The following meeting of the "Kultura 2.0" series took place on Tuesday, at the printing house on Ogrodowa Street. Paweł Janicki was the evening's guest - an artist and media producer connected with the Art Centre WRO. Thanks to the meeting, we were given the opportunity of listening to and watching one of Poland's few artists, who are able to adeptly navigate between the worlds of technology and art.

The evening began with Paweł's lecture on the idea of "live coding" - programming live. It is based on the assumption that the modern artist should not only make use of commercial tools but also create the programs which he or she will need. Paweł tried to show us, that thanks to new programming languages like Processing and environments like PD, it is not longer necessary to have extraordinary programming skills.

The solutions presented by Paweł were not only a criticism of the use of easy, yet effective solutions (everyone knows that it isn't especially difficult to create professional sounding music or remixes using programs readily accessible on the market), but also an attempt to move away from traditional methods of creating music. Even in the age of computers, music remains prisoner to notes and composing based on a time line - says Paweł. He presented an entirely different view - object based composition. In order to make the performance more accessible to the audience, he didn't write live code, but used the above mentioned PD program with a graphic interface.

After the lecture a lively discussion began. It was surprisingly boisterous, especially when one takes into account the sensitive subject matter, obviously connected with art, which we had tended to avoid during all previous „Kultura 2.0" meetings. The question of education appeared numerous times. Although part of the audience was skeptical about the idea of introducing new-media experiments into schools, Paweł argued that young people should be made aware of the fact that tools are not "transparent" and it is worth while trying to deconstruct them in various ways.

According to Paweł, not even art school graduates currently have this kind of medium-awareness. When creating critical art, based on a program, they forget that the „anti-system" effect of their work is mostly determined by the structure of the software they use. Paweł did, however, have a few optimistic things to say - these days in some areas like VJ-ing or - to a lesser degree - club music, one can come across elements of live programming.

After the discussion, Paweł gave a thirty minute concert, during which you could observe the work of a musician, who works on a composition in real time. An amusing example of the possibilities that live coding presents was demonstrated by the artist overcoming technical problems. When Paweł realized that the speakers were only emitting one stereo channel, he was able to immediately modify his construction so as to not disturb the musical presentation.

We are pleased that, as this meeting demonstrated, the Ogrodowa Street meetings do not only have to be limited to subjects directly connected with free culture and that even a seemingly narrower subject found its own eager audience. Why, the problem connected with the fading of culture, stimulated by the development of media, is a problem that affects almost every form of art.