up being like this. The software has now rendered the circle as a smilie. I could also, like in a normal graphics program, put some text into the graphics - here is the text tool. It also looks like a normal graphics text tool, but when I use it, it generates its own text randomly. So I have no control over the text. The software also has bugs - you know there are bugs, errors, in every software. But in this program, the bugs are graphical. If I use the bug tool and click here on the button, then the bug runs through the image. I also squish the bugs - debug - kill them by using the bug killing tool and then trying to catch them… Yes, I have stopped one bug, but the other one is still running, I guess.

OK, this is the graphics that not really I have generated but rather the program has generated. And it even has some fancy tools to manipulate it. If it looks to childish right now, I can use a filter like, for example, "Inspirational Instant Bauhaus-Style". If I use it, it looks like this. The smilie becomes rectangular. There are many other filters, like: "stupid", "pointless"… Let's use "stupid"… I could go on for hours. It's a complex program - it is as complex as Photoshop or Illustrator, but it doesn't behave as you expect such a program to behave.

This I think is the point, and this also is why we gave this program the transmediale software prize in 2001. If you use a piece of software, it is usually modelled after something you know. It has paintbrushes, it has buttons that represent something that you expect from a normal, non-digital tool. But who says that the software tool behaves the way it presents itself? If you have any piece of software and there is a button that says "save", you expect that pushing "save" actually saves your work and does not erase it. But nobody can give you the certainty that it doesn't erase it instead. So it is a pure cultural convention to rely on software as something that does what it pretends to do, and which acts like a tool you control and that doesn't control you by generating things on its own. So this piece of software shows you what software is about and who is actually in control of what you do with software.

Maybe it's enough to state that. For me this piece is a point of departure for software art. You take a given cultural notion of software and you criticize it and turn it upside down. This is where the creative imagination of what artistic software could be may depart from.

I would like to show you another art work totally different from that.

Cramer presents La Monte Young's "Composition 1960 #10" (October 1960) which instructs the performer to "draw a straight line straight line and follow it".

This is a Fluxus conceptual art piece from 1960 by the American composer La Monte Young, who is also one of the founders of minimal music. It simply consists of what you see here. It is a simple paper card and it says: "Draw a straight line and follow it."
Why do I consider this software art? It's a formal instruction. It is an algorithm which you can execute. It could be executed by a machine. You could build a machine that draws a straight line and follows it. But on the other hand it's something I would call imaginary software because a radical execution is physically almost impossible. You would need a machine that breaks through walls, that breaks the entire physics of the earth to draw straight line once around the globe to complete the piece.
It is something that you can physically perform in a limited way, but actually only can perform in your mind. It is a code executing on your brain and not on a machine. That shows for me that computer software, or software in general, is not limited to machine execution, a certain hardware or the whole concept of computing as something involving a CPU and electricity, but that it also can be something fantastic, utopian, something that is almost literary, writing a code which runs in your imagination.

Inke Arns: Thanks a lot. I think we should move straight on to the last panelist. Next to me is sitting Alex McLean [http://slab.org/]. He is from London and works in the field of new media. He is - together with Adrian Ward, who is sitting here and who is the author of "Auto-Illustrator" that we just have seen - the founder of the "eu-gene" mailing list that started 2000. It is a mailing list for software art and generative art. He is also involved in the setting up/organizing of "dorkbotlondon". It is a meeting focusing on electronic art especially software art. I don't know, do you have monthly meetings or is it irregular?

Alex McLean: Highly irregular.

Inke Arns: Irregular. OK.
He is also involved in the runme.org software art repository. He did the design and the web programming. What I also want to mention - because he is going to present a piece of software art in the field of music - he is performing music, mostly together with Adrian Ward. They perform together as "slub" and also write generative software applications and perform them in real-time. I don't know, have you performed in Berlin already?

Alex McLean: Yes, last year at transmediale.

Inke Arns: Oh, okay. I think it's your turn.

Alex McLean: Thanks. Hello. I wanted to explore the idea that programming is an expressive medium. I wasn't sure how to do it [? unintelligible] talking to Adrian Ward he said I should write some software in the five minutes that I have to present some software. So I'm going to try and do that and see how far I go. Hopefully it will only take a couple of minutes. We'll see.

He opens a xterm on his computer and starts to write a Perl script.

Inke Arns while Alex is still typing: Sorry I forgot to mention he developed forkbomb.pl, that won the transmediale software award last year 2002. After that he developed a new program called animal.pl. Perhaps we can talk about it later on.

Alex McLean: See what it does now. He is typing, executing, getting error messages, changing the script. I made a bit of a mistake there. Got confused. More typing, then a drum rhythm can be heard from his computer. What I wanted to do is to draw a similarity between playing the guitar - strumming in your bedroom - and writing software where you can also play around not have a clear idea what you are going to start with. Just start with something and play around with it. So I could try now with a different set of samples.
He types and changes the script.
Maybe some gabba sample and some different parameters. A new, more complex rhythm is heard with two different tracks. I'll add a bit of randomness. He is typing, changes the script. After a while new music with three different tracks can be heard. Then I introduce a couple of other programs. More Music is performed.

Applause from the audience for the impromptu performance.

Thank you! It's probably more than five minutes.

Inke Arns: What an amazing presentation. I think we should start now with the discussion, but if you have any questions please make a sign and we will pass the microphone to you.

Question from the audience: In the last presentation where did the sounds come from? Was it from the program or was it sample-based?

Alex McLean: It was sample based, using software that Adrian and I use and have written. The idea is that we perform just using software that we have written ourselves. Adrian actually wrote the software sampler and synthesizer and I was choosing from different sets of samples that I was using to render the sound.

Question from the audience: [unintelligible]

Alex McLean: Yeah, kind of.

>> part 2

Transcript by Vali Djordjevic