Olivia Jack is a programmer and artist who works frequently with open-source software, cartography, live coding, and experimental interfaces. In this episode of the Art && Code Podcast series, Jack talks with AMT Lab Lead Researcher Hannah Brainard about Hydra, a browser-based open source software she developed for live-coding visuals. With a background in computer engineering, Jack was first introduced to the world of live coding in Bogota, Columbia while working primarily as a programmer. Though initially skeptical, she quickly connected with the community and found that watching artists think through the creative process helped shift her approach to software development.

Beyond Hydra, Jack’s research interests include algorithmic representations of uncertainty and chaos, peer2peer networking, and live coding as a way to enter into a continuous dialogue or feedback loop between herself and her computer. This podcast was made in partnership with the Frank Ratchye Studio for Creative Inquiry.

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Hannah Brainard  

Welcome to another episode of Tech in The Arts, the podcast series of the Arts Management and Technology Laboratory. The goal of our podcast series is to exchange ideas, bring awareness and stay on top of the trends. You're listening to our Art&&Code podcast series highlighting artists working at the intersection of performance, real time visuals and live coding. This series is in partnership with the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University. My name is Hannah Brainerd, my pronouns are she/her and I'm the Lead Researcher for AMTLab. Today, I'm joined by Olivia Jack, a programmer, artist and educator who works frequently with open source software, cartography, live coding and experimental interfaces. She's developed browser based creative tools, including hydra, PIXELSYNTH and Live Lab. 

Olivia, thanks so much for joining us today. 

Just to kind of start off, we'll go back into your background, you earned your Bachelor's degree in Engineering and Product Design with a Minor in Computer Science at Stanford University. Could you talk a little bit more about your journey and how your engineering background informs some of your artistic practice?

Olivia Jack  

Thank you for having me. I'm happy to be here. Yeah, I, I've always been really into art in a lot of different ways and just liked kind of making things and building things and then I've also been really interested in math and science and the design program was one way of sort of combining these interests in, in, in science and in making things. Since studying I've pretty much only done computer science, I would say, and I've gone a I wouldn't call myself a designer, in any sense of the word and even less a product designer in some ways, but I'm sure kind of just ways of thinking about things, and especially aspects of the design process of like prototyping and continuous iteration are big parts of the way that I approach making things.

Hannah Brainard  

Yeah, what kind of things are you making now? What are some of your recent projects that excite you. 

Olivia Jack  

So my like, big baby, ongoing project is called Hydra. I do consider her a sort of child in some ways but, it Hydra is a software that I started making six years ago that sort of I don't even know, I think software's is a good, correct word. But it's basically a software for making live coded visuals and where it's inspired by analog video synthesis and it kind of lets you quickly write code directly in the browser and generate these video effects. There's also kind of collaborative components to it and I think it's been this sort of journey of making the software and then seeing how people use it, and then changing it and then making things with it. And then yeah, and I think I've made now a few different browser-based creative tools and I really like the social aspect of, of building software, and especially open source software that other people can use and sort of hack and use for free and then bring their own ideas to it and it becomes a sort of like international community of people who get into some really weird art practice, and then meet each other through that.

Hannah Brainard  

Yeah, so kind of talking about that. Could you tell us a little bit more about some of your live coding work?

Olivia Jack  

Yeah, so I actually first learned about live coding when I was living in Bogota, Colombia. And I lived there for about five years and there was a kind of big community of live coding, which is a practice of writing code in real time to generate audio and visuals and usually in a performative context. So you like writing code in front of other people. And I had been a programmer for a long time, or, yeah, I've been programming since like, 2009 but, learning about live coding at first I kind of didn't really understand it. I was like, why would people want to write code in front of other people that's, like really boring. But I think kind of meeting a bunch of people, especially in Colombia and other parts of Latin America, where I was at the time, who would, you know, go to the club or a party and write, make music using code, it changed the way that I started to approach developing software. And so as a software developer, usually when I've worked on a project, it's kind of like a developer write a piece of code or develop a piece of software and it has certain functions and certain buttons and a certain unit user interface and way that you're supposed to use the software but, writing code that's meant to be live coded, part of it is like, leaving the code as this open ended thing that you can keep changing and so it's much more of some sort of ongoing dialogue. And I think I'm just a curious person, I'm always interested in learning about different things like how computer graphics work, or how sound on the computer works and so I like writing little bits of code to explore certain ideas and then live coding lets me like, keep editing that and exploring different ideas with the code. 

Hannah Brainard  

Yeah, that's amazing. And you get to sort of collaborate using live code, in some ways, have you found a community around live coding?

Olivia Jack  

Yeah, this has been a really big aspect of it. Something that's common in live coding, is people will project their screen so, you can see kind of, as they're writing a bit of code, you can see what they're typing, and you can see the mistakes that they make, which is sometimes the funnest part, because there's some sort of like tension of, oh, no, what's the mistake. And I think even usually, even if it's a language, I'm familiar with watching someone live code, I won't understand everything that they're doing. But just seeing this sort of a little bit of how someone is like thinking through creating something that you're watching or hearing. I find it really interesting and, and it creates this sort of social space, often where a lot of people who do live coding then will lead a workshop and share what they know with other people. And so sometimes with technology, there's this kind of people can be protective of what they know with really technical things and, and, you know, want to be like, Oh, I'm an all-star media artist doing impossible things or something. And like, the, the attraction to it, some of the selling point is like how complicated and seemingly magical it is, and, and live coding is a bit, the opposite of some of what's interesting is how kind of social it is and how much it can be about like sharing something or learning together or building your own tools. And so I like, especially when people like are experimenting with different kinds of tools, and like building their own tools.

