AV club

[Live-Code Performances]

Live Code Visual Performances

by Polina Powers

  • Moscone Center, SF. Snowflake Dev Conference. June 2024
  • Public Works, SF. Visual performance & RTyler DJ set. May 2024
  • Impulse Response CCRMA, Stanford. January 2024
  • Become Machine at Syzygy, SF. December 2023
  • AV Club at Spectra, LA. July 2023
  • Club Code at Gray Area, SF. June 2023
  • AV Club at Indexical, Santa Cruz. December 2022
The stage’s transparency welcomed the audience into the creative process, which I felt pushed the experience beyond a mere spectacle or consumption of entertainment.

Stanford Daily

AV Club SF

Dive into the electric world of the San Francisco Audio Visual live code community. As a harmonious blend of visual artists and DJs, we craft both music and visuals in real-time on stage, all powered by the magic of code. More than performers, we're a self-organized collective where every member actively shapes our events, performances, and artistic direction. Off-stage, our passion continues – brainstorming future sets, plotting upcoming shows, curating exhibitions, and sharing our craft through engaging talks. Spanning both the US and Europe, the AV Club stands as a testament to the fusion of code, music, and visual wonder

Impulse Response CCRMA Stanford

“Impulse response” is a music production term describing the way electronic sound systems respond to a given impulse (e.g. a short burst of sound), creating a unique pattern of reverberations and reflections. The performers brought this principle to life by exhibiting the lines of code creating the dynamic visual exhibits on screen. The stage’s transparency welcomed the audience into the creative process, which I felt pushed the experience beyond a mere spectacle or consumption of entertainment.

Nathan Ho introduced a more abstract, aggressive sound to CCRMA’s stage. Working with a completely live sound setup, Ho strung together a hypermodern soundscape, using everything from what sounded like blaring alarms, to electronic beats, to arcade game jingles. His music was mirrored by Polina Powers’ visuals. 

Coding commands for Powers’ images appeared on the screen: She used beautiful yet strange elements of nature to match Ho’s sound, such as ferns, feathers and roots. The artist utilized stable diffusion, a generative artificial intelligence (AI) model that translates text to image. Powers live coded these grotesque images, multiplying them into grids according to Ho’s musical lead. The duo’s unpredictable sound and offbeat natural motifs heightened the intensity within the space." - Alexandra Blum for Stanford Daily

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