Listen to the Episode: King of the VJs
Luke Toop (University of Adelaide) is a Video Jockey. Well not just any old video jockey. Having cut his live coding teeth on the Isadora graphic programming environment, Luke Toop is now the undisputed king of Quartz Composer, a visual programming language that is integral to Mac OS X.
Which is a very dry and techno-geeky way of saying – this guy can crank out stuff like you have never seen before. Luke’s Create World 2008 performance was simply stunning: Luke on his own at the front of the auditorium, armed with just a Mac laptop, pumping out the music and throwing up on the screen the most exciting set of visual ideas that you are ever likely to see interacting together in one place.
In this podcast episode Allan Carrington interviews Luke about his work, and along the way does some rueful reflection on how far we’ve come since Allan got to plug in his first set of disco lights. A long way indeed. Luke’s performance wasn’t any ordinary disco. My brain was frazzled with new ideas, and my eyeballs were fried.
Unfortunately this episode is the only recording we can offer you – Luke’s emphasis, it seems, has been on the real-time performance, on the act of creating itself, not on capturing it for later replay. (I guess it comes as a kind of relief to find that in this most digital of arts there is still a premium on the ephemeral rather than the archival.)
But if you want to keep in touch with what’s going on with Luke you can monitor his Epiphanies blog at http://luketoop.com, and you can find out more about applications of the composer at the Quartz Composition site. And get into some mind-bending stuff about the world of live coding over at Toplap.
Allan Carrington is a Learning Designer with the Centre of Learning and Professional Development at the University of Adelaide. 
Dr Ian Green teaches and researches in areas of researcher education, elearning and linguistics at the University of Adelaide. 
Dr Kate Foy is a freelance creative arts consultant and practitioner, and an e-learning researcher. She was until recently Associate Professor and Deputy Dean Faculty of Arts, University of Southern Queensland. 
Cat Hope runs the composition, music technology and postgraduate programs in music at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA) at Edith Cowan Univeristy in Perth, WA. She is a composer, performer, installation artist and active music researcher and writer. 