Hannah Brainard  

That's amazing. So talking about that some of the artistic elements that you incorporate in your work, I saw that you use a lot of feedback. Why does that interest you? And could you kind of tell us a little bit more about how that works within your artistic practice? 

Olivia Jack  

Yeah, so feedback, it's often when kind of the output of something becomes the input. So like, for example, when you have like two mirrors facing each other, and then it looks like this infinite loop, because each one is reflecting back into the other one. And in audio, it gets used a lot for like reverb effects, or just actually a lot of like effects in audio and in Video synthesis, it can create a lot of kind of, like, organic feeling types of visuals. And I think I am especially interested in it because of its unpredictability, and I think often computers and art made with computers, often there's this idea that you can control everything and you're giving the computer instructions, and you can create a lot of precision and repetition and that can be both a process and an aesthetic output. But actually computers and technology in general are just as capable of kind of creating more unpredictable systems. And I think in within a creative process, I really like being able to have control over certain elements of what's happening and not have control over other elements of what's happening and kind of use that as part of a process of making something interesting. And actually, I, I really like painting as well. And there's something also in applying paint to a canvas often where you like placing broad strokes onto the canvas, but you're not like precisely controlling every, like, drop of paint. And I think there's some aspect of like, layering things and then doing something and seeing what happens and adapting to that, that I really relate to, in my coding practice, or like, or at least in the visual outputs that I create with coding that I really relate to painting.

Hannah Brainard  

So sort of moving out of your artistic practice and into more of your professional work, some of the same things might sort of apply that there are areas where you have some control, and some that you don't, for example, talking about some of your cartography and data visualization work with the Anti-Eviction Mapping project ,migration patterns, COVID-19 research, could you talk a little bit more about the process and creating that and how you sort of represent the data in that work? 

Olivia Jack  

Yeah, I've, I've worked for a variety of different in a variety of different contexts, often kind of for science organizations that are looking at sort of researching and distilling information about scientific processes to a wider audience than an academic audience. And I think that is all still very visual for me and kind of using code also to, to communicate kind of visual visual ideas, specifically, I the the COVID-19 research that you mentioned, I, I didn't really do COVID 19 research, but I was working. The last few years, I've been working for a lab in Berlin, where I live now called the research on Complex Systems Laboratory and it's part of the Biology and Physics departments at Humboldt University.

And part of the complex systems are my botched understanding of it but, it's sort of describing and modeling parts of systems that are too complex to fully model, what will happen. And so a big part of complex systems, often, people will, like, someone will want to predict something and often what I learned is that often the answer is no, we actually can't predict this, for example, in the case of something like COVID-19, nobody, even the, you know, most advanced scientists couldn't predict exactly what might happen, because there's so many scientific, biological and social processes, like all in conversation with each other. 

And so I'm going to bring this back to video feedback but often, ways of trying to model these types of things are kind of similar to these feedback, simulate simulations, where you can like, like, describe certain behaviors and incrementally kind of visualize what could happen with them, but not fully predict what might happen. 

And so I was working at this website called Complexity Explorables that are that is part of this research complex systems lab and are interactive explanations of scientific concepts, and specifically, kind of chaos theory and chaotic and unpredictable systems. And it turns out that those are very similar to video feedback. And so I really like being able to create creative tools in my own practice, that let people often play around with some ideas that are complex math concepts, like differential equations, that just like looks like a pretty liquidy effect. And I think it's amazing to be able to play around with these things without necessarily having taken, you know, five years of college math classes.

Hannah Brainard  

I'm on my last question, so you said there's a lot that people cannot predict, but I'm going to ask you to do just that. So, looking ahead, what trends are you excited about and what do you hope to explore? 

Olivia Jack  

For me, I'm excited. I've been really stuck on the computer for a long time, and I've gotten to a point where often I can only imagine being creative on the computer and I'm not trying to get completely away from the computer. But I'm trying to like, bring some of what I like to do, which is kind of creates playful tools and instruments and bring them more to smaller physical devices or phones are kind of like a hodgepodge of like hackable objects, so that I don't have to always rely on the computer to like, feel great.

Hannah Brainard  

That's great. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. We really appreciate you taking some time out of the busy, busy weekend here at Carnegie Mellon. 

Olivia Jack  

Thank you so much for having me.

Hannah Brainard  

Thank you for listening to the Art&&Code series on Tech in The Arts. Be on the lookout for new episodes coming to you very soon. If you found this episode, informative, educational or inspirational be sure to send this to another arts or technology aficionado in your life. You can let us know what you think of this podcast by visiting our website amt-lab.org. That's AMT dash La b dot O R G. Or you can email us at amtlabcmu@gmail.com. Follow us on Instagram @techinthearts or Facebook and LinkedIn at Arts Management and Technology Lab. We'll see you next time.